mishes on the way, General Lee being unaware, however, that the Union army was advancing in mass.

The Confederate army crossed the Potomac and moved up the Cumberland Valley to Chambersburg, Carlisle, and Cashtown. Early's division marched on June 26 from Cashtown to York, part of the command going through Gettysburg to seek supplies. Now suddenly General Lee was amazed to discover that the Union troops were close at hand. Immediately lying at Cashtown, he concentrated his army.

The Union army, meanwhile, had crossed the Potomac at Frederick. There General Hooker resigned and General Meade took his place, and the army continued to move north, east of South Mountain. General Meade proposed to give battle on the heights of Pipe Creek, fifteen miles south of Gettysburg. But on the night of the 29th of June, General Buford of the cavalry saw the lights of the Confederate camp-fires between Monterey and Fairfield, and was at once ordered to Gettysburg.

The Army of the Potomac was well clothed, well fed, magnificently disciplined, and thoroughly reliable. It had been relieved of a leader of whose judgment it was not certain, and had been put under one for whom it had great respect. The Confederate army was no less ready for battle. It was not quite as well cared for as the Northern army, but it had the cheering recollection of many victories and a leader whom it adored.

The Army of the Potomac was divided into seven corps-the First, under General Reynolds and afterwards under General Doubleday; the Second, under General Hancock and afterwards under General Gibbon ; the Third, under General Sickles; the Fifth, under General Sykes; the Sixth, under General Sedgwick; the Eleventh, under General Howard; the Twelfth, under General Slocum. The three cavalry divisions under the direction of General Pleasonton were commanded severally by Buford, Gregg, and Kilpatrick.

In the Confederate army there were only three corps, each one of which was much larger than a Union corps. They were under the command of Generals Longstreet, Ewell, and A. P. Hill. The Confederate cavalry was under the command of General J. E. B. Stuart.

Immediately upon his arrival at Gettysburg General Buford established his camp upon a little ridge sloping west from Seminary

Ridge to Willoughby Run, and had the ground between Willoughby Run and Marsh Creek, three miles farther to the west, thoroughly patrolled. Early on the morning of Wednesday, July 1, his pickets saw the advance of the enemy, General Heth's division of the Third Confederate Corps, advancing along the Chambersburg pike. One picket galloped back with the news: the other, from the shelter of the bridge, fired the first shot of the battle, three miles to the west of Gettysburg.

At once the Confederates, fearing a large force, proceeded more cautiously. The Union cavalry squadrons, coming promptly to the relief of their comrades, so harassed the advancing troops that they were two hours in traversing the three miles to Willoughby Run. Until a quarter of ten General Buford directed his small host in their effort to stay the approach of the foe, while in the cupola of the Seminary his lookouts gazed eagerly towards the south, watching for reinforcements.

Presently General Buford was summoned to observe a large body of Union troops advancing along the Emmittsburg road. In a few minutes General Reynolds himself arrived, and directed and encouraged the troops.

Cutler's brigade of Union infantry was now placed across the Chambersburg pike, and the exhausted cavalry fell to the rear. Meredith's Iron Brigade took possession of the woodland. For two hours the Union troops not only held their own against a superior number, but succeeded in driving back the Confederates. The Confederate Generals Archer and Davis lost more than half their effective force, and General Archer was finally captured with all his men.

During the engagement in the woodland, General Reynolds was shot as he was riding among his troops. General Reynolds was one of the best-loved soldiers of the Union army. A Pennsylvanian by birth, a graduate of West Point, he had seen distinguished service in the Mexican War. At the time of the battle he was forty-three years old, with a prospect of great fame before him. was at once succeeded by General Doubleday. In spite of its early victories and its heroic struggles, it became more and more evident as noon approached that Cutler's brigade would have to fall back and that the Union troops were being worsted.

He

Between ten and eleven o'clock General Howard had arrived in the town and had heard the news of Reynolds's death. Seeing

the strategic importance of Culp's Hill, he gave orders that it be fortified. He then notified General Meade that Reynolds had been killed and begged that the Twelfth Corps be forwarded. He sent two divisions of his own corps under Generals Shimmelpfennig and Barlow to reinforce the Union right, upon which General Ewell's artillery had opened fire. General Barlow was severely wounded; both the Eleventh Corps and the gallant First Corps were compelled to retire to Cemetery Hill.

There was great confusion as the troops passed through the town. General Shimmelpfennig was captured, and could not regain his command for three days; General Barlow lay within the Confederate lines, and hundreds of prisoners were captured. By halfpast four the Union troops were fortifying their new position on Cemetery Ridge.

