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many forest roads, in the face of a determined and infuriated enemy, deterred M'Lellan from attempting to penetrate to Richmond overland. But there was a Federal stronghold considerably nearer to Richmond, Fortress Monroe, acting from which as his base, M'Lellan thought that he might, without great risk, extend his army along the peninsula lying between the York and James rivers, and so reach Richmond. Acting on this idea, of the soundness of which he had convinced President Lincoln, he caused a great quantity of transports to be provided, and embarking his troops in the Chesapeake, landed at Fortress Monroe on the 2nd April. Gradually concentrating his forces, he advanced along the peninsula above mentioned, and while encamped before Yorktown, on the 30th April, found that he had 130,000 men at his standards. From Yorktown he advanced towards Richmond; but now the difficulties of the enterprise began to appear. A small sluggish river, the Chickahominy, running much through marshes and scattered woods, divides the peninsula nearly in two equal halves, or long narrow strips, for forty miles and more to the east of Richmond, bending round suddenly at last, and flowing into the James. General J. E. Johnston, who was in command of the main army of the Confederates, allowed his enemy to march on unchecked, until a considerable part of his troops was well entangled in the swamps of this treacherous valley, and then commenced a series of vigorous and well-planned attacks. The first collision took place at New Bridge, on the Chickahominy, on the 24th May. On the 27th, General Porter, sent to clear the Federal right in the direction of Hanover Court House, dispersed with some loss the Confederate division which opposed his march. But the first serious action was the battle of Fair Oaks, or the Seven Pines, on the 31st May. The divisions of Generals Casey and Couch having been thrown forward by M'Lellan to the point, or points, indicated by those names, without, it would seem, adequate provision for their support in case of need, the Confederate army, marching out of Richmond simultaneously along several roads which led towards the scene of action, fell upon the Federals while the breastworks with which they were preparing to secure their position were still incomplete. Couch's division was the first attacked; it was enveloped, broken, and forced back on the division of Casey; which, also, was unable to stand its ground. The camps of these two divisions, with many guns and stores, fell into the hands of the conquerors. Heintzelman was promptly summoned to the aid of the beaten generals, but we are told that "some of his regiments did not rush to the front quite so impetuously as a good portion of Couch's made tracks for the rear."* The task of relief now passed into the able hands of General Sedgwick, who, coming up with fresh troops, and handling them well, checked the further advance of the Confederates, and even recovered a portion of the lost ground. The total loss of the Federals in this battle was about 5,700 men; that of the Confederates 4,200. M'Lellan seems to have been, as it were, stunned by

Greeley, "American Conflict," vol. ii.

this battle of Fair Oaks, for he kept his army, still vastly superior to that of the Confederates, for more than three weeks in camp, without attempting any movement of importance. The Confederate generals had thus full leisure to mature a great combined movement, the object of which was to turn the Federal right and force the whole army down on the shore of the James river. Johnston having received a severe wound in the battle of Fair Oaks, the command had devolved on General Robert Lee, a gallant gentleman of the old Virginian stock, aided by that thunderbolt of war, "Stonewall" Jackson, by Stuart, the "beau sabreur," by Ewell, Longstreet, and other brave and able officers. Jackson had just returned from the Shenandoah valley, where, with skill and daring seldom equalled, he had defeated or foiled all the Federal corps that he had come across, driving most of them right out of the valley. On the 26th June, General Porter, commanding the right wing of the Federal army, was attacked at Mechanicsville, on the north side of the Chickahominy, by the divisions of Longstreet and Hill. On that day Porter appears to have stood his ground; but on the 27th Jackson came up and mingled in the fight; and the Federal general, after having fallen back from Mechanicsville to Gaines' Mill, was dislodged from that position also, and completely defeated. M'Lellan, with a force immensely outnumbering anything that was in his own front, was within three or four miles of his defeated subaltern; but, being a man of no true military insight, he was deceived by the feigned attacks which the Confederate troops in his front had been instructed to keep up during the day, and sent across the Chickahominy, in compliance with Porter's urgent messages, reinforcements too weak to turn the tide of battle, but large enough to give additional magnitude to the catastrophe. The right wing of the Federal army being thus turned, its communications with its base at West Point on the York river were cut, and immense quantities of stores were captured by Stuart and his cavalry, while as much more was destroyed by the Federal officers in charge. M'Lellan, in pursuance of the decision of a council of war, ordered a retreat. He wrote to Secretary Staunton, and was doubtless sincerely convinced, that the enemy with whom he had to contend numbered from 150,000 to 200,000 men, the fact being that the entire force under Lee's command, even after Jackson's army had joined him, never exceeded 70,000 men. and harassed by the victorious Confederates, yet turning to bay readily and often, and fighting stubbornly, the Federal army marched by Malvern Hill upon the James river. There fevers broke out among them, exposed as they were to the fierce summer sun of Virginia and to the malarious exhalations of a marshy region; and as soon as sufficient transport could be provided, the remains of that imposing array which had gone forth three months before with such proud hopes, were transferred by sea to Acquia Creek, on the Potomac. This took place in the first half of July.

Pursued

M'Lellan had been thoroughly discomfited; but another Federal army still kept the field in Virginia, covering Washington, and occasionally making forward movements

A.D. 1862.]

DEFEAT OF GENERAL POPE.

as far as the Rappahannock. This was the army, numbering about 40,000 men, under the command of General Pope. On taking the command, Pope had issued a boast ful and grandiloquent manifesto, some of the expressions of which were understood to glance at the luckless M'Lellan. "I hear constantly," he said, "of taking strong positions and holding them-of lines of retreat and of bases of supplies. Let us discard such ideas. . . . Let us study the probable lines of retreat of our opponents, and leave our own to take care of themselves. Let us look before, and not behind. Success and glory are in the advance. Disaster and shame lurk in the rear." But

Quid dignum tanto feret hic promissor hiatu ?

After the greater part of M'Lellan's beaten army had taken up its quarters again within the lines of Alexandria, Lee, with Jackson, his indefatigable lieutenant, resolved to pay his undivided attention to Pope. In the first battle, at Cedar Mountain, near the Rapidan, a portion of Pope's army attacked, without knowing it, nearly the whole of Lee's, and, of course, received a terrible and bloody repulse. The next fifteen days were a maze of marches and combats, in the course of which Jackson, with an audacity defensible rather on moral than on military grounds, and evidently proceeding from an exact appreciation of the calibre of the man and the troops opposed to him, marched round Pope's right and seized his magazines at Manasses Junction, exactly in his rear; yet managed to extricate himself in time from a position which, with an abler adversary, would have been his certain destruction, and succeeded in rejoining Longstreet before he was compelled to fight the battle of Gainesville, in which Pope's generals of division sustained a crushing defeat. Pope retreated to Centerville; again his flank was turned, and he found himself compelled to fall back on the line of Alexandria, having been incessantly engaged, ever since the Confederate army turned against him, in that very operation of retreating which he had vain-gloriously announced would, under his auspices, be the exclusive portion of "our opponents."

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this object, or along with it, Lee had formed a plan
for the reduction of Harper's Ferry, an important post
at the junction of the Shenandoah and Potomac, and the
capture of its garrison. By one of the accidents of war,
a copy of Lee's general order, giving clear instructions to
his divisional commanders with a view to this important
capture, fell into M'Lellan's hands; yet, although it was
an operation which involved the cutting of Lee's army
in two, and the separation of the two halves by a con-
siderable river, the Federal general was so poor a
tactician that he could neither prevent the fall of
Harper's Ferry, nor fall with overwhelming force upon
the portion of the Confederate army that remained to the
north of the river. The active Jackson opened fire on
Harper's Ferry on the 13th September, and the place
surrendered on the 15th, nearly twelve thousand men
laying down their arms. Not delaying a moment,
Jackson hurried his division across the Potomac again,
and, marching day and night, reached Lee's head-quarters
behind the Antietam Creek on the 16th, in time to help
him in repelling the great Federal attack of the next day.
The indecisive battle of Antietam was the most bloody
of the whole war; the loss on each side exceeded twelve
thousand men. M'Lellan, according to his own state-
ment, had 87,000 men in line on that day; the
Confederates stood their ground with only 45,000 for
the first half of the day, and for the remaining half
with no more than an aggregate of 70,000; yet the
last incident of all was the driving of the Federal left
down the hills, up which they had gradually advanced,
and across the creek again. The stubborn valour of
the Confederate soldiers, and the high qualities of
their officers, were never more nobly exemplified than
on this bloody field of Antietam. On the following
day, the 18th, both armies rested; but M'Lellan was
joined by a reinforcement of fourteen thousand men ;
and Lee knew that he could do no more.
the Potomac with his whole force on that night, and
retired upon Winchester, in the Shenandoah valley; nor
did M'Lellan pursue. Emboldened by this inaction, Lee
detached Stuart with eighteen hundred horsemen on a
raid into Pennsylvania. Stuart penetrated into that
state as far as Chambersburg, where he destroyed a large
quantity of military stores; he then rode right round the
Federal army, doing what damage he could by the way,
and recrossed without loss into Virginia below Harper's
Ferry.

He crossed

But Lee was not satisfied with having defeated two Federal armies, and nearly cleared Virginia of invaders; he determined to carry the war across the Potomac, and enter Maryland at least, if not Pennsylvania. The bulk of his army crossed the Potomac near Leesburg on the 5th September, and advanced to Frederick, whence Lee issued an address to the people of Maryland, to whom he held Gallant and unfortunate men! brave gentlemen of forth the prospect of deliverance from their oppressors. Virginia and the Carolinas! genuine strain of the old He appears to have hoped that the Confederate ranks English blood! worthy countrymen of the Mannys and -not over well filled at the first, and now sadly thinned Raleighs of former times! defenders of your native fields by the drain of incessant warfare and hardship-would against a motley host representing twenty different be recruited by a large accession of enthusiastic Mary- nationalities, a "colluvies omnium gentium" pouring landers. But most of the more ardent spirits among upon you from the North-Scotch, Irish, Dutch, these had already crossed the border and enlisted in the Germans, and many more,-surely, if mortal heroism Confederate armies, while of the remainder many doubt- could avail to bar the irresistible decrees, your blood less shrank from the peril of confiscation and other would not have been shed in vain, and your names would trouble which their joining Lee might bring upon their have shone in the page of history as the founders of a friends and relations. Thus it happened that not more new nation. But you fought not against overwhelming than between 200 and 300 Marylanders enlisted. Failing numbers only, but against the eternal law of justice,

though you knew it not; and therefore you could not prevail. Your chiefs prated about liberty, but in their hearts designed to establish their state on the perpetual enslavement and inequality of a race of men that deserved not such a fate; and you, imagining your cause to be just and holy, sacrificed your lives for ends that in the last analysis were plainly irreligious and immoral.*

Yet one more day of slaughter was to close this year of carnage. In November, M'Lellan had been relieved of his command, which had been turned over to Burnside. The sole military conception of this general, with reference to the taking of Richmond, appears to have been that he must march straight at it along the direct road until he arrived there. He pressed on as far as the Rappahannock, and occupied Fredericksburg, on the southern bank of that river; but the heights behind the town offered a strong position, which Lee at once seized and carefully fortified; so that when, on a beautiful sunny day of the Indian summer, December 12th, Burnside flung his masses against the heights, they were repulsed with fearful slaughter. During the remainder of the winter the armies of the Union and the Confederacy faced one another on opposite sides of the Rappahannock, which, by a sort of tacit consent, was accepted as the dividing line of the two powers. But cavalry raids, most of which were successful, were the order of the day with the Confederate officers all through the winter. In January, 1863, the command of the army of the Potomac was transferred from Burnside to Hooker, who had greatly distinguished himself at Antietam.

Cumberland Gap into Eastern Tennessee, which at this period was firmly held by the Confederates. Dissatisfied with the dilatory proceedings of Buell, the Federal Government superseded him at the end of October by General Rosecranz, who, on the 4th instant, had repelled, with heavy loss to the assailants, a combined attack of Generals Van Dorn and Price upon the lines of Corinth. The expedition of Bragg was, upon the whole, a failure; since it demonstrated that in spite of the incapacity of generals and the rawness of soldiers, the resources of the Federal power were far too solid, far too elastic, to permit of the Confederacy making conquests on Federal ground. Would the Confederacy be able to hold its own? That was now the question of questions.

