in detail touching the siege, the losses, the morale of the army, its sanitary condition, the hospital service, and General Grant.  Said he:  ’I guess I was right in standing by Grant, although there was great pressure made after Pittsburg Landing to have him removed.  I thought I saw enough in Grant to convince me that he was one on whom the country could depend.  That ‘unconditional surrender’ message to Buckner at Donelson suited me.  It indicated the spirit of the man.”

It is interesting to note that before the capture of Vicksburg the protracted campaign had occasioned no little dissatisfaction with General Grant; the President had been importuned to remove him, and had much formidable opposition to encounter in his determination to stand by him.  Only a few days before the capitulation of the beleaguered city, Senator Wade of Ohio—­“Bluff Ben Wade,” as he was termed—­called upon the President and urged Grant’s dismissal; to which Lincoln good-naturedly replied, “Senator, that reminds me of a story.”  “Yes, yes,” rejoined Wade petulantly, “that is the way it is with you, sir, all story—­story!  You are the father of every military blunder that has been made during the war.  You are on your road to h—­l, sir, with this Government, and you are not a mile off this minute.”  Lincoln calmly retorted, “Senator, that is just about the distance from here to the Capitol, is it not?” The exasperated Wade grabbed his hat and rushed angrily from the White House.

It is not pleasant to record that the cordial and generous congratulations to Grant for his achievements at Vicksburg were in marked contrast to the rather grudging recognition of Meade’s much more important and hard-won victory at Gettysburg.  In the latter case the despatches from Washington took the form not so much of acknowledgments of what had been done as of complaints at what had not been done.  It is hard to believe that the President dictated, or even authorized, the ill-timed and peevish despatch sent to General Meade[I] by the inopportune Halleck, a few days after the battle of Gettysburg, in which the victor on that desperate field is officially informed that “the escape of Lee’s army has created great dissatisfaction in the mind of the President, and it will require an active and energetic pursuit to remove the impression that it has not been sufficiently active before.”  To this extraordinary message Meade at once made a simple and manly rejoinder in which he said:  “Having performed my duty conscientiously and to the best of my ability, the censure of the President, as conveyed in your despatch, is in my judgment so undeserved that I feel compelled most respectfully to ask to be immediately relieved from the command of this army.”  Halleck replied, rather ineptly, that his despatch had not been intended as a censure, but as a “stimulus,” and was not regarded as a sufficient cause for Meade’s request to be relieved.  When one thinks of the ill-fortunes of the Army of the Potomac under previous