Brigadier-General King, a division commander in this battle, was a soldier by profession, and a diplomatist and journalist by inheritance--for he was a graduate of West Point, a son of Charles King, editor of the New York _American_ in 1827, and a grandson of the elder Rufus, an officer of the Revolution and Minister to the Court of St. James. He had left the army in 1836 to become Assistant Engineer of the New York & Erie Railroad, a post he gave up to become editor of the _Daily Advertiser_, and subsequently of the Milwaukee _Sentinel_. At the outbreak of the war Lincoln had appointed him Minister to Rome, but he asked permission to delay his departure, and was made a Brigadier-General of Volunteers. Later he resigned as Minister, and was assigned to McDowell's corps. At the battle of Manassas, in which the Forty-first New York earned honor, he proved an able leader. In 1867 he was again appointed as Minister of the United States to Italy. [Illustration: THE GENERAL-IN-CHIEF IN 1862] Major-General Henry Wager Halleck; born 1814; West Point 1839; died 1872. Sherman credits Halleck with having first discovered that Forts Henry and Donelson, where the Tennessee and the Cumberland Rivers so closely approach each other, were the keypoints to the defensive line of the Confederates in the West. Succeeding Fremont in November, 1861, Halleck, importuned by both Grant and Foote, authorized the joint expedition into Tennessee, and after its successful outcome he telegraphed to Washington: "Make Buell, Grant, and Pope major-generals of volunteers and give me command in the West. I ask this in return for Donelson and Henry." He was chosen to be General-in-Chief of the Federal Armies at the crisis created by the failure of McClellan's Peninsula Campaign. Halleck held this position from July 11, 1862, until Grant, who had succeeded him in the West, finally superseded him at Washington. [Illustration: AT ANTIETAM. _Painted by E. Jahn._ _Copyright, 1901, by Perrien-Keydel Co., Detroit, Mich., U. S. A._] ANTIETAM, OR SHARPSBURG At Sharpsburg (Antietam) was sprung the keystone of the arch upon which the Confederate cause rested.--_James Longstreet, Lieutenant-General C. S. A., in "Battles and Leaders of the Civil War."_ A battle remarkable in its actualities but more wonderful in its possibilities was that of Antietam, with the preceding capture of Harper's Ferry and the other interesting events that marked the invasion of Maryland by General Lee. It was one of the bloodiest and the most picturesque conflicts of the Civil War, and while it was not all that the North was demanding and not all that many military critics think it might have been, it enabled President Lincoln to feel that he could with some assurance issue, as he did, his Emancipation Proclamation.