own over it the first day of the battle.

With a yell of terror he started on a run for his life.

He never stopped until he had flanked Lee's army by a wide swing, made
his way to the rear and joined the Confederacy.

Grant had now changed his plan of campaign. He determined to capture
Petersburg by a _coup_ and cut the communication of Lee and Richmond
with the South. The _coup_ failed. The ragged remnants of Lee's army
which had been left there to defend it, held the trenches until
reinforcements arrived.

He determined to take it by a resistless concerted assault. On the 16th
he threw three of his army corps on Beauregard's thin lines before
Petersburg, capturing four redoubts. At daylight, on the 17th, he again
hurled his men on Beauregard and drove his men out of his first line of
defense. All day the defenders held their second line, though Grant's
crack divisions poured out their blood like water. As night fell the
dead were once more piled high on the Federal front and the Confederate
dead filled the trenches.

As the third day dawned the fierce, assault was renewed, but Lee had
brought up Anderson's Corps with Kershaw and Field's division and the
blue waves broke against the impregnable grey ranks and rolled back,
leaving the dead in dark heaps.

As the shadows of night fell, Grant withdrew his shattered lines to
their trenches.

_He had lost ten thousand five hundred more men and had failed._

He began to burrow his fortifications into the earth around Petersburg
and try by siege what had been found impossible by assault. Further and
further crept his blue lines with pick and axe and spade and shovel,
digging, burrowing, piling their dirt and timbers. Before each blue
rampart silently grew one in grey until the two siege lines stretched
for thirty-seven miles in bristling, flaming semicircle covering both
Richmond and Petersburg.

Again Grant planned a _coup_. He chose the role of the fox this time
instead of the lion. He selected the key of Lee's long lines of defense
and set a regiment of Pennsylvania miners to work digging a tunnel under
the Confederate fort known as "Elliot's Salient," which stood but two
hundred yards in front of Burnside's corps.

The tunnel was finished, the mine ready, the fuses set, and eight
thousand pounds of powder planted in the earth beneath the unsuspecting
Confederates.

Hancock's division with Sheridan's cavalry were sent to make a
demonstration against Richmond