But Gettysburg convinced Lee that he could toy with the Potomac army no longer, and this was more than ever impossible after Grant took command.  Then Greek met Greek, and the death grapple began.  At the Wilderness, at Spottsylvania, and most mercilessly of all at Cold Harbor, Grant drove his colossal battering-ram against Lee’s gray wall, only to find it solid as Gibraltar.

This struggle tested both commanders’ mettle to the utmost.  At the end of the hammering campaign, after losing men enough to form an army as large as Lee’s, Grant’s van was full twice as far from Richmond as McClellan’s had been two years before.  Not once was Lee flanked, duped, or surprised.  As always hitherto, so now, his darling mode of defence was offence,—­to fight,—­Grant’s every blow being met with another before it hit.  Only once were Lee’s lines forced straight back to stay.  Even then, at the Spottsylvania “bloody angle,” the ground he lost hardly sufficed to graveyard the Union men killed in getting it.  In swinging round to Petersburg, and again at the springing of the Petersburg Mine, Grant thought himself sure to make enormous gains; but Lee’s insight into his purposes, and lightning celerity in checkmating these, foiled both movements, giving the mine operation, moreover, the effect of a deadly boomerang.

Spite of all this, the end of the Confederacy was in sight from the moment of Grant’s arrival at Petersburg.  During the three years that Lee and his indomitable aides and soldiers had been holding at bay brave and perfectly appointed armies vastly outnumbering them, and twice boldly assuming the offensive, with disaster indeed, yet with glory, two other grand campaigns had been going on wherein the Confederacy had fared much worse.  The capture of New Orleans, of Island No.  Ten, and of Vicksburg, had let the Father of Waters again run “unvexed to the sea.”  A second line of operations via Murfreesborough, Chattanooga, Atlanta, and Savannah, had divided the Confederacy afresh.  Sherman’s army, which had achieved this, began on Feb. 1, 1865, to march northward from Savannah.

Bravery in camp and field and deathless endurance at home could not take the place of bread.  The blockade was, to be sure, for some time extensively evaded, admitting English wares of all sorts in great quantities.  But in no long time the blockade tightened.  Moreover, comparatively little cotton was raised which could in any event have been exported.  Credit failing, imports, if any, had to be paid for in money.  This, of course, was soon spent, and then importation ceased.  Privateers destroyed but could bring nothing home.

As the war progressed, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, Louisiana, and with the fall of Vicksburg the whole immense Trans-Mississippi tract, were lost to the Confederacy.  Sherman’s march isolated also Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.