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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[525] fighting at the Wilderness and around Spottsylvania Court-house, to wait six days for reinforcements from Washington before he could move, and had baffled his favourite plan of reaching Richmond. Lee never received a single item of reinforcement until the 23d of May. At Hanover Junction, he was joined by Pickett's division of Longstreet's corps, one small brigade of Early's division of Ewell's corps, which had been in North Carolina with Hoke, and two small brigades, with a battalion of artillery under Breckinridge. The force under Breckinridge, which Grant estimated at fifteen thousand, did not exceed two thousand muskets. When he fell back to the lines immediately about Richmond, Gen. Lee was joined there by Hoke's division from Petersburg; but at the same time Breckinridge's force had to be sent back into the Shenandoah Valley, and Ewell's corps, with two battalions of artillery, had to be detached under Gen. Early's command to meet the demonstrations of Hunter upon Lynchburg. This counterbalanced all reinforcements. The foregoing statement shows, indeed, that the disparity of forces between the two armies in the beginning of the campaign was never lessened after they reached the vicinity of Richmond and Petersburg, but, on the contrary, was largely increased. It has well been asked, by a commentator on these remarkable facts: “What would have been the result, if the resources in men and munitions of war of the two commanders had been reversed?”

The fact was that Grant, notwithstanding his immense preponderance of men and material, had, after losses almost equalling Lee's numbers, utterly failed in his design of defeating the heroic Army of Northern Virginia away from its base, and pushing the fragments before him down to Richmond, and had been forced to cover up his failure by adopting the derided Peninsular scheme of McClellan. Tie Northern public, however, professed to find occasion of exultation in the reflection that he was within a few miles from Richmond, without considering that Lee's army was as much a protection there as a hundred miles away, and that Grant had only by a monstrous circuit, reached a point, where, ascending the waters of Virginia, he might have landed at the very beginning of the campaign without loss or opposition. It was a remarkable exhibition of the gaseous nonsense of New York that a mob of twenty-five thousand persons should have assembled in that city “to render the thanks of the nation to Gen Grant” for a feat which was, simply and at once, absurd, disastrous, shocking, and contemptible.