2. The naval portion of the war must now be briefly described. In the course of January and February, Commodore Goldsborough and General Burnside, at the head of a powerful expedition, attacked the coast defences of North Carolina, capturing the island of Roanoke, and compelling the surrender of Fort Macon, Newbern, and other places. In March occurred the famous conflict of the Merrimac and Monitor. When the navy-yard at Norfolk, in Virginia, opposite Fortress Munroe, on the south side of the James river, was abandoned by the Federals, they endeavoured, but without success, to destroy the forty-gun steam frigate Merrimac. The Confederates, having repaired this vessel, cut her down nearly to the water's edge, built up over her a sort of deck-house, sloping inwards, of solid timber strongly plated with railway iron, armed her with ten heavy guns and a formidable iron beak, rechristened her the Virginia, and sent her out to burn, sink, and destroy. On the 8th March, the officers on board the Federal fleet stationed in Hampton Roads beheld a strange black object, showing nothing but a funnel and a sloping roof above water, moving rapidly down upon them, followed by two small war steamers. Before they could decide on any course of action, the monster ran at the Cumberland frigate, and opened a gaping breach in her side with her iron beak, so that she sank at her anchors in a brief space of time, carrying to the bottom about a hundred sick and wounded men. Two other frigates, the Congress and the Minnesota, came to the assistance of the Cumberland, and rained heavy shot on the sides of the iron-clad, which glanced ineffectively off her mail. To avoid the fate of the Cumberland, the Congress ran herself aground; but being exposed in that position to a raking fire from the Merrimac, and having lost many men, she hauled down her colours. But the fire from the Federal soldiers on

In the autumn, General Bragg led a Confederate army from Chattanooga, on the confines of Alabama, across Tennessee, into the state of Kentucky, routing in succession all the troops that opposed his march. Occupying Frankfort, the state capital of Kentucky, he then issued a skilfully worded address to the Kentuckians, whom he professed an ardent desire to liberate from the thraldom in which they were held by the Federal Government. Great was the alain in the wealthy cities on the Ohio, Louisville and Cincinnati. But on this, as on many other occasions during the war, it was seen that the sheer weight of numbers was enough to neutralise all the advantage which the superior élan of the Confederate troops, and the finer strategy of their generals, had for a time obtained. General Buell, who had slowly followed Bragg from the vicinity of Chattanooga, reached Louisville towards the end of September. Reinforcements now joined him to such an extent that, at the beginning of October, he found himself at the head of 100 000 men, the greater part of them indeed raw troops, but out-shore prevented the Confederates from taking possession numbering the Confederates in the ratio of more than of her, and in the end she was set on fire and destroyed. two to one. So far from advancing on Louisville, Bragg The Minnesota also got aground, but in a position where felt that he was no longer safe at Frankfort, and he the Merrimac could not approach within a considerable resolved to retreat. But in order to protect the march of distance. On the next day, the battle was renewed, and his immense trains, loaded with the plunder of Kentucky, the Merrimac, having made out the channel by which he gave battle to Buell at Perryville, on the 9th October, the Minnesota had reached the bank on which she lay, and signally defeated him. After this he retired through was proceeding to attack her at close quarters, when a new combatant appeared on the scene. This was the Monitor, a small turreted iron-clad, just arrived from New York. Steaming in between the Minnesota and

"Had I a million slaves," said Lee (we quote from memory from his Life by Cooke), “I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I join those who are invading my native land ?"

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her assailant, the Monitor commenced a duel with the latter, which lasted some time without much apparent damage being done on either side. At last, as if in desperation, the Merrimac ran at the Monitor, and butted at her with all her force; the shock, however, did little or no injury to the turret ship, while in it the Merrimac carried away her enormous beak, and is supposed to have seriously damaged her machinery. Certain it is, that although she was got safely into Norfolk, she never made a second appearance; and not long afterwards, when the progress of the Federal arms in North Carolina rendered Norfolk untenable except by leaving there a larger garrison than the Confederates could spare, the place was evacuated, and the Merrimac, whose fame had flown already round the civilised world, was blown up and destroyed.

