Siege Of Petersburg Quotes

After a siege of 293 days, Grant forced the Confederates to abandon Petersburg and Richmond on the same day.

This sounded, even to the Russians of the time, like a fairy tale out of some opera in St. Petersburg’s gilded theaters; but the hunger, the poverty, and the desperation were real. The

The peasantry had only recently been freed from slavelike servitude, and they were crushed with debt. The economy was stagnant. The country was hardly industrialized; there were not many factories. Though in St. Petersburg itself, nobles and sophisticates attended balls in Parisian gowns and discussed the poetry of the French, this ramshackle empire also included huge, frigid wastes of fir tree and tundra, deserts where the only inhabitants were nomadic families with their herds, and mountain towns that had never even heard the name of their distant ruler.