The people of the city burrowed into the ground for safety, their walls of clay being shaken by the roaring battles that raged above the ground. The supply of food became scarcer day by day, and by the end of June the entire city was in a complete famine. They had been living for several days upon corn meal, beans and mule meat, and were now facing their last enemy, death by starvation. At ten o'clock on the morning of July 3d the firing ceased and a strange quietness rested over all. Pemberton had opened negotiations with Grant for the capitulation of the city. It is strange to say that on this very day the final chapter at Gettysburg was being written. On the following morning Pemberton marched his 30,000 men out of the city and surrendered them as prisoners of war. They were released on parole. This was the largest army ever surrendered at one time. BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG Our colonial fathers from North and South fought together when they brought this republic into being, defended it together in the war of 1812, and triumphed together when they carried the Stars and Stripes into the heritage of the Montezumas. The final and crucial test of the republic's strength and durability was the combat on the field of battle in the war between the states. The battle of Gettysburg is conceded to be the turning point in that war. Abraham Lincoln said in his Gettysburg address, in November, 1863: "This nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, is now engaged in a great civil war, testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure." The great question of that day was the question of state rights and relationship between state and federal government. It had now come to the point where it could not be determined in the councils of peace, although the illustrious Henry Clay and other statesmen of his day had been the means of successfully deferring from time to time this crisis for almost a half century. Gettysburg is a small, quiet town among the hills of Adams county, in southeastern Pennsylvania, and in 1863 contained about 1,500 inhabitants. It had been founded by James Gettys in about 1780. He probably never dreamed that his name, thus given to the village, would become famous in history for all time. The hills around Gettysburg are little more than general swells of ground, and many of them were covered with timber when the legions of the North and South fought out the destinies of the republic on those memorable July days in 1863. Lee's army was flushed with the victories of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, and public opinion was demanding an invasion of the North.