Assail Richmond from the South.
It was a determination based upon the soundest military principles, for from that direction could an assailant hope to bring to bear with greatest assurance of success that cardinal maxim of military strategy, “operate on the communications of the enemy without endangering your own.”
Though the plan was now for the first time to be put to the test, it was no new conception.
McClellan had proposed it to
Halleck,
1 when that General visited the Army of the Potomac after what was euphemistically termed “its strategic change of base to the
James,” but the
Chief of the
Staff curtly rejected it as “impracticable.”
Lee, cautious of speech, had not hesitated to say to friends here in
Richmond that the good people of the town might go to their beds without misgiving, so long as the enemy assailed the
Capital north and east, and left unvexed his communications with the Carolinas.
General
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Grant himself, while still in the
West, had urged upon the
Government the adoption of this plan, which, in his eyes, was identical in its main features with that which had won for him the capitulation of
Vicksburg.
Why, when invested with supreme command, he should have rejected a plan which his judgment had approved but a year before, and adopted only after the loss of sixty thousand veteran troops a line of advance open to him at the outset without firing a gun — is one of the mysteries of war, the key to which is most likely to be found in the political history of the time.
Resolved upon this last change of base,
General Grant pressed its execution.
From the 4th to the 11th of June, by a gradual withdrawal of his right flank, he had placed his army within easy marches of the lower crossings of the
Chickahominy, and
Sheridan, meanwhile, having been dispatched to destroy the Virginia Central railroad and effect a junction with
Hunter, on Sunday night, June 12th,
