he never sent it.  Step by step Meade moved on Lee’s track into the enemy’s country.  Indecisive manoeuvres on both sides continued over four months.  Lee was forced over the Rappahannock, then over the Rapidan; Meade followed him, found his army in peril, and prudently and promptly withdrew.  In December the two armies went into winter quarters on the two sides of the Rappahannock to await the opening of a very different campaign when the next spring was far advanced.

The autumn months of 1863 witnessed in the Middle West a varying conflict ending in a Northern victory hardly less memorable than those of Gettysburg and Vicksburg.  At last, after the fall of Vicksburg, Rosecrans in Middle Tennessee found himself ready to advance.  By skilful manoeuvres, in the difficult country where the Tennessee River cuts the Cumberland mountains and the parallel ranges which run from north-east to south-west behind, he turned the flank of Bragg’s position at Chattanooga and compelled him to evacuate that town in the beginning of September.  Bragg, as he retreated, succeeded in getting false reports as to his movements and the condition of his army conveyed to Rosecrans, who accordingly followed him up in an incautious manner.  By this time the bulk of the forces that had been used against Vicksburg should have been brought to support Rosecrans.  Halleck, however, at first scattered them for purposes which he thought important in the West.  After a while, however, one part of the army at Vicksburg was brought back to General Burnside in Ohio, from whom it had been borrowed.  Burnside accomplished the very advance by Lexington, in Kentucky, over the mountains into Eastern Tennessee, which Lincoln had so long desired for the relief of the Unionists there, and he was able to hold his ground, defeating at Knoxville a little later an expedition under Longstreet which was sent to dislodge him.  Other portions of the Western army were at last ordered to join Rosecrans, but did not reach him before he had met with disaster.  For the Confederate authorities, eager to retrieve their losses, sent every available reinforcement to Bragg, and he was shortly able to turn back towards Chattanooga with over 71,000 men against the 57,000 with which Rosecrans, scattering his troops in false security, was pursuing him.  The two armies came upon one another, without clear expectation, upon the Chicamauga Creek beyond the ridge which lies south-east of Chattanooga.  The battle fought among the woods and hills by Chicamauga on September 19 and 20 surpassed any other in the war in the heaviness of the loss on each side.  On the second day Bragg’s manoeuvres broke Rosecrans’ line, and only an extraordinarily gallant stand by Thomas with a part of the line, in successive positions of retreat, prevented Bragg from turning the hasty retirement of the remainder into a disastrous rout.  As it was, Rosecrans made good his retreat to Chattanooga, but there he was in danger of being completely cut