General Lee arrived upon the field in time to see the end of the first day's battle and to rejoice with the Confederate troops in their success. He declared that, contrary to his usual custom of fighting upon the defensive, he would the next day attack the Union forces. All the bright moonlit night his line was forming along Seminary Ridge. General Longstreet was placed on the extreme right; General Ewell kept his position on the extreme left; between them was placed General A. P. Hill. General Pickett with his division of Longstreet's Corps was still far back in South Mountain guarding the wagon trains.

When General Meade heard at his headquarters in Taneytown the news of Reynolds's death, he ordered General Hancock to proceed to Gettysburg. At once taking precedence of General Howard, he rode up and down the line directing the troops. Having helped to restore order, and having consulted with the Generals present, he rode back to Taneytown, to discover that General Meade had already determined to proceed to Gettysburg.

The bright moonlight aided not only the soldiers upon the field who were throwing up defenses, but illumined the path of thousands of their comrades, hurrying toward them over the rough roads. The troops met many stragglers who reported the events of the day, and presently a mounted guard accompanying the body of General Reynolds to Baltimore.

At one o'clock in the morning General Meade arrived upon the field. The Union

troops were disposed as follows: The Eleventh Corps occupied Cemetery Hill; to its left was the First Corps. The Twelfth Corps was sent to Culp's Hill, the Second Corps was placed along Cemetery Ridge. The Third Corps extended the line of the Second. The Fifth Corps was placed in reserve near the Rock Creek crossing of the Baltimore turnpike, until six P.M., when the Sixth Corps arrived. Then the Fifth Corps was moved to the extreme left.

Now, directly, the two armies faced each other. Each was somewhat sheltered by woodland, but between them the country was open. The Union army lay, as has been said, on slightly higher ground than the Confederate. Each army was strong, determined, confident.

The second day of the battle dawned clear and bright. It was General Lee's plan to attack the whole line at once. Longstreet was to begin with his fresh columns and Hill and Ewell were to follow upon hearing his guns. But the attack was not begun until late in the afternoon, when valuable time had been lost by the Confederates and gained by the Federals.

At three o'clock the battle opened. Lee believed that if General Sickles's Third Corps could be driven from its position near a little peach orchard, he could reach the crest beyond. After a severe struggle and with great loss Longstreet accomplished his purpose; the Third Union Corps was in imminent danger of annihilation. With it suffered the first division of the Second Corps which was sent to its. aid.

While this engagement was in progress General Warren observed that Little Round Top was about to be captured, and here at once the troops of the Fifth Corps took their position. They succeeded in driving back the oncoming Confederates, but with tremendous loss.

To the far right of the Union line there was a third contest. The Twelfth Corps, holding Culp's Hill, was assaulted by General Ewell. In a fearful conflict the Louisiana Tigers were so beaten that of seventeen hundred only three hundred got back to the village where their line had formed. As Union reinforcements arrived, General Johnson, of the Confederate army, moved back of the hill, where he camped for the night. Here the lines were so close together that the opposing forces drank from the same spring.

Thus closed the second day of battle, with

victory for the Union troops. General Lee had turned back the line of the Third Corps, but he had failed to capture the Round Tops or to pierce the Union center, and his losses were heavy.

- Early on the morning of the 3d of July the Twelfth Corps drove the Confederates from the Union works on Culp's Hill. As early as possible the Union lines were reformed. Riding up and down the line, General Meade saw for himself that his army was prepared for the assault which he anticipated.

General Lee planned to attack the left center of the Union line. General Pickett's fresh troops had arrived; they were to be reinforced by other infantry troops and by General Stuart's cavalry. Unfortunately for General Lee's plans, General Stuart was intercepted by the Union cavalry and his approach cut off in a brilliant engagement.

The Confederate guns, one hundred and thirty-eight in number, were made ready. Meade's position was such that he could place only seventy guns in line, but he had a large artillery reserve.

At one o'clock a single cannon from the Confederate line opened the fight. It was echoed by a vast roar from its fellows and replied to by an equal blast from its foes. For an hour and a half the fierce duel continued. Then General Hunt, of the Union forces, ordered the Union fire to cease so that the guns might cool and the ammunition be saved for the charge of the Confederate infantry which was sure to follow.

Across the wide field on the Confederate line, Pickett with his troops and his reinforcements waited. The Union guns were now silent, according to General Hunt's command. Certain that the Union ammunition had failed, General Lee, urged by General Pickett, gave the order to advance, and, mounting his horse, General Pickett rode confidently to the head of his troops. In the center of the Union line stood a rounded clump of trees; toward this the Confederate troops aimed their course they were five thousand men supported by nine thousand, the best and bravest soldiers of the South.

