Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

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[698] still continued, heavy mist-clouds hung upon the horizon, or streamed upwards on the varying current of the winds. As night came on, there was a painful reaction after the day's terrible excitement; a strange quiet fell upon the blackened city and its scenes of destruction. It was the quiet of a great desolation. Groups of women and children crawled under shelters of broken furniture in the Capitol square; hundreds of homeless persons laid down to sleep in the shadows of the ruins of Richmond; and worn out by excitement, exhausted as by the spasm of a great battle, men watched for the morrow with the dull sense that the work of years had been ruined, and that all they possessed on earth had been swept away.

While Richmond was filled with horrour and destruction, and the smoke of its torment ascended to the skies, very different scenes were taking place far away in the cities of the North. It was a strange reverse to the picture we have been contemplating. With those fervours and shows characteristic of the Northern mind, Washington and New York were celebrating the downfall of the Confederate capital. Bells were rung; wild and enthusiastic congratulations ran along the street; and vast crowds collected, whose fantastic exhibitions of joy, not content with huzzas, cheers, and dancing in the streets, broke out into a blasphemous singing of hymns of the church. In New York twenty thousand persons in the open air sung the doxology. There was, of course, an unlimited display of flags; and as evidence of this characteristic exhibition it is said that half an hour after the news of the fall of Richmond was known, not a single large flag in the whole city of New York was left unpurchased. These symbols of loyalty not only floated over houses, but were fastened to carts, stages and wagons. The newspapers were mostly occupied with spread-eagles and maps of Richmond. The World expressed the opinion that the event of the day “more fully justified exuberant rejoicing than any previous achievement in the history of the war.” The New York Herald-the organ par excellence of Yankee wind-went further, and declared that the taking of Richmond was “one of the grandest triumphs that had crowned human efforts — for centuries.”

Such stuff was characteristic of Northern newspapers. But looking to facts we shall find a more precise language in which to describe the achievement of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in the fall of Richmond.

It was simply the consummation of the disgrace of this commander — that he should have taken eleven months to capture a position at no time held by more than one third of his forces, having lost in the enterprise in killed and wounded more than double the numbers actually in arms against him! This sentence may grate on Northern pride; but it is founded upon plain, unyielding figures; it is the inexorable statement of the law of proportions; it can be no more contested than a mathematical demonstration. As long as the intelligent of this world are persuaded of