THE end of 1862, in the Civil War, found the army in the East in camp at Falmouth, Virginia, after severe reverses. In the Southwest a vigorous campaign was being waged by the heroes of Iuka and Corinth, Mississippi. Grant was in supreme command of the Federal corps in northern Mississippi. A movement was in operation against Vicksburg. Sherman was attempting to get into the rear of the city by the Chickasaw Bayou road which ran from the Yazoo battlefield to the Walnut Hills, six miles above the city. His column of thirty thousand men was defeated and driven back with dreadful slaughter on the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth of December. Rosecranz was established at Nashville, while Bragg was putting his men into winter huts at Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The Federal troops enjoyed Christmas in camp and on the following morning, in a cold rain, the Army of the Cumberland advanced to Stone River where it enters the Cumberland River just above Nashville. At sunrise on the last day of 1862, Rosecranz's army met Bragg's forces with a deafening roar of artillery and musketry that fairly caused the earth to tremble. The fighting on both sides was of a determined character. The fields were literally covered with dead and dying men. Victory was claimed by both the Federals and the Confederates. Photographs are here shown of Chickasaw Bayou and the deadly Poison Spring on the battlefield; also an excellent portrait of the medical corps of the Army of the Potomac, in camp under charge of Dr. Jonathan Letterman, a prominent battlefield surgeon. EVERY AMERICAN citizen pledges his "life, fortune and sacred honor" to the truth that "all men are created free and equal," and that they are endowed by their Creator, with certain "unalienable rights." It was fidelity to this oath, as sacred as life itself, that led the American people to rush "to arms" to defend it. The mobilization of a volunteer army, of freemen born and bred in the arts of peace, never was known until the new Republic of the Western Hemisphere championed the cause of Liberty and common manhood. Battle-trained monarchies declared that it could not be maintained; that the hundreds of thousands of men who were offering their services to their country could never stand the severe exposures and deprivations of warfare. The tongues of the Nations knew not what they were talking. These men were fighters, not by training or nature, but by an honest impulse of the heart they were patriots. It was not love of adventure that urged the strongest men of the North to leave home and family and shoulder a musket under the Stars and Stripes; nor was it a brutal love of combat that marshalled the best manhood of the South to the flag of the Confederacy. It was an impulse that no people had ever before felt. It was a sense of justice that was early kindled in the American Heart with the first tidings of the Declaration of Independence.