ive, the beginning of the end of the Confederacy may
be dated from the loss of Vicksburg and the simultaneous retreat from
Gettysburg. For these two disasters made all classes consider more
deeply, both their inducing causes and the final results that must
follow a succession of such crushing blows.

There can be little doubt that a complete victory at Gettysburg,
vigorously followed up, would have ended the war; and the
generally-accepted belief in the South was that the exhaustive defeat
was proportionately bad. The war had been going on two years and a
half. Every device had been used to put the whole numerical strength of
the country into the field and to utilize its every resource. The South
had succeeded to a degree that stupefied the outside world and
astonished even herself. But the effort had exhausted, and left her
unfit to renew it. Over and again the armies of the East and West had
been re-enforced, reorganized and re-equipped--and ever came the heavy,
relentless blows of the seemingly-exhaustless power, struggled against
so vainly. The South had inflicted heavy loss in men, material and
prestige; but she wasted her strength in these blows, while unhappily
she could not make them effective by quick repetition.

The people, too, had lost their early faith in the Government. They had
submitted to the most stringent levy of conscription and impressment
ever imposed upon a nation. They had willingly left their fields to
grow weeds, their children to run wild and perhaps to starve; they had
cheerfully divided their last supplies of food with the Government, and
had gone to the front steadily and hopefully. But now they could not
fail to see that, in some points at least, there had been gross
mismanagement. The food for which their families were pinched and
almost starved, did not come to the armies. Vast stores of provision
and supplies were blocked on the roads, while speculators' ventures
passed over them. This, the soldiers in the trench and the laborer at
the anvil saw equally.

They saw, too, that the Government was divided against itself; for the
worse than weak Congress--which had formerly been as a nose of wax in
Mr. Davis' fingers--had now turned dead against him. With the stolid
obstinacy of stupidity it now refused to see any good in any measure,
or in any man, approved by the Executive.

Under the leadership of Mr. Foote--who wasted the precious time of
Congress in windy personal diatribes against