failure to vanquish his
opponent. Undoubtedly Lee was disappointed by his failure to repulse the
Union army in the Wilderness and at Spottsylvania as he had done
formerly at Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg, when it had come into
the same territory. Each had underestimated the other's quality. From
Spottsylvania, on the 11th of May, after six days of continuous
fighting, with an advance of scarcely a dozen miles, and an experience
of checks and losses that would have disheartened any one but the hero
of Vicksburg, he sent this bulletin to the War Department: "We have now
ended the sixth day of very heavy fighting. The result to this time is
much in our favor. But our losses have been heavy, as well as those of
the enemy. We have lost to this time 11 general officers killed,
wounded, and missing, and probably 20,000 men.... I am now sending back
to Belle Plain all my wagons for a fresh supply of provisions and
ammunition, and propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all
summer."

The indomitable spirit of the last sentence electrified the country. It
did take all summer, and all winter, too,--eleven full months from the
date of this dispatch, and more, before General Lee, driven into
Richmond, forced to evacuate the doomed city, his escape into the South
cut off, his soldiers exhausted, ragged, starving, reinforcements out of
the question, surrendered at Appomattox the Army of Northern Virginia,
the reliance of the Confederacy, to the general whom he expected to
defeat by his furious assault in the Wilderness.

CHAPTER XIV

FROM SPOTTSYLVANIA TO RICHMOND

The story of this campaign is too long to be narrated in particular. On
both sides it is a record of magnificent valor, endurance, and
resolution, to which the world affords no parallel, when it is
remembered that the armies were recruited from the free citizenship of
the nation. As the weeks and months wore on, General's Grant's visage,
it is said, settled into an unrelaxing expression of grim resolve. He
carried the nation on his shoulders in those days. If he had wearied or
yielded, hope might have vanished. He did not yield nor faint. He
planned and toiled and fought, keeping his own counsel, bearing
patiently the disappointment, the misunderstanding, the doubt, the
criticism, the woe of millions who had no other hope but in his success
and were often on the verge of despair. He beheld his plans defeated by
the incompetence or errors of subor