another attack against the Confederate works was ordered the men would refuse to obey.

But Grant could not stand still. To remain where he was would be simply playing into the enemy's hands. Lee would have liked nothing better than to have kept the Union army in a state of inert catalepsy before his Cold Harbor trenches for an indefinite period. The Confederates needed time to recuperate and reorganize.

Grant decided to move his army to the south side of the James. He would then stand between Richmond and the states to the south. It would be Lee, instead of Grant, who would have to defend his line of supplies, for Grant could bring supplies and reënforcements by steamer up the James river, while Lee would have to depend on the two railroads that ran southward from Richmond. In time, Grant thought, the Union lines might be extended further and further toward the left, so that eventually he would have both the railroads that entered Richmond from the south in his possession. When that was once accomplished Lee would be forced to abandon Richmond immediately, or surrender both the city and his army.

The move to the south side of the James was decided upon, and the Army of the Potomac began to cross the river on June 14th. Lee was completely deceived. He thought that Grant intended to move to the north of Richmond, and he persisted so long in his belief that he was on the verge of an irretrievable catastrophe before he discovered what Grant was actually doing.

Twenty miles to the south of Richmond is the town of Petersburg. It was garrisoned at the time by a small force under General Beauregard. Petersburg was the military gateway to Richmond. The Weldon railroad ran through Petersburg. With the town in Union hands there would be only one other railway line—that running up from Danville-over which Lee could obtain men and supplies from the south.

Grant knew the importance of Petersburg. His instructions

Frantic Telegrams

331 were that the head of the column should move against it with the least possible delay after crossing the river. The Union forces might have gone ahead like a steam-roller and smashed Beauregard, but they didn't. The generals on the spot organized skirmish lines, made reconnaissances, wrote down their observations, and did everything they could think of except attack Beauregard in force.

The fact is that the Army of the Potomac was so unnerved after Cold Harbor that it had lost its dash. For months there was a pronounced reluctance on the part of the rank and file to go up against Confederate entrenchments. This state of affairs does not appear in the official records, but it makes a rather glaring appearance in the diaries and letters of officers.

Beauregard sent frantic hourly telegrams to Lee, who was still fifty miles away on the other side of Richmond, facing Grant's almost deserted trenches. Meanwhile the blue-clad soldiers continued to pour across the river. By the sixteenth Grant had 48,000 men on the south side, while the Confederates in Petersburg numbered about 14,000. Grant himself arrived on the sixteenth, but even he was unable to get an attack under

way.

...

Beauregard's telegrams had ceased; he was sending staff officers instead . . . gloomy men who sat in Lee's tent at two o'clock in the morning and told him that the horizon in front of Petersburg was blue and silver with men and bayonets, and that at night the sky glowed with the reflection of the Union campfires. But Lee continued to believe that the movement was merely a ruse.

The little town of Petersburg was excited as it had never been before. Beauregard had taken every white man who knew how to load a gun. An attack in force might have been made on the Confederate works late in the afternoon of the sixteenth, but it was found, when everything else was ready to move, that the chief of artillery had sent all the horses to water and they

could not be brought back before night. That hour's delay probably saved Petersburg for the Confederates for nine months.

Lee was at last awake to his danger, and he moved with speed. He became convinced at three o'clock in the morning that Grant's army was before Petersburg, and by four his troops were on the way. Next afternoon, when the long deferred Union assault in force was about to begin, Grant's officers-listening-heard the hum and stir of an army moving into position. Lee had arrived.

T

CHAPTER XXIII

THE SUNSET OF THE CONFEDERACY

§1

HE siege of Petersburg was long and dreary. It lasted from the middle of June, 1864, until the first

of April, 1865. The network of trenches, forts and redans that constituted the Confederate defense was too strong to be taken by assault. Grant hammered at them with his artillery and gradually extended his lines to the left. As he had more than twice as many men as Lee it was only a question of time before the Southern lines would become too thin to hold. They could not be stretched indefinitely to parallel Grant's extension.

Grant's plan was to "sidle” far enough to the left to obtain possession of both the railroads which entered Richmond from the South. In the meantime his cavalry, under Sheridan, circled in far-ranging raids and tore up miles of the railroads again and again.

There were no more headlong assaults on the Confederate works. A change had come over Grant's spirit. He, too, like everybody else, was appalled at the losses at Cold Harbor- -or so I think, though he never said so-and for the last six months of 1864 his men burrowed in trenches and dug their way slowly toward the Confederate position.

A Pennsylvania colonel who knew all about coal mining suggested that a mine might be run under one of the key positions of the Confederates, and Grant told him to go ahead and try it. The mine was an enormous affair. The Pennsylvanians worked for a month at it, and then crammed it full of powder in barrels.

Lee knew the mine was being dug, and his officers made

desperate efforts to locate it by countermining, but without success. It was exploded on July 30th. A huge crater was made, and about two hundred Confederate soldiers went up in the air. Then the Union troops were piled into the crater... far too many of them. They were so many that they became a packed mob, floundering in the loose earth. The Confederates quickly recovered and lined the edge of the crater. Within an hour they had artillery playing on the squirming mass of helpless men. The mine episode was a complete fiasco. Grant lost 4,000 men in killed, wounded and missing.

Although transportation from the south became uncertain, and finally almost impossible, the Confederate authorities were able, during the first months of the siege, to obtain an abundance of food supplies from the Shenandoah Valley, to the west of Richmond. But in the early fall Grant sent General Hunter —and, after him, General Sheridan-to raid the Shenandoah granary. They made a thoroughly heartless job of it, burning everything in sight, homes of non-combatants, bridges, mills, schoolhouses, churches, as well as barns full of corn and wheat.

In an attempt to draw off part of Grant's army from its position in front of Richmond Lee detached General Jubal A. Early and sent him on a raid into Maryland. Early came within a hair's breadth of capturing the city of Washington. On July 11th he appeared in the suburbs of the capital. If he had known how feebly Washington was defended he would have gone in, no doubt, and taken possession of it. But he did not know that Grant had denuded the defenses of the troops; so, after a little desultory firing, he went away. On this raid Early burned Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in retaliation for the devastation in the Shenandoah Valley.

$2

While Grant's army was crossing the Rapidan, around the first of May, 1864, Sherman, in far-off Tennessee, began his