A year passed and it was not yet over; 1862 came in and the fierce battles of Shiloh, Cedar Mountain, Manassas and Antietam formed the bitter record of that one summer alone. In the very heart of the country soldiers by the thousand from the north and from the south stood glaring at each other, pressing forward, warding off, moving warily even upon the critical spaces about the city of Washington, while occasionally the Confederate raiders slipped through and ran almost up to the city itself. The resistance of the Confederate army was proving much more stubborn than had been dreamed possible, and by November of 1862 long streets of tents full of soldiers waiting for orders were making white cities for miles and miles throughout the surroundings of Washington. The people began to fear the horror of a long, devastating war. Almost worse than this was the feeling of criticism into which discouragement was concentrating. Grief at the defeats of the army of the Potomac was reacting in troubles among President Lincoln’s advisers. The northern abolitionists could not understand why he was so slow--why he did not stop the war at once. And he, poor man, in the midst of the most harassing executive difficulties, with personal sorrow for the recent death of his little son eating at his heart and national sorrow for the loss in deadly battle of many hundreds of soldiers overshadowing him, did not know which way to turn for strength, wisdom and good generalship. “I cannot create generals,” he said. As the month for Thanksgiving Day, 1862, approached it would seem that no one could have the heart to celebrate. On the farms of New England and Ohio and Nebraska the women were beginning to have to carry the whole burden of home and town. In a New Hampshire countryside, not far from where the Stowes were living, fourteen strong daughters of the mountains went one night after their own farm work was done to the barn of an aged neighbor whose three sons had gone to the war, and before morning had husked for him one hundred bushels of corn. This sort of thing was being done everywhere. As for the homesick soldiers in their distant camps, certainly the approach of the time for the giving of thanks was not specially welcomed, for they did not know what a day might bring forth of new horror and disaster. They, too, together with statesmen and citizens everywhere, were beginning to realize distinctly that the war was no little quarrel to be lightly settled, but a fierce interlocking of stubborn wills. That it was the wills of brothers thus conflicting added to the poignancy of their grief.