The
White House sent him words of cheer. The Confederate Commander, General
Bragg, rapidly closed in and began to lay siege to Chattanooga, and the
defeated Federal army were put on short rations.

The President turned his eyes now from Meade and his army of the Potomac
which Lee's strategy had completely baffled and gave his first thought
to the armies of the West. He sent Sherman hurrying from the Mississippi
to Rosecrans' relief and Hooker from the East. In the place of Rosecrans
he promoted George H. Thomas, whose gallant stand had saved the army
from annihilation and won the title, "The Rock of Chickamauga." And most
important of all he placed in supreme command of the forces in Tennessee
the silent man whom his patience and faith had saved to the Nation, the
conqueror of Vicksburg--Ulysses S. Grant.

On November the 24th and 25th, the new Commander raised the siege of
Chattanooga, and drove Bragg's army from Missionary Ridge and Lookout
Mountain back into Georgia.

At last the President had found the man of genius for whom he had long
searched. Grant was summoned to Washington and given command of all the
armies of the United States East and West.

The new General at once placed William Tecumseh Sherman at the head of
an army of a hundred thousand men at Chattanooga for the purpose of
reinvading Georgia, sent General Butler with forty thousand up the
Peninsula against Richmond along the line of McClellan's old march,
raised the Army of the Potomac to one hundred and forty thousand
effective fighters, took command in person and faced General Lee on the
banks of the Rapidan but a few miles from the old ground in the
Wilderness around Chancellorsville where Hooker's men had baptized the
earth in heroic blood the year before.

Grant's army was the flower of Northern manhood and with its three
hundred and eighteen great field guns the best equipped body of fighting
men ever brought together on our continent. His baggage train was over
sixty miles long and would have stretched the entire distance to
Richmond.

By the spring of 1864 when he reached the Rapidan Lee's army had been
recruited again to its normal strength of sixty-two thousand.

A great religious revival swept the Southern camps during the winter
and its meetings lasted into the spring almost to the hour of the
opening guns of the Wilderness campaign. Had whispers from the Infinite
reached the souls of the ragged men in grey and told them of coming