Difficult and dark questions now travelled to Washington, and closely besieged Mr. Lincoln. Calmly, patiently, and good-humoredly he sat down with them in a conference to which his own good sense and large-hearted wisdom were invited. The result was that on New-Year’s day, 1863, free papers were plumped into the lean, slave stockings throughout all the somehow seceded States.
During this period history and paper money were both made in large quantities; and the paper business became very lucrative. We were getting rich very fast after the European fashion. In the midst of the armed clash, however, a very Pacific act was committed,—the passage in July, 1862, of the Pacific Railroad charter, which gave one hundred millions of reasons why the Union could not be broken. So far from giving up the South, Congress provided for making Japan and China American dependencies; reaching out with steel fingers for their teas, silks, and almond-eyed live productions.
The year 1863 dawned cheerfully upon the hitherto sombre whites North, as well as upon the more sombre sable loyalists at the South. Blockades on the coast, a currency as depraved as Breckenridge; railroads undulating as saws, over which phthisicy engines groaned, as they drew the ever-lessening transportation; and a population rapidly sieved by repeated drafts, signalled the ravages to which the Confederacy was subjected, and its lessening means constantly clipped and pared away. The curious stories of Mr. Davis had neither wrought a faith beyond his own equestrian escort, nor drawn any recognition from foreign spectators.
Little was done through the winter in the field.
Early in May, General Hooker, successor to Burnside, and the fifth leader of the Potomac Army, having gained Lee’s rear at Chancellorsville, kicked it severely for three hot days; but was in turn kicked roundly. Each army lost about sixteen thousand men,—losses which, if united, would equal the entire number of the American troops engaged in the four principal battles of the Revolution,—Bunker Hill, Princeton, Saratoga, and Yorktown. While this prolonged fight was going forward, Stoneman and Kilpatrick showed some astounding feats of horsemanship, in swinging around Fredericksburg and Richmond; cutting the Confederate lines with such nimble swords that it delighted an enthusiastic audience.
In June, Lee, masking large designs on Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, crossed the Potomac and showed his own face with uncounted others at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, where, for the first three days in July, he was so handled by Meade, that he left 30,000 dead and wounded, 14,000 prisoners, and 27,000 stand of arms, to add attractions, that need no special advertising to Springs that receive so much.
The next day, July 4, Vicksburg, fruitlessly assailed during 1862, and beleaguered[beleaguered] from May 4, 1863, by the reticent, self-contained, ever-pounding, never-compounding Grant,—who had inextricably tangled it by parallels and lines unparalleled,—surrendered its army of 30,000 men, 70,000 small arms, 200 cannon, without reckoning those dangerous edge-tools, for the use of which its desperate gamblers had so long been famous. Fortunately the surrender came too late to be abused by the orators of that patient and long-suffering day.
The Mississippi River once more bore all its pipes in peace. The mortar-boat masons, clearing away the ruins which the strikers had caused, had prepared anew the foundations for the prosperity of that noble valley, whose exuberant wealth is hereafter to be rolled adown it by unshackled hands.
While the troops were absent from New York, repelling Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania, and the black regiments before Charleston were assisting Gilmore to execute the stern Federal judgment upon that place, the anti-war Irish in New York, largely left away from the front by their own consent, gained the peaceful rear of the native-born colored men, women, and children of that city, and took a safe hand in the only kind of contest which they coveted. The valor which for three days they displayed, in destroying property wholly unowned, of course, by themselves, in chasing and hanging colored people, and in robbing all who had watches or purses to furnish lines for their avaricious bravery to attack, was, by a few, almost as much admired as the heroic courage of the regiments before Charleston.
At Chattanooga, Grant, in the latter part of November, by a heaven-touching struggle of three days, drove away the Confederate forces out of the cloud-hidden heights of Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain. From this Tabor he himself came down, but not to Bragg of the transfiguration there.