The indomitable spirit of the last sentence electrified the country. It did take all summer, and all winter, too, eleven full months from the date of this dispatch, and more, before General Lee, driven into Richmond, forced to evacuate the doomed city, his escape into the South cut off, his soldiers exhausted, ragged, starving, reinforcements out of the question, surrendered at Appomattox the Army of Northern Virginia, the reliance of the Confederacy, to the general whom he expected to defeat by his furious assault in the Wilderness.

CHAPTER XIV

FROM SPOTTSYLVANIA TO RICHMOND

THE story of this campaign is too long to be narrated in particular. On both sides it is a record of magnificent valor, endurance, and resolution, to which the world affords no parallel, when it is remembered that the armies were recruited from the free citizenship of the nation. As the weeks and months wore on, General's Grant's visage, it is said, settled into an unrelaxing expression of grim resolve. He carried the nation on his shoulders in those days. If he had wearied or yielded, hope might have vanished. He did not yield nor faint. He planned and toiled and fought, keeping his own counsel, bearing patiently the disappointment, the misunderstanding, the doubt, the criticism, the woe of millions who had no other hope but in his success and were often on the verge of despair. He beheld

his plans defeated by the incompetence or errors of subordinates whom he trusted, and let the blame be laid upon himself without protest or murmuring. He knew better than any one else the terrible cost of life which his unrelenting purpose demanded; but he knew also that the price of relenting, involving the discouragement of failure, the cost of another campaign after the enemy had got breath and new equipment, the possible refusal of the North to try again, was far greater and more humiliating. Little wonder that he was oppressed and silent and moody. Yet he ruled his own spirit in accordance with the habit of his life. No folly or disappointment provoked him to utter an oath. General Horace Porter, of his staff, a member of his intimate military family, says that the strongest expression of vexation that ever escaped his lips was: "Confound it!" He alone had the genius to be master of the situation at all times, and the " simple faith in success " that would not let him be swerved from his aim.

So he pressed on from the Wilderness to

Spottsylvania, to North Anna, to South Anna, to the Pamunky, to Cold Harbor, to the Chickahominy, fighting and flanking all the way, until at the end of the month he had pressed Lee back to the immediate vicinity of Richmond. The bloodiest of all these battles was the ill-judged attack, for which Grant has been much criticised, on the strongly intrenched rebel lines at Cold Harbor. If he could have dislodged Lee here he could have compelled him to retreat into the immediate fortifications of Richmond. But Lee's position was impregnable: the assault failed. In less than an hour Grant lost 13,000 men killed, wounded, and missing, and gained nothing substantial.

General Butler had signally failed to accomplish the work given him to do. Instead of taking Petersburg, destroying the railroads connecting Richmond with the south, and laying siege to that city, he had, after some ineffectual manoeuvring, got his army hemmed in, "bottled up," Grant called it, at Bermuda Hundred, where he was almost completely out of the offensive movement for

months. Sigel had been worsted in the North, and had been relieved by Hunter, who had won measurable success in the Shenandoah Valley.

Grant, checked on the east and north of Richmond, crossed the Chickahominy and the James with his whole army by a series of masterly manœuvres, regarding the meaning of which his opponent was brilliantly deceived. Then followed the unsuccessful attempt to capture Petersburg before it could be reinforced, unsuccessful by reason of the want of persistence on the part of the general intrusted with the duty. This failure involved a long siege of that place, which the Confederates made impregnable to assault. A breach in the defences was made by the explosion of a mine constructed with vast labor, but there was failure to follow up the advantage with sufficient promptness. Here the Army of the Potomac passed the winter, except the part of the army that was detached to protect Washington from threatened attack, and with which Sheridan made his great fame in the Shen