oga, desperate fighting followed and, in spite of
varying fortunes, it resulted in the discomfiture and retirement of
Confederate forces to the Southeast into Georgia. By the middle of 1863,
the Mississippi Valley was open to the Gulf, the initiative taken out of
the hands of Southern commanders in the West, and the way prepared for
Sherman's final stroke--the march from Atlanta to the sea--a maneuver
executed with needless severity in the autumn of 1864.

[Illustration: GENERAL ULYSSES S. GRANT]

[Illustration: GENERAL ROBERT E. LEE]

For the almost unbroken succession of achievements in the West by
Generals Grant, Sherman, Thomas, and Hooker against Albert Sidney
Johnston, Bragg, Pemberton, and Hood, the union forces in the East
offered at first an almost equally unbroken series of misfortunes and
disasters. Far from capturing Richmond, they had been thrown on the
defensive. General after general--McClellan, Pope, Burnside, Hooker, and
Meade--was tried and found wanting. None of them could administer a
crushing defeat to the Confederate troops and more than once the union
soldiers were beaten in a fair battle. They did succeed, however, in
delivering a severe check to advancing Confederates under General Robert
E. Lee, first at Antietam in September, 1862, and then at Gettysburg in
July, 1863--checks reckoned as victories though in each instance the
Confederates escaped without demoralization. Not until the beginning of
the next year, when General Grant, supplied with almost unlimited men
and munitions, began his irresistible hammering at Lee's army, did the
final phase of the war commence. The pitiless drive told at last.
General Lee, on April 9, 1865, seeing the futility of further conflict,
surrendered an army still capable of hard fighting, at Appomattox, not
far from the capital of the Confederacy.

[Illustration: _Copyright by Underwood and Underwood, N.Y._

THE FEDERAL MILITARY HOSPITAL AT GETTYSBURG]

=Abraham Lincoln.=--The services of Lincoln to the cause of union defy
description. A judicial scrutiny of the war reveals his thought and
planning in every part of the varied activity that finally crowned
Northern arms with victory. Is it in the field of diplomacy? Does
Seward, the Secretary of State, propose harsh and caustic measures
likely to draw England's sword into the scale? Lincoln counsels
moderation. He takes the irritating message and with his own hand
strikes out, erases, tones down, and interl