and grief. The Hartford Press thus speaks of one of these receptions: "The veterans were greeted all along the line of march by crowds of people with cheers, hurrahs, and waving handkerchiefs. When the line arrived in front of the State House it halted, and the veterans were received by the Governor, State officers and both Houses of the Legislature. Governor Buckingham made a brief, but most eloquent and cordial address of welcome. He said in substance ::

"General Harland, officers and men of the Eighth and Eleventh Regiment:

"In behalf of the Legislature and the people of Connecticut, I greet you with a hearty welcome. Not as prodigals returning home, but as having performed a most honorable and hazardous duty.

"When the rebel States insulted our nation's flag, turned their guns upon the nation's forts, and attacked the government, you stepped out bravely to protect them. I have watched you with friendly interest through all your honorable career. I remember when you went out with the gallant Burnside, encountered perils at Hatteras, and won a victory at Roanoke. I remember you at Newbern, at Fort Macon and at South Mountain.

"And God grant that we shall never forget that fatal struggle at Antietam, where your first colonel, the noble Kingsbury, fell; where the intrepid Griswold led his company across that bloody stream, and gave up his life gladly; where Lieutenant Wait would not go back when wounded, but cheered on his men till a fatal bullet laid him low in death. There sixty-nine of your number learned 'how sweet it is to die for one's country.'

"We owe you a debt of gratitude we can never repay. We would have your names inscribed on the granite and marble. They will be written in the history of your country. Your banners came back tattered and torn, but covered with honor and inscribed with such glorious names as Roanoke and Antietam, where you fought in defense of the principles of liberty.

‘Your re-enlistment is a pledge that you first enlisted from motives of patriotism, and that you, too, stand ready to give your lives, if need be, in defense of your country. So long as our hearts continue to beat, they shall beat in gratitude to the members of the Eighth and Eleventh Regiments."

In this spirit, and with such uncalculating devotion to the safety of the Republic, did Connecticut and her Governor gird themselves anew for the most critical and sanguinary part of the war.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE FIRST NATIONAL THANKSGIVING.

It was Brightened by News from Chattanooga-Relative Condition of the Northern and Southern Armies at this Time-President Lincoln at the Gettysburg Cemetery-Popular Feeling-The Battle Hymn of the Reformation.

After the fall of Vicksburg and the battle of Gettysburg, which took place in July of 1863, no very important military movements were made by the Army of the Potomac, or by General Lee's army, until the spring of 1864. Both these armies by their brave fighting on the Peninsula, at Antietam and at Gettysburg, had been sadly depleted and must be recruited and reorganized. The Army of the Potomac had not yet found its commander, nor the several Union armies their commander-in-chief. The term of enlistment of the nine-months' men and of those who had re-enlisted for two years had expired, and with the reduction of the army by such severe campaigns, and such a sacrifice of all the material of war, nothing could be done 80 important for the next nine months as to stimulate enlistments, enforce drafts where necessary, organize and drill troops, manufacture arms and clothing, and collect all the varied supplies for the armies in the field. Hence the President's large and repeated calls for volunteers, and the encouragement of the Northern governors to make them large and frequent enough to finish the war. Then became apparent the comparative resources of the two sections of the country. The South had been preparing and husbanding her resources for this very conflict, and at the first was

It

stronger in the field than we were. Her rigid conscription. brought every man capable of military service into the army, and they were kept there till the war was ended. But when she had lost her 20,000 in the Peninsular campaign, and 30,000 at Gettysburg, and twice the whole number at Vicksburg, though we had lost perhaps as many, how was she to replace that loss as we could? Besides this, blockade running had been so checked that she could neither import arms or supplies freely, nor export cotton to be the basis of her credit abroad. Gold was worth 1.100 per cent. premium in the Confederate capital. General Lee, as well as General Grant, has been criticised for his wasteful expenditure of men in the war. seems awful in either case, to talk deliberately about the expenditure of so many human lives to win a battle. And the only justification can be that some things, like human liberty, and good government, and true religion, are worth even more than life itself, and may be exchanged the one for the other. And even the severities of war are somewhat palliated by the sharpness that makes it shorter. It is, however, rather on the ground of lack of wisdom than of inhumanity that General Lee is censured. That he should have been so prodigal of his brave and well-disciplined troops as to require two of his commanders, Hill and Magruder, to sacrifice 5,000 of their "effective men" in crossing the Chickahominy, and of Longstreet 6,000 more at Malvern Hill, accomplishing nothing as their commander says, and insisting upon Pickett's "last charge" at Gettysburg, when "more than 2,000 were killed and wounded to no effect in scarcely thirty minutes," as the corps commander admits, when it might have been known as well then as afterwards that the Confederacy never could replace

* (See "War Book, Vol. III, pp. 345-7) Confederate General Longstreet's article: "It was thus I felt when Pickett," etc.. 345. "More than 2,000 in about thirty minutes," 347. "I do not think there was any necessity for giving battle at Gettysburg," etc., 350. I felt our last hope was gone," 351.

that splendid army, does seem to imply that he undervalued the military qualities of his opponents, or sadly overestimated his own.

With General Grant it was different. His losses could be replaced. The resources and spirit of the North had only begun to be drawn upon, and when the spirit behind these resources was thoroughly roused, as it was by the invasion of the free States, he might well expect that new armies would be furnished if the old ones were swept away, and that the vast stores of warlike material so carefully collected, and so quickly destroyed, would all be supplied again. With him the war had come to be essentially a question of endurance and exhaustion, and the result vindicated his judgment. Notwithstanding the prodigious losses. of the Army of the Potomac during the first two years of the war, and the 25,000 more needlessly thrown away at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, and the little accomplished toward ending the war, except weakening the enemy to an equal extent, when Vicksburg fell and Gettysburg was fought, the Confederacy ought to have read its doom and arranged for the best terms of adjustment, before Sherman had made his devastating march through the South, and Grant had decimated its army in the Wilderness and accepted the surrender of the remnant of it on the sacred soil of Virginia. As the Count of Paris has justly said, in his account of that battle, General Lee, as a soldier, at the close of that third day's fight at Gettysburg, "must have foreseen Appomattox."

In the meantime General Grant was clearing the Mississippi valley, opening the river to navigation, and doing some of his most vigorous campaigning, before he was called East to be put in command of all our armies, and take charge of the Potomac army in particular. It was hard and expensive work, particularly costly in men, and all the material and facilities of war. The destruction and

rebuilding of railroads, which had come to play such an important part in campaigning, especially in a country so vast as this, was an item of almost the first consideration. Here was the Ohio and Mobile railroad, running hundreds of miles from Ohio to Mobile Bay, Ala., upon which both armies were almost equally dependent, and which it was the constant struggle of each to hold and keep in repair, or to destroy if they could not hold it, and to recover it again and then rebuild it. As showing this kind of work, take Sherman's Meridian expedition, undertaken about this time (February, 1864). His force was not large, and his loss small, yet he marched 400 miles during the shortest month of the year, and destroyed, we are told, "150 miles of railroad, 67 bridges, 700 trestles, 20 locomotives, 28 cars, several thousand bales of cotton, several steam mills, and over two million bushels of corn." At Meridian, it is said, that "for five days 10,000 men worked hard with axes, sledges, crowbars, drawbars, and fire, and the town with its depots, storehouses, arsenals, offices, hospitals and cantonments was totally destroyed. Nothing was spared except the inhabited houses." One of his commanders reported "the destruction of sixty miles of railroad ties, and iron burnt and bent, and fifty miles of road thus ruined," besides bridges, locomotives and cars. As the object of the expedition was to destroy the resources of the enemy for the continuance of the war, it is easy to see that, awful as it makes war in such a form, it was fast accomplishing its purpose. These were resources without which no army could be transported over such great States, or maintained in the field. And when these were seriously impaired, the war was coming to an end. The same was true of the material for an army. The Confederacy was fast using up its men who were fit for military duty, however rigid its conscription might be. Here is where the North always had an immense advantage over the South.