were posted on the ranges north and west of Gettysburg. | ever, who held the Confederate left, advancing in great Each side had summoned up its reserves and outlying force, wrested a portion of that ridge, to the south-east brigades; Meade arrived on the ground in the middle of of the town, from Slocum's corps. All the efforts of the front, the best of A. P. Hill's veterans in support-came steadily, and as it seemed resistlessly, sweeping up. Our skirmishers retired slowly from the Emmitsburg road, holding their ground tenaciously to the last. The rebels reserved their fire till they reached this same Emmitsburg road, then opened with a terrific crash. From a hundred iron throats, meantime, their artillery had been thundering on our barricades. "Hancock was wounded; Gibbon succeeded to the command-approved soldier, and ready for the crisis. As the tempest of fire approached its height, he walked along the line, and renewed his orders to the men to reserve their fire. The rebels-three lines deep-ca came steadily up. They were in point-blank range. "At last the order came! From thrice six thousand guns there came a sheet of smoky flame, a crash, a rush of leaden death. The line literally melted away; but there came the second, resistless still. It had been our supreme effort on the instant we were not equal to another. Confederates, however, against the Federal right, which miles to the left in magnificent array, but strongest here abutted on a hill, called Round Top Hill, rising above-Pickett's splendid division of Longstreet's corps in the general level of the ridge, and regarded by Meade as the key of the position, were unavailing. Both armies bivouacked on the field and prepared for the struggle of the following day. It was apparent that unless Lee could dislodge the Federals from their strong position, he must himself retreat. Why he made no attempt to turn it, does not appear; that such a manœuvre was feasible, and was apprehended by the Federal commanders, we know from what Hancock wrote to Meade on the 1st-that the position [at Gettysburg] was good, but liable to be turned by way of Emmitsburg." Emmitsburg lies to the south of Gettysburg, between it and Washington; and a turning movement in that direction must have alarmed Meade for his communications. But whatever may have been his motives, Lee decided on attacking the position in front, and made his preparations accordingly. During the forenoon of the 3rd, there was little beyond firing between the outposts; but, about one o'clock, Lee, having massed more than a hundred guns on his right centre, where were the divisions of Hill and Longstreet, opened a tremendous cannonade on the Federal left; after which, between three and four o'clock, he ordered a general ad--the momentum of their charge, the mere machine vance of Longstreet's corps, with Pickett's Virginians leading, to charge and carry the hill. The charge was made with the utmost gallantry; but, after a desperate struggle, it appeared that the advantage of their position, aided by the rude abattis and piles of stones which they had thrown up, enabled the Federals to hold their own, and to hurl back the assailants, with fearful loss in killed, wounded, and prisoners. Slocum also, in the course of the day, recovered the portion of the ridge which had been wrested from him by Ewell. Thus the entire Federal position remained intact at the close of the day, and the battles of Gettysburg ended in a decisive victory for the Federal cause. An account by an eye-witness of the great charge and its result is so strikingly told, that we subjoin it here :— "The great desperate final charge came at four. The rebels seemed to have gathered up all their strength and desperation for one fierce convulsive effort, that should sweep over and wash out our obstinate resistance. They swept up as before; the flower of their army to the front, victory staked upon the issue. In some places they literally lifted up and forced back our lines; but that terrible position of ours!--wherever they entered it, enfilading fires from half a score of crests swept away their columns like merest chaff. Broken and hurled back, they easily fell into our hands; and, on the centre and left, the last half-hour brought more prisoners than all the rest. "So it was along our whole line; but it was on the 2nd Corps that the flower of the rebel army was concentrated; it was there that the heaviest shock beat upon, and shook, and even sometimes crumbled, our line. "We had some shallow rifle-pits, with barricades of rails from the fences. The rebel line, stretching away Quoted in Greeley's "American Conflict," vol. ii. p. 386. "Up to the rifle-pits, across them, over the barricades strength of their combined action, swept them on. Our thin line could fight, but it had not weight enough to oppose to this momentum. It was pushed behind the guns. Right on came the rebels. They were upon the guns-were bayoneting-the gunners were waving their flags above our pieces. "But they had penetrated to the fatal point. A storm of grape and canister tore its way from man to man, and marked its track with corpses, straight down