His answer to his critics was remorseless.
"We must fight to win. Grant is the ablest general we have. His losses are appalling. But the struggle is now on to the bitter end. Our resources of men and money are exhaustless. The South cannot replace her fallen sons. Her losses, therefore, are fatal!"
War had revealed to all at last that the Abolition crusade had been built on a lie. The negro had proven a bulwark of strength to the South. Had their theories been true, had the slaves been beaten and abused the Black Bees would surely have swarmed. A single Southern village put to the torch by black hands would have done for Lee's army what no opponent had been able to do. It would have been destroyed in a night. The Confederacy would have gone down in hopeless ruin.
Not a black hand had been raised against a Southern man or woman in all the raging hell. This fact is the South's vindication against the slanders of the Abolitionists. The negroes stood by their old masters. They worked his fields; they guarded his women and children; they mourned over the graves of their fallen sons.
And now in the supreme hour of gathering darkness came the last act of the tragedy—the arming of the Northern blacks and the training of their hands to slay a superior race.
In the first year of the war Lincoln had firmly refused the prayer of Thomas Wentworth Higginson that he be allowed to arm and drill the Black Legions of the North. Later the pressure could not be resisted. The daily murder of the flower of the race had lowered its morale. It had lowered the value set on racial trait and character. The Cavalier and Puritan, with a thousand years of inspiring history throbbing in their veins, had become mere cannon fodder. The cry for men and still more men was endless. And this cry must be heard, or the war would end.
Men of the white breed were clasping hands at last across the lines under the friendly cover of the night. They spoke softly through their tears of home and loved ones. The tumult and the shout had passed. The jeer and taunt, blind passion and sordid hate lay buried in the long, deep graves of a hundred fields of blood.
Grant's new plan of campaign resulted in the deadlock of Petersburg. The two armies now lay behind thirty-five miles of deep trenches with a stretch of volcano-torn, desolate earth between them.
The Black Legions were massed for a dramatic ending of the war. Grant,
Meade, and Burnside had developed a plan. Hundreds of sappers and miners
burrowed under the shell-torn ground for months, digging a tunnel under
Lee's fortress immediately before Petersburg.
The tunnel was not complete before Lee's ears had caught the sound. A counter tunnel was hastily begun but Grant's men had reached the spot under the center of Elliot's salient before the Confederates could intercept them.