In emerging from the Wilderness, the head of the column reached the cross-roads the left fork of which led back to the Potomac and the right fork to Richmond or to Petersburg.  In the previous campaigns, the army of the Potomac, after doing its share of plucky fighting and taking more than its share of discouragement, had at such a point been withdrawn for rest and recuperation.  It was not an unnatural expectation that this course would be taken in the present campaign.  The road to the right meant further fatigue and further continuous fighting for men who were already exhausted.  In the leading brigade it was only the brigade commander and the adjutant who had knowledge of the instructions for the line of march.  When, with a wave of the hand of the adjutant, the guidon flag of the brigade was carried to the right and the head of the column was set towards Richmond, a shout went up from the men marching behind the guidon.  It was an utterance not of discouragement but of enthusiasm.  Exhausting as the campaign had been, the men in the ranks preferred to fight it out then and to get through with it.  Old soldiers as they were, they were able to understand the actual issue of the contest.  Their plucky opponents were as exhausted as themselves and possibly even more exhausted.  It was only through the hammering of Lee’s diminishing army out of existence that the War could be brought to a close.  The enthusiastic shout of satisfaction rolled through the long column reaching twenty miles back, as the news passed from brigade to brigade that the army was not to be withdrawn but was, as Grant’s report to Lincoln was worded, “to fight it out on this line if it took all summer.”  When this report reached Lincoln, he felt that the selection of Grant as Lieutenant-General had been justified.  He said:  “We need this man.  He fights.”

In July, 1864, Washington is once more within reach if not of the invader at least of the raider.  The Federal forces had been concentrated in Grant’s lines along the James, and General Jubal Early, one of the most energetic fighters of the Southern army, tempted by the apparently unprotected condition of the capital, dashed across the Potomac on a raid that became famous.  It is probable that in this undertaking, as in some of the other movements that have been referred to on the part of the Southern leaders, the purpose was as much political as military.  Early’s force of from fifteen to sixteen thousand men was, of course, in no way strong enough to be an army of invasion.  The best success for which he could hope would be, in breaking through the defences of Washington, to hold the capital for a day or even a few hours.  The capture of Washington in 1864, as in 1863 or in 1862, would in all probability have brought about the long-hoped-for intervention of France and England.  General Lew Wallace, whose name became known in the years after the War through some noteworthy romances, Ben Hur and The Fair God,