Then, suddenly, an amazing sound startled their ears. The Union guns were only temporarily silenced; they now thundered forth once more. But still, in the face of solid shot, shell, and canister, the Confederates advanced. They lost their magnificent formation, but still they moved on. Stannard with his Vermont brigade advanced to meet them,

assailing them with new volleys. At a little stone wall, forming a sharp angle, they pierced for an instant the Union line, but were driven back, slain, captured, their colors taken, their cause lost. The tide of battle had turned; the tide of war had begun to ebb.

The joy in the Union army was indescribable. Shouting their triumph, they forgot the long marches, the privations, the miseries; they even forgot their comrades lying all about them in terrible positions of agony. The battle of Gettysburg was won.

The conquered could not stay to see their dead buried or to give their wounded the succor which might save their lives. Out the Hagerstown road in the darkness and pouring rain of a terrific storm, toward distant Monterey Gap, disheartened, fearful of attack, they made their weary way.

At once the task of caring for the wounded left on the field was begun. The churches, the public buildings, the college buildings, the private houses of the village became hospitals where army nurses, citizens of Gettysburg, and scores of charitable persons from other places dressed wounds, assisted in amputations, and helped to control delirium.

At once, also, the sad task of burying the dead was begun. The bodies were laid, not in separate graves, but in great trenches, which could sometimes be only loosely covered. In the fall and winter the bodies were transferred to single graves in the National Cemetery, a tract of about seventeen acres, dedicated by the great speech of Abraham Lincoln. Here the National Monument, with its encircling rows of unknown dead, was erected.

Before the war was over plans were made for the preservation and the marking of the whole vast battlefield. Fine avenues have been constructed, great observation towers have been built, hundreds of markers and monuments have been placed. No effort has been spared to maintain the original topographical features of the field. The open spaces have been kept open, thinning groves have been replanted, old trees showing the effect of the iron hail have been preserved. The returning soldier may be able to recall each sound and sight of the conflict as he finds his way back to his old position, but he will carry away with him a more valuable impression of desolation turned to beauty, of strife become peace. All honor to him who here on this blood-stained tract fought our battle for us!

H

ENRY WARD BEECHER was born on the 24th of June, 1813. This year, therefore, and especially this month, his friends are making an occasion for special affectionate tributes to his memory. The object of this article, however, is not to eulogize him, but to give, especially to the younger readers of The Outlook, some analysis of his character, and so some interpretation of the elements which enter into true oratory. It is sometimes said that the days of oratory are passed. I do not believe that this is true. The time will never come when a great personality, trained in the art of selfexpression, will be unable to affect vitally the lives of auditors, and so the life of the community.

It is my sober judgment that Mr. Beecher was quite the greatest orator I ever heard, and one of the greatest orators the world has ever known. In particular qualities he was surpassed by others. Gladstone was more persuasive, Gough was more dramatic, Wendell Phillips was more keen, George William Curtis was more finished, Daniel Webster was more weighty; but no man in my time, and perhaps no man in any time, combined in a more remarkable degree all the qualities which go to make up true oratory.

Oratory is partly physical. An invalid. may be an orator, but he is always at a disadvantage. Henry Ward Beecher had a magnificent physique. Three qualities which go to make efficient health he possessed in a superlative degree: muscles of steel, good digestion furnishing rich blood-currents, and a nervous organization of apparently exhaustless vitality. I once asked him to write for The Christian Union an article on "How to Keep Well." There are only three rules," he replied. Eat well, sleep well, and laugh well." All three rules he observed spontaneously and without difficulty. And I may add that, while nature had given him health, he observed carefully and scrupulously the conditions necessary to preserve and to develop it.

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Oratory depends partly upon the voice. It is the organ through which the soul expresses itself in speech. A great soul may overcome the handicap of a thin, feeble, piping voice, or a harsh, nasal, or guttural voice, but such a voice is always a handicap. Mr. Beecher's voice, carefully trained in his early youth, was

It

a splendid organ for varied expression. ran the whole gamut of rich and strong music, from the deep diapason to the flute. I heard him once, in preaching a sermon on the love of God as illustrated by the life of Christ, interrupt himself with the question, "Did not Christ with wrathful indignation denounce the Pharisees?" "That depends," he replied, " on how you read the record." Then he took up his New Testament and read, with a voice surcharged with wrath, "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, how can you escape the damnation of hell?" and then, with only pause long enough to mark the transition of feeling, he read the same passage in a voice tender and tremulous, with pathos, expressing by the tone of the voice a change of emotion which here I venture to express by a change in phraseology and italics: "Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, how can you escape the damnation of hell?" Then he laid down his New Testament and went on with his sermon. The effect, startling and profound. could have been produced only by a voice equally remarkable for its natural quality and its long training.

