place within the next few days, cost the North 14,000 men, against a loss to the South which has been put as low as 1,700.  It was the one battle which Grant regretted having fought.  He gave up the hope of a fight with Lee on advantageous conditions outside Richmond.  On June 12 he suddenly moved his army across the James to the neighbourhood of City Point, east of Petersburg.  Lee must now stand siege in Richmond and Petersburg.  Had he now marched north against Washington, Grant would have been after him and would have secured for his vastly larger force the battle in the open which he had so far vainly sought.  Yet another disappointment followed.  On July 30 an attempt was made to carry Petersburg by assault immediately after the explosion of an enormous mine.  It failed with heavy loss, through the fault of the amiable but injudicious Burnside, who now passed into civil life, and of the officers under him.  The siege was to be a long affair.  In reality, for all the disappointment, and in spite of Grant’s confessed mistake at Cold Harbour, his grim plan was progressing.  The force which the South could ill spare was being worn down, and Grant was in a position in which, though he might have got there at less cost, and though the end would not be yet, the end was sure.  His army was for the time a good deal shaken, and the estimation in which the West Point officers held him sank low.  His own determination was quite unshaken, and, though Lincoln hinted somewhat mildly that these enormous losses ought not to recur, his confidence in Grant was unabated, too.

People in Washington who had watched all this with alternations of feeling that ended in dejection had had another trial to their nerves early in July.  The Northern General Sigel, who commanded in the lower part of the Shenandoah Valley, protecting the Baltimore and Ohio Railway, had marched southward in June in pursuance of a subsidiary part of Grant’s scheme, but in a careless and rather purposeless manner.  General Early, detached by Lee to deal with him, defeated him; outmanoeuvred and defeated General Hunter, who was sent to supersede him; overwhelmed with superior force General Lew Wallace, who stood in his way further on; and upon July 11 appeared before Washington itself.  The threat to Washington had been meant as no more than a threat, but the garrison was largely made up of recruits; reinforcements to it sent back by Grant arrived only on the same day as Early, and if that enterprising general had not wasted some previous days there might have been a chance that he could get into Washington, though not that he could hold it.  As it was he attacked one of the Washington forts.  Lincoln was present, exhibiting, till the officers there insisted on his retiring, the indifference to personal danger which he showed on other occasions too.  The attack was soon given up, and in a few days Early had escaped back across the Potomac, leaving in Grant’s mind a determination that the Shenandoah Valley should cease to be so useful to the South.