rst week of July the decisive battle of Gettysburg
turned the tide of war, and the fall of Vicksburg made the great river
free from its source to the Gulf.

On foreign nations the influence of the proclamation and of these new
victories was of great importance. In those days, when there was no
cable, it was not easy for foreign observers to appreciate what was
really going on; they could not see clearly the true state of affairs,
as in the last year of the nineteenth century we have been able, by our
new electric vision, to watch every event at the antipodes and observe
its effect. The Rebel emissaries, sent over to solicit intervention,
spared no pains to impress upon the minds of public and private men
and upon the press their own views of the character of the contest. The
prospects of the Confederacy were always better abroad than at home. The
stock markets of the world gambled upon its chances, and its bonds at
one time were high in favor.

Such ideas as these were seriously held: that the North was fighting for
empire and the South for independence; that the Southern States, instead
of being the grossest oligarchies, essentially despotisms, founded on
the right of one man to appropriate the fruit of other men's toil and to
exclude them from equal rights, were real republics, feebler to be sure
than their Northern rivals, but representing the same idea of freedom,
and that the mighty strength of the nation was being put forth to
crush them; that Jefferson Davis and the Southern leaders had created
a nation; that the republican experiment had failed and the Union had
ceased to exist. But the crowning argument to foreign minds was that
it was an utter impossibility for the government to win in the contest;
that the success of the Southern States, so far as separation was
concerned, was as certain as any event yet future and contingent could
be; that the subjugation of the South by the North, even if it could be
accomplished, would prove a calamity to the United States and the world,
and especially calamitous to the negro race; and that such a victory
would necessarily leave the people of the South for many generations
cherishing deadly hostility against the government and the North, and
plotting always to recover their independence.

When Lincoln issued his proclamation he knew that all these ideas were
founded in error; that the national resources were inexhaustible;
that the government could and would win, and tha