In the Life of Mr. Beecher" by his son and son-in-law he describes this training. "I had," he says," from childhood a thickness of speech arising from a large palate, so that when a boy I used to be laughed at for talking as if I had pudding in my mouth. When I went to Amherst I was fortunate in passing into the hands of John Lovell, a teacher of elocution, and a better teacher for my purpose I cannot conceive. His system consisted in drill, or the thorough practice of inflections by the voice, of gesture, posture, and articulation. Sometimes I was a whole hour practicing my voice on a word-like 'justice.' . . . Now I never know what movements I shall make. My gestures are natural, because this drill made them natural to me. The only method of acquiring an effective education is by practice, of not less than an hour a day, until the student has his voice and himself thoroughly subdued and trained to right expression." I wish that every theological seminary furnished at least an optional course in voice-building and elocution, with time enough, taken if necessary from Hebrew or from Medieval Theology,

to enable the student to acquire a power of spontaneous expression, now too often lacking in the ministrations of the pulpit.

The orator must have a mastery of language as well as a mastery of voice, for the English language, no less than the voice, is the instrument which he must use for the expression of his life, if with his life he would impress the lives of others. In his later years Mr. Beecher was an extemporaneous speaker, using only brief notes, and often no notes at all. But in his early ministry he was often a careful, painstaking writer, and a careful, painstaking student of the great masters in English literature. He read not only for thought, but also for style. With the stylistic methods of Ruskin, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, John Milton in his prose, and other classical writers, he was familiar.

He gave

me once an interesting comparison of Barrow and South and their use of English, of which I wish I had made notes. His sermons to young men, delivered when he was settled in Indianapolis, were carefully written, and although they are too dramatic and too highly colored for modern taste, they were admirably adapted to the time and place in which they were delivered. In general, the hearer noticed not the beauty or power of expression, so absorbed was he in the thought conveyed; and often the sermon was marred by infelicities of expression which strike the reader of the printed page, though they produced little or no impression upon the hearer when they were uttered. Sometimes these apparent infelicities of expression were even made to add effectiveness to the spoken address, by the intonation thrown into them by a highly trained voice.

But there are some of Mr. Beecher's printed sermons which demonstrate in him a capacity for perfection of finish in expression not surpassed by any orator. On the death of a young woman of his congregation, the daughter of one of his dearest friends, and to him almost as a daughter of his own, he preached a sermon on the burial of Jesus in the sepulcher in the garden, with Mary Magdalene and the other Mary sitting over against the sepulcher. The whole of this sermon is a poem in prose. From it I extract a single paragraph, despite the fact that by taking it from its setting I seriously impair its beauty:

A plow is coming from the far end of a long field, and a daisy stands nodding and full of dew-dimples. That furrow is sure to strike the

daisy. It casts its shadow as gayly, and exhales its gentle breath as freely, and stands as simple and radiant and expectant as ever; and yet that crushing furrow, which is turning and turning others in its course, is drawing near, and in a moment it whirls the heedless flower with sudden reversal under the sod!

The story of Demosthenes, possibly apocryphal, is familiar. Asked the secret of oratory, he is said to have replied: "Three conditions. The first is action, the second is action, and the third is action." The great orator makes not only his voice but his whole body an instrument of expression. He may do this in various ways. The gracefulness of their gestures added persuasive and insinuating grace to the oratory of George William Curtis and Mr. Gladstone. The sledge-hammer gestures of Daniel Webster doubtless partly explained the saying of the New Hampshire farmer, Every word weighed a ton ;" and they were the more effective because they were not frequent. The gestures of Wendell Phillips were rapier-like thrusts which accompanied the rapier-like thrusts of his rhetoric. He gestured like a fencer, and thrust to kill. John B. Gough was an actor, and impersonated in voice and gesture every character in every story he told, and he was a wonderful story-teller. Mr. Beecher's action combined that of Daniel Webster and John B. Gough. To the reader this statement may present an impossible incongruity, but it did not present an impossible incongruity to the auditors of Mr. Beecher. Sometimes his gestures simply lent the force of a great, strong, muscular character to an assertion or a conclusion. Oftener his gestures were illustrative. His vivid and active imagination impelled him to assume whatever character he was portraying. This he did in private conversation no less than in public discourse. It is sometimes said that he would have made a great actor. I think this is a mistake. There is nothing in his oratory and there is nothing in his biography to indicate that he had ever made a study of the mimetic art. I do not recall that he had the art or skill in the use of dialect such as that of John B. Gough. His dramatic imagination simply served to make vivid as well as clear his meaning. I doubt whether he ever acted a part consciously to entrance an audience. His action was like that of a little boy who enacts his story in order to tell it.

A fine physique, a well-trained voice, skillful rhetoric, dramatic action, will not suffice to make a great orator. They may entrance