1863, General Bragg made a stand against Rosecrans and inflicted upon him a defeat which came very nearly being the most overwhelming Federal disaster of the war. Much blood was yet to be shed before the winter's fighting was over. On 24th and 25th November, Grant, who had taken charge of the forces at Chatanooga, fought Bragg, who was besieging them at Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, with such force and success as to break up the siege and make him retreat. General Bragg fell back to Dalton, and the Confederate General, Longstreet, with the force that General Bragg had sent into Eastern Tennessee, crossed the mountains and joined Lee in Virginia.

To the world, at this moment, Lincoln, in his official capacity as President of the United States, presented his Gettysburg address, which has become one of the basic documents of American history. Every school child is taught to say it by heart; it is recited at every national anniversary.

The field of Gettysburg was dedicated as a national cemetery for the soldiers who died in the war. Edward Everett gave the speech of the occasion and the President dedicated the ground. They say that at the time the speech made small impression. It was too cryptic, too chiselled to be impressive, read to a vast throng in an open field drenched with the blood of 50,000 men. "That speech won't scour," said Lincoln to his friend. Lamon. "It is a flat failure. The people are disappointed."

They have long since awakened to its beauty:

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought

forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

"But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate-we cannot consecrate-we cannot hallow-this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us-that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

To himself he expressed a thought which came to him in the second year of the war, when he saw that the struggle was not to be the holiday jaunt that had been generally expected. His economic and social philosophy was insufficient to answer the question of the meaning of the great struggle, its length, and the great task it was to accomplish. He sought an answer

through the divine will. In September 1862 he made this note:

"The Will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party, and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. almost ready to say that this is probably true; that God wills this contest and wills that it shall not end yet. By His mere great power on the minds of the now contestants He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began, and having begun, He could give final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds."

T

the war.

CHAPTER XII

RE-ELECTION

Dis

HE battle of Gettysburg did not put an end to Yet it was decisive enough to assure ultimate success to the arms of the North. couraging as was the disastrous defeat at Chickamauga of 20th September 1863, it did not deter the country from voting approval in the elections of November. Vallandigham was defeated in Ohio, a War Governor was elected in Pennsylvania, and in general there were Republican gains over the elections of the year before. Lincoln wrote a little ironically of the fortuitousness of this success:

"I am glad the elections this summer have gone favourably, and that I have not, by native depravity or under evil influence, done anything bad enough to prevent the good result. I hope to stand firm ' enough to not go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country's cause."

Though the country approved of the purpose of the war, a clamour arose for its end. Suspicion was beginning to be felt that Lincoln and the Administration could end it quickly if they so desired, and not Congress, but the war and the political skirmishes for the Presidential campaign of 1864 held the attention of public interest.

Lincoln earnestly desired a re-nomination to finish

the task that he had begun. The republican form of government puts its administration on trial at every election, and voting had to take place when the national authority was trying to assert itself through the means of a civil war. Yet, to quote Lincoln, "we cannot have free government without elections, and if the rebellion could force us to forego or postpone the national election it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us."

The elections were to be held, but in this precarious condition it must be confessed that the whole machinery of the Government was employed to further its success.

In the early fall preparations were being made for the nominations to be held in the spring and summer. The slow, deliberate and lenient policies which Lincoln laid down made him an unpopular candidate with his own party, the Republican. It was dissatisfied with his continued support of the more conservative faction in Missouri, which were represented by his personal friends, the Blairs, and which disputed incessantly with the radicals, who showed their temper by the support of Frémont and his proclamation of freedom.

On the other hand there was growing up in the Republican ranks, as in the other parties, a strong peace faction, which placed the length of the war on Lincoln's shoulders, and which, like Greeley, held to the anomalous position that it would not sacrifice slavery yet would make peace. Lincoln was becoming unpopular for still another cause-the conservative principles upon which he was instituting amnesty and a reconstruction of the States brought back under Federal control, and which seemed to the radicals a surrender of the principles of