their line! They had exposed themselves to the enfilading fire of the guns on the western slope of Cemetery Hill: that exposure sealed their fate. "The line reeled back-disjointed already-in an instant in fragments. Our men were just behind the guns. They leaped forward upon the disordered mass; but there was little need for fighting now. A regiment threw down its arms, and, with colours at its head, rushed over and surrendered. All along the field smaller detachments did the same. Webb's brigade brought in 800, taken in as little time as it requires to write the simple sentence that tells it. Gibbon's old division took fifteen stand of colours. Over the fields the escaped fragments of the charging line fell back; the battle there was over." The loss on both sides in this series of battles was very heavy. Meade reports his loss in killed and wounded as exceeding 16,000; in missing as exceeding 6,000-these were mostly prisoners taken on the first day's battle. Lee made no return of his losses; they are estimated by Mr. Greeley at 18,000 in killed and wounded, and 10,000 in prisoners. Lee held his ground during the 4th, and Meade, onefourth of whose army was dead or disabled, judged it wiser not to assume the offensive. On the 5th, the Confederates began to retreat. Heavy rains impeded their march; the Federals put their columns in pursuit, with no great vigour indeed, but so as to overtake and capture A.D. 1863.] THE ATTEMPTS UPON VICKSBURG. hundreds of exhausted and famished Confederates, whom the unwonted sense of failure had depressed and demoralised. The Potomac, rising in flood, carried away the bridge which Lee had caused to be thrown over it at Williamsport; and while he was still on the northern side of the river, taking measures to restore the bridge, Meade with his victorious army was upon him. Another desperate battle seemed to be imminent. But Meade called a council of war on the 12th, the opinion of which was adverse to attacking; and, on the night of the 13th, Lee, having replaced the bridge, brought his army over with little loss, and was again in comparative safety in Virginia. Bad news awaited him here-no less than the fall of Vicksburg, the stronghold on the Mississippi which had so long resisted the Federal arms; the capture of Jackson, the state capital of Mississippi; and the hopeless collapse of the Confederate power in all that region. By the exercise of what undaunted perseverance General Grant, contending against all kinds of natural obstacles as well as against an active and powerful enemy, had by slow degrees accomplished this immense result, we must now briefly explain. 51 Sherman lost 2,000 men in this fruitless expedition, and returned (January 2, 1863) to his former quarters at Milliken's Bend. Various other attempts were made, and met with the like ill success. Vicksburg stands on the convex side of a great bend of the river, and it was thought that a canal might be cut across the chord of this bend, down which the "Father of Waters" might be induced to flow, so as to leave the channel dry in front of the fortress, and render its batteries innocuous. A host of negroes was collected, and set to this work. It had made some progress; but the Mississippi scorned to be thus dictated to, and, rising in a sudden flood, drowned out the excavators, washed away their embankments, and utterly baffled the enterprise. An attempt also was made to bring some armed steamers into the Yazoo from above, through a channel called Yazoo Pass; but this likewise was defeated with loss. In that immense system of waters, the Federal gunboats, numerous as they were, could not guard or visit all points; and the Confederates, having collected a number of steamers at Vicksburg, Yazoo city, and other points, busily employed themselves in arming and ironplating them. Against these Admiral Porter dispatched down the river a formidable iron-clad, armed with 11-inch and 9-inch guns, the Indianola, which ran past the Vicksburg batteries without receiving any injury. But encountering soon after several small Confederate steamers, the Indianola, in the fight that ensued, was so butted, battered, raked, and dodged by her-singly insignificant-antagonists, that she was compelled to surrender. The prize was important, and its capture augured well for at least a temporary naval ascendency of the Confederates in those waters. But the fruits of their success were blasted by a laughable stratagem of Admiral Porter's, which the Federal historian designates a "Yankee trick." "A worthless coal flat-boat, fitted up, covered, and decorated by Porter, with furnaces of mud and smoke-stacks of pork-barrels, to counterfeit a terrible ram, was let loose by him, unmanned, above Vicksburg, and floated down by the batteries, eliciting and surviving a tremendous cannonade. The rebels in Vicksburg hastened to give warning of this fearful monster. The Indianola was now undergoing repairs near the point where she was captured; and word was sent from Vicksburg that she must be burnt at once to save her from the monster's clutches. A few hours later, when it had been discovered that they had been thrown into