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scarcely able to protect Washington, and did not prevent another invasion of the Northern States the next summer. Immense forces were gathered and put into the field on both sides, and there was great activity and vigor displayed, particularly in the Southwest, and with varying success, until the midsummer of 1863, when the "peace party" at the North began to say, that the war should never have been undertaken, and that the South could never be conquered, and was discouraging enlistments and fairly compromising itself with treason, when the great improvement to the Union cause began. General Grant was coming into notice, and was soon to take command of all our armies and bring the struggle to its proper issue. With the indomitable West behind him, and such generals as Sherman, Thomas, Rosecrans and Logan around him, and with Commodore Foote's fleet in advance opening the Tennessce and the Upper Mississippi, he had possessed himself of one important position after another, and driven the Confederates before him until he had invested Vicksburg, and was slowly but steadily reducing it by starvation. All efforts to relieve it had been useless, and both South and North were watching the struggle there, as likely to decide the possession of the great Southwest. It was in this state of things, when the bells and cannon of the North were ushering in the Fourth of July, 1863, that the telegraph announced the fall of Vicksburg, and redoubled every patriot's hope. Then, too, it was announced that the battle. of Gettysburg was won, a battle that was to this land what Waterloo was to Europe, which had engaged two armies of 60,000 men, one-third of each of whom were to be reported killed, wounded, or missing; a battle over which the whole nation had hung for three days, hoping and fearing, until news came that victory had been granted to freedom, union, and the perpetuity of our Republic. This was the meaning of it, which both North and South more than sus

pected then, though we could not fully understand it as we do now, when all of us may rejoice together over it as what was meant for our salvation even more than as the punishment of our sins. It meant that slavery was forever disposed of upon this continent. It meant that the African slave trade, which was introduced into Virginia the very year the Pilgrim Fathers landed upon our New England shores, and was one of the complaints of the Colonies against the Mother Country, when our Declaration of Independence was declared, and was only admitted into the Constitution under restrictions which it was hoped would eventually remove it, and without which our Constitution could not have been adopted; after a continuance here of two centuries and a half, and with a growth in the slave States equal to that of the white population, and an encroachment all the while upon free territory and the threatening of new conquests for the building up of a vast slave republic, whatever that might have proved to be; the overthrow of this whole system came, and came through the struggles and necessities of war. And when all human strength was weak, and our wisdom folly, we were led to acknowledge that there is "a power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness," and a God above who established and enforces such a law, and we bow before Him, with our wise and devout President, saying, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

CHAPTER XVI.

A TURNING POINT IN THE WAR.

Effect of the Battles of Vicksburg and Gettysburg-New Development of the Peace Party at This Very Time-The Draft RiotsGovernor Buckingham's Vindication for Lending Arms to Keep the Peace-Tho Several Calls for Troops-Connecticut's RecordNo Draft in the State.

The effect of the fall of Vicksburg, July 4, 1863, and of the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg, July 1-3, 1863, soon began to show itself upon both the Union and the Confederate cause. There had been a great amount of difficult and useful work accomplished by the Union government during the last year, but since the defeat of our Peninsular army up to these successes, no great achievements had encouraged the North. We had built up a good navy, retaken almost all the forts seized by the South at the beginning of the war, and nearly broken up blockade running. The export of cotton could no longer do much to keep up the credit of the Confederacy, while we were constantly seizing and confiscating the swiftest English steamers, loaded with arms, supplics of all kinds, and British gold. Missouri had been held in the Union, and our frontier army had pushed on beyond and was operating in Arkansas. The frontier line of the Confederacy, which at first included within it Kentucky and Tennessee, stretching west to the Mississippi, had been steadily pushed back to Cumberland Gap, and then to Nashville and to Chattanooga, until at this time it had reached Vicksburg. Admiral Foote had opened the upper Mississippi, and Farragut the

mouth, while Butler was holding New Orleans in his iron grasp until Port Hudson fell, as it did just after Vicksburg, and that grand river which penetrated so many Statescach an empire in itself-was once more opened to commerce. (It is deemed worthy of historic record, that "July 16th, 1863, the steamer Imperial arrived at New Orleans from St. Louis, the first boat through in two years.") Then the conscription laws of the Confederacy had been made so rigid-extending the age of military service and so ruthlessly enforced, that some portions of the South, like East Tennessee, were in absolute rebellion, and some of the State governments, like North Carolina, were protesting against having their troops sent out of the State. There was no possibility of recruiting her armies again up to the size of Lee's when he invaded Pennsylvania, or of those which stood in the way of Grant when he was investing Vicksburg. Unable to get her cotton out of the country, but obliged to burn it to keep it out of the hands of the Union forces, and with few other means of purchasing supplies abroad, and little assurance that they could be delivered, as blockade running was becoming too danger ous-with gold within the Confederacy worth eleven hundred per cent. premium-the end might have been foreseen as not far distant. This was so well understood in the money market, that gold in New York, which in the spring of 1863 stood at $145, was within a week after the battle of Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg down to $125. The Richmond Examiner, early in that year, and before the Confederacy had met with the reverses that overtook them that summer, had taken this despondent view of their prospect:

It is not altogether an empty boast on the part of the Yankees, that they hold all they have ever held; and that another year or two of such progress as they have already made, will find thom masters of the Southern Confederacy. The pledge, once deemed foolish by the South, that they would "hold, occupy and possess all the forts be

longing to the United States government," has been redeemed almost to the letter, by Lincoln. Forts Sumter and Morgan we still retain, but with these exceptions, all the strongholds on the seaboard, from Fortress Monroe to the Rio Grande, are in the hands of the enemy; and the onward march of Rosecrans toward Alabama, the presence of Grant in North Mississippi, and of Curtis in Middle Arkansas, to say nothing of the presence of Banks at New Orleans and Baton Rouge, set at rest the silly dream that a thin strip of seacoast only is in possession of our foes.-[January 20, 1863.

Of this period of the war, and the effect of the Confederate defeat at Vicksburg, General E. W. Law of the Confederate army, who held an important command in that battle, writes in his paper in the "War Book:"

Gettysburg was the turning point in the great struggle, together with the fall of Vicksburg, which occurred simultaneously with the retreat of Lee's army toward the Potomac, it inspired the armies and people of the North with fresh courage, and stimulated anew the hopes of ultimate success, which were visibly flagging under an almost uninterrupted series of reverses to the Federal arms in Virginia, extending over a period of nearly two years. On the other hand, it was at Gettysburg that the right arm of the South was broken.— ["War Book," Vol. III, p. 319.

And yet this very time of greatest hope and promise to the Union cause became the most critical one to that cause during the whole war. It had always been a matter of regret to some of the leaders of the Democratic party, as to Senator Douglas and to General Butler, that Secession should have been allowed to gain such an ascendency under President Pierce's administration, and be left all ready to break out into war when President Buchanan retired from office. And so, while they retained their political principles, they were patriotic enough to fight for the Union. But there was another and larger class, who had more partisanship than patriotism, and whose party the South had sustained, and who had gone into the war because Mr. Lincoln's administration had supplanted theirs; these were ready to take advantage of mismanagement and defeats in

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