the magnitude of the undertakings. Their defect resulted from not carrying out the requirement urged upon General Grant by Meade, represented by his proposed retention of Sheridan on the north bank of the James while the operations of Wilson were proceeding south of that river.

CHAPTER XXV.

THE AUTUMNAL SIEGE OF PETERSBURG.

We have at last reached the beginning of the formal investment of Petersburg. And here, on that account, it becomes necessary to give the reader some general notion of the lay of the land involved in the operations, for they included not only the ground immediately about Petersburg, but that along a front extending to and beyond the eastern face of Richmond. The reader will, therefore, as a preliminary, picture to himself that Petersburg is about fourteen miles south of Richmond, and so nearly due south that it may, for convenience, be here regarded as due south of it. Having this north and south line as our guide, with Richmond at the top and Petersburg fourteen miles distant at the bottom, it will be easy to develop therefrom an accurate conception of the horizontal relations of the ground. Its vertical character is so varied that nothing but an elaborate map could afford a correct idea of the surface as to elevation. Basing our orientation upon the north and south line between Richmond and Petersburg and the termini of it as constituted by those two places, imagine that the James, flowing from west to east, close to the southern side of Richmond, thence runs due south for a third of the distance between it and Petersburg, and thence, as an offset from the north and south line, at two-thirds of the way from Richmond to Petersburg, bends towards the east five or six miles, making, with the previous reaches of the river, and with the lower straight reach towards Petersburg, of the Appomattox, from near its mouth, a

blunt little peninsula with two teat-like projections formed by sharp bends of the James. This blunt little peninsula east of the north and south line between Richmond and Petersburg is Bermuda Hundred. Running north and south across its western and narrowest width, as thus formed by the confluence of the James and the Appomattox, were Butler's fortifications, and opposite, and just to the west of them, the enemy's, which were continuous, in double lines, all the way north, after crossing the James, to and around Richmond, and all the way south, after crossing the Appomattox, to Petersburg, encircling it from the east, where they rested on the Appomattox, to the west, where they again rested on the river above the town. Southeast of the centre of Bermuda Hundred is situated City Point, on the southern side of the entrance of the Appomattox into the James. This place was the depot of supplies for the Army of the Potomac, and from it ran the military railroad constructed back of the lines of the army. At City Point were also General Grant's permanent headquarters.

This premised, it remains only to add that the coming operations of battle and siege were so stupendous, and lasted, in one form or another, over so many months of untiring activity, that it would be a mere pretence to profess to give here more than an account of the main features of the conflict, mere pictures seen by flashlight, in which the reader must fill in the dark spaces from other works, or from the resources of his own imagination.

The army was for a while no longer the imposing force that it had been when it set out from the Rapidan, nor anything like it. Its losses had been so frightful in officers and men that, depleted in numbers, and worn out with constant labors and vigils by day and night, it was neither physically nor morally for a time more than a semblance of what it had been. It had, however, this advantage over that of the