When the sun rose over Gettysburg on the second day of July, the union army, rushing breathlessly through the night to the rescue of its defeated advance corps, had reached the heights beyond the town. Before Longstreet had attempted to obey Lee\'s command to take these hills, General Meade\'s blue host had reached them and were entrenching themselves.

The Confederate Commander discovered that in the death of Jackson, he had lost his right arm.

It was one o\'clock before Longstreet moved to the attack, hurling his columns in reckless daring against these bristling heights. When darkness drew its kindly veil over the scene, Lee\'s army had driven General Sickles from his chosen position to his second line of defense on the hill behind, gained a foothold in the famous Devil\'s Den at the base of the Round Tops, broken the lines of the union right and held their fortifications on Culp\'s Hill.

The day had been one of frightful slaughter.

The union losses in the two days had reached the appalling total of more than twenty thousand men. Lee had lost fifteen thousand.

The brilliant July moon rose and flooded this field of blood and death with silent glory. From every nook and corner, from every shadow and across every open space, through the hot breath of the night, came the moans of thousands, and louder than all the long agonizing cries for water. Many a man in grey crawled over the ragged rocks to press his canteen to the lips of his dying enemy in blue, and many a boy in blue did as much for the man in grey.

Fifteen thousand wounded men lay there through the long black hours.

At ten o\'clock a wounded Christian soldier began to sing one of the old, sweet hymns of faith, whose words have come ringing down the ages wet with tears and winged with human hopes. In five minutes ten thousand voices of blue and grey, some of them quivering with the agony of death, had joined. For two hours the woods and hills rang with the songs of these wounded men.

All through this pitiful music the Confederates were massing their artillery on Seminary Ridge, replacing their wounded horses and refilling their ammunition chests.

The union army were burrowing like moles and planting their terrible batteries on the brows of the hills beyond the town.

At Lee\'s council of war that night Longstreet advised his withdrawal from Gettysburg into a more favorable position in the mountains. But the Confederate Commander, reinforced now by the arrival of Pickett\'s division of fifteen thousand men and Stuart\'s cavalry, determined to renew the battle.

At the first grey streak of dawn on the 3rd the Federal guns roared their challenge to the Confederate forces which had captured their entrenchments on Culp\'s Hill. Seven terrible hours of bombardment, charge and counter charge followed until every foot of space had claimed its toll of dead, before the Confederates yielded the Hill.

At noon there was an ominous lull in the battle. At one o\'clock a puff of smoke from Seminary Ridge was followed by a dull roar. The signal gun had pealed its call of death to thousands. For two miles along the crest of this Ridge the Confederates had planted one hundred and fifty guns. Two miles of smoke-wreathed flame suddenly leaped from those hills in a single fiery breath.

The longer line of big Federal guns on Seminary Ridge were silent for a few minutes and then answered gun for gun until the heavens were transformed into a roaring hell of bursting, screaming, flaming shells. For two hours the earth trembled beneath the shock of these volcanoes, and then the two storms died slowly away and the smoke began to lift.

An ominous sign. The grey infantry were deploying in line under Pickett to charge the heights of Cemetery Ridge. Fifteen thousand gallant men against an impregnable hill held by seventy thousand intrenched soldiers, backed by the deadliest and most powerful artillery.

They swept now into the field before the Heights, their bands playing as if on parade—their grey ranks dressed on their colors. Down the slope across the plain and up the hill the waves rolled, their thinning ranks closing the wide gaps torn each moment by the fiery sleet of iron and lead.

A handful of them lived to reach the union lines on those heights. Armistead, with a hundred men, broke through and lifted his battle flag for a moment over a Federal battery, and fell mortally wounded.

And then the shattered grey wave broke into a spray of blood and slowly ebbed down the hill. The battle of Gettysburg had ended.

For the first time the blue Army of the Potomac had won a genuine victory. It had been gained at a frightful cost, but no price was too high to pay for such a victory. It had saved the Capital of the Nation. The union army had lost twenty-three thousand men, the Confederate twenty thousand. Meade had lost seventeen of his generals, and Lee, fourteen.

When the thrilling news from the front reached Washington on July 4th, the President lifted his big hands above his head and cried to the crowd of excited men who thronged the Executive office:

"Unto God we give all the praise!"

None of those present knew the soul significance of that sentence as it fell from his trembling lips. He seated himself at his desk and quickly wrote a brief proclamation of thanks to Almighty God, which he telegraphed to the Governor of each union State, requesting them to repeat it to their people.

While the North was still quivering with joy over the turn of the tide at Gettysburg, Gideon Welles, the Secretary of the Navy, hurried into the President\'s office and handed him a dispatch from the gunboat under Admiral Porter co?perating with General Grant announcing the fall of Vicksburg, the surrender of thirty-five thousand Confederate soldiers of its garrison, and the opening of the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico.

The President seized his hat, his dark face shining with joy:

"I will telegraph the news to General Meade myself!"

He stopped suddenly and threw his long arms around Welles:

"What can we do for the Secretary of the Navy for this glorious intelligence? He is always giving us good news. I cannot tell you my joy over this result. It is great, Mr. Welles, it is great!"

