"We surrender!" shout the Confederates; and one hundred and sixtyone give themselves up. Other troops cross, and a strong garrison holds. the fort.

General Longstreet was surprised. In a moment all his plans had been overturned. He saw that he must abandon all thoughts of crossing by a bridge. To capture the Union line he must begin a regular siegethe building of strong earthworks, mounting heavy guns, etc.; all of which would require time. He was surprised at the audacity of the Union troops. A party crossed the Lower Nansemond, marched out three miles, and drove the Confederate cavalry.

Two days later General Corcoran, with a brigade, made a sortie on the Edenton Road, below Suffolk, and drove the Confederates into their works.

Every day the batteries were thundering; but the Union guns were larger and heavier than Longstreet's, and had the advantage. But heavy guns came from Richmond, and on the last day of April were ready to open fire.

General Hill's troops were arriving (ten thousand men) from North Carolina, giving Longstreet forty thousand. With this reinforcement he hoped to make a successful assault.

He waited till night, and then, instead of attacking, withdrew his heavy guns, packed up his camp, and started his long lines of wagons. Daylight came, May 3d, and the Union pickets discovered that the Confederate breastworks, instead of swarming with troops, were silent and deserted. Longstreet was hastening northward, summoned by General Lee, who was fighting a great battle at Chancellorsville.

The movement of Hill in North Carolina, the expenditure of sending Longstreet's troops to Suffolk and bringing them back; all the marching, digging, building batteries, waste and expense, and a loss of fifteen hundred men in the skirmishes, had resulted in failure. Nothing had been gained. Quite likely there would have been a far different result if General Viele had not captured the man with the Confederate mail; for, with three thousand of his best troops gone, General Peck would have found it difficult to hold his line-fifteen miles long-and it seems probable that Longstreet would have broken through. As it was, nothing was gained, but much lost, by the Confederates.

WE

CHAPTER VII.

COTTON FAMINE IN ENGLAND.

HEN the great slave-holders planned the disruption of the Union and the building up of a Confederacy with slavery for its cornerstone, they fully believed that the whole world would be compelled to acknowledge its power. Several years before the breaking out of the war Mr. Hammond, of South Carolina, declared in the Senate of the United States that "cotton was king," for over no other lands were wafted such balmy winds laden with moisture as those which floated inland from the Gulf of Mexico. In no other fields could be found cotton-plants of such luxuriant growth as those whitening the plantations of the islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, along the coast of Alabama, producing every year nearly five million bales. The States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas were the world's cotton-garden. The world demanded cotton, and the Gulf States were so endowed by Nature that they, and they alone, could supply the demand. Nearly two-thirds of all the cotton used was produced in those States. In England nearly forty million spindles were whirling, and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children earning their daily bread in spinning, carding, and weaving cotton. In midwinter the Mississippi, at New Orleans, bore upon its tide a great fleet of ships laden with the raw material, which alone could keep the great multitude in England from starving, which enriched ship-owner, manufacturer, and merchant. "England," said Jefferson Davis, "never will allow our great staple, cotton, to be, dammed up within our limits. She will aid us" ("Drum-beat of the Nation," p. 39). This was the great mistake of those who established a Confederacy with slaves and cotton the foundation materials of the structure.

The men who seceded from the Union were ignorant of the great economic principles governing the commerce of the world. Believing that slavery was a beneficent institution ordained by Almighty God, they did not comprehend the fact that they were attempting to establish a nation

upon a system which, during the middle period of the century, had become repugnant to the moral sense of the world. Thus it came about that they were confidently expecting recognition by England and France.

There were sad scenes in Great Britain. The supply of raw cotton was exhausted. No longer was there a throbbing of steam-engines. The machinery of the cotton-mills was motionless-no spindles whirling, no shuttles flying. Hundreds of thousands were out of employment. Seek work where they might, there was none for them.. Starvation stared them in the face, and famine, with all its horrors, confronted them, and yet no murmur or complaint fell from their lips. The shillings they had saved by thrift and industry disappeared; the furniture of the humble home-the chair, the table, the clock upon the mantle-the Sunday coat, the best gown, the little gold-washed ornament, were taken to the pawn-shop, until the pawnbroker had no place for articles, nor money to give for them. When all was gone they did not beg for charity. There were no threats of violence, no attempt to help themselves from the stores of the rich, but with resignation like that of the martyr at the stake, with coun

tenance illumined by the light of heaven, they calmnly looked death in the face.

Beautiful picture of the ages! When the hunger was keenest, when loved ones were pining away, when children were crying for bread, when the last crumbs had gone, in humble homes, stripped of all furniture, these men and women, kneeling upon bare floors, lifted up their prayers to God, beseeching success to the men who were fighting to free the slave! For, by a heaven-born instinct they comprehended that the Stars and Stripes was the emblem of the world's best hope; that the men who were upholding that flag were fighting a battle for the poor and lowly of every land.

This the portrayal of the situation by the London Illustrated News: "Hundreds of thousands, accustomed to win a comfortable livelihood by this honest industry, find themselves suddenly bereft of the raw material on which their skill and labor had been before employed. The catastrophe is as complete for the time being as if an earthquake had swallowed up the mills in which they were accustomed to earn their bread. Their own glowing hearths, their cherished household ornaments, the pleasant things about them which they toiled so long and patiently to acquireall that administered to the comfort and attractiveness of their homes-all are gone; desolation has swept over them all, and nothing is left them but life, without the means of satisfying it, and brave hearts that bleed inwardly but make no complaint. The last-mentioned feature of the distress is the most touching of all. Most of us can well imagine the anguish which has wrung their souls as, hoping to avert the want, and looking with strained sight into the dim and dreary future for better times, they have surrendered one by one the articles which constituted their modest wealth. We can realize to some extent the intense anxiety with which they watched the rising tide of misery, the pangs which they have felt in the progress of the gradual but sure approach of that sharp penury which, in the case of the great majority of them, has already worn them to the bone. Savage winter, following close upon the heels of want and fever, is crouched and waiting to make prey of physical weakness.

"The scene does not need another touch of misery to deepen its pathos; but if it were possible to look upon it with callous feelings, the sublime pathos of the sufferings would make indifference impossible. There has been nothing like it in modern times. The unassuming manliness, the calm and intelligent fortitude, the unostentatious resignation, the marvellous abstention from all bitterness of utterance, and the cheerful acquiescence in the policy of right which the present distress has elicited, make