fifteen thousand men a general would undertake to hold such an extended front, to stick so obstinately to weak and untenable positions, to try repeatedly by desperate counter-assaults to recapture the ground which had been wrested from him.

The tactics of the Confederate general were bold indeed. Had the Fifth corps, at any time while the rest of the army were engaging Beauregard's forces, marched up the Jerusalem plank road into Petersburg, the whole game would have been up. But this seems not to have been even thought of. We repeat that it is no wonder that the unaccountable failure of the Army of the Potomac to accomplish anything of moment during these two days has obscured the brilliant strategy by which the army had these two days given to it in which to make itself master of Petersburg.

For, during this time, Lee was on the north side of the James, fully expect ing that Grant intended a direct move on Richmond. Able as Lee undoubtedly was, he failed on this occasion to divine his opponent's scheme. Nor could Beauregard rouse him to a sense of the danger of the situation. Dispatch after dispatch, aide after aide, were sent to Richmond; but the alarming news they brought was attributed to Beauregard's too fertile imagination. Among the most curious stories in the book are those of the staff officers whom Beauregard sent at this time to General Lee. It was not till Beauregard telegraphed, on the 17th, that, unless reinforced, he would have to evacuate Petersburg by noon of the next day that Lee consented to move to Petersburg; and even then he expressed himself as "not yet satisfied of General Grant's movements."

On the morning of Saturday, the 18th, accordingly, General Lee's army began to appear. On that day the same fatality pursued the Federal leaders as had marked their doings for the preceding forty-eight hours. Meade's order to attack at daybreak, which could have

been and ought to have been carried out to the letter, would even then have gained us the possession of Petersburg. When our troops moved, early on Saturday morning, they found the lines of the night before abandoned; in pressing on, they allowed themselves to be detained by the enemy's skirmishers; finally, they arrived in front of the formidable positions, near the city itself, on which Beauregard, with excellent judgment, had placed his little force, and which were the positions held to the end of the war. Here our corps commanders saw fit to halt; and while they were thus delaying in front of the thin lines of Beauregard, which at that moment they could either have broken by a direct assault, or have turned by way of the Jerusalem Road, the gallant little force which had so well defended Petersburg was reinforced by the army of Northern Virginia. At half past ten o'clock in the morning appeared General Lee himself, at the head of Kershaw's division. And when, after a sufficient time had been spent in making preparation, the Federal army delivered their assault it was a total failure.

Despite of the greatest courage and self-devotion on the part of both officers and men, we were repulsed at every point, with great slaughter. Our want of enterprise had cost us dear.

Beauregard was in Petersburg at the time of the explosion of the mine, on the 30th of July, 1864, and Colonel Roman gives us much that is interesting and valuable in regard to that most unfortunate day.

In the autumn of 1864, Beauregard was again sent to the West, to command the armies of Hood and Taylor. His authority over these officers seems not to have been very clearly defined. He certainly took no active part in the disastrous campaign of General Hood.

But in the winter and early spring of 1865 we find him, at first alone, afterwards with his old comrade, Joseph E.

Johnston, working hard to get together a respectable force, to arrest the progress of Sherman in the Carolinas. Matters were at a desperate pass for the Southern cause. The "march to the sea gave the Federals two armies on the Atlantic coast. Sherman left Savannah on the 1st of February, on his march northward, and to the armies of Grant and Lee "there came," as Swinton well says, "rolling across the plains of the Carolinas, beating nearer and nearer, the drums of Champion Hills and Shiloh." Unless Sherman could be stopped, the Confederacy was doomed. On the other hand, such was the weariness of the war in the North and in Europe, and so precarious seemed the condition of the Federal finances, that a severe defeat inflicted upon Sherman, while in the Carolinas, might yet, so some sagacious men thought, restore the falling fortunes of the South. It might accomplish for the Confederacy what was accomplished for the colonies by the bloody and indecisive battle of Guilford Court House, which Greene forced upon Cornwallis in March, 1781.

But to effect this required the instant adoption of a policy of concentration. Augusta, Columbia, Goldsboro', Wilmington, Charleston, even, as Beauregard thought, Richmond itself, - should be abandoned at once. Any and every sacrifice of local feeling should be unhesitatingly made. No associations were too sacred to be given up, if only a force could be raised capable of coping with Sherman's powerful and well-appointed army. This policy Beauregard strongly advocated. He soon, however, found obstacles in his way. The Confederacy had deeply felt the loss of Savannah. But to abandon Charleston was too terrible even to think of. General Hardee doubted and delayed at the last moment. Davis ordered him to postpone the evacuation of the city as long as was prudent, hoping to save the pain of seeing it pass into the hands of the enemy."

