The veterans from the Keystone State had not lost faith in “Little Mac.” They contended that McClellan had been handicapped just at a moment when he was “about to execute a _coup de main_ that would prove a _coup de grâce_ to the Southern Confederacy!” Meade was the second choice of the Pennsylvanians. His splendid victory over Lee at Gettysburg had brought him into the front rank. He had won the gratitude of the whole North, Copperheads excepted. Checking Lee's advance Northward, whipping the rebel army and compelling the defeated Confederacy to “about face” and put for home, gave Gen. Meade a big place in the hearts of the soldiers and the loyal people of the Keystone State. Surely the patriots of the North had good cause to rejoice on the eighty-seventh anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. On that day Grant's victorious army raised the stars and stripes over the rebel fortifications at Vicksburg, and the Mississippi was opened to the sea; and Lee's army of Northern Virginia was retreating from the scene of its unsuccessful attack on Meade's army at Gettysburg. Within forty-eight hours after the Union troops had crossed the Rapidan under the direction of Gen. Grant, there was not a soldier in the Army of the Potomac but what felt that the lieutenant-general meant business. The official records on file at Washington show that during that two days' terrible struggle in the Wilderness--May 5 and 6, 1864--the loss sustained by the Army of the Potomac was 13,948, of which 2,261 were killed, 8,785 wounded and 2,902 taken prisoners or missing. Then came Spottsylvania, with an aggregate Union loss of 13,601. The total loss sustained by the Army of the Potomac, the Army of the James and by Sheridan's operations in the valley, from May 1, 1864, to the surrender of Lee at Appomattox, April 9, 1865, is given in official compilations at 99,772--14,601 killed, 61,452 wounded and 23,719 missing. In the meantime the Federal forces operating in Virginia captured 81,112 Confederates, and Lee's killed and wounded are believed to have been equal to Grant's, but the “scattering” of the rebels after Richmond fell, and the destruction of Confederate records, made it impossible to arrive at the exact figures.