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 ariny 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 several 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. No result but that of victory could be expected in Richmond when Butler was the combatant. The Richmond Examiner designated the fight as that of "the Buzzard and the Falcon." 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.

THE ENEMY'S OPERATIONS IN WESTERN VIRGINIA.

While Butler had thus come to grief, the failure of Sigel, who threatened the Valley of Virginia was no less complete. Grant had made an extraordinary combination in Virginia. His plan of campaign was clearly not limited to the capture of Richmond. He might capture it without capturing the government machinery and without overthrowing Lee's army. In such event further operations were necessary; and these were already provided for in the ambitious and sweeping plan of the campaign.

The movement of Sigel up the Shenandoah Valley towards Staunton was designed with the view, first, of taking possession of the Virginia Central Railroad, and ultimately effecting a lodgment upon the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad at Lynchburg. Averill was to move towards the same great railroad with a design of striking it at Salem. General Crook was to move with a strong force and large supplies from Charles

town towards Dublin Depot; and a fourth movementwhich, however, was not actively developed until the period, some weeks later, of the second combination of forces in this part of Virginia-was designed on the Virginia side of the Big Sandy towards Abingdon on the same railroad.

The invasion thus planned for Western Virginia comprehended a heavy aggregate of forces. There were the six thousand of Crook, which came from the Lower Kanawha. These last were joined by Averill, with twenty-five hundred cavalry, coming from Northwest Virginia; and there was the army of Sigel, whose strength was variously estimated, but was not less than twelve thousand. The design was that these different corps should strike the Lynchburg and Tennessee and the Central railroads simultaneously at Abingdon, Wytheville, Dublin Depot, and Staunton, and should afterwards unite, west of Lynchburg, and march against that city. Grant was strongly impressed with the importance of this city. In subsequent attempts against it, his orders were that it should be taken and held at any loss and at all hazards.

In pursuance of the plan of operations in Western Virginia, at the very moment that Grant crossed the Rapidan it was announced that Sigel was in motion upon Staunton, Crook upon Dublin Depot, and Averill upon Wytheville, with design, after destroying that town and the lead mines, to unite with Crook at Dublin for a march towards Lynchburg; but no news came of a movement at that early day of Major-General Burbridge upon Abingdon and Saltville. The sequel proved that we were poorly prepared to meet this concerted assault. Breckinridge had been ordered away from Dublin in a hurry, with all the troops he could collect at short notice, and sent down the Valley to confront Sigel, leaving nothing but a few scattered troops, afterwards collected together by McCausland, to oppose Crook at Dublin.

On the 15th of May, Sigel's 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.

But while Breckinridge defeated Sigel, and drove him back

in dismay and rout, McCausland was left at Dublin with only 1,500 men to resist Crook's 6,000. He fought bravely, however, and so shattered Crook's army as to destroy his design of proceeding towards Lynchburg, and compel a retreat as far as Meadow Bluff, in Greenbrier, for the purpose of recruiting his disorganized army and repairing damages. Crook left several hundred prisoners and all his wounded, but succeeded, before leaving the region of the battle, in destroying the important bridge over New River.

It so happened that the Confederates had a larger force at that time in the extreme Southwest than anywhere else on the line of the Lynchburg and Tennessee Railroad. The fact was fortunate, for it enabled General W. E. Jones, then commanding there, to spare General Morgan's command for services further east. Thus it happened that General Morgan, making a forced march from Saltville, arrived at Wytheville with his mounted men in time to save that town from Averill, and to completely defeat that boasted cavalry officer, with a heavy loss of killed, wounded, prisoners, and horses. This defeat was very important, for it prevented Averill from joining Crook before the battle at Dublin, and before that general had found it necessary to fall back to Meadow Bluff. Averill arrived in Dublin two days after Crook had gone. It was still further fortunate that General Morgan, at the same time that he marched from Saltville with his mounted men against Averill, at Wytheville, was able to send his dismounted men by the railroad to Dublin, which force arrived there just in time to take part with McCausland in the fight which sent Crook back to Meadow Bluff.

These occurrences took place in the early part of May, simultaneously with Grant's operations in Spottsylvania. Morgan's fight at Wytheville, McCausland's at Dublin, and Breckinridge's at Newmarket, all occurred about the same time with each other, and simultaneously with the great battles of the Wilderness between Lee and Grant.

We left Grant defeated in the action of the 12th in front of Spottsylvania Courthouse. 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 develop the left flank; and by this characteristic manoeuvre he moved down the Hanover Courthouse 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 accounted as an event of the next week. The Yankee periodi

cals 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 another route, 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 Fredericksburg and Richmond line. But, repulsed at Spottsylvania,