The Sun.
London, England, 1864-07-21 00:00:00

with no other resnit than to find itself barred at
Spotsylvania Court-house by the immovable grate
presented by the right wing of General Lf':'s army.
Slowly the two armies drew near to each other once
more, but General Lee, well knowing h:s opponent's
character, awaited with calmness, and behind the
slight earthworks which are dignified in this coun-
try with the name of intrenchments, the onslaught
of the Federals. After four days of heavy skir-
mishing, from the Bth to the 11th of May inclusive,
the great shock of Grant's attack was delivered
on the 12th. I question whether in the annals of
modern history so frightful a slaughter has ever
been inflicted by an army acting on the defensive
upon its assailants. It has again and again been
remarked in this war that there is but one way to
get sustained energy of attack out of the Federals,
and that is, to throw them in swiftly-succeeding
lines, and treading close upon each other's heels,
upon their enemy's guns, I know not in how many
lines the hapless Federals—too often I fear blinded
with whisky—were upon this bloody day thrown
into the deadly hailstorm which smote them like a
destroying angel, but the evidence that the slaughter
of Ball's Bluff, Shiloh, Chancellorsville, Murfrees-
boro', or Gettysburg was but as child's play come
pared with the carnarge of Spotsylvania Court-house
is ample and irresistible. Savage and csllous as
Suwarrow, Grant drove his victims, line after line,
upon the death-dealing volleys of their foe. At in-
tervals the smoke lifted, and disclosed a dead, dying,
writhing mass of humanity, such as has not been
witnessed before during this century, if I except
the scene which on the morning of Sept. 8, 1812—
the day after the hitherto bloodiest battle of civi-
lisation—was to be seen in front of the great redoubt
of Borodino. It is not for me to estimate the damage
which, between the commencement of his campaign
and the close of the battle of the 12th, Grant's army
sustained, for I have lived long enough in the neigh-
bourhood of Gen. Lee to share his unwillingness to
guess at the loss inflicted upon his foe. That this
loss isunprecedented is abundantly manifest from the
mingled cry of pride and agony which has gone up
from the Northern journals, and I am in a position
to apprise them of the cost to the Confederates at
which that loss was inflicted. The estimate of Gen.
Lee, based upon the fullest returns from the medical
directors of each corps, places his killed, wounded,
and missing in the battles of the Wilderness and
Spotsylvania Court-house at 12,000 men, all told. If
it be true, as is here generally supposed, that these
two terrible battles have carried the Confederates
over the slope of the dividing line which separates
them from plenary independence, it may be said
that—

" Tan+se molls erat Romanam condere gentem."
The interest of the campaign, so far as it has
hitherto been conducted, culminated at Spotsyl-
Yeti.% Court-house. Again, but not with such
promptitude as after the battle of the Wilderness,
Grant essayed his old flanking policy, and Lee was
heard to exclaim, "Let him circle round where he
likes he will in the end always find me before him.'
Once more the armies faced each other to the south
of the Pamunkey River, and Grant, who had sacri-
ficed thousands upon thousands of his men in reach.
ing a position which M'Clellan gained in 1862 with
the loss of a few hundreds, established incontrover-
tibly the sagacity of the latter General's strategy
by selecting the White-house on the Pamunkey
River, as the base of his farther operations against
Richmond. It was not until the 3d of June that
the armies came for the third time into important
collision, in the neighbourhood of the old battlefields
of 1862, near Cold Harbour, at a distance of not
more than nine miles from Richmond. But it was
abundantly evident that the fury of the storm had
spent itself at Spotsylvania. The attack, it is true,
was supported with the vigour such battles as
Fredericsburg and Chancellorsviile had proved the
Federals to possess, but there was about it little of
the fierce ilan which Grant had at first breathed into
his troops, and which they manifested in the battles
at the commencement of May. It was repulsed
with a facility which has led Northern journals to
sneer at the loss acknowedged on that day by the
Confederates, and which, as compared with the
\damage inflicted upon and acknowledged by General
Grant, seems hardly credible. It is forgotten that
, almost for the first time in three years of war the
IConfederates fought at Spotaylvania Court-house
and Cold Harbour behind fieldworks. Nor can it
be doubted that the callous ferocity of the Federal
General's disposition, his reckless and lavish expen-
diture of life, his disregard of the unburied dead
and the agonised wonnded, have begun latterly to
tell upon the ardour of his men, and to estrange
confidence and affection from breasts in which three
weeks ago they abounded to overflowing.
