66 for traverses, embrasures, and other interior structures. To delay to the utmost the near approach of the besieger's trenches, and thus to postpone the period of an assault, which the weak profiles of the work invited, the use of logemens" (rifle-pits), which played so important a part in the siege, and subsequently in the American War, was resorted to. For the better protection of the defenders (who, to guard works so weak, must be always in force along the lines) from the storm of gun and mortar pro jectiles, bomb-proofs became a necessity, and were improvised by the usual expedients, and by the novel one of excavations in the rocky soil. In these, and in devices to protect the men, and especially the gunners, against the searching fire of the new rifled weapons in the hands of sharpshooters, great ingenuity and invention were displayed. Considered as a whole, these defenses, based upon a matured plan of permanent fortification, and having some of its features, combined therewith the characteristics of lines of field-works and those of the siege works always resorted to by a besieged garrison, but yet differed from all these and from all others previously employed, owing to the indicated peculiarities of site and circumstance, to the skill of the engineer, and to the indomitable resolution of the defenders. Though compressed into comparatively small linear space, their real magnitude was enormous, five or six thousand men being at some periods daily engaged on them, and the labor being unintermitted during the eleven months of the siege. The garrison, during this period (always in free communication with the external forces by which it was replenished), was usually about 30,000 men; the number of guns mounted at the final assault is said to have been 800, several times that number having been put hors de service in the course of the siege. SECTION XX. INTERIOR AFFAIRS OF THE REPUBLIC AND THE CON FEDERACY. CHAPTER LXXXIV. INTERIOR AFFAIRS OF THE REPUBLIC AND THE CONFEDERACY IN 1863. The elections following the Proclamation of Emancipation showed that that measure was not thoroughly sustained by the people until it became clear that nothing but separation would satisfy the Southern leaders. The 37th Congress commenced its second regular session on the 1st of December, 1862. The topics with which it was mainly occupied were compensated emancipation, political arrests, suspension of the habeas corpus, conscription, the national currency, the relation of insurgent states to the Union, the admission of West Virginia, and foreign mediation. An abstract is given of its chief acts. A portion of the Irish laboring population in New York was excited to riot on account of the draft. It overpowered the municipal authorities and committed many excesses. Troops brought in from the army quelled the disturbance. The Autumn elections proved favorable to the administration. The Confederate Congress conducted its sessions chiefly in secret. The people whom it represented held it in so little esteem that the domestic and foreign policy of the Confederacy is best illustrated by the presidential speeches and acts. They considered it as simply registering the presidential decrees. An abstract is given of some of the more important addresses of Mr. Davis. Interior affairs of 1863. In the lull of military operations occasioned by the winter of 1864-5, while Grant is crouching and the Republic and watching before Petersburg, making ready for a death-spring on the main army of the Confederacy; while Sherman is at Savannah, preparing for his destructive march through the Carolinas, and Thomas is resting at Nashville after exterminating the army of Hood, we may profitably take the opportunity of turning our attention from the affairs of war to the civil condition and transactions of the Republic and the Confederacy respect Effect of the Eman tions. on the elec In the preceding volumes I have treated of this portion of the subject up to the period of issuing "the Proclamation of Emancipation of the Slaves." Considering that proclamation in a political light as the great central event of the war, I propose in this section to collect together the more prominent transactions occurring between it and the overthrow of the Confederacy—a period reaching from the commencement of 1863 to the close of the spring of 1865. It was not alone in the Army of the Potomac that the emancipation of the slaves gave dissatisfac cipation Proclama- tion; the spring elections of 1863, showed that it met the disapproval of a large portion of the people who had until that time sustained the Republican party. In New Hampshire (March 10) that party was nearly defeated; in Rhode Island (April 1) it exhibited a very considerable decline. The same thing occurred in Connecticut. Mr. Seymour, a leader of the Peace section of the Democratic party, was made governor of New York. That section still indulged the belief that, even after all that had taken place, the Southern politicians could be induced to unite with it for the recovery of place and power in the Union. It opposed emancipation, declared the war a failure, and by its clamor against taxation and conscription brought many persons, over to its views. "The war is a failure!" exclaimed the Peace section-CopConduct of the perheads as their antagonists termed them. Peace party. "Is not Grant checked before Vicksburg, and Banks before Port Hudson? Bragg is holding Rosecrans fast at Nashville; Morgan has invaded Ohio; your fleet has been driven from Charleston; the Confederate cruisers have swept the ocean of your shipping; the Army of the Potomac has been twice disastrously beaten on the Rappahannock; General Lee is invading Pennsylvania. The summer of 1863 is at hand-are these the victories that Lincoln promised us?" Lincoln fears that sustain him. Not without alarm did Lincoln witness this diminishing support. He had not yet cast away the the country will not cramped ideas he had gathered in a merely political life, nor did he yet perceive the grandeur of his position, or rise to a sense of the responsibilities imposed upon him. Forgetting that it is the nature of mankind to be unreasoning and inconstant, he was disposed to accept a manifestation of popular will as an expression of intrinsic wisdom, and to doubt the correctness of his own judgment when rebuked by the votes of an election. Political opinions time. Considering the variety of interests touched, it was not possible that so great a measure as the emanprevailing at the cipation of the slaves should be carried without difficulty or without opposition. In Amer ican as in other communities, there are multitudes who have an aversion to any great organic change-who would have things go on in the future as in the past. Dislik ing any political disturbance, they are prone to transfer their dissatisfaction at an event to the instrument which may seem to be connected with it. Lincoln certainly had nothing to do with determining the course of affairs which for many years had been inevitably leading to the destruction of the slave system in America, though he was the instrument for bringing it to an end. The abhorrence of a measure which would give to a slave, and that slave a negro, social equality, was transposed into detestation of a man who had only been the proclaimer of an unavoidable fact. Some-among the worthiest members of society-indulged in a pensive retrospect of the old Republic. They were reluctant to believe that the Constitution under which a nation lives must necessarily undergo change. They remembered with intense affection the institutions established by their forefathers when the Republic was a thin line of colonies along the Atlantic coast, and could not Conduct of the Southern oligarchy. bring themselves to understand that great changes had be come necessary to adapt those institutions to a continent. There were also many who believed that the war might have been avoided, and that a mere election squabble had been transmuted into a dismal tragedy. Though the Southern oligarchya most atrocious tyranny-was bent on separation, cost what it might, and loudly declared that it would have nothing more to do with the Union except to destroy it, these persons affected to believe that its insatiate ambition could be cajoled, its anger appeased by fair words. For more than thirty years that oligarchy had been training itself to hate the beneficent Republic, and in a frenzy had resolved to establish in its stead a slave empire—a vast and fantastic conception, a dark nocturnal dream. Accustomed to dictate, it had yet to learn that man can not defy mankind with impunity; that a people can not obtain, in the congregation of civilized nations, reception and recognition if it insists on carrying with it habits or institutions which the human race abhors. Two years of civil war had not in the smallest degree changed the inflexible determination of that It will have no separation. peace except with oligarchy. To gain its ends, it had appealed to the sword and fire. Its efforts knew no intermission. No matter what ruin was inflicted either upon its antagonist or itself, separation it was determined to have. If fair words fail, and fail they will to conciliate or caSpeech of ex-Presi- jole a hatred so intense, what will you then dent Pierce. do? Such was the question pressed by the supporters of the national government on the Peace party. Mr. Pierce, who had been President of the United States— he was the immediate predecessor of Mr. Buchanan-in a speech delivered before a great meeting at Concord, in New Hampshire, undertook to furnish an answer to this ques tion. From the eminent position he had occupied, and |