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a time when it was divided by heated discussion concerning past commanders and had lost faith in all commanding generals. To him it hardly seemed credible that the repulse of Pickett's Brigade was the great victory for which the Army of the Potomac had been praying for more than two bloody and disastrous years. If General Meade be blamed for excessive caution in not following Lee, it is at least to be remembered to his credit that under him for the first time Lee met an army capable of inflicting upon him an incurable loss. Meade did not know how great a victory he had won. But General Lee knew.

CHAPTER XV

GETTYSBURG: WHAT HE SAID THERE

IT IS impossible to study the career of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War and avoid the conviction that during those anxious months when the president was bearing a burden of responsibility and grief such as few men have ever borne, Abraham Lincoln grew largely in his own spiritual nature.

On the fourth of July, 1863, the president issued an announcement of the success of Gettysburg in the following words:

The President of the United States announces to the country, that the news from the army of the Potomac, up to 10 o'clock P. M. of the 3d, is such as to cover the army with the highest honor—to promise great success to the cause of the Union-and to claim the condolence of all for the many gallant fallen; and that for this, he especially desires that on this day, "He whose will, not ours, should ever be done," be everywhere remembered and reverenced with the profoundest gratitude.

On that evening the president was serenaded at the White House, and said: "I do most sincerely thank Almighty God for the occasion of this call."

Remembering that it was the fourth of July, and the president not then having precisely in mind the exact number of years since the Declaration of Independence, he asked:

How long ago is it? Eighty-odd years since, on the fourth of July, for the first time in the history of the world, a nation by its representatives assembled, declared as a self-evident truth that all men are created equal.

It will be noted that he recurred to this same thought in the following November when he delivered the address at Gettysburg, but that in the meantime he had looked up the exact number of years between 1776 and 1863, and found it "four-score and seven years." On this night of the fourth of July, he went on to allude to other extraordinary events in American history which had occurred on that same month and day, notably the death of Jefferson and Adams in 1826, and then said:

And now on this last fourth of July just past, we have a gigantic rebellion, at the bottom of which is an effort to overthrow the principle that all men are created equal. We have the surrender of a most important position and an army on that very day.

He was speaking of the fall of Vicksburg; and he then alluded gratefully and with expressions of joy to the battle in Pennsylvania as a victory over the cohorts of those who opposed the Declaration of Independence.

The president did not stop with expressions of congratulation. A few days afterward he called for a national day of thanksgiving and praise, appointing the fourth of August as the day for the expression of gratitude to God for these victories, and invited them to call upon God by his Holy Spirit to subdue the anger which had produced and too long sustained a cruel rebellion; to guide the councils of the government; to visit with tender care and consolation those who had been brought to suffer, and finally, to lead the whole nation through paths of repentance and submission to the Divine will, to unity and fraternal peace. A portion of this proclamation read:

It has pleased Almighty God to hearken to the supplications and prayers of an afflicted people, and to vouchsafe to the army and the navy of the United States, victories on the land and on the sea, so signal and so effective, as to furnish reasonable ground for augmented confidence that the Union of these States will be maintained, their Constitution preserved, and their peace

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