The story of this campaign is too long to be narrated in particular. On both sides it is a record of magnificent valor, endurance, and resolution, to which the world affords no parallel, when it is remembered that the armies were recruited from the free citizenship of the nation. As the weeks and months wore on, General's Grant's visage, it is said, settled into an unrelaxing expression of grim resolve. He carried the nation on his shoulders in those days. If he had wearied or yielded, hope might have vanished. He did not yield nor faint. He planned and toiled and fought, keeping his own counsel, bearing patiently the disappointment, the misunderstanding, the doubt, the criticism, the woe of millions who had no other hope but in his success and were often on the verge of despair. He beheld his plans defeated by the incompetence or errors of subordinates whom he trusted, and let the blame be laid upon himself without protest or murmuring. He knew better than any one else the terrible cost of life which his unrelenting purpose demanded; but he knew also that the price of relenting, involving the discouragement of failure, the cost of another campaign after the enemy had got breath and new equipment, the possible refusal of the North to try again, was far greater and more humiliating. Little wonder that he was oppressed and silent and moody. Yet he ruled his own spirit in accordance with the habit of his life. No folly or disappointment provoked him to utter an oath. General Horace Porter, of his staff, a member of his intimate military family, says that the strongest expression of vexation that ever escaped his lips was: "Confound it!" He alone had the genius to be master of the situation at all times, and the "simple faith in success" that would not let him be swerved from his aim. So he pressed on from the Wilderness to Spottsylvania, to North Anna, to South Anna, to the Pamunky, to Cold Harbor, to the Chickahominy, fighting and flanking all the way, until at the end of the month he had pressed Lee back to the immediate vicinity of Richmond. The bloodiest of all these battles was the ill-judged attack, for which Grant has been much criticised, on the strongly intrenched rebel lines at Cold Harbor. If he could have dislodged Lee here he could have compelled him to retreat into the immediate fortifications of Richmond. But Lee's position was impregnable: the assault failed. In less than an hour Grant lost 13,000 men killed, wounded, and missing, and gained nothing substantial.