r bloody battle ensued. After a vain and hopeless
sacrifice of 12,000 men, Burnside withdrew to the northern bank of the
river. The active fighting of 1862 had come to a close. In northern
Mississippi Grant and Sherman were blocked; at Murfreesboro, Tennessee,
the armies of Rosecrans and Bragg were about to make their fruitless
onsets already mentioned, and in Virginia the Union outlook was quite as
dark as it had been after the first unfortunate trial at arms in July,
1861. Lincoln thought of removing Grant because of the failure of the
campaign in northern Mississippi, but gave him another opportunity;
Burnside resigned a command he had not sought, and Joseph Hooker took up
the difficult problem of beating Lee.

At Washington the deepest gloom prevailed. On July 2, 1862, before the
news of McClellan's failure to capture Richmond had reached the people,
a call for 300,000 three-year men was made. Then came the disaster of
Second Manassas and the invasion of Maryland. Recruiting went on
drearily during the fall, when most signs pointed to the failure of all
the gigantic efforts to maintain the Union. The writ of _habeas corpus_,
so dear to Anglo-Saxons, had been frequently suspended; arbitrary
arrests were made in all parts of the North, and many well-known men
were held in military and other prisons without warrant or trial.
Stanton and Seward with the approval of the President issued orders for
the seizure of men at night, and the mysterious disappearances of public
men in places where opposition had been shown served to warn people
against displeasing their own officers at the capital. The cost of the
war had mounted to $2,500,000 a day, while the gross receipts of the
Government were not more than $600,000 a day. When the time came to put
into force the Emancipation Proclamation, the people were in greater
doubt than ever about the wisdom of the move, and Secretary Seward wrote
to a friend condemning utterly this effort to raise a servile war in the
South. The letter found its way into the newspapers and showed once more
the cleavage of Northern public opinion. The radical East approved, the
nationalist West disapproved, and business men, bankers, merchants, and
manufacturers, whom Seward best represented, went on their indifferent
ways, refusing to lend money to the Government save on usurious terms,
and at the same time denouncing its policy of paying debts by issuing
irredeemable paper. Lincoln had lost the confid