the government
changed all the commanders and turned to the consideration of new
plans. With President Lincoln, as we have seen, the opening of
the Mississippi had long been a favored scheme. His early experience
had rendered him familiar with the waters, the shores, and the vast
traffic of the great river, and had brought home to him the common
interests and the mutual dependence of the farmers, the traders,
the miners, and the manufacturers of the States bordering upon the
upper Mississippi and the Ohio on the one hand, and of the merchants
and planters of the Gulf on the other. Thus he was fully prepared
to enter warmly into the idea that had taken possession of the
minds and hearts of the people of the Northwest. From a vague
longing this idea had now grown into a deep and settled sentiment.
Indeed in all the West the opening of the Mississippi played a part
that can only be realized by comparing it with the prevailing
sentiment of the East, so early, so long, so loudly expressed in
the cry, "On to Richmond!"

That the President should have been in complete accord with the
popular impulse is hardly to be wondered at by any one that has
followed, with the least attention, the details of his remarkable
career. Moreover, the popular impulse was right. Wars take their
character from the causes that produce them and the people or the
nations by whom they are waged. This was not a contest upon some
petty question involving the fate of a ministry, a dynasty, or even
a monarchy, to be fought out between regular armies upon well-known
plans at the convergence of the roads between two opposing capitals.
The struggle was virtually one between two peoples hitherto united
as one,--between the people of the North, who had taken up arms
for the maintenance and the restoration of the Union, and the people
of the South, who had taken up arms to destroy the Union. Of such
an issue there could be no compromise; to such a contest there
could be no end short of exhaustion. For four long years it was
destined to go on, and at times to rage with a fury almost unexampled
along lines whose length was measured by the thousand miles and
over a battle-ground nearly as large as the continent of Europe.
Looked at merely from the standpoint of strategy, and discarding
all considerations not directly concerning the movements of armies,
true policy might, perhaps, have dictated the concentration of all
available resources in men and mate