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on the morning of the 10th, and make, instead of it, a front attack on the strong intrenchments of Longstreet's left. It would have been better to have continued the turning movement, the Fifth Corps aiding by sending one of its divisions to Hancock, and making a front attack with the other two at the critical moment."

The assaults upon the enemy's intrenchments, alike by the Fifth and by the Second Corps, had been bloody and fruitless. Assuming the withdrawal of Hancock's corps across the Po to have been necessary, the opportunity of the day was in the attack of Upton. Nothing that could be said of that heroic young officer or of General David A. Russell, his division commander, could exaggerate the deserts of these two soldiers, the shining ornaments of the Sixth Corps. The support of Upton should not have been left to a single division. The assaulting column should have been backed up by divisions of the Sixth Corps, by Gibbon as well as Mott from the Second, and by at least one division from the Fifth, uselessly engaged in assailing the center. This the more needs to be said because the characteristic fault of the campaign then opened was attacking at too many points. Few lines can be drawn by engineering skill which, owing to the nature of the ground, have not a weak point; few will be drawn by good engineers which have more than one. It is the office of the commander of an army to discover

that weak point, to make careful and serious preparations for the attack, and to mass behind the assaulting column a force that shall be irresistible if the line be pierced. To assault at two points instead of one only is to double the loss while halving the chance of victory. To assault "all along the line," as was so often done in the summer of 1864, is the very abdication of leadership. It is gratifying to record that the conduct of Colonel Upton received cordial recognition, and that he was at once promoted to be a brigadier general of volunteers.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE SALIENT.

Down to the 12th of May everything had gone wrong with the Union army since it left the battle ground of the Wilderness. "Some one had blundered" regarding the movement to Spottsylvania. Instead of seizing that important point without a contest, the Union forces, finding the enemy there before them, had fallen to making a series of ill-conceived and ill-prepared attacks upon intrenched lines, which had resulted in nothing but severe losses, especially to the Fifth Corps, which had behaved with great but useless heroism. Sedgwick had been killed, an irreparable disaster; and almost every division of the army had suffered severely. The partition of authority between Grant and Meade had worked badly from the first, as it was destined to do through the remainder of the campaign. The troops felt that the attacks had not been carefully studied and adequately provided for; and the intelligence of the rank and file of the Northern army made them very poor subjects for official "fooling."

On the eve of the 11th of May Hancock was or

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