y.--Notable Coincidence.--State Elections favorable
to the Administration.--Meeting of Thirty-eighth Congress.--Schuyler
Colfax elected Speaker.--Prominent New Members in Each Branch.--E.
D. Morgan, Alexander Ramsey, John Conness, Reverdy Johnson, Thomas
A. Hendricks, Henry Winter Davis, Robert C. Schenck, James A.
Garfield, William B. Allison.--President's Message.--Thirteenth
Amendment to the Constitution.--First proposed by James M. Ashley.
--John B. Henderson proposes Amendment which passes the Senate.--
Debate in Both Branches.--Aid to the Pacific Railroads.--Lieutenant-
General Grant.

At no time during the war was the depression among the people of
the North so great as in the spring of 1863. When the Thirty-
seventh Congress came to its close on the 3d of March, partisan
feeling was so bitter that a contest of most dangerous character
was foreshadowed in the Loyal States. The anti-slavery policy of
the President was to be attacked as tending to a fatal division
among the people; the conduct of the war was to be arraigned as
impotent, and leading only to disaster. Circumstances favored an
assault upon the Administration. The project of freeing the slaves
had encountered many bitter prejudices among the masses in the
Loyal States, and reverses in the field had created a dread of
impending conscriptions which would send additional thousands to
be wasted in fruitless assaults upon impregnable fortifications.
General Hooker had succeeded to the command of the Army of the
Potomac, still sore under the cruel sacrifice of its brave men in
the previous December. General Grant was besieging Vicksburg,
which had been fortified with all the strength that military science
could impart, and was defended by a very strong force under the
command of J. C. Pemberton, a graduate of West Point, and a lieutenant-
general in the Confederate army.

CRUSADE AGAINST THE PRESIDENT.

The opponents of the Administration intended to press the attack,
to destroy the prestige of Mr. Lincoln, to bring hostilities in
the field to an end, to force a compromise which should give
humiliating guaranties for the protection of Slavery, to bring the
South back in triumph, and to re-instate the Democratic party in
the Presidential election of the ensuing year for a long and peaceful
rule over a Union in which radicalism had been stamped out and
Abolitionists placed under the ban. Such was the flatt