With the eagerness of a boy he rushed to the telegraph office and sent the message to Meade over his own signature.

For the first time in dreary months the sun had burst for a moment through the clouds that had hung in endless gloom over the White House. The sorrowful eyes were shining with new hope. The President felt sure that General Lee could never succeed in leading his shattered army back into Virginia. He had lost twenty thousand men out of his sixty-two thousand—while Meade was still in command of a grand army of eighty-two thousand soldiers flushed with victory. The Potomac River was in flood and the Confederate army was on its banks unable to recross.

It was a moral certainty that the heroic Commander who had saved the Capital at Gettysburg could, with his eighty-two thousand men, capture or crush Lee\'s remaining force, caught in this trap by the swollen river, and end the war.

The men who crowded into the Executive office the day after the news of Vicksburg, found the Chief Magistrate in high spirits. Among the cases of deserters, court-martialed and ordered to be shot, he was surprised to find a negro soldier bearing the remarkable name of Julius C?sar Thornton. John Vaughan had telegraphed the President asking his interference with the execution of this cruel edict.

The President was deeply interested. It was the beginning of the use of negro troops. He had consented to their employment with reluctance, but they were proving their worth to the army, both in battle and in the work of garrisons.

Julius was brought from prison for an interview with the Chief Magistrate.

Stanton had sternly demanded the enforcement of the strictest military discipline as the only way to make these black troops of any real service to the Government. He asked that an example be made of Julius by sending him back to the army to be publicly shot before the assembled men of his race. He was convicted of two capital offenses. He had been caught in Washington shamelessly flaunting the uniform he had disgraced.

Julius faced the President with an humble salute and a broad grin. The black man liked the looks of his judge and he threw off all embarrassment his situation had produced with the first glance at the kindly eyes gazing at him over the rims of those spectacles.

"Well, Julius C?sar Thornton, this is a serious charge they have lodged against you?"

"Yassah, dat\'s what dey say."

"You went forth like a man to fight for your country, didn\'t you?"

"Na, sah!"

"How\'d you get there?"

"Dey volunteered me, sah."

"Volunteered you, did they?" the President laughed.

"Yassah—dat dey did. Dey sho\' volunteered me whether er no——"

"And how did it happen?"

"Dey done hit so quick, sah, I scacely know how dey did do hit. I was in de war down in Virginia wid Marse John Vaughan—an\' er low-lifed Irishman on guard dar put me ter wuk er buryin\' corpses. I hain\'t nebber had no taste for corpses nohow, an\' I didn\'t like de job—mo\' specially, sah, when one ob \'em come to ez I was pullin\' him froo de dark ter de grave——"

"Come to, did he?" the President smiled.

"Yassah—he come to all of er sudden an\' kicked me! An\' hit scared me near \'bout ter death. I lit out fum dar purty quick, sah, an\' go West. An\' I ain\'t mor\'n got out dar \'fore two fellers drawed dere muskets on me an\' persuaded me ter volunteer, sah. Dey put dese here cloze on me an\' tell me dat I wuz er hero. I tell \'em dey must be some mistake \'bout dat, but dey say no—dey know what dey wuz er doin\'. Dey keep on tellin\' me dat I wuz er hero an\', by golly, I \'gin ter b\'lieve hit myself till dey git me into trouble, sah."

"You were in a battle?"

Julius scratched his head and walled his eyes:

"I had er little taste ob it, sah,——"

"Well, you tried to fight, didn\'t you?"

"No, sah,—I run."

"Ran at the first fire?"

"Yas, sah! An\' I\'d a ran sooner ef I\'d er known hit wuz comin\'——"

Julius paused and broke into a jolly laugh:

"Dey git one pop at me, sah, \'fore I seed what dey wuz doin\'!"

The President suppressed a laugh and gazed at Julius with severity:

"That wasn\'t very creditable to your courage."

"Dat ain\'t in my line, sah,—I\'se er cook."

"Have you no regard for your reputation?"

"Dat ain\'t nuttin\' ter me, sah, \'side er life!"

"And your life is worth more than other people\'s?"

"Worth er lot mo\' ter me, sah."

"I\'m afraid they wouldn\'t have missed you, Julius, if you\'d been killed."

"Na, sah, but I\'d a sho missed myself an\' dat\'s de pint wid me."

The President fixed him with a comical frown:

"It\'s sweet and honorable to die for one\'s country, Julius!"

"Yassah—dat\'s what I hear—but I ain\'t fond er sweet things—I ain\'t nebber hab no taste fer \'em, sah!"

"Well, it looks like I\'ll have to let \'em have you, Julius, for an example. I\'ve tried to save you—but there doesn\'t seem to be any thing to take hold of. Every time I grab you, you slip right through my fingers. I reckon they\'ll have to shoot you——"

The negro broke into a hearty laugh:

"G\'way fum here, Mr. President! You can\'t fool me, sah. I sees yer laughin\' right now way back dar in yo\' eyes. You ain\'t gwine let \'em shoot me. I\'se too vallable a nigger fer dat. I wuz worth er thousan\' dollars \'fore de war. I sho\' oughter be wuth two thousan\' now. What\'s de use er \'stroyin\' er good piece er property lak dat? I w............