Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 02.djvu/271

Rh clamors for substantial victory smote more sharply on his inner ear than did the piteous wail which rose from countless Northern homes for the 45,000 brave men whose bodies lay putrefying in the tangled Golgotha from Rapidan to North Anna—urged by these clamors, or else goaded into unreasoning fury by the patient readiness of his adversary, ordered up 16,000 of Butler's men from south of the James, and at break of day on June the 3d assaulted Lee's entire front—resolute to burst through the slender, adamantine barrier, which alone stayed the mighty tide of conquest, that threatened to roll onward until it mingled with the waves of Western victory which were even then roaring through the passes of Alatoona—resolute, yet, like Lord Angelo, "slipping grossly," through "heat of blood and lack of tempered judgment," for the slender barrier yielded not, but when subsided the dreadful flood, which for a few brief moments had foamed in crimson fury round the embattled slopes of Cold Harbor, there was left him but the wreck of a noble army, which in sullen despair refused longer to obey his orders.

Such was the retrospect of this thirty days' campaign to Lee, as he sat in his simple tent pitched upon the very ground, whence, but two years before, with positions reversed, he had driven McClellan in rout and disaster to the James; and though Lee the man was modest, he was but mortal, and Lee the soldier could but be conscious of his own genius, and having proved the matchless temper of the blade, which Providence, or Destiny, or call it what you will, had placed within his hands, we may be sure that his heart was stirred with high hopes of his country's deliverance, and that through these hopes his pliant genius was inspired to discern in each new difficulty but fresh device. And his veterans of confirmed hardihood, watching the gracious serenity of that noble face, conscious of the same warlike virtues which made him dear to them, caught up and reflected this confidence, remembering that he had declared to them in general orders after Spotsylvania: "It is in your power, under God, to defeat the last effort of the enemy, establish the independence of your native land, and earn the lasting love and gratitude of your countrymen and the admiration of mankind."

And to an army intelligent as it was resolute, there was surely