Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 20.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

At the end of thirty days General Grant found himself, after a loss of 54,929, within ten miles of Richmond, a point which he might have reached without the loss of a man. War's appetite for slaughter was gorged in this brief campaign, and while we do not propose to discuss the generalship of the overland route to Richmond, the friends of those who fell at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor must sometimes feel that they were the victims more of a political prejudice than of a military necessity.

Lee's entire army, from the Rappahannock and including Cold Harbor was 76,400. If his losses were as great as Grant's, that is, 54,929, then he would have had only 21,471 of his original army left. This campaign had reduced the result of the war to a mathematical problem. Grant's army was the upper millstone, two inches thick, and Lee's was the nether-stone, one inch thick. The friction being the same, it required little mathematical knowledge to divine the result.

For the benefit of the future historian, we compile the following statistics issued by the Adjutant-General's Office of the United States July 15, 1885:

The seceding States of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia (then including West Virginia) furnished to the Federal army 86,009 white troops, while the slave-holding States, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri, which never formally seceded, furnished to the Federal army 190,430 white soldiers, and the negro population of the various States furnished 178,975 negro troops. Summarized, it is as follows: