dinates 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
manoeuvres, regarding the meaning of which his opponent was brilliantly
deceived. Then followed the unsuccessful attempt to capture Petersburg
be