Marching to Victory, December 1864–April 1865

This chapter describes William T. Sherman’s approach march to Fort McAllister. The March to the Sea might be over, but Sherman had not yet reached the sea. He had managed to cross the Ogeechee River thanks to the reconstruction of King’s Bridge, but he still faced two problems. First, he needed to make contact with the Union fleet. Second, he still needed to seize Savannah, a risky operation that needed to be completed swiftly. It is true that Sherman encountered weak opposition and that the March had not pulled significant Confederate reinforcements to Savannah. Nonetheless, Sherman lacked the equipment for a prolonged siege and might yet be seriously embarrassed. The fall of Fort McAllister permitted Sherman to concentrate his energies on establishing contact with the US Navy. Once contact with the US Navy had been firmly established, it brought some unexpected pleasures. The chapter then looks at the interactions between Sherman and the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton.

Import, export, and recycling of dissolved nutrients in the Ogeechee River estuary (Georgia, USA)

We constructed an empirical mass balance model of nutrient fluxes in the Ogeechee River estuary (Georgia, USA) from eight surveys of seasonal estuarine nutrient concentrations during 2015 and 2016. The model results indicated a net removal of dissolved phosphorus and a net production of dissolved nitrogen (N) within the estuary over an annual cycle. During summer and autumn low flow periods, much of the dissolved N discharged to the ocean seems to be recycled into the estuary in the form of phytoplankton biomass. As a result, the outwelled N is not new nitrogen fueling coastal production but is nitrogen trapped within a recycling loop across the ocean–estuarine boundary. Higher flows in the fall and winter lead to direct discharge of nutrients with minimal recycling. A balanced N budget for the Ogeechee River estuary requires that estuarine N-fixation must exceed burial and denitrification losses within the estuary.