whole
army straightforward against Lee's front--all along his line. The
conflict which followed was one of those bloody grapples, rather
than battles, which, discarding all manoeuvring or brain-work in the
commanders, depend for the result upon the brute strength of the
forces engaged. The action did not last half an hour, and, in that
time, the Federal loss was thirteen thousand men. When General Lee
sent a messenger to A.P. Hill, asking the result of the assault on
his part of the line, Hill took the officer with him in front of his
works, and, pointing to the dead bodies which were literally lying
upon each other, said: "Tell General Lee it is the same all along my
front."

The Federal army had, indeed, sustained a blow so heavy, that even the
constant mind and fixed resolution of General Grant and the Federal
authorities seem to have been shaken. The war seemed hopeless to many
persons in the North after the frightful bloodshed of this thirty
minutes at Cold Harbor, of which fact there is sufficient proof. "So
gloomy," says a Northern historian,[1] "was the military outlook after
the action on the Chickahominy, and to such a degree, by consequence,
had the moral spring of the public mind become relaxed, that there was
at this time great danger of a collapse of the war. The history of
this conflict, truthfully written, will show this. The archives of the
State Department, when one day made public, will show how deeply the
Government was affected by the want of military success, and to what
resolutions the Executive had in consequence come. Had not success
elsewhere come to brighten the horizon, it would have been difficult
to have raised new forces to recruit the Army of the Potomac, which,
shaken in its structure, its valor quenched in blood, and thousands of
its ablest officers killed and wounded, was the Army of the Potomac no
more."

[Footnote 1: Mr. Swinton, in his able and candid "Campaigns of the
Army of the Potomac."]

The campaign of one month--from May 4th to June 4th--had cost
the Federal commander sixty thousand men and three thousand
officers--numbers which are given on the authority of Federal
historians--while the loss of Lee did not exceed eighteen thousand.
The result would seem an unfavorable comment upon the choice of the
route across the country from Culpepper instead of that by the James.
General McClellan, two years before, had reached Cold Harbor with
trifling losses. To attain the same po