Denouement: Fortifications sapped and mined! A city wrecked, subdued by want! An army in capitulation! A mighty host, surrendered! Flags furled! Arms stacked! One hundred and seventy-two captured cannon! Sixty thousand rifles taken! Twenty-nine thousand four hundred and ninety-one men prisoners of war—hungry, emaciated, broken, dejected men, worn by sleepless vigil, the ordeal of war, the alarm of siege—men who suffered and endured, but would not yield till dire distress compelled—men whose gallant valor challenges admiration and respect, and gives them equal claim to fame with their invincible captors, whose iron grip and ever-tightening hold they could not break! Victory complete and splendid! And over all—river, field, and city—where crash of musketry, roar of cannon, scream of shell, and all the tumultuous din of war had reigned—the hush and awe of silence, unbroken by cheer or shout or cry of exultation! Result: The fall of Port Hudson, an impregnable fortress, two hundred and fifty miles below; the disenthrallment of the Mississippi—unvexed by war, its waters free to seek the sea in peace; the bisecting of the Confederacy—cut in two—severed completely—its doom decreed—its fate forever sealed—all thereafter dying in its defense going hopeless and in vain to sacrificial altars; the establishment of the Union’s indissolubility—its power made manifest East and West—faith in its ultimate triumph, though the pathway led through toil and blood, became assured—the Nation saw the end, distant but sure—it found itself and it found a man, and that man had found himself, and had found others, too—Sherman, McPherson, Logan, Hovey, Osterhaus, McGinnis—a quiet, silent man, of grim determination, who “looked upon side movements as a waste of time”—a man of immovable purpose, who went to his object unswerving as a bullet—a man of sublime courage, who wanted “on the same side of the river with the enemy”—a man of calm confidence, who relied upon himself and the disciplined, hardy men who followed him, who, under him, knew no defeat and who were unwilling to learn what it was—a man who knew the trade of war, its science and its rules, but who dared ignore its long-accepted axioms when occasion required; who, when he could not protect his communications with his base without delay and the diminution of his force, could cut loose from all communications and have no base, though moving in the heart of the enemy’s country—a man of daring brilliancy, who could fight in detail a force superior in the aggregate to his own and defeat in turn its scattered fragments before they could consolidate—who had no rear, whose every side was front—who knew that “time was worth more than re-enforcements,” and that delay only gave “the enemy time to re-enforce and fortify”—whose strategy, celerity, and rapidity of movement threw confusion into the councils of opposing generals, in a land strange to him and filled with his