South while at the same time putting much faith in the expected
defeat of Lincoln at the polls. As always at this period, save for the
few newspapers avowedly friendly to the North and one important daily
professing strict neutrality--the _Telegraph_--the bulk of the
metropolitan press took its cue, as well as much of its war news, from
the columns of the _Times_. This journal, while early assuming a
position of belief in Southern success, had yet given both sides in the
war fair accuracy in its reports--those of the New York correspondent,
Mackay, always excepted. But from June, 1864, a change came over the
_Times_; it was either itself deceived or was wilfully deceiving its
readers, for steadily every event for the rest of the year was coloured
to create an impression of the unlimited powers of Southern resistance.
Read to-day in the light of modern knowledge of the military situation
throughout the war, the _Times_ gave accurate reports for the earlier
years but became almost hysterical; not to say absurd, for the last year
of the conflict. Early in June, 1864, Grant was depicted as meeting
reverses in Virginia and as definitely checked, while Sherman in the
West was being drawn into a trap in his march toward Atlanta[1211]. The
same ideas were repeated throughout July. Meanwhile there had begun to
be printed a series of letters from a Southern correspondent at Richmond
who wrote in contempt of Grant's army.

"I am at a loss to convey to you the contemptuous tone in
which the tried and war-worn soldiers of General Lee talk of
the huddled rabble of black, white, and copper-coloured
victims (there are Indians serving under the Stars and
Stripes) who are at times goaded up to the Southern lines....
The truth is that for the first time in modern warfare we are
contemplating an army which is at once republican and
undisciplined[1212]."

At the moment when such effusions could find a place in London's leading
paper the facts of the situation were that the South was unable to
prevent almost daily desertions and was wholly unable to spare soldiers
to recover and punish the deserters. But on this the _Times_ was either
ignorant or wilfully silent. It was indeed a general British sentiment
during the summer of 1864, that the North was losing its power and
determination in the war[1213], even though it was unquestioned that the
earlier "enthusiasm for the slave-holders" had passed away[