after hour went by, and at three o'clock in the morning, when the secretary finished his task and stole silently away, the last sound he heard was that measured, heavy footfall. A few hours later, when he returned, the President was eating breakfast in the same room, and the new orders to General Hooker were ready to go out.

The months of May and June, 1863, were crowded with activities. General Grant succeeded in cooping up in Vicksburg the best force which the Confederacy had remaining in the Mississippi Valley. General Hooker accomplished little more than the work of getting his forces into very effective condition, while General Lee prepared for the most stupendous military and political blunder of the war, an invasion of the North with his entire available field force. It was an undertaking in which success was impossible and failure was ruin. The soundest explanation of it is probably an exaggerated estimate of the existing disaffection among the people of the loyal States, the loud grumbling against taxes and the Draft Act being misinterpreted to imply a readiness to accept a Confederate deliverer, and to furnish men and money to the Confederacy instead of to the Union.

The machinery for the enforcement of the conscription was in good hands, and it was announced that the first draft would be made in July all over the North. How many more were to be made afterward could only be guessed at, and everywhere the press and leaders of the Opposition were vehement in their denunciations of the pitiless blood tax

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levied to carry on an abolition war." There were distinctly uttered threats of violent opposition to the enforcement of the draft, but less attention was paid to these by anybody after the great events which preceded the day set for it.

General Lee's preparations for his northward movement were made behind a bold and threatening front, and the hot battle of Brandy Station, in the second week of June, resulted from General Hooker's effort to ascertain his enemy's position. The truth, or enough of it, was soon known to the President, and he at once called upon the States nearest to the point of probable invasion, New York, West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, for one hundred and twenty thousand men for temporary service. The nature of the summons was at once known across the lines, and a curious impression spread among Lee's men that they were now to be met only by militia, whom they expected to scatter easily. They were to be quickly undeceived, but the leisurely manner in which General Hooker moved the Army of the Potomac brought to a culmination existing differences between him and the President and General-in-Chief Halleck. He offered his resignation, and it was accepted while the army was on its march.

Through campaign after campaign, Mr. Lincoln had carefully, almost painfully, studied the course and character of the generals commanding under him. He knew them much better than they or the country supposed that he did. In such a juncture as now arose, it was absolutely necessary to name a

new commander from among the corps commanders who had been with the Army of the Potomac from the beginning, who were acquainted with its officers, known to and trusted by its men, and who were familiar with the details of the present movement. There was very little adverse criticism of his selection of General George G. Meade of the Fifth Army Corps, to take the place vacated by General Hooker.

By June 24th the main body of General Lee's army was north of the Potomac, and a few days later part of his force seemed to be within striking distance of Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania. If he were now to win a victory, Philadelphia and Baltimore would quickly be in his hands, and the work of fortifying those places and intermediate points was hurriedly begun. There could be to him and his army but one result of even such a success, but the moral effect upon the North was tremendous. The militia came forward rapidly, and the cry of vehement opposition to the draft seemed for a moment to subside.

General Grant was known to be pressing the siege of Vicksburg with an energy which needed no urging, and the President gave his whole mind to the measures needful for strengthening Meade, and for preparation to meet any, even the worst possible termination of the coming collision between the two armies. Had the Army of the Potomac been shattered at Gettysburg, instead of victorious, General Lee would still have found himself confronted by numbers exceeding his own, of men who had not.

been in that battle. The story of Gettysburg is too well known to require repetition. The news of the three days' fight, and the final recoil of the Army of Northern Virginia, went out to the country accompanied by the glad tidings of the surrender of the Confederate force and fortress at Vicksburg to the army under Grant, and it was everywhere felt that the Civil War had reached its turning-point. Never could the Confederacy hope to rally from the effect of the twin disasters. Its allies at the North, what was called the Copperhead faction of the miscellaneous Opposition to the Lincoln Administration, received as destructive a blow a few days later.

Saturday, July 11th, had been named for the enforcement of the Draft Act in the city of New York, and it began on that day. It was resumed upon the 13th, Monday, with a confident expectation that it would proceed peacefully. The great city, however, contained enormous imported elements of social disorder, the ignorance, the depravity, the crime of Europe, and these, by the rash talk of local political disturbers, had been infused with the idea that the conscription was a rich man's law for the oppression of the poor. It was as if a heap of combustibles had been prepared. If any organized resistance to the draft had really been intended in co-operation with General Lee's invasion, that idea had now, of course, died away, but the match was applied, nevertheless, as if accidentally, and the results were terrific. During several days the mob - held a fiercely disputed possession of large parts of the city, doing an immense amount of damage, and

the riots were not suppressed until over fourteen hundred rioters were killed. There were no disturbances of any importance elsewhere, but the lesson was universally accepted that nothing but ruin could come from a factious refusal to obey law and sustain the National Government.

Brighter hope seemed to be dawning upon the country as the Army of Northern Virginia sullenly recrossed the Potomac, and as the Union gunboats came and went, undisturbed, up and down the Mississippi, while the Union armies occupied the wide areas on either side which were now cleared of Confederate armies. No sunshine seemed to come into Mr. Lincoln's working-room, however. His critics were as busy as ever. The credit for all successes went to the generals in the field who, as some men said, had won victories almost in spite of his intermeddling. The declarations of the generals themselves, then and afterward, silenced that particular slander; but there were a thousand faults to find, and even his best friends seemed dissatisfied. It was weary toiling, and only a frame and a will of tempered iron could have so long endured it.

Not many days after the battle of Gettysburg, the first Grand Council of Delegates of the Union League was held in Washington. Even in this patriotic body the bitter animosities caused by Mr. Lincoln's policy in Kansas and Missouri made themselves vehemently heard, nearly all of the first session being consumed in unstinted attacks upon him. A sufficient defence was made by one of his own secretaries, a member of the permanent Grand Council, and a