The weekly pioneer and Democrat. [volume] (Saint Paul, Minn. Territory) 1855-1865, 1864-11-11

kfuoOan's Campaign against Rich.
mOn6.

mona
No one has presumed to question the
unanimity with which the Democratic
press has sustained General GRANT in bis
campaign against Richmond. No matter
how much they may have questioned the
prudence or the wisdom of an overland
movement, from the moment it was decid-
ed upon, they gave to it the entire weight
of their influence, and seriously addressed
themselves to the task of sustaining the
General in the field.
The campaign, which has cost the coun-
try one hundred and fifty thousand lives,
is now practically over, and must be de-
clared Ia failure. The object for which
it was undertaken has not been accom-
plished, the army is almost about re-
firing ito winter quarters with Rich
mond in undisputed possession Of the
enemy. Az the men, all the ammunition
and all the means that Gen. GRANT has
demanded of the Government have been
lavishly furnished. He has been left free
to form his own plans, and to organize his
own campaign. He has selected his own
time and his own generals. He has fol-
lowed his own strategy. In short, he fur
nishes, in company with Gen. SHERMAN,
one of the two instances in which
general has not been interfered with by
any military plan of the Administration,
and must therefore be judged upon his
own merits. That Gen. GRANT has fought
some bloody and obstinate battles, we
freely and readily admit, while we as
readily assert that for all purposes of
successful military strategy those battles
were useless, and involved needless sac
riice of human life. The succession of
battles in the Wilderness were claimed by
the Administration as great victories, and
upon them was based the assertion, which
almost took the form of an official procla-
nation, that Gen. GRANT would celebrate
the Fourth of July within the walls of
Richmond. The Fourth of July came and
Richmond was not taken. The marvellous
skill of Gen. IxB baffled GRANT at every
point, who, with an army of two hundred
thousand men, whose decimated columns
were kept up to their full number by per-
petual reinforcements, found himself pow
erless in the front of Notifications which
have never been defended by over seventy
thousand of the enemy. The assaults of
Our columns, brave and determined as they
were, we're made Intellectual by the
strength of LKR's position, and bloody by
the obstinacy and skill of his resistance.
Our army, as courageous an organization
as ever marched with steady step to death
or victory, was unable to accomplish the
specific object for which it had set out,
after having whitened the wilderness and
the valleys with its bones from tie Kappa
hammock to the James But the fault
was not in the army. Led over and over
again to useless slaughter by determined
and gallant General, they never faltered
They piled up their dead and CORY bodies
in one huge hecatomb, az a sublime and
eternal monument to the heroic endurance
and invincible powers of the American
people. They walked through the valley
of the shadow of death while the flames
kindled around and upon them. They
sealed their testimony with martyrs sac
rifice in behalf of the Constitution and the
Union. Who then was to blame? The
army? No! thousand times no! Gen.
GRANT? No! he accomplished all that
could be accomplished with the army. The
President of the United States? Yes!
he was the guilty man. He was the Com
manderin-C Chief who ranked the Gen.
eral in the field, and who gave to
the army Of General LEE an auxiliary
resisting force of at least one hundred
thousand men, by the proclamation
of political policy which banded the
South together in deathless determine
ton to conquer or die. Let US hold the
President responsible. While freely sus-
tanning the military measures of our Gem
erals in the field, let us denounce with just
and unsparing condemnation, a policy
which renders ell these measures inef-
fectual.