It is not necessary to say more about the effort
of General Butler upon the south side of the James
River than that it would probably have been much
more formidable if conducted by a soldier. If, after
the first landing of 40,000 Federals at the mouth of
the Appomattox River, ordinary vigour had been
manifested, it is difficult to see how Petersburg, dis-
tant some ten miles from the James River, could
have been saved. As it was, ample time was given
to General Beauregard to gather up a force from
Charleston and Wilmington, and he had little diffi•
culty in scattering Butler's forces to the winds in
a well-planned night attack, which lacked little of
compassing the utter annihilation of Butler. The
attack which Grant has led has been the most per-
sistent, energetic, and intrepid onslaught which
Lee has ever been called on to stem ; the attack of
Butler upon Petersburg has exhibited neither
ability nor courage in the General who planned it,
neither spirit nor persistence in the troops which
conducted it.
I must confess myself at a loss when speaking of
Confederate prospects in Northern Georgia. There
is little to reassure those who contemplate the
numerous retreats of General Johnston, without his
striking a blow for the fine wheat district which he
has surrendered, within three weeks of the hareest,
to the enemy, to say nothing of the iron rolling mills
and Government works abandoned at Rome and on
the Etowah river. It is possible that the ability and
energy of General Sherman (who is here considered
a more formidable antagonist than Grant) and the
strength of his army may necessitate great prudence
on the part of General Johnston ; but I have heard
more than one complaint that the Confederate army
of the West is larger and better appointed than any
army intrusted since the commencement of the war
to either of General Johnston's predecessors. Judg-
ing from present appearances, Atlanta, if preserved,
will owe its salvation more to the distance which
divides it from General Sherman's base at Chatta-
nooga than to the strenuous blows of its Confederate
defenders. It is not necessary for me to say more
about the trans-Mississippi department than that
the Federal grasp upon Louisiana and Texas is now
resolved into little more than the tenure of New Or-
leans, For the last ten days no aggressive movements
have bees undertaken against either Richmond or
Petersburg, and the rumour prevails that, although
a force of not less than 220,000 men has been en•
gaged in the operations conducted by Generals Grant
and Butler, there is an urgent cry already for more
men—to be poured, as seems probable, into that
great abyss of slaughter which has already engulfed
so many of their predecessors.
Languid as is the interest of Europe in the details
of the American war, it will be strange if, when the
details of the Spring campaign of 1864 in Virginia
become thoroughly known, the name of General
Robert E. Lee is not inscribed upon the brightest
rolls of military fame. It is seldom that full justice
is rendered to military genius coincidently with the
achievement of Lie victories which reveal it. It took
years for England to understand and appreciate the
sagacity and foresight which checked Massen a before
the lines of Torres Vedras, and converted a momen-
tarymistake of Marmont into the rout of Salamanca.
There are French books in existence which caw the
light just after Marengo, and which, in spite of the
Italian canopafge of 1796, deny to Napoleon the pos-
session of anything approaching to military genius.
penetrating t
everyln g
design, and But if, as now seems probable, the whole campaign
of General Grant ends in conspicuous failure, the
forethought which has unravelled
which has anticipated his
every move, the vigour and prudence which have so
handled a vastly inferior army as to inflict at the
cost of less than 15,000 men a loss upon the Federals
of five or SIX times that number, and the moral
qualities which have converted in every Scuthern