The Sun.
London, England, 1864-09-09 00:00:00

the first onset of the Confederates, many of the
panic•atruck negroes (who numbered 2,200 in all)
crowded into the empty crater of the mine, and
cowered down in abject terror. As the Confederate
soldiers, infuriated by the passions of battle and
maddened by being for the first time in their lives
engaged hand to hand with negroes, 'orced their
way up to the ghastly hole, into which wounded,
dead, and shrinking men had together been thrust,
a scene ensued which baffles description. Confede-
rate officers who have witnessed this war from the
commencement, and who have seen " on horror's
head horrors accumulate," tell me that their eyes
have rested on no such other scene. Here and
there, a few white Federals, who did not share the
panic of their black associates, kept firing from the
edge of the pit, while volley after volley was poured
by the Confederates into the writhing, quivering
conglomeration of black and white humanity which
struggled and died in this hole of horror. Out of
2,200 negroes carried into the Confederate salient
at five o'clock in the morning the Federals are said
to have regained only 900. Three hundred were
taken, and are now held prisoners by the Confe-
derates ; the rest, that is to say 1,000, perished in
and about the Cave of Despair which I have at-
tempted to describe.
His "great Napoleonic device" cost Gen. Grant
very dear. Including the negroes, he must have
lost, when his troops were driven out by General
Mahone, not less than 5,000 men, killed, wounded,
and taken prisoners. It is not, I think, pre3umpe
tuous to predict that any fresh attempts at mining
will cost the Federals still dearer. The experience
of the 30th of July has so quickened the energies of
the Confederate engineers, that I do not believe they
will be caught tripping again. Possibly, before this
letter reaches England, the truth of these words
will have received a pointed illustration. It is stated
in the Northern journals that the charge of powder
employed was six tons, but it is believed by
General Lee's engineers that a charge of one ton
would have been amply adequate for the purpose.
As upon many previous occasions, so again in this
instance, I feel bound to remark that an English
military engineer would gain much by inspecting
the mining and countermining operations now in
progress at Petersburg. The lessons of the most
gigantic war of modern times, involving the only
material blockade established since the intro-
duction of steam, and military and naval operations
of the most diversified character, extending over the
largest canvas ever stretched by Bellona, will have
to be gathered from the hurried, imperfect, and ne-
cessarily inaccurate reports of newspaper corres-
pondents.

It is obvious that since the failure of his mine the
hopelessness of General Grant's prospects as regards
Richmond cannot be concealed even from the hood.
winked people of Broadway and Chestnut-street. I
believe that if President Lincoln remained undis-
turbed or unthreatened in Washington, his impulse
would be to retain General Grant and his army in
their present position on the Appomattox and
James, and to keep on promising a new and more
startling development, if the people would only swal-
low it until after they have re-elected him on the 4th
November. But unless lam mistaken, in addition
to General Early, who is protecting the Shenandoah
Walley and its bountiful crops, and to General Lee
who seems likely with the bulk of his army still to
face Grant before Petersburg, President Lincoln is
likely to have a third Confederate army on his
hands. We shall witness either the heavy reinforce-
ment of Early and his march with a large army into
Pennsylvania, or the operation of another distinct
force against Washington. At any rate it seems to
me very improbable that Grant will be able to re.
main where he is until the end of next month. With
a comparatively small force General Lee will protect
Petersburg and Richmond, and will worry his oppo-
nents to death by threatening Washington from the
Valley, and possibly also from Orange Court-house.
It must be remembered that the railroads leading
north from Richmond to Gordonsville and Culpepper
Court-house are repaired and again in working
order. It is to the credit of an unmechanical and
dilatory people like the Southerners that they have
shown such fertility of resource and energy in new
and untried fields. All the railroads into Richmond
have at times been cut; all are at this moment re-
paired and in active running order, At no moment,
since the commencement of May, has General Lee
been in so great a degree lord of the ascendant in
Virginia as at present, Hence I conclude, instead of
imitating Grant's strategy and dashing his head
against the strong fortifications of his enemy, he
will unfix Grant's grasp upon Petersburg and Rich-
mond by making his presence imperatively nem:,
sere/ elsewhere.
It will have been remarked in England that the
lon gsufferin g forbearance wh:ch has been manifested
by the Confederates, whenever they have left the
Potomac to their south, is at last exhausted. I have
often had occasion to call the attention of your
readers to the savage excesses of warfare which in
every insurgent State the Federal armies have prac-
tised, encouraged by the applause of ninestenths of
the journals of the North, by the fiery pulpit elo-
quence of their slaughter-breeding clergy, and by
the vindictive approbation of what in every other
country is called the softer sex. Atrocities which
in Europe would have roused the House of Com-
mons to madness fall upon dull and insensate ears
when the report of them is wafted across the At-
lantic. But there is one feature in these excesses
of the Federals which shows that their pErpetrators
evidently believe that Confederate forbearance has
been dictated only by fear. I allude to the increased
ferocity and irresponsibility to outside public opinion
which each successive Federal General has mani-
fested. When I was at Winchester in June of
last year, listening to story after story about the
enormities of Nlilroy,l little thought that before 12
months Winchester would sigh for Milroy as though
he were an angel. Although Butler still reigns
supreme as prince of ruthless and cowardly
tyrants, he has a formidable rival and competitor
in Gen. Hunter. It seems that the raid of this last
worthy in June to the neighbourhood of Lynch.
burg, his destruction of Governor Letcher's house
at Lexington, his outrage on the statue of Wash-
ington, his insolence to women wherever he en•
countered them, have combined to inflame even
such a merciful man as Gen. Lee, and to exhibit to
him the necessity of fighting the devil with fire.
The burning of the town of Chambersburg, in
Pennsylvania, is but the first of many similar acts,
unless some marked difference of animus in the con-
duct of the war is breathed hereafter into the
Federal Generals by the authorities at Washington.
Dark, indeed, are the prospects of this continent, if
another year of this increasingly ruthless and em-
bittered war be in store for her. Towns, houses,
and barns of non-combatants, which in civilised
warfare have for 50 years been sacred, will, in the
old Scottish border language, " hear the red cock
\
crow," and mark, by their ruddy glare, the track
o
of theth raider for miles and miles along either bank
Potomac. At Andersonville, in Georgia,
Salisbury,Spots
ofselehesaiNorth Carolina, and many other
a, no less than 40,000 Federal
prisoners
are
held in darance. It is believed here
that 30,000 CoNth
nfoerderate prisoners are similarly de-
tained in the North,
and although the balance of
prisoners is against
to no exchange can Mr
Stanton and the Cabinet
to consent. But of this ionfdl'eVlashington be broughtos
great as is the insensibiliteasyy
)toitihonumoannthseuiffreprainrtg,
which it reveals, there
tihse
30,000 Confederate
explanation. It
is known that out of
reT,rn to
pri-
soners, every man, if exchanged, would
the ranks ; it is also known that the term o
of the 40,000 Federal prisoners has expired, mosta
, that neither persuasion nor money Would induce
I
them to shoulder a musket again. Think of the
suffering and anguished hearts implied in the
detention as prisoners, always under circumstances
of trial, often under circumstances of cruelty, of
ssand men ! Well might an American
in weariness and despair the map
:oetfacteteni3siatn close
cilocitl Tinent, as Mr Pitt closed the map
of Europ,_-! after Austerlitz, and sigh over the
havoc which three short years of war and rapine
have worked in prospects such ae, before the election
of Mr Lincoln, had no parallel among the other
civilised nations of the globe 1
I will defer until my next letter any detailed state-
ments of the brightening prospects of Gin. Hood
and his army before Atlanta, merely adding that at