He was outnumbered from first to last; and all his victories were gained against greatly superior forces, and with troops greatly deficient in every necessary of war except courage and discipline.  Never, perhaps, was so much achieved against odds so terrible.  The Southern soldiers—­’that incomparable Southern infantry’ to which a late Northern writer renders due tribute of respect—­were no doubt as splendid troops as a general could desire; but the different fortune of the East and the West proves that the Virginian army owed something of its excellence to its chief.  Always outnumbered, always opposed to a foe abundantly supplied with food, transport, ammunition, clothing, all that was wanting to his own men, he was always able to make courage and skill supply the deficiency of strength and of supplies; and from the day when he assumed the command after the battle of Seven Pines, where General Joseph Johnston was disabled, to the morning of the final surrender at Appomattox Court-House, he was almost invariably victorious in the field.  At Gettysburg only he was defeated in a pitched battle; on the offensive at the Chickahominy, at Centreville, and at Chancellorsville, on the defensive at Antietam, Fredericksburg, the Wilderness, and Spottsylvania, he was still successful.  But no success could avail him any thing from the moment that General Grant brought to bear upon the Virginian army the inexhaustible population of the North, and, employing Sherman to cut them off from the rest of the Confederacy, set himself to work to wear them out by the simple process of exchanging two lives for one.  From that moment the fate of Richmond and of the South was sealed.  When General Lee commenced the campaign of the Wilderness he had, we believe, about fifty thousand men; his adversary had thrice that number at hand, and a still larger force in reserve.  When the army of Virginia marched out of Richmond it still numbered some twenty-six thousand men; after a retreat of six days, in the face of an overwhelming enemy, with a crushing artillery—­a retreat impeded by constant fighting, and harassed by countless hordes of cavalry—­eight thousand were given up by the capitulation of Appomattox Court-House.  Brilliant as were General Lee’s earlier triumphs, we believe that he gave higher proofs of genius in his last campaign, and that hardly any of his victories were so honorable to himself and his army as that six-days’ retreat.

“There have, however, been other generals of genius as brilliant, of courage and endurance hardly less distinguished.  How many men have ever displayed the perfect simplicity of nature, the utter absence of vanity or affectation, which belongs to the truest and purest greatness, in triumph or in defeat, as General Lee has done?  When Commander-in-Chief of the Southern armies, he moved from point to point, as duty required, with less parade than a European general of division, wearing no sword, attended by no other staff than the immediate occasion demanded,