The British Ministry kept looking for the auspicious opportunity for several months thereafter. Many thought it had come in the middle of December, when the Fredericksburg disaster was described by the London _Times_ correspondent as "a memorable day to the historian of the Decline and Fall of the American Republic." But on the last day of the year was begun the battle that was to show the British public,--what was sometimes forgotten,--that there were armies outside of Virginia and territories beyond the Alleghanies. Out of the mists which surrounded Stone's River,--out of the uncertainty due to counter-claims of victory by the rival commanders,--arose this definite fact: The Northern Army had occupied the town that it set out to take, and the Southern Army had retired almost to the borders of Tennessee and could not dispute the claim of its enemy to the greater part of the area of that Commonwealth. Another postponement seemed necessary. By this time also the leaven of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which at first had been derided, was working in England; and, in their turn and time, Gettysburg and Vicksburg aided to produce a much-changed official atmosphere. The Foreign Minister who, against the law of the Kingdom, had let the _Alabama_ and the _Florida_ slip away to prey upon American commerce, was to strain that law a few months later to hold war-vessels that had been built for the South. The danger to the Union from foreign sources had passed. CHAPTER III THE ARMIES AND THEIR LEADERS The armies that were soon to measure strength in Middle Tennessee were not strangers. They had raced with each other to the banks of the Ohio in the previous fall, they had confronted each other,--at times,--in fractional strength upon a score of fields. It was the advance division of the Army of the Ohio, which had checked the Confederate onset on the first day at Shiloh, where Grant was all but overwhelmed, and that command, in full strength, had done its share in driving the gray-clad battalions from the field the next day. The guarding of Middle Tennessee and the taking of East Tennessee had since then been its special charge and designed function, and in token thereof it had been named anew "the Army of the Cumberland," after the river that traverses those regions. The army was composed principally of soldiers from the old Northwest Territory,--a region dedicated to human freedom in the ordinance of 1787. But while Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin furnished the bulk of the troops, there were also regiments from Kentucky and several composed of East Tennessee Unionists. Pennsylvania had sent a contingent, and Missouri and Kansas were both represented. From the regular army of the United States, there were a formidable force of artillery, a few troops of cavalry, and a particularly fine brigade of infantry.