powers of the Executive and the Constitution, to the end that he might wield untrammelled all the resources of the nation to meet the emergency of the invasion. Though not what is called a popular officer, he was much respected by his comrades in arms. He was an able commander, forty-eight years of age, in person tall and slim, with a long, grayish, thoughtful face, an excellent tactician, and imbued with sound military ideas; and though he afterwards manifested an undue shrinking from responsibility, the gravity of the hour had the effect to quicken and elevate his powers, and he immediately put the army in motion, with the determination to speedily bring Lee to battle. Spite of the malicious detraction of his adversaries, who have tried to make it appear that he shrank from the issue of arms at Gettysburg, it was in reality the moral firmness of General Meade that determined the great combat in the form in which it actually occurred.

On the morning of the 29th of June, Meade put his columns in motion from Frederick. He renounced all thought of moving to the west side of the South Mountain, and resolved to press northward on the east side of that range, ascending the course of the Monocacy towards the Susquehanna, till he should compel Lee to loose his hold on the Susquehanna, and turn and give fight. Mark, now, the curious conjunction of events that was bringing the two hostile masses, though quite ignorant of each other's movements, towards each other, till unexpectedly they found themselves grappling in deadly wrestle, in an obscure hamlet of Western Pennsylvania! Meade thought the Confederates were pressing northward to the Susquehanna, where he knew of the presence of Ewell's corps at York and Carlisle; Lee thought the Union army was marching westward from Frederick. But in point of fact, Lee turned eastward the same morning of the 29th, on which Meade moved northward, and as the direction of the rival armies was at right angles with each

other, it was inevitable that they should come to an encounter in the course of two or three marches.

Eight miles east of Chambersburg, the great road to Baltimore debouches through the South Mountain range at the furnace of Thad. Stevens. Thence, continuing eastward, it passes through the town of Gettysburg, which is a point of convergence of many roads leading as well northward to the Susquehanna as southward to the Potomac. Thither Lee, on the morning of June 29th, directed the Chambersburg column, composed of the corps of Longstreet and Hill, and to that point also he ordered Ewell's column to countermarch from the Susquehanna. Gettysburg was not in any manner the objective of this operation: the purpose was simply to move in that direction as a measure of concentration. To give battle there was the last idea Lee had in mind; and the manner in which, contrary alike to his inclination and his desire, he was led to do so, forms one of the most remarkable illustrations of the absence of truth in that saying of Napoleon, that "war is not an accidental science."

After the army of the Potomac had made two marches, that is, on the night of the 30th of June, Meade became satisfied that Lee was concentrating his forces east of the mountains to meet him. Under these circumstances, he set about to select a position on which by a movement of concentration, he might be prepared to receive battle on advantageous terms. With this view, the general line of Pipe Creek, on the dividing ridge between the Monocacy and the waters flowing into Chesapeake Bay, was selected as a favorable position, though its ultimate adoption was held contingent on developments that might arise. Accordingly orders were issued on the night of the 30th for the movement of the different corps on the following day. The Sixth Corps (Sedgwick) forming the right wing of the army, was ordered to Manchester, in rear of Pipe Creek; head-quarters of the Second Corps (Hancock) were directed to Taneytown; the

Twelfth Corps (Slocum) and the Fifth Corps (Sykes) forming the centre on Two Taverns and Hanover, somewhat in advance of Pipe Creek; while the left wing formed of the First (Reynolds), Third (Sickles), and Eleventh Corps (Howard), all under Gen. Reynolds, was ordered to Gettysburg, which had that morning been occupied by General Buford, who with a division of horse covered the front of the left wing of the army.

Now the van of Lee's main column that, as has been seen, had started from Chambersburg, bivouacked on the night of the 29th at Cashtown, five or six miles west of Gettysburg; and on the following morning, the morning of the 30th, General Heth commanding the advanced division, sent forward Pettigrew's brigade to Gettysburg to procure some supplies. Pettigrew, on nearing the town, found it occupied by a hostile force which was, in fact, Buford's cavalry; and fearing to risk an attack with his single brigade, he returned to Cashtown, after a mere far-off reconnoissance of the Union force. Having reported to his corps commander, General Hill, that officer determined to move the next morning to Gettysburg, with a couple of divisions for the purpose of disposing of the body of cavalry. But Reynolds, with his corps, bivouacked that same night of the 30th of June, on the right bank of Marsh Creek, distant only some four miles from Gettysburg, which he was to make the next morning; and though in Meade's plan of operations it was not proposed that Reynolds should stay at Gettysburg, or be followed thither by the other corps, his presence there being indeed simply designed as a mask behind which the army should take position on Pipe Creek - still the movements of the opposing forces were such that though they knew it not, a collision was inevitable in the vicinity of Gettysburg. On such turns of fortune hinges the issue of mighty campaigns!

II.

THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG.

When Lee crossed the frontier to enter upon the invasion of Pennsylvania, he promised his lieutenants he would so act as to throw the cost and peril of attack upon the enemy. This resolution arose from a wise appreciation of the lesson of many an encounter between the rival armies in Virginia; for to this day the largest logic to be drawn from the history of the hundred combats waged between the two great armies is that victory accrued to that side which secured for itself the advantage of fighting on the defensive behind a fortified position. Exceptions there are indeed to this generalization, but they are only sufficient to give a greater prominence to the rule that repulse attended that army which was compelled to oppose its naked valor in the storming of lines which its opponent had had a day or a night to fortify by the improvised works so readily and so constantly constructed. Penetrated with this principle, and desirous of husbanding his strength for the execution of his ulterior purpose (since it was not a mere blow and return that the Confederates meditated, but a permanent lodgment on Northern soil), Lee had resolved so to manœuvre as to compel his opponent to attack him rightly adjudging that the prizes of Baltimore and Washington could only be snatched after the Army of the Potomac should have suffered defeat in the open field.

Now Lee was faithfully following out the line of this purpose in concentrating his columns on the east side of the South Mountain; for, in so moving, he would soon, provided the motions of the Army of the Potomac were such as he supposed them to be, compel that army to turn and give battle for the safety of its own communications, seriously compromised by his manoeuvres. But he was not aware that Meade, by a rapid forward leap, had changed the whole situation;