Adam Badeau, Military history of Ulysses S. Grant from April 1861 to April 1865. Volume 2

But Lee made no attempt whatever to escape, nor indeed to prepare for the assault which he must have seen was inevitable. On the contrary, he ordered Pickett to return towards Petersburg,¹ and left Longstreet with ten thousand men north of the James,² at the very moment when Grant was massing his forces to deal his heaviest blow. The bombardment presaged the coming storm, and Lee had received intelligence of the disaster at Five Forks. He still had in front of Grant, between the Appomattox and the Claiborne road, as many as forty thousand effective men,³ and a line of works as strong and as skilfully constructed as ever defended an army. The force before him was not more than sixty thousand in number, including the entire effective strength of Parke, Wright, Ord, and Humphreys, as they stood in line of battle. It would seem as if the gallant soldiers who had so long withstood the national armies might even yet have resisted an advance; or that the ingenuity and skill which had contrived so many manoeuvres might still have devised a plan by which those soldiers should have eluded their foe, and made one more effort to escape destruction.