heory, however, Grant attacked the whole Confederate front at dawn of
the 18th. Driven back with heavy slaughter, the men were again sent in.
Four times that day they rallied and came well up to the works; and
four times they were sent back reeling and bleeding. Even Grant's
obstinacy could not drive them again into certain destruction; and the
assault on Petersburg had failed utterly, at the cost of 14,000 men for
the experiment.

On that same day, Hunter was driven back from an assault on Lynchburg,
and sent in disgraceful rout through West Virginia.

Hampton, too, had done his share as ever in the long war. He had caught
Sheridan at Trevellian's Station, and compelled him to retreat and
entirely abandon his part of Grant's new programme; and a little later
he came upon Kautz and Wilson--in a railroad raid below Petersburg--and
defeated them disastrously, capturing their trains, artillery and a
large proportion of their men.

Thus, by July, these rough and repeated lessons had taught even General
Grant that hammering with flesh and blood upon earthworks was too
costly; that barn-burning and railroad-tearing cavalry were not
effectual to reduce the city that had so laughed to scorn his brilliant
tactics of the left flank!

A more disgusted, if not a wiser man, he sat down and fortified for a
regular siege; as fully convinced as ever that the blood of the
soldiers was the seed of the war; as fixed in his theory that he could
spare seven lives for one and gradually by this fearful "swapping, with
boot," reduce the capital he had failed to win by soldierly methods or
skillful combination.

And the southern people felt that was the test to be applied to them
now. Bayonet and steel, rapine and torch had failed; but now the
process of _pulverizing_ was to come. "Southern blood!" was General
Grant's war-cry--"Southern blood by the drop, if it take rivers of
ours. Southern lives by the score--and we can well pay for them with
the hundred!"

And, looking the alternative squarely in the face, the southern people
for the last time girded their loins for the shock; feeling they could
do what men might and when they could no longer do--they could die!

Once more the tide of battle had rolled away from Richmond; but it
surged up, redder and rougher, against her sister city. And staunch
little Petersburg braced herself to meet its advancing waves--ever
offering to them her dauntless breast and ever riding above them,
breathl