d
by the barrenness of the country, by the complete destruction of
all Union stores likely to fall into his hands, and by the fact
that he was between two Federal forts when the battle ended. On
the twenty-eighth of March there was a desperate fight in Apache
Canon. Both sides claimed the victory. But the Confederates lost
more men as well as the whole of their supply and ammunition train.
After this Sibley began a retreat which ended in May at San Antonio.
His route was marked by bleaching skeletons for many a long day; and
from this time forward the conquest of California became nothing
but a dream.

The "War in the West" was a mere twig on the Trans-Mississippi
branch; and when the fall of Vicksburg severed the branch from the
tree the twig simply withered away.

The sword that ultimately severed branch and twig was firmly held
by Union hands before the year was out; and this notwithstanding
all the Union failures in the last six months. Grant and Porter
from above, Banks and Farragut from below, had already massed forces
strong enough to make the Mississippi a Union river from source to
sea, in spite of all Confederates from Vicksburg to Port Hudson.

CHAPTER V

LINCOLN: WAR STATESMAN

Lincoln was one of those men who require some mighty crisis to call
their genius forth. Though more successful than Grant in ordinary
life, he was never regarded as a national figure in law or politics
till he had passed his fiftieth year. He had no advantages of birth;
though he came of a sturdy old English stock that emigrated from
Norfolk to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, and though
his mother seems to have been, both intellectually and otherwise,
above the general run of the Kentuckians among whom he was born
in 1809. His educational advantages were still less. Yet he soon
found his true affinities in books, as afterwards in life, not
among the clever, smart, or sentimental, but among the simple and
the great. He read and reread Shakespeare and the Bible, not because
they were the merely proper things to read but because his spirit
was akin to theirs. This meant that he never was a bookworm. Words
were things of life to him; and, for that reason, his own words
live.

He had no artificial graces to soften the uncouth appearance of his
huge, gaunt six-foot-four of powerful bone and muscle. But he had
the native dignity of straightforward manhood; and, though a champion
competitor in feats of strength,