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On the 9th, which was marked by some skirmishing, General John Sedgwick, one of the most valuable corps commanders in the Yankee army, was killed, probably by a stray bullet. He had just been bantering his men about dodging and ducking their heads at the whistle of Confederate bullets in the distance. แ Why," said he, "they couldn't hit an elephant at this distance." The next moment a ball entered his face, just below the left eye, and pierced his brain, causing instant death.

On Thursday, the 12th of May, occurred what may be entitled as the great battle of Spottsylvania Court-house. The enemy had planned an attack on what was supposed to be a vital section of the Confederates, a salient angle of earthworks held by Johnson's division of Ewell's corps. The storming column advanced silently, and without firing a shot, up to the angles of the breast works, over which they rushed, taking the forces within in flank, surrounding them, capturing nearly the entire division of Johnson's, with its commander, and also a brigade or two of other troops, Brigadier-general George H.. Stuart in command.

But the surprise was only momentary. For long hours a battle raged over those intrenchments, the intense fury, heroism, and horror of which it is impossible to describe. From dawn to dusk the roar of guns was ceaseless; a tempest of shell shrieked through the forest and ploughed the field. Ewell's corps held the critical angle with a courage that nothing could subdue. General Hill moved down from the right, joined Ewell, and threw his divisions into the struggle. Longstreet came on from the extreme left of the Confederate line. Column after column of the enemy was hewn down, or repulsed and sent back like a broken wave. At all points the enemy was repulsed with enormous loss. The ground in front of the Confederate lines was piled with his slain.

The sixth day of heavy fighting had been ended. "It would," says an intelligent critic of this period, "not be impossible to match the results of any one day's battle with stories from the wars of the old world; but never, we should think, in the history of man were five such battles as these compressed into six days." Grant had been foiled; but his obstinacy was apparently untouched, and the fierce and brutal

consumption of human life, another element of his generalship, and which had already obtained for him with his soldiers the soubriquet of "the butcher," was still to continue. He telegraphed to Washington: "I propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer."

But we must turn for a few moments from this dominant field of action and interest to notice other movements, which were parts of Grant's combination, and of the great military drama in Virginia.

While Grant was engaged on the Rapidan, a cavalry expedition of the enemy, commanded by General Sheridan, moved around Lee's right flank to the North Anna river; committed some damage at Beaver Dam; moved thence to the South Anna and Ashland station, where the railroad was destroyed; and finally found its way to the James at Turkey Island, where it joined the forces of Butler. The damage inflicted by this raid was not very considerable; but it was the occasion of a severe fight, on the 10th May, at Yellow Tavern, on the road to Richmond, where Sheridan encountered a Confederate cavalry force, in which engagement was lost the valuable life of General J. E. B. Stuart, the brilliant cavalry commander, who had so long made Virginia the theatre of his daring and chivalric exploits.

The column of Butler, the important correspondent to Grant's movement, intended to operate against Richmond on the south side, had raised the hopes of the North merely to dash them by a failure decisive in its character, and ridiculous in all its circumstances. On the 5th of May, Butler proceeded with his fleet of gunboats and transports, and the Tenth and Eighteenth army corps, up the James river, landing at Wilson's Wharf a regiment of Wild's negro troops, and two brigades of the same color at Fort Powhatan; thence up to City Point, where Hinks' division was landed; and at Bermuda Hundred, just below the mouth of the Appomattox, the entire army was disembarked.

On the 7th, five brigades, under General Brooks, struck for the Petersburg and Richmond Railroad, and succeeded in destroying a bridge seven miles north of Petersburg. In the mean time, Butler, after intrenching himself, closed about the defences of Drury's Bluff. The Yankee general seemed confi

dent that he could, by a little fighting, in conjunction with the powerful flotilla upon the James, easily overcome the main barrier to his approach to the rear of the Confederate capital, presented in the defences of Drury's Bluff. It was already announced to the credulous public of the North that Butler had cut Beauregard's army in twain; that he had carried two lines of the defences of Drury's Bluff; and that he held the keys to the back-door of Richmond.

On Monday, the 16th of May, General Beauregard fell upon the insolent enemy in a fog, drove Butler from his advanced positions back to his original earthworks, and inflicted upon him a loss of five thousand men in killed, wounded, and captured. He had fallen upon the right of the Yankee line of battle with the force of an avalanche, completely crushing it backward and turning Butler's flank. The action was decisive. The day's operations resulted in Butler's entire army being ordered to return from its advanced position, within ten miles of Richmond, to the line of defence known as Bermuda Hundred, between the James and Appomattox rivers.

