t an end. After another hard battle, in which the enemy
lost five thousand men, Hancock succeeded in his mission and captured
and retained the road. The only link now between the capital and
the other sections of the South on which the subsistence of the army
depended was that by Danville, Va. This was a military road completed
by the government in anticipation of those very events that had now
transpired. Another road on which the government was bending all its
energies to complete, but failed for want of time, was a road running
from Columbia to Augusta, Ga. This was to be one of the main arteries
of the South in case Charleston should fail to hold out and the
junction of the roads at Branchville fall in the hands of the enemy.
Our lines of transportation, already somewhat circumscribed, were
beginning to grow less and less. Only one road leading South by way
of Danville, and should the road to Augusta, Ga., via Columbia and
Branchville, be cut the South or the Armies of the West and that of
the East would be isolated. As gloomy as our situation looked, there
was no want of confidence in the officers and the troops. The rank and
file of the South had never considered a condition of failure. They
felt their cause to be sacred, that they were fighting for rights and
principles for which all brave people will make every sacrifice to
maintain, that the bravery of a people like that which the South had
shown to the world, the spirits that animated them, the undaunted
courage by which the greatest battles had been fought and
victories gained against unprecedented numbers, all this under such
circumstances and under such leadership--the South could not fail.
Momentary losses, temporary reverses might prolong the struggle, but
to change the ultimate results, never. And at the North there
were loud and widespread murmurings, no longer confined to the
anti-abolitionist and pro slavery party, but it came from statesmen
the highest in the land, it came from the fathers and mothers whose
sons had fallen like autumn leaves from the Rapidan to the Appomattox.
The cries and wails of the thousands of orphans went up to high Heaven
pleading for those fathers who had left them to fill the unsatiate
maw of cruel, relentless war. The tears of thousands and thousands
of widows throughout the length and breadth of the Union fell like
scalding waters upon the souls of the men who were responsible for
this holocaust. Their voices and murmuring