That the President should have been in complete accord with the popular impulse is hardly to be wondered at by any one that has followed, with the least attention, the details of his remarkable career. Moreover, the popular impulse was right. Wars take their character from the causes that produce them and the people or the nations by whom they are waged. This was not a contest upon some petty question involving the fate of a ministry, a dynasty, or even a monarchy, to be fought out between regular armies upon well-known plans at the convergence of the roads between two opposing capitals. The struggle was virtually one between two peoples hitherto united as one,--between the people of the North, who had taken up arms for the maintenance and the restoration of the Union, and the people of the South, who had taken up arms to destroy the Union. Of such an issue there could be no compromise; to such a contest there could be no end short of exhaustion. For four long years it was destined to go on, and at times to rage with a fury almost unexampled along lines whose length was measured by the thousand miles and over a battle-ground nearly as large as the continent of Europe. Looked at merely from the standpoint of strategy, and discarding all considerations not directly concerning the movements of armies, true policy might, perhaps, have dictated the concentration of all available resources in men and material upon the great central lines of operations, roughly indicated by the mention of Chattanooga and Atlanta,--the road eventually followed by Sherman in his triumphant march to the sea. Apart, however, from considerations strictly tactical, the importance of cutting off the trans-Mississippi region as a source of supply for the main Confederate armies was obvious; while from the governments of Europe, of England and France above all, the pressure was great for cotton, partly, indeed, as a pretext for interfering in our domestic struggle to their own advantage, but largely, also, to enable those governments to quiet the cry of the starving millions of their people.