hysterics by an old coal-boat, fresh word was sent that they had been sold; but, ere this arrived, the Indianola had been blown to splinters-not even her priceless guns having been saved." Vicksburg, perched on a high rolling bluff on the east bank of the Mississippi, about midway between the confluence of the Ohio and the sea, in the midst of a rich cotton-growing country, and in direct communication by rail with Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, was the natural centre and chief citadel of the Confederacy. Its natural strength had been enormously increased by extensive and well-planned fortifications; its powerful batteries commanded the river; and while it was in the possession of the Confederates, the Federal power, though supreme both on the upper and the lower course of the river, could not be said to have the complete control of the Mississippi. Grant, therefore, whose department of Western Tennessee had, after his successes at Forts Henry and Donelson and elsewhere in that state in 1862, been enlarged so as to include the state of Mississippi, directed his thoughts from an early period to the reduction of this important stronghold. In the last month of 1862, he was preparing to advance on Jackson, as the first step towards his object, when the surprise and destruction of his depot of arms and stores at Holly Springs, in Northern Mississippi, by the Confederate General Van Dorn (December 20), disabled him for a time from any forward movement. An attempt was made about the same time by General Sherman and Admiral Porter, who were stationed with a considerable body of troops and a fleet of war-steamers at Milliken's Bend, a point some twenty miles above Vicksburg, to storm the defences of the place from the north. Dropping down the river to the mouth of the Yazoo (a considerable Months had now passed by since the earlier attempts stream which meanders at the foot of the bluffs on which upon Vicksburg; and General Grant, finding that his the fortress stood, and then joins the Mississippi), they attacks from the west-or from the north, by obtaining steamed up that river some miles, and then landed the the command of the Yazoo river-were baffled by aptroops. Sherman led his men gallantly to the assault of parently insurmountable obstacles, now decided on an the bluffs, but there was a sluggish marshy stream, entirely new line of operations. He resolved to turn Chickasaw Bayou, which had first to be crossed under Vicksburg on the south, march first upon Jackson, overfire, and the difficulty proved to be insurmountable. powering any resistance which he might meet with from Confederate armies in the field (for which he had ample and more than ample force), and then advance upon Vicksburg from the east. At the end of March, 1863, he set his troops in motion from Milliken's Bend, down the western bank, to a point opposite a little village called Bruinsburg, some thirty miles below Vicksburg. But his army now must be transported to the eastern bank; and for this purpose he requested Admiral Porter to run past the batteries of Vicksburg, with his iron-clads and a number of transports. Porter at once complied, sustaining during the operation a loss which, though severe, was not serious enough to cripple him, and joined Grant below Vicksburg. Now the army was embarked on the war-steamers and transports, and ferried across. Just at this juncture the Confederate troops in Mississippi appear to have been ill led; instead of concentrating in front of Jackson, they were hurled in detail against Grant's advancing columns, and suffered consequently a succession of small reverses, which had a fatally depressing effect on their morale. At Port Gibson, Raymond, and before Jackson, actions were fought, and with uniform good fortune to the Federals. General Jo. Johnston was now appointed to the chief command of the Confederate forces. But the Confederacy, girdled round both by sea and land with a circle of fire, allowed no rest, compelled to make head on a hundred points at once against implacable assailants, cut off from all foreign supplies, was now drawing towards the end of its resources, especially its resources in men. On the other hand, the unchecked emigration from Europe provided the Federal Government with the raw material of soldiers to an almost unlimited extent. Mr. Whiteside said, in the House of Commons, about the beginning of 1864, that during the past thirteen months upwards of 100,000 men had quitted the shores of Ireland, to swell the ranks of the Federal army of America. Granting that this statement was much exaggerated, still it is certain that the waste and depletion of their armies was so effectually replaced from this source, that the Federal Government -who, to gratify their Republican ambition of "saving the country," lavished human life as unsparingly as any despot who ever reigned-were seldom at a loss for men to execute any military operation that the generals might project. Defeated in front of Jackson, the Confederates evacuated the city, after having removed all their arms and stores to a safer place, or else destroyed them. This was on the 14th of