inevitable blow "might be delayed, but could not be averted."[1] Other writers, with mawkish affectation of humanity, little allied to sound military judgment, have gone still further, and asserted that the struggle had assumed a phase so hopeless, that Lee should have used the vantage of his great position and stopped the further effusion of blood. Let us, the survivors of the Army of Northern Virginia, authoritatively declare in reply, that such was not the temper of our leader nor the temper of his men.
It would, indeed, have been an amazing conclusion for either army or general to have reached as the lesson of the
CAMPAIGN FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR.
Grant had carried into the Wilderness a well-officered and thoroughly-equipped army of 141,000 men, to which Lee had opposed a bare 50,000.[2] Despite these odds, Lee had four times forced his antagonist to change that line of operations on which he emphatically declared he "proposed to fight it out if it took all summer." He had sent him reeling and dripping with blood from the jungles of the Wilderness, though foiled himself of decisive victory by a capricious fortune, which struck down his trusted lieutenant in the very act of dealing the blow, which his chief, in a true inspiration of genius, had swiftly determined to deliver; barring the way again with fierce and wary caution, after a grim wrestle of twelve days and twelve nights, he had marked the glad alacrity with which the general, who but a few weeks before had interrupted the prudent Meade with the remark, "Oh, I never manœuvre," now turned his back on the blood-stained thickets of Spotsylvania, and by "manœuvring towards his left"[3] sought the passage of the North Anna—seeking it only to find, after crossing the right and left wings of his army, that his wary antagonist, who, unlike himself, did not disdain to manœuvre, had, by a rare tactical movement, inserted a wedge of gray tipped with steel, riving his army in sunder, forcing him to recross the river, and for the third time abandon his line of attack. Then it was that the Federal commander, urged, mayhap, to the venture by the needs of a great political party, whose silent
- ↑ Colonel Chesney—Essays in Military Biography, p. 119.
- ↑ Stanton's Report, 1865-66; General Early's able article in Southern Historical Papers, vol. ii, July, 1876; Lee's letter to General David Hunter, U. S. A.; Lee's letter (October 4th, 1867), to Colonel C. A. White; Swinton, A. P., p. 413.
- ↑ "The 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th (of May) were consumed in manœuvring and awaiting the arrival of reinforcements from Washington."—Grant's Report of Campaign. At this time Lee had not been reinforced by a single man.
