financial
bankruptcy, which of itself must destroy the nation.

And yet neither Mr. Lincoln nor his generals knew or had in mind any
plan other than that of forcing a passage down the Mississippi,
bristling with batteries that frowned from its bluffs, while swamps
and bayous skirted and pierced its banks, affording defenses in the
rear little less formidable and forbidding.

And thus the nation stood as in the hush that precedes the storm or
the crash of battle, apprehending not so much any particular movement
of the Confederate armies as the threatening elements generally with
which the air seemed surcharged, and knowing not how or when or where
the blow would fall. Military success was of all things most desired;
military delay of all things most dreaded. With the South to stand
still was their strength; time was power, and every day's delay
increased the thickening dangers that were closing around the Union
cause. With the North not to advance was to recede; not to destroy was
to be destroyed. The exigencies of the situation made it imperative
that the decisive blow should be struck thus early in the war. How to
make that advance and deliver that fatal blow was the great problem to
be solved. Omniscience only was then able to know whether the last sun
had set to rise no more on the Union of these States. The country was
clamorous for military successes, but not half so troubled as was Mr.
Lincoln and his advisers, for the people did not know, as they did,
how much depended thereon; how the beam trembled in the balance and
what irremediable evils were involved in delay.

Congress met; the Committee on the Conduct of the War was at once
created. How great were the dangers which at that supreme moment made
the continued existence of the Government a question of doubt, and the
fact that the military successes in the West which followed were not
achieved a day too soon is made evident by the speeches of many of the
most distinguished statesmen of that period, in both houses of
Congress, some of them occupying positions on the most important
committees connected with the prosecution of the war and necessarily
possessed of the most reliable information. The utterances in the
halls of Congress sustain every fact as here described."

In this same Congressional document of 1878 Miss Carroll thus
describes her inception of the plan of the Tennessee campaign:

"In the autumn of 1861 my attention was arrested by the confiden