low process of entrenching his own
lines securely and extending the entrenchment further and further round
the south side of Petersburg. Lee was thus being forced to extend the
position held by his own small army further and further. In time the
lines would crack and the end come.

It need hardly be said that despair was invading the remnant of the
Confederacy; supplies began to run short in Richmond, recruiting had
ceased, desertion was increasing. Before the story of its long
resistance closes it is better to face the gravest charge against the
South. That charge relates to the misery inflicted upon many thousands
of Northern prisoners in certain prisons or detention camps of the South.
The alleged horrors were real and were great. The details should not be
commemorated, but it is right to observe that the pitiable condition in
which the stricken survivors of this captivity returned, and the tale
they had to tell, caused the bitterness which might be noted afterwards
in some Northerners. The guilt lay mainly with a few subordinate but
uncontrolled officials. In some degree it must have been shared by
Jefferson Davis and his Administration, though a large allowance should
be made for men so sorely driven. But it affords no ground whatever, as
more fortunate prisoners taken by the Confederates have sometimes
testified, for any general imputation of cruelty against the Southern
officers, soldiers, or people. There is nothing in the record of the war
which dishonours the South, nothing to restrain the tribute to its
heroism which is due from a foreign writer, and which is irrepressible in
the case of a writer who rejoices that the Confederacy failed.

4. _The Second Election of Lincoln: 1864_.

Having the general for whom he had long sought, Lincoln could now be in
military matters little more than the most intelligent onlooker; he could
maintain the attitude, congenial to him where he dealt with skilled men,
that when he differed from them they probably knew better than he. This
was well, for in 1864 his political anxieties became greater than they
had been since war declared itself at Fort Sumter. Whole States which
had belonged to the Confederacy were now securely held by the Union
armies, and the difficult problem of their government was approaching its
final settlement. It seemed that the war should soon end; so the
question of peace was pressed urgently. Moreover, the election of a
President was due