August 24, 1864
What you say of
Meade's want of success is, as a fact, true; but what I don't understand is,
that the successes are Grant's but the failures Meade's. In point of reality
the whole is Grant's: he directs all, and his subordinates are only responsible
as executive officers having more or less important functions. There have been
cases where they might be said to act alone; for instance, the assault of the
18th of June, though under a general permission from Grant, was strictly an
operation of Meade. He felt badly about that failure, “Because,” said he, “I
should have taken Petersburg. I had reason to calculate on success. The
enemy had no defences but what they had thrown up in a few hours; and I had
60,000 men to their 25,000.” All of which was true and the result showed the
difference of morale. The men who stormed the Rappahannock redoubts in November
'63 would have walked over the breastworks and driven Beauregard into the
Appomattox; but those men are on the ground between here and the Rapid Ann, or
fill the hospitals in the North. Put a man in a hole and a good battery on a
hill behind him, and he will beat off three times his number, even if he is not
a very good soldier.
SOURCE: George R. Agassiz, Editor, Meade’s
Headquarters, 1863-1865: Letters of Colonel Theodore Lyman from the Wilderness
to Appomattox, p. 224
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