e Nation. Daylight seemed to be breaking at last.
Gettysburg had hurled back the Southern invader from our soil; and
Vicksburg, with the immediately resulting surrender of Port Hudson, had
opened the Mississippi river from Cairo to the Gulf, and split the
Confederacy in twain.

But it happened just about this time that, the enrollment of the whole
Militia of the United States (under the Act of March, 1863), having been
completed, and a Draft for 300,000 men ordered to be made and executed,
if by a subsequent time the quotas of the various States should not be
filled by volunteering, certain malcontents and Copperheads, inspired by
agents and other friends of the Southern Conspirators, started and
fomented, in the city of New York, a spirit of unreasoning opposition
both to voluntary enlistment, and conscription under the Draft, that
finally culminated, July 13th, in a terrible Riot, lasting several days,
during which that great metropolis was in the hands, and completely at
the mercy, of a brutal mob of Secession sympathizers, who made day and
night hideous with their drunken bellowings, terrorized everybody even
suspected of love for the Union, plundered and burned dwellings,
including a Colored Orphan Asylum, and added to the crime of arson, that
of murdering the mob-chased, terror-stricken Negroes, by hanging them to
the lamp-posts.

These Riots constituted a part of that "Fire in the Rear" with which the
Rebels and their Northern Democratic sympathizers had so frequently
menaced the Armies of the Union.

Alluding to them, the N. Y. Tribune on July 15th, while its office was
invested and threatened with attack and demolition, bravely said: "They
are, in purpose and in essence, a Diversion in favor of Jefferson Davis
and Lee. Listen to the yells of the mob and the harangues of its
favorite orators, and you will find them surcharged with 'Nigger,'
'Abolition,' 'Black Republican,' denunciation of prominent Republicans,
The Tribune, etc. etc.--all very wide of the Draft and the exemption.
Had the Abolitionists, instead of the Slaveholders, revolted, and
undertaken to upset the Government and dissolve the Union, nine-tenths
of these rioters would have eagerly volunteered to put them down. It is
the fear, stimulated by the recent and glorious triumphs of the Union
Arms, that Slavery and the Rebellion must suffer, which is at the bottom
of all this arson, devastation, robbery, and murder."

The Democratic Governor,