The fall of New Orleans, which took place in April of this year (1862), was the first crushing and irremediable blow which the Confederacy had sustained. An expedition for the purpose had been long since projected by General Butler, and approved by President Lincoln. Various delays prevented its being brought to full maturity till near the end of March, when Butler landed at Ship Island (in the Gulf of Mexico, between Mobile and the mouth of the Mississippi) and proceeded to concert with Captain Farragut, of the U.S. steam sloop Hartford, the details of the enterprise. The land forces here concentrated did not much exceed 13,000 men, and would have been of themselves insufficient to make an impression on so large a city as New Orleans, which at that time had a population of 170,000 inhabitants, and the defence of which was in the hands of an able and energetic governor, General Lovell. But the naval force at Ship Island numbered forty-seven vessels, of which eight were large and powerful steam sloops-of-war, and twenty-one mortar-boats, each throwing a 215-pound shell, the whole under the command of David Farragut, a man in whom the approach of age (he was sixtythree years old, fifty of which he had passed in the navy) had not chilled the fire or damped the enthusiasm of his youth. The principal defences of New Orleans were the forts Jackson and St. Philip, on opposite sides of the river, seventy-five miles below the city. An immense boom, composed of cypress-trees and chain cables, had been prepared with great labour and stretched across the current, just under the guns of the forts; but the flood in the Mississippi, rising this year to an unusual height, had carried the chief part of it away. Attempts, indeed, had been made to patch it up, but the obstruction thus presented was more formidable in appearance than reality. The plan agreed upon between the Federal commanders was this: that Captain Porter, who had charge of the mortar-boat squadron, should commence operations by bombarding the forts; that General Butler -after they had been sufficiently dismantled and disarmed by the heavy shelling they would receive-should attack them on the land side with his troops; lastly, that прon the fall of the forts Captain Farragut should, with his men-of-war, break the boom, engage and overpower the Confederate squadron, and steam up to the city.

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The actual course of events was somewhat different. Captain Porter with his mortar-boats commenced shelling the forts on the 17th April; but the defence was well conducted, and little progress was made. On the other hand, all the attempts of the Confederates to set fire to the fleet of Federal transports and other vessels, by sending down fire-rafts among them, were neutralised by the carefully planned precautions of Farragut. On the third day of the bombardment, the gallant veteran called a council of war on board the Hartford, and it was decided that the attempt should be made to run past the forts with the fighting portion of the fleet. But it was necessary that the boom should first be broken, and this service was ably performed by Captain Bell that very night. The grand attack was fixed for the night of the 23rd April. The fleet was arranged in three divisions, that on the left led by Farragut in the Hartford, that on the right by Captain Bailey in the Cayuga, while Captain Bell, with a smaller division, was to keep the centre of the river. The ships under Captain Bell's command were unable to sustain the heavy fire of the forts, and retired down stream; but both Farragut and Bailey, after running the gauntlet past the forts with little loss, engaged in a strange midnight conflict with the Confederate flotilla, which they succeeded, being in greatly superior force, in destroying or putting to flight. "Captain Farragut, in the fore-rigging of the Hartford, anxiously watching every visible movement through his night glass, had advanced within a mile and a quarter of Fort Jackson, when he was opened upon from that fort and repeatedly struck. Still steaming directly for the fort, and replying only from his two fore-castle guns, when within half a mile he sheered and gave them broadsides of grape and canister, which soon drove every man from their barbette guns; but those in the casemates rendered full and quick returns for every volley received. The Richmond, closely following, hurled grape and canister in profusion. The Brooklyn, bringing up the rear, ran over one of the hulks which had upheld the chain, during a hot fire from Fort St. Philip. Hardly had she been freed from the hulk and her head turned up stream, when the ram Manasses came butting into her starboard gangway, first opening her iron trap door at ten feet distance and firing at the smoke-stack of the Brooklyn a heavy bolt, which was caught and stopped by the sand bags protecting her steam-drum. A guard of chain armour which had been woven over her sides " (Farragut had ordered the adoption of this simple precaution in all the large steamers, viz., the protection of the machinery by chain cables, and the result proved with what accurate judgment) "shielded her from destruction by the ram, which soon slid off and disappeared in the darkness. A few minutes later, while still under a raking fire from Fort Jackson, the Brooklyn was attacked by a large rebel steamer, to which she gave a broadside at fifty yards, setting it instantly on fire, and putting an end to its career. Still groping onward in the thick darkness, Captain Craven soon found himself abreast of Fort St. Philip, and so near that his leadsman reported thirteen feet of water. Bringing all his guns to bear for a few

moments, he poured in grape and canister so that the fort was completely silenced, and her garrison were seen by our men in the tops of the Brooklyn, by the fitful flashes of their bursting shrapnel, running like sheep to their coverts. Thus passing the upper fort, Captain Craven engaged several of the rebel gun-boats at sixty to a hundred yards. He was an hour and a half under fire, lost eight killed and twenty-six wounded, while his ship was badly cut up by shot and shell; but she bore her full part in the attack on the rebel batteries below New Orleans next morning." *

