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| Jefferson Davis residence.2 |
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Americans forgive their British brethren for their unkindness in the hour of trial, but all the waters of the Atlantic cannot wash out the stain.
Let us now turn again to a consideration of military events, whose theater of action, at the close of 1862, was nearly coextensive with the area of the slave-labor States.
Up to that time the loyal States had furnished for the war, wholly by volunteering, more than one million two hundred thousand men, of whom; on the 1st of January, 1863, about seven hundred thousand were in the service.
Sickness, casualties in the field, the expiration of terms of enlistment, discharges for physical disability, and desertions, had greatly thinned the original regiments.1
The most important movement at the close of 1862 was that of the beginning of the second siege of Vicksburg, which resulted in its capture at the following midsummer, and which engaged the services of nearly all the troops westward of the Alleghanies, directly or indirectly, during several months.
Though a city of only between four and five thousand inhabitants when the war broke out, the position of Vicksburg soon became one of the most important on the Mississippi River in a military point of view, while its peculiar topography made its conversion into a strong defensive post an easy matter.
Port Hudson below (about twenty-five miles above Baton Rouge), another position of great natural strength, was now quite heavily fortified, and growing in defensive power every day. Between these fortified places, only, the Mississippi was free from the and patrol of National warvessels.
Here was now the only connecting link between the portions of the Confederacy separated by the Mississippi, and here
alone could the vast supplies of the grain and cattle growing regions of Western Louisiana and Texas be passed safely over the great River to Confederate armies, which, with those of the Nationals, were exhausting the regions eastward, between it and the mountain ranges that project into Georgia and Alabama.
The importance of holding this connecting link firmly was felt by the Confederates, and when, in the autumn of 1862, Jefferson Davis visited his home within the bounds of that link, and was returning, he declared in a speech at Jackson that Vicksburg and Port Hudson must be held at all hazards.
The Nationals, equally impressed with the importance of destroying that link, now bent all their energies to effect
1 The fearful waste of an army may be comprehended by considering the statement made by General Meade, in a reply to an address of welcome from tile Mayor of Philadelphia, that from March, 1862, when the Army of the Potomac left its lines in front of Washington, to the close of 1856, not less than 100,000 men of that army had been killed or wounded.
2 this is a view.of Davis's mansion on his estate below Vicksburg, from a photograph by Joslyn, of that city. When it was taken, the front of the House over the colonnade bore the words, in large black letters, “the House Jeff. Built.” the region was then in possession of the National forces, and Union soldiers occupied the mansion and the plantation. Davis was the owner of a large number of slaves, and on his estate were found. Every implement employed in Slave-labor and its management in that rich cotton district. Among other things. Found there was a lash for beating the slaves, represented in the engraving, which Colonel James Grant Wilson, of General Banks's staff, sent to his home in Poughkeepsie. It is a
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| Slave-lash. |
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