May. General Johnston collected his shattered forces at a point farther north, and sent orders to General Pemberton, commanding in Vicksburg, to march out with a portion of the garrison and join him. But before Pemberton could do so, the Federals were upon him; and he sustained a serious defeat in a bloody action at Champion Hills (May 16), between Jackson and Vicksburg, on the line of the Big Black river. The Confederates were driven into Vicksburg, and Grant found himself at last under the walls of the fortress, the possession of which he had so long coveted. Without delay he ordered an assault on the outer line of works, reckoning perhaps, as it was said Lord Raglan and Marshal St. Arnaud ought to have reckoned after the battle of the Alma, on finding the defenders demoralised, and, in the flush of victory, carrying all before him. If so, the result justified their conduct on that memorable occasion; for the assault was repulsed, with the loss of nearly 3,000 men. Grant then regularly invested the place, and proceeded to open trenches and dig mines. Pemberton defended the place with great skill and determination; but provisions ran short, there was no hope of relief from without, and the fierce sun of Mississippi exhausted his harassed men, who were required to defend a line of entrenchments and earthworks too extensive for their now reduced numbers. After forty-five days of isolation, Pemberton, quite at the end of his resources, hung out a white flag, and proposed to come to terms for surrendering the place. Grant would hear of nothing but an unconditional surrender. A conference between him and Pemberton was then arranged, at which Grant heard all that was proposed on the other side, and said that he would send his answer before night. After conferring with his majorgenerals, Grant wrote to Pemberton, offering the following terms: that upon the surrender of the city, public stores, &c., tho officers and men of the garrison should be allowed to depart, giving their parole not to serve again during the war, the officers being permitted to take one horse each, and both officers and men taking with them their clothing, but no other property. Pemberton might take for the use of the garrison any amount of rations he might deem necessary, from the stores he then had. There was a stroke of grim humour in this; for Pemberton, not wishing it to be thought that the garrison was reduced to extremities, had proposed to take with him eight days' rations; and Grant well knew that his stores were far too attenuated for that; indeed, the famished men applied for rations at the Federal camp on the day after the surrender. Vicksburg fell on the 3rd of July. Still everything was not lost beyond the Alleghanies, so long as General Bragg, commanding at Chattanooga, could keep the field, and preserve that most important position. Chattanooga is a small town on the Tennessee river, close to the southern border of the state of the same name, and adjoining the boundary lines of three other states-Georgia, Alabama, and North Carolina. On one side it was protected by the river, here flowing deep and wide; on the other an intrenched camp had been constructed, and fortified with great care. Mountain ridges encompassed it on all sides, rendering the marching of armies difficult: in fact, it was the key of all that region; so that while it was in Confederate hands, a Federal army could not, without great risk, advance out of Tennessee into Georgia, or Alabama, or even into the Carolinas. But Chattanooga once lost, a direct way was open for the Federal armies into Georgia, with a strong base to retire upon in case of a reverse. These considerations weighed so strongly with Lee, that, at the risk of dangerously weakening his army in Virginia, he detached Longstreet, in the autumn of 1863, with 20,000 men, to the aid of Bragg. But before relating the operations which A.D. 1863.] THE CAMPAIGN IN TENNESSEE. 53 ensued, we must briefly retrace the course of events in reinforced by Longstreet and his tried veterans from Tennessee since the end of the campaign of 1862. It has been related how, after the battle of Perryville, the President relieved Buell of the command, and appointed to it (October 30) General Rosecrans, who had a few weeks before ably repelled a combined attack made by the Confederate Generals Van Dorn and Price upon the lines of Corinth, and driven them back with heavy loss far into Mississippi. Rosecrans' first care was to re-organise his army, and to provide a sufficiency of supplies. The bulk of his army was posted at Murfreesboro', a few miles to the south-east of Nashville. Here it was attacked by Bragg (whose soldiers had by this time recovered from the fatigues of the Kentucky expedition), on the line of the Stone river. Two bloody battles were fought, on the last day of 1862, and January 2nd, 1863. On the first day, Bragg turned the Federal right and routed it, taking twenty-eight guns and many prisoners; but he met with a solid resistance on the centre and left. On the second day, Breckinridge's corps made a very brilliant charge, which for a time swept away all before it; but it was finally