The President seized his hat, his dark face shining with joy:
"I will telegraph the news to General Meade myself!"
He stopped suddenly and threw his long arms around Welles:
"What can we do for the Secretary of the Navy for this glorious
intelligence? He is always giving us good news. I cannot tell you my joy
over this result. It is great, Mr. Welles, it is great!"
With the eagerness of a boy he rushed to the telegraph office and sent
the message to Meade over his own signature.
For the first time in dreary months the sun had burst for a moment
through the clouds that had hung in endless gloom over the White House.
The sorrowful eyes were shining with new hope. The President felt sure
that General Lee could never succeed in leading his shattered army back
into Virginia. He had lost twenty thousand men out of his sixty-two
thousand--while Meade was still in command of a grand army of eighty-two
thousand soldiers flushed with victory. The Potomac River was in flood
and the Confederate army was on its banks unable to recross.
It was a moral certainty that the heroic Commander who had saved the
Capital at Gettysburg could, with his eighty-two thousand men, capture
or crush Lee's remaining force, caught in this trap by the swollen
river, and end the war.
The men who crowded into the Executive office the day after the news of
Vicksburg, found the Chief Magistrate in high spirits.
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