lost five thousand men, Hancock succeeded in his mission and captured and retained the road.  The only link now between the capital and the other sections of the South on which the subsistence of the army depended was that by Danville, Va.  This was a military road completed by the government in anticipation of those very events that had now transpired.  Another road on which the government was bending all its energies to complete, but failed for want of time, was a road running from Columbia to Augusta, Ga.  This was to be one of the main arteries of the South in case Charleston should fail to hold out and the junction of the roads at Branchville fall in the hands of the enemy.  Our lines of transportation, already somewhat circumscribed, were beginning to grow less and less.  Only one road leading South by way of Danville, and should the road to Augusta, Ga., via Columbia and Branchville, be cut the South or the Armies of the West and that of the East would be isolated.  As gloomy as our situation looked, there was no want of confidence in the officers and the troops.  The rank and file of the South had never considered a condition of failure.  They felt their cause to be sacred, that they were fighting for rights and principles for which all brave people will make every sacrifice to maintain, that the bravery of a people like that which the South had shown to the world, the spirits that animated them, the undaunted courage by which the greatest battles had been fought and victories gained against unprecedented numbers, all this under such circumstances and under such leadership—­the South could not fail.  Momentary losses, temporary reverses might prolong the struggle, but to change the ultimate results, never.  And at the North there were loud and widespread murmurings, no longer confined to the anti-abolitionist and pro slavery party, but it came from statesmen the highest in the land, it came from the fathers and mothers whose sons had fallen like autumn leaves from the Rapidan to the Appomattox.  The cries and wails of the thousands of orphans went up to high Heaven pleading for those fathers who had left them to fill the unsatiate maw of cruel, relentless war.  The tears of thousands and thousands of widows throughout the length and breadth of the Union fell like scalding waters upon the souls of the men who were responsible for this holocaust.  Their voices and murmuring, though like Rachael’s “weeping for her children and would not be comforted,” all this to appease the Moloch of war and to gratify the ambition of fanatics.  The people, too, of the North, who had to bear all this burden, were sorely pressed and afflicted at seeing their hard earned treasures or hoarded wealth, the fruits of their labor, the result of their toil of a lifetime, going to feed this army of over two millions of men, to pay the bounties of thousands of mercenaries of the old countries and the unwilling freedmen soldiers of the South.  All this only to humble a proud people and rob them of their inherent