pect
always to gain victories."

Lee had lost twenty thousand men and fourteen generals. Meade had lost
twenty-three thousand men and seventeen generals. Lee withdrew his army
across the swollen Potomac, carrying away his guns and all the prisoners
he had taken.

General Meade had saved the North, but Lee's army was still intact, on
its old invincible lines in Virginia, sixty-five thousand strong.

The news from Gettysburg crushed the soul of Davis. He had hoped with
this battle to end the war, and stop the frightful slaughter of our
noblest men, North and South. His Commissioner, Alexander H. Stephens,
was halted at Fortress Monroe and sent back to Richmond with an
insulting answer.

So bitter was Lee's disappointment that he offered his resignation to
Davis.

The President at once wrote a generous letter in which he renewed the
expressions of his confidence in the genius of his Commanding General
and begged him to guard his precious life from undue exposure.

Gettysburg was but one of the appalling calamities which crushed the
hopes of the Confederate Chieftain on this memorable fourth of July,
1863.

On the recovery of Joseph E. Johnston from his wound at Seven Pines he
was assigned to the old command of Albert Sidney Johnston in the West.
His department included the States of Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama,
Georgia and North Carolina.

He entered on the duties of his new and important field--complaining,
peevish, sulking.

On the day before his departure Mrs. Davis visited his wife and
expressed to General Johnston the earnest wish of her heart for her
husband's success.

"I sincerely hope, General," she said cordially, "that your campaign
will be brilliant and successful."

The General pursed the hard lines of his mouth.

"I might succeed if I had Lee's chances with the army of Northern
Virginia."

From the moment Johnston reached his field he began to quarrel with his
generals and complain to the Government at Richmond. He made no serious
effort to unite his forces for the defense of Vicksburg and continuously
wrote and telegraphed to the War Department that his authority was
inadequate to really command so extended a territory. He made no effort
to throw the twenty-four thousand men he commanded into a juncture with
Pemberton who was struggling valiantly against Grant's fifty thousand
closing in on the doomed city.

On May eighteenth, Johnston sent a courier to Pemberton and advised him
to e