"Death Angle" by which it will ever be known. The place became then
and there the bloodiest spot that ever was washed with human life in
America. The bushes and trees round about were literally shot away. At
one point an oak tree, more than eighteen inches in diameter, was
completely eaten off at the man-level by the bullet storm that beat
against it. That tree in its fall crushed several men of a South
Carolina regiment who still stood and fought in the death harvest that
was going on.

The counter assaults of the Confederates, however, were in vain. They
inflicted terrible losses, and were themselves mowed down by
thousands; but they could not and did not retake the angle. Hancock
and his heroes could not be dislodged. The battle of Spottsylvania
died away with the night into sullen and awful silence, which was
broken only by the groans of thousands of wounded men who could not be
recovered from the bloody earth on which they had fallen. The
antagonists lay crouching like lions, only a lion's spring apart, and
neither would suffer the other, even for the sake of their common
American humanity, to recover his dead.

In the retrospect it seems marvelous that within the memories of men
now living and not yet old, so awful a struggle as that of the Death
Angle in the Wilderness could have taken place between men of the same
race and language, born under the flag of the same Republic, and
cherishing the same sentiments and traditions and hopes.

APPOMATTOX.

Appomattox was not a battle, but the end of battles. Fondly do we hope
that never again shall Americans lift against Americans the avenging
hand in such a strife! Here at a little court-house, twenty-five miles
east of Lynchburg, on the ninth of April, 1865, the great tragedy of
our civil war was brought to a happy end. Here General Robert E. Lee,
with the broken fragments of his Army of Northern Virginia, was
brought by the inexorable logic of war to the end of that career which
he had so bravely followed through four years of battle, much of which
had shown him to be one of the great commanders of the century.

The story of the downfall of the Confederacy has been many times
repeated. It has entered into our literature, and is known by heart
wherever the history of the war is read. Generally, however, this
story has been told as if the narrator approached the event from the
Union side. We have the pursuit of General Lee from Petersburg
westward, almost to t