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From causes like this, Beauregard's policy was blocked at every stage; the result fell far short of his hopes. Sherman, in the mean time, was steadily pursuing his onward course. He compelled the evacuation of Augusta, Columbia, Charleston, and Wilmington, as an inevitable consequence of his admirable strategy. He completely deceived his adversaries as to his real intentions; he kept them separated from each other; and it was not until his masterly march from Savannah to Goldsboro' was wellnigh completed that Johnston, who had succeeded Beauregard in command, was able to strike the well-meant but feeble blows of Bentonville and Averysboro'. Sherman had deserved his suc

cess.

After the evacuation of Richmond and the surrender of General Lee, Mr. Davis had an interview with Johnston and Beauregard at Greensboro', North Carolina. Of this interview General Johnston, in the appendix to the second volume (page 664), gives a curious account. The military men were all of a mind. They considered the situation as hopeless, and so expressed themselves. With them agreed the Secretary of War, Breckinridge, and all the members of the cabinet except the President and Mr. Benjamin. The latter, General Johnston says, "repeated something very like Sempronius's speech for war. Mr. Davis," the general goes on to say, "received these suggestions of mine as if annoyed by them." if annoyed by them." Beauregard reports that the President said that the struggle could still be carried on to a successful issue by bringing out all the latent resources of the Confederacy, and, if necessary, by crossing the Mississippi and uniting with Kirby Smith's forces. But he was finally compelled to hear reason, and General Johnston was permitted to open negotiations with Sher

man.

Here we leave our subject. It needs not to be said that Colonel Roman's

Congress and struck down the recreant Whig party, and he ran as Vice-President on the ticket with Hale in 1852, when it looked as if the Free Soil movement was about to be submerged in the flood of compromise. A man who had such experiences as these could hardly fail to tell his story well, and Mr. Julian's narrative is instinct with the fire of those exciting times.

Nothing is more striking, however, than the flashes of light which are here thrown on certain phases of the antislavery movement; enabling us to appreciate some of them, and to read their true character in a way that no other writer has attained. Here, for instance, we see clearly that Taylor's triumphant election was in reality the death of the Whig party; and no one can read Mr. Julian's account of that episode and fail to understand why the Whigs went so hopelessly to pieces at the very next election. His analysis of the Free Soil vote in 1848, to take another instance, shows plainly why there was such an apparent falling-off four years later. The vote for Van Buren was artificial; the vote for Hale was genuine, and, far from indicating loss of strength, really gave evidence of remarkable growth. Mr. Julian describes the leading men of the day in the same incisive manner. He has, indeed, quite a faculty for disposing of a man by a single touch, as when he refers to Mr. Thompson, of Pennsylvania, as "the parliamentary hangman of his employers." He heard the 7th of March speech, and he is the first writer of any party who has pointed out the way in which Webster labored in his utterance. The sentences of the great orator were broken in delivery, and big drops of sweat stood on his forehead. Mr. Julian attributes this to a troubled conscience, the right the right explanation, undoubtedly, and another striking indication of the sense which Webster had that he was doing wrong, and acting contrary to the impulses of

his better and higher nature. Nothing, again, could be neater than this little touch about a first meeting with Sumner, before the latter, whom Mr. Julian profoundly admired, was in active political life: "He told me that he had recently been lecturing at several points out of the city [Boston], and had been delighted to find the people so intelligent and so capable of understanding him." Nothing could illustrate better the lack of quick perception and of a sense of humor which was so marked a defect in Sumner's powerful but solemn mind and character.

The dramatic portion of the book closes with the election of Lincoln; but we have never seen the absolute violence with which the Republicans recoiled from war, or from any hostile measures, when they first came into power, so strongly portrayed as it is here. They not only would not and did not interfere in any way with the South, but, overmastered by love for the Union and by dread of its impending dissolution, they stood ready, and were even eager, to make every concession. This attitude on the part of the Republicans, so forcibly described by Mr. Julian, brings out in darker relief than ever the crime of the Southern leaders, who seem to have gone mad with rage because they had merely lost the election, and to have rushed headlong to destruction, dragging their people after them. If any one has doubts as to where the awful burden of having caused the most terrible of civil wars should rest, let him read Mr. Julian's account of the conduct of the Republicans, which he himself bitterly condemned, in the spring of 1861.

The chapters on the war and the reconstruction period are by no means so interesting interesting or so valuable as their predecessors. They are necessarily fragmentary, and they deal with events for the most part so entirely within the memory of the present generation that