Following Lee, the Army of the Potomac, under General Hooker, also recrossed the Potomac, and pursued the enemy by a somewhat parallel route, but keeping carefully between him and Washington.  The occasion was one calling for the best resources of a great military commander; and General Hooker, realizing his unfitness for the responsibility, asked to be relieved of the command.  Thus was thrown upon the President the hazardous necessity of changing commanders upon the very eve of a great battle.  It was a terrible emergency.  Even the stout-hearted Stanton was appalled.  He afterward stated that when he received the despatch from Hooker, asking to be relieved, his heart sank within him, and he was more depressed than at any other moment of the war.  “I could not say,” said Mr. Stanton, “that any other officer knew General Hooker’s plans, or the position even of the various divisions of the army.  I sent for the President to come at once to the War Office.  It was in the evening, but the President soon appeared.  I handed him the despatch.  As he read it his face became like lead, and I said, ’What shall be done?’ He replied instantly, ‘Accept his resignation.’”

Immediately an order was sent to Major-General George G. Meade, one of the most efficient of the corps commanders of the Army of the Potomac, appointing him to the chief command.  Meade was a quiet, unassuming man, very unlike Hooker.  Three days after assuming command, he led his army against the Southern host at Gettysburg, where, after a most bloody and memorable battle of three days’ duration (July 1, 2, and 3, 1863), was won the first decisive victory in the history of the gallant Army of the Potomac.  Lee retired, with disastrous losses, across the Potomac to Virginia; and Washington and the North breathed free again.

Senator Chandler of Michigan, speaking of the terrible strain on Lincoln during the progress of the battle of Gettysburg, said:  “I shall never forget the painful anxiety of those few days when the fate of the nation seemed to hang in the balance; nor the restless solicitude of Mr. Lincoln, as he paced up and down the room, reading despatches, soliloquizing, and often stopping to trace the position of the contending armies on the map which hung on the wall; nor the relief we all felt when the fact was established that victory, though gained at such fearful cost, was indeed on the side of the Union.”

Amidst the murk and gloom of those dark days in Washington, when the suspense was breathless and the heart of the nation responded in muffled beats to the dull booming of the cannon of Meade and Lee at Gettysburg, an episode occurred, with Lincoln as the central figure, which reveals perhaps more poignantly than any other in his whole career the depths of feeling in that tender and reverential soul.  On Sunday evening, July 4,—­the fourth day of that terrible battle, with nothing definite yet known of the result,—­the President drove out in a carriage, in company with