MARCHING TO VICTORY.

CHAPTER I.

THE HOUR OF GLOOM.

THERE has been no other night in the history of our country like

that of December 31, 1862. On the banks of Stone River, in Tennessee, the soldiers of the Army of the Cumberland were lying where they had fought through the day, with the dead and dying around them. They had been driven from their chosen position of the morning, and the conflict was still undecided. Those whose duty it was to care for the wounded were out upon the field, where the battle had raged most fiercely, groping their way in the darkness or by the dim light of lanterns searching for the wounded. For this army, which had marched through snow and sleet and rain from their camp at Nashville to attack an army superior in number, New-Year's greetings were to be from the cannon's brazen lip, and the morning was to be ushered in with a renewal of the strife-the giving up of other lives that the nation might live.

The soldiers of the Confederate army opposing them were hovering around their bivouac fires congratulating themselves over the success which had attended them through the day, and looking forward to the morning of the New Year with confident expectation of completing the victory. They were animated by a lofty idea-truly believing that they were fighting for liberty and independence.

On the banks of the Mississippi between Memphis and Vicksburg were the soldiers of the Union, who had won victories at Donelson, Shiloh, Corinth, Iuka, who had vainly tried to gain the bluffs of Chickasaw near Vicksburg, but who were determined that the Father of Waters should flow from its source to the sea through an undivided country, whose emblem of sovereignty should ever be the Stars and Stripes.

From the bluffs of Vicksburg the Confederate soldiers of the army under General Pemberton could look down upon the winding river and behold in the distance, upon the moonlit waters, the fleet of Union gunboats which had opened the river southward to that point, but which were powerless to drive them from their stronghold. With Vicksburg and Port Hudson in their possession, with heavy cannon high above the stream, they could send a plunging fire upon the Federal craft and hold the gate-ways of the mighty river against all assault. Never by any attack from gunboats could those places be taken.

On that last night of the year the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac, around their camp-fires on the Stafford hills opposite Fredericksburg, in Virginia, were thinking of loved ones at home, of peaceful scenes far away, of those who never again would keep step to the drum-beat, who had gone down in battle, or whose lives had ebbed away in the hospital. Twenty months had passed since the humiliation of the flag they loved at Fort Sumter; great battles had been fought; they had seen more defeats. than victories. They had been so near to Richmond that in the silent. hours of night, or on the calm still Sabbath morn, they could hear the church-bells of the city toll the hours. Then came Seven Pines, Gainesville, Fair Oaks, Glendale, and Malvern. Upon the plains of Manassas, through mismanagement, inefficiency, jealousy, want of co-operation on the part of those in command, there had been defeat and disaster. From their camp on that closing night of the year they could look across the Rappahannock to the field where twelve thousand of their comrades had fallen in battle. They could claim only one great victory-Antietam.

The sentinels of the Confederate army encamped upon the heights of Fredericksburg, triumphant on so many hard-fought fields, could audaciously fling their sarcastic taunts, their jests and gibes, across the gleaming river to the soldiers of the Union and inquire how soon the Army of the Potomac was going to march into Richmond.

When the war began, the people throughout the country, North and South alike, confidently expected that it would soon be over, not comprehending that it was to be a struggle for supremacy between ideas and institutions.

The people of the Southern States seceded from the Union and formed a confederacy to maintain what they sincerely regarded as the rights of the States. They looked upon the election of Abraham Lincoln as a menace to the institution of slavery, which they had come to believe was divinely established by Almighty God-that it was the best form of society for the Southern States. They were determined to be free and indepen