Grant had captured Vicksburg, a good part of the English Press and the upper classes mourned as for a calamity. The fall of Washington had been fully expected.

Seward's letter to Adams concerning the two rams that were being built was that if any more ships were fitted out they would "pursue the pirates into British ports," and Adams wrote hastily to Lord Russell concerning the ships, "This is war." On 8th and 9th October 1863 the rams were seized by the English Government, and in the end purchased by them.

But the "new reckoning" was not in the world of foreign or domestic politics, but in the field of battle. The limitless resources of the North and the limited resources of the South were being matched to a logical conclusion. By the summer of 1863 the decisive battles were fought in favour of the North.

In September of the year before, when M'Clellan had fought and won at Antietam, Lincoln had hoped that he would prevent Lee from escaping with his army already crippled by a fourth, and that Richmond would be taken, and thus the war be brought to an end. It seemed to him that under the conditions this was feasible. Perhaps the wish was father to the thought, for he knew that another year of war would mean a radical change in the laws of the Government he was trying to uphold, a forced conscription of soldiers, and perhaps foreign recognition of the South, or mediation.

He urged M'Clellan with gentleness, with arguments, and finally with impatience. "I have just read your dispatch about sore-tongued and fatigued horses," he wrote to him on 23rd October, two weeks

before his dismissal. "Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?"

Finally, on the 7th of November, he sent an order which relieved M'Clellan of his command and placed Burnside in his stead, "because he was a good housekeeper." In reality because there was no one else. Burnside had twice refused the command on the ground of his own unfitness, and most military experts agree with him.

The fatality of the Eastern campaign continued. Burnside threw himself against the Confederate forces at Fredericksburg Heights on 13th December, with the result that 13,000 Union soldiers lay slain on the field. Again and again he sent his men up against a fortified stone wall, only to be mown down. Burnside had proved almost as slow in movements as M'Clellan and not as cautious.

The army reverses angered the nation and the blame fell on Lincoln. A cartoon of 3rd January in Harper's Weekly showed Columbia demanding of Lincoln an accounting of the thousands slain at Fredericksburg.

joke."

field."

This," replied Lincoln, "reminds me of a little

Go," she said. "Tell your little joke at Spring

With the nation watching him, Lincoln tried yet another experiment in the army. He relieved General Burnside and placed in his stead General Hooker, "Fighting Joe Hooker," who had criticized his commander to such an extent, and had talked so much of the necessity of a dictatorship, that Lincoln decided to

try him. He sent him a characteristic letter ending with, "What I ask of you is military success and I will risk the dictatorship."

Hooker brought neither success nor the much-talkedof dictatorship. He met Lee in May at Chancellorsville and went down heavily before him. Seventeen thousand were dead on the side of the North, and thirteen thousand on the South. The South lost one of its ablest generals in the death of Stonewall Jackson, who was shot accidentally by one of his own pickets.

Lee, whose resources were less than the North's, naturally continued the offensive and followed up his victory. But he lay for a month on the opposite side of the Rappahannock facing Hooker's camp, held back by his own Government, which hoped that the defeat at Chancellorsville, coupled with the discontent of the Copperheads and the threat of foreign intervention, would force a treaty of peace from Lincoln. No offer of peace came, except on the basis of Union and the laying down of arms, and Lee finally began his desperate and fatal march northward.

Hooker would have preferred to continue against Richmond, but the idea recurred to Lincoln that here again the decisive battle could be fought. "Lee's army and not Richmond is your true objective point," he told him.

On 22nd June the Confederates entered Pennsylvania. The intensity of the situation showed itself in a nervous changing of commanders. General Hallock was put over Hooker, and on the 27th Hooker was entirely relieved, and General Meade, at three in the morning, was given the appointment. The argu

ments in his favour were that he was a native of Pennsylvania, where the battle was to be fought, and a Democrat, which would check that party's demand for the restoration of M'Clellan.

On the first day of July the Northern armies under Meade surrounded Lee, now in exactly the same position as the Northern generals were in the South, in hostile territory, with no means of getting information.

The battle lasted three days, Lincoln spending his days and nights in the telegraph-office of the War Department. The North won, but with dreadful losses, and Lee escaped. Before this battle Lincoln had a dream which he had dreamed before on the eve of the battle of Antietam.

He saw a ship sailing away, badly damaged, with victorious Union vessels in pursuit. There appeared also the end of a battle on land, the enemy routed, and the Union forces in possession of an important point.

The dream seemed of great portent to him, coming as it did before the battle of Gettysburg, now called the pivotal battle of the war. When it was fought, however, it seemed only another one of those indecisive Union victories at the cost of fearful carnage. Twentythree thousand lay slain on either side and Lee's army was free.

Whether Meade could have pursued Lee and really crushed his forces is a matter of military speculation, but Lincoln's distress over Meade's failure to do so was keen. He wrote Meade as near a letter of censure as he came to writing anyone, but he thought better of sending a letter of criticism to a general who had won

what was after all an important battle, and he did not send it. But he could not help writing and speaking of it to other men. It was one of his greatest disappointments of the war.

The day after Gettysburg better news reached Lincoln. Vicksburg had fallen, and a few days later, 9th July, Port Hudson was taken, and Lincoln could write, "The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea."

The Union forces in the West were pressing toward the heart of the Confederacy. After the evacuation of Corinth, in May 1862, the Confederate General, Bragg, had moved northward to Chatanooga with 35,000 soldiers. He made an advance upon Louisville, Kentucky, but was checked by General Buell at Perryville in a decisive battle on 8th October. The Confederates returned to Chatanooga.

In the meantime an attempt was made to recapture Corinth, under the Confederate General, Van Dorn, which almost succeeded, but on the second day of desperate fighting (4th October) was driven back by General Rosecrans.

Step by step the battlefields and the armies were being pushed towards the strongholds of Tennessee and Georgia.

General Rosecrans succeeded General Buell in Tennessee, and after three days' terrible fighting around Murfreesboro, 31st December to 2nd January, held his ground against the attacks of the Confederates and the latter were forced to leave even Chatanooga to the Northern troops.

Nine months later, on 19th and 20th September