He sat sometimes by his window for hours immovable as a marble statue, his deep, hungry eyes gazing, gazing forever over the shining river toward the Southern hills. His Secretaries stepped softly about the room in silent sympathy with the Chief they loved with passionate devotion.
Grant had crossed the Rapidan on that glorious spring morning in May with his magnificent army accompanied by the highest hopes of millions. And there had followed those awful sickening battles, one after another, until he had fallen back in failure before the impassable trenches around Petersburg.
The star of Grant, the conquering hero of the West, had apparently set in a sea of blood.
Lee, with inferior numbers, alert, resourceful, vigilant, had checked and baffled him at every turn, and Richmond's fall was no nearer to human eye than in 1862.
The miles and miles of hospital barracks in Washington, crowded to their doors with wounded, dying men, were the living witnesses of the Nation's mortal agony. Every city, town, village, hamlet and county in the North was in mourning. Death had literally flung its pall over the world.
From these thousands of stricken homes there had slowly risen a storm of protest against the new leader of the Army. The word "Butcher" was on every lip. General Grant, they said, possessed merely the qualities of the bulldog fighter—tenacity and persistence. He held what he had won so long as men were poured into his ranks by tens of thousands to take the place of the dead. They declared that he possessed no genius, no strategic skill, no power to originate plans and devise means to overcome his skillful and brilliant antagonist. The demand was pressed on the President for his removal.
His refusal had brought on him the blame for all the blood and all the suffering and all the failures of the past bitter year.
His answer to his critics was remorseless in its common sense, but added nothing to his hold on the people.
"We must fight to win," he firmly declared. "Grant is the ablest general we have yet developed. His losses have been appalling—but the struggle is now to the bitter end. Our resources are exhaustless. The South can not replace her fallen soldiers—her losses are fatal, ours are not."
In the face of a political campaign he prepared a call by draft for five hundred thousand more men and issued a proclamation appointing a day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer.