Now it was that the regular siege of Vicksburg was undertaken.  Toward the latter part of June, the Confederates, both soldiers and citizens, began to suffer.  Houses became untenable.  The people sought what refuge they might find.  Some actually burrowed in the earth.  The garrison was placed on short rations, and then a condition of starvation ensued.  Pemberton held out with a resolution worthy of a better fate.  But at length human endurance could go no further.  On the fourth of July the white flag was hoisted from the Confederate works, announcing the end.  Generals Grant and Pemberton, with three or four attendants each, met between the lines, and the terms of capitulation were quickly named and accepted.  Vicksburg was surrendered.  General Pemberton and all his forces, 30,000 strong, became prisoners of war.

This was the greatest force ever surrendered in America, though it was only about one-sixth of that of Marshal Bazaine and his army at Metz seven years afterward.  Thousands of small arms, hundreds of cannon, and all the remaining ammunition and stores of the Confederates were the other fruits of this great Union victory, by which the prospect of ultimate success to the Confederacy was either destroyed or long postponed, and by which in particular the great central river of the United States was permitted once more to flow unvexed from the confluence of the Missouri to the Gulf.

GETTYSBURG.

The battle of Gettysburg is properly included among the great battles of the world.  It was the greatest conflict that has thus far occurred in America.  The losses relative to the numbers engaged were not as great as those at Antietam, Spottsylvania, and a few other bloody struggles of our war; but in the aggregate the losses were greatest.  Gettysburg was in truth the high tide of the American Civil War.  Never before and never afterward was there a crisis such as that which broke in the dreadful struggle for the mastery of Cemetery Ridge.

The invasion of the Northern States by General Lee had been undertaken at the close of the previous summer.  That invasion had ended disastrously at the battle of Antietam.  Once more the Confederate commander would make the trial.  So well had he been able to beat back every invasion of Virginia by the Union forces that he now thought to end the war by turning its tide of devastation into Pennsylvania.

Doubtless Lee realized that he was placing everything upon the cast of a die.  He undertook the campaign with a measure of confidence.  He, almost as much as Grant, was a taciturn man, not much given to revelations of his purposes and hopes.  No doubt he was somewhat surprised at the successful rising of the Union forces against him.  Besides the Army of the Potomac, Pennsylvania seemed to rise for the emergency.