The rest may be briefly told. On the next day, April 25th, Farragut steamed up to the wharves of New Orleans, the inhabitants of which, knowing that the city could be easily laid in ashes by the Federal squadron, abandoned the thought of further resistance. Very firm language was required from Farragut before the irritated people would leave the Union flag to fly undisturbed from the top of the City Hall. The civil government was committed to General Butler, and was by him administered with great firmness, and perhaps with no greater severity of repression than the circumstances substantially required. But being without the breeding of a gentleman, Butler did not know or feel that there are some means of repression which, whatever may be the previous provocation, must not be employed. He thus came to issue the celebrated proclamation, ordering that "hereafter, when any female shall, by word, gesture, or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation." The civilised world received this ebullition with astonishment and indignation, Lord Palmerston declaring, in the House of Commons, that "Englishmen must blush to think that it came from a man of the Anglo-Saxon race." Yet there is no ground to think that Butler's order, hateful as it is, was ever put in force-that it was more than a brutum fulmen; and, on the other hand, Englishmen who have known their countrymen order the living bodies of Hindoo prisoners to be blown into ghastly and gory fragments of quivering flesh from the mouths of cannon, cannot predict to what lengths even their portion of the "Anglo-Saxon race may not proceed under circumstances of pressure. The execution of Mumford by Butler's order, for having been the ringleader of a mob which tore down the Federal flag from the roof of the Mint, after the Confederate forces had evacuated the city, was, perhaps, an act of extreme harshness, and not absolutely required for the security of a power which was then so firmly in possession; nevertheless, the plea of military necessity has been not seldom held sufficient to cover worse deeds.

Great progress was made in this year towards the complete emancipation of the slaves. Already Federal officers in command of corps or detachments serving in the Southern states had been forbidden to interfere in any way with the enjoyment of their freedom by slaves who had escaped from their masters within the Federal lines.

• Greeley, "American Conflict," vol. ii. ch. 5.

Mr. Lincoln displayed sound statesmanship and a wise deliberation in this whole matter. So faras military interests seemed to require it, he gladly took and approved of measures which tended to emancipation; but he would not let himself be hurried by the Abolitionists into any such premature declaration against slavery, regarded as an institution, as would, while everything was still in doubt, have estranged Kentucky and Missouri from the cause of the Union far more decidedly than was now the case. He expressed himself very plainly, and with characteristic brevity, in a letter to Horace Greeley, written in August of this year. "My paramount object," he said, "is to save the Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it-if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it-and if I could save it by freeing some and letting others alone, I would also do that." In September, he published a proclamation, distinctly stated to be resorted to as a war measure, notifying that from the first day of January, 1863, all slaves owned in any state, or in any designated part of a state, which was then in rebellion against the Union, should be held to be from that time and for ever after free. In accordance with this notification, the President issued a second proclamation on the 1st January, 1863, which, considering the result of the war, practically amounted to the abolition of slavery in North America. This document, after reciting the previous proclamation, continued: "Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this first day of January in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty three order and designate as the States and the parts of States wherein the people thereof respectively are this day in rebellion against the United States, the following, to wit: Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana [except certain parishes], Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia [except certain counties] .. and by virtue of the power and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States are and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognise and maintain the freedom of such persons." The military effect of this proclamation, considered as a war measure, was probably less than Mr. Lincoln had counted upon: for either it was carefully withheld from the knowledge of the slave population in the Southern states, or, if even its contents became known to any of them, the fierce and desperate resolution which animated the whites deterred them from attempting, or even planning, anything like a general insurrection. But the political effect was enormous; in every Chrie ian country the cause of the Union was thenceforward identiied with the freedom of the negro, so that even those who on many accounts sympathised with the South could not

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