cut up by artillery, and driven back. The losses were very heavy on both sides-heaviest, probably, on the side of the Federals; nevertheless, Rosecrans-unlike that Samnite general who retreated after a battle because a voice in the night declared that the Samnites had lost one more man than the Romans-persisted in holding his ground; and it was finally Bragg who retired. Wheeler, the celebrated Confederate raider, was busy all this time in Rosecrans' rear, destroying railroads, breaking bridges, and capturing or burning supply trains; the consequence of all which was that Rosecrans was not in a condition to pursue. Early in May, the Federal Colonel Streight, at the head of 1,800 cavalry, started on a raid into Georgia, with intent to destroy the factories, machine-shops, and magazines at Rome and Atlanta. But he was overtaken before long by the Confederates Forrest and Roddy, and after a running fight of 100 miles, compelled to surrender. Rosecrans' preparations for an advance were not completed till the 24th June, 1863; on which day he moved forward from Murfreesboro', at the head of a wellappointed army of 60,000 men. By a series of vigorous and combined movements, he drove the Confederates from the towns of Shelbyville and Tullahooma, and out of the whole plain country of Tennessee. The mountainous corner which included Chattanooga was the only remaining hold which Bragg had on Tennessee, and yet he voluntarily relinquished it! This is the most inexplicable step which we have found recorded in the whole history of the war. Bragg, it is true, had an army | inferior by at least one-third to that of Rosecrans; and he seems to have dreaded the being cooped up within Chattanooga, as Pemberton had been in Vicksburg, and being ultimately compelled to capitulate from failure of supplies. Yet, on the other hand, he received a strong reinforcement in August, when he was joined by General Buckner and his troops from Knoxville, East Tennessee; and but a few days after the evacuation he was further Virginia. Bragg must have been apprised of their approach; why, then, did he abandon Chattanooga ? That he could, behind those formidable entrenchments, have beaten back an army much superior in force to his own appears certain, for this was accomplished by Rosecrans a few days later, when, after being worsted in a great battle, and driven into Chattanooga, he held out there without difficulty against an enemy at that time, according to Greeley, superior in numbers, and flushed with recent victory. After evacuating the place, Bragg led his army to Lafayette, in Georgia, fifteen or twenty miles south of Chattanooga. Rosecrans, thinking that he was retreating on Rome, urged his columns in over-hasty pursuit, and the two armies encountered each other (September 20) in the wooded country to the west of Chickamauga creek, a stream running in a northerly direction into the Tennessee, above Chattanooga. Longstreet, who had just come up, was on the left of the Confederate army, with the gallant Hood-the Bayard of the South -acting under him. The veterans from Virginia broke through every formation opposed to them, and chased the Federal right in headlong disorder off the field; but on the Confederate left matters fared otherwise. General Thomas stubbornly held his ground, in spite of the utmost efforts, attended with lavish expenditure of life, of Breckinridge and Cleburne, and defeated Bragg's main object, which was to turn the Federal right, and interpose between it and Chattanooga. Yet the sum of the entire struggle was a Confederate victory, though, as it proved, a barren one. The slaughter on both sides was frightful, amounting on the Federal side to more than 11,000 killed and wounded, and on the Confederate side to 16,000, they having been generally the assailants. The next day Rosecrans withdrew his army behind the lines of Chattanooga, which, as already stated, Bragg had not force enough to storm. All that he could do was to endeavour to starve the enemy out, by intercepting their communications. Meantime, General Burnside, commanding at Cincinnati, having ascertained that Buckner had marched from East Tennessee to join Bragg, led an army of 20,000 men thither, and occupied Knoxville without opposition. But he diffused his small force over the district; hearing which Bragg detached Longstreet against him, who at first gained some minor successes, and shut up Burnside in Knoxville, without being able, however, to take it or drive him out of it. The President was not pleased at the loss of the battle of Chickamauga, and as Grant had now nothing more to conquer about Vicksburg, he sent him to supersede Rosecrans at Chattanooga (October 19). Hooker, who had been detached with 20,000 men from Meade's army, now joined Grant, and the Federals had again their usual preponderance of numbers, and, what was more, a general who, since hostilities began, had learnt the art of war, made no mistakes himself, and took the utmost advantage of those of the enemy. Issuing from Chattanooga, the Federals, in a series of hard-fought actions, drove Bragg's army from its positions on the mountain ridges south of |