While Sheridan rode against Richmond, Lee and Grant were struggling ina pool of red at the "Bloody Angle" of Spottsylvania. The musketry fireagainst the trees came in a low undertone, like the rattle of a hailstorm on the roofs of houses.
A company of blue soldiers were cut off by a wave of charging gray. Themen were trying to surrender. Their officers drew their revolvers andordered them to break through. A sullen private shouted:
"Shoot your officers!"Every commander dropped in his tracks. And the men were marched to therear. Hour after hour the flames of hell swirled in endless waves aboutthis angle of the Southern trenches. Line after line of blue brokeagainst it and eddied down its sides in slimy pools.
Color bearers waved their flags in each other\'s faces, clinched andfought, hand to hand, like devils. Two soldiers on top of the trench,their ammunition spent, choked each other to death and rolled down theembankment among the mangled bodies that filled the ditch.
In this mass of struggling maniacs men were fighting with guns, swords,handspikes, clubbed muskets, stones and fists. Night brought no pause tosave the wounded or bury the dead.
For five days Grant circled his blue hosts in a whirlpool of deathtrying in vain to break Lee\'s trenches. He gave it up. The stolid,silent man of iron nerves watched the stream of wagons bearing thewounded, groaning and shrieking, from the field. Lee\'s forces had beenhandled with such skill the impact of numbers had made but littleimpression.
Thirty thousand dead and mangled lay on the field.
The stark fighter of the West was facing a new problem. The devotion ofLee\'s men was a mania. He was unconquerable in a square hand-to-handfight in the woods.
A truce to bury the dead followed. They found them piled six layers deepin the trenches, blue and gray locked in the last embrace. Black wingswere flapping over them unafraid of the living. Their red beaks weretearing at eyes and lips, while deep below yet groaned and moved thewounded.
Again Grant sought to flank his wily foe. This time he beat Lee to thespot. The two armies rushed for Cold Harbor in parallel columns flashingat each other deadly volleys as they marched. Lee took second choice ofground and entrenched on a gently sloping line of hills. They swung increscent as at Fredericksburg.
With consummate skill he placed his guns and infantry to catch bothflanks and front of the coming foe. And then he waited for Grant tocharge. Thousands of men in the blue ranks were busy now sewing theirnames in their underclothing.
With the first streak of dawn, at 4:30, they charged. They walked intothe mouth of a volcano flaming tons of steel and lead in their faces.
The scene was sickening. Nothing like it had, to this time, happened inthe history of man.
_Ten thousand men in blue fell in twenty minutes._Meade ordered Smith to renew the assault. Daring a court martial, Smithflatly refused.
The story of the next seventy-two hours our historians have refused torecord. Through the smothering heat of summer for three days and nightsthe shrieks and groans of the wounded rose in endless waves of horror.
No hand could be lifted to save. With their last breath they begged,wept, cried, prayed for water. No man dared move in the storm-sweptspace. Here and there a heroic boy in blue caught the cry of a woundedcomrade and crawled on his belly to try a rescue only to die in theembrace of his friend.
When the truce was called to clear the shambles every man of the tenthousand who had fallen was dead--save two. The salvage corps walked ina muck of blood. They slipped and stumbled and fell in its festeringpools. The flies and vultures were busy. Dead horses, dead men, smashedguns, legs, arms, mangled bodies disemboweled, the earth torn into anashen crater.
In the thirty days since Grant had met Lee in the wilderness, theNorthern army had lost sixty thousand men, the bravest of our race.
Lee\'s losses were not so great but they were tragic. They were as greatin proportion to the number he commanded.
Grant paused to change his plan of campaign. The procession ofambulances into Washington had stunned the Nation. Every city, town,village, hamlet and country home was in mourning. A stream of protestagainst the new Commander swept the North. Lincoln refused to removehim. And on his head was heaped the blame for all the anguish of thebitter years of failure.
His answer to his critics was remorseless.
"We must fight to win. Grant is the ablest general we have. His lossesare appalling. But the struggle is now on to the bitter end. Ourresources of men and money are exhaustless. The South cannot replace herfallen sons. Her losses, therefore, are fatal!"War had revealed to all at last that the Abolition crusade had beenbuilt on a lie. The negro had proven a bulwark of strength to the South.
Had their theories been true, had the slaves been beaten and abused theBlack Bees would surely have swarmed. A single Southern village put tothe torch by black hands would have done for Lee\'s army what no opponenthad been able to do. It would have been destroyed in a night. TheConfederacy would have gone down in hopeless ruin.
Not a black hand had been raised against a Southern man or woman inall the raging hell. This fact is the South\'s vindication against theslanders of the Abolitionists. The negroes stood by their old masters.
They worked his fields; they guarded his women and children; theymourned over the graves of their fallen sons.
And now in the supreme hour of gathering darkness came the last act ofthe tragedy--the arming of the Northern blacks and the training of theirhands to slay a superior race.
In the first year of the war Lincoln had firmly refused the prayer ofThomas Wentworth Higginson that he be allowed to arm and drill the BlackLegions of the North. Later the pressure could not be resisted. Thedaily murder of the flower of the race had lowered its morale. It hadlowered the value set on racial trait and character. The Cavalier andPuritan, with a thousand years of inspiring history throbbing in theirveins, had become mere cannon fodder. The cry for men and still more menwas endless. And this cry must be heard, or the war would end.
Men of the white breed were clasping hands at last across the linesunder the friendly cover of the night. They spoke softly through theirtears of home and loved ones. The tumult and the shout had passed. Thejeer and taunt, blind passion and sordid hate lay buried in the long,deep graves of a hundred fields of blood.
Grant\'s new plan of campaign resulted in the deadlock of Petersburg.
The two armies now lay behind thirty-five miles of deep trenches with astretch of volcano-torn, desolate earth between them.
The Black Legions were massed for a dramatic ending of the war. Grant,Meade, and Burnside had developed a plan. Hundreds of sappers and minersburrowed under the shell-torn ground for months, digging a tunnel underLee\'s fortress immediately before Petersburg.
The tunnel was not complete before Lee\'s ears had caught the sound. Acounter tunnel was hastily begun but Grant\'s men had reached the spotunder the center of Elliot\'s salient before the Confederates couldintercept them.
Grant skillfully threw a division of his army on the north side of theJames and made a fierce frontal attack on Richmond while he gatheredthe flower of his army, sixty-five thousand men with his Black Legions,before the tunnel that would open the way into Petersburg.
Lee was not misled by the assault on Richmond. But it was absolutelynecessary to meet it, or the Capital would have fallen. He wascompelled, in the face of the threatened explosion and assault, todivide his forces and weaken his ............