While Butler had thus come to grief, the failure of Sigel, who threatened the valley of Virginia, was no less complete. On the 15th his column was encountered near Newmarket by General Breckinridge, who drove it across the Shenandoah, captured six pieces of artillery and nearly one thousand stand of small arms, and inflicted upon it a heavy loss; Sigel abandoning his hospitals and destroying the larger portion of his train.

We left Grant defeated in the action of the 12th in front of Spottsylvania Court-house. On the 14th, he moved his lines by his left flank, taking position nearer the Richmond and Fredericksburg railroad. On the 18th he attempted an assault on Ewell's line, which was easily repulsed. It was admitted by the enemy that the object of this attack was to turn Lee's left flank, and that their line got no further than the abattis, when it was "ordered" back to its original position.

A new movement was now undertaken by Grant: to pass his army from the line of the Po, down the valley of the Rappahannock. It thus became necessary for General Lee to evacuate his strong position on the line of the Po; and by an admirable movement he had taken a new position between the

North and South Anna, before Grant's army had arrived at the former stream. Having cut loose from Fredericksburg as a base (and established depots on the Lower Rappahannock), on the 21st Grant's forces occupied Milford Station and Bowling Green, and were moving on the well known high roads to Richmond. But they were again intercepted; for Lee had planted himself between Grant and Richmond, near Hanover Junction.

On the 23d, and on the 25th, Grant made attempts on the Confederate lines, which were repulsed, and left him to the last alternative. Another flanking operation remained for him, by which he swung his army from the North Anna around and across the Pamunkey. On the 27th, Hanovertown was reported to be occupied by the Yankee advance under General Sheridan; and on the 28th Grant's entire army was across the Pamunkey.

In the mean time, General Lee also reformed his line of battle, north and south, directly in front of the Virginia Central railroad, and extending from Atlee's Station, south, to Shady Grove, ten miles north of Richmond. In this position he covered both the Virginia Central and the Fredericksburg and Richmond railroads, as well as all the roads leading to Richmond, west of, and including the Mechanicsville pike.

The favorite tactics of Grant appear to have been to develope the left flank; and by this characteristic maneuver, he moved down the Hanover Court-house road, and on the first day of June took a position near Cold Harbor.

Grant was now within a few miles of Richmond. The vulgar mind of the North readily seized upon the cheap circumstance of his proximity in miles to the Confederate capital, and exclaimed its triumph. The capture of Richmond was discounted as an event of the next week. The Yankee periodicals were adorned with all those illustrations which brutal triumph could suggest; Grant drubbing Lee across his knee; the genius of Yankee liberty holding aloft an impersonation of the Southern Confederacy by the seat of the breeches, marked "Richmond;" Jefferson Davis playing his last card, ornamented with a crown of death's heads, and with his legs well girt with snakes; and a hundred other caricatures alike characteristic of the vulgar thought and fiendish temper of the Yankee.

To such foolish extremity did this premature celebration go, that a meeting was called in New York to render the thanks of the nation to Grant, and twenty-five thousand persons completed the hasty apotheosis.

But for the candid and intelligent, the situation of Grant was one of sinister import to him, implied much of disaster, and was actually a consequence of his repeated disappointments. The true theory of it was defeat, not victory. He did nothing more than hold the same ground as that occupied by General McClellan in his first peninsular campaign. This position, had he come by that point, a day's sail from Washington, he could have occupied without the loss of a single man. But he had occupied it by a devious route; with a loss variously estimated at from sixty to ninety thousand men; with the consumption of most of his veteran troops, whom he had put in front; with the disconcert and failure of those parts of the drama which Butler and Sigel were to enact; and with that demoralization which must unavoidably obtain in an army put to the test of repeated defeats and forced marches.

What was represented by the enemy as the retreat of General Lee's army to Richmond, was simply its movement from a position which its adversary had abandoned, to place itself full before him across the new road on which he had determined to travel. In this sense, it was Grant who was pursued. He had set out to accomplish Mr. Lincoln's plan of an overland march upon Richmond. Mr. Lincoln's scheme as detailed by himself, in his famous letter to General McClellan, was to march by the way of the Manassas railroad. The first movement of General Grant was to give up that route, and fall back upon the line by which Generals Burnside and Hooker attempted to reach the Confederate capital—that is, the Freder icksburg and Richmond line. But, repulsed at Spottsylvania, this route proved untenable, and General Grant was forced east and south, and adopted a new base at Port Royal and Tappahannock, on the Rappahannock river, which conformed in a measure to General McClellan's first plan of a march upon Richmond by way of Urbana. The next change Grant was compelled to make was, after finding how strong the Confederates were, as posted on the South Anna, to cross the Pamunkey and make his base at the White House, bearing thereafter

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