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 that they constituted the fatal blow which broke the Confederate power and hastened the war to its end.

The National Cemetery on the bluffs, just north of the corporate limits of the city, is, taken all in all, perhaps the most attractive patriotic cemetery in the South. The visitor to the city always seeks it first. Nature has given to it sublimity; art and landscape-engineering have imparted all the freshness and loveliness that flower and shrub and tree can give. Here rest sixteen thousand soldiers who lost their lives in the service of their country in and around Vicksburg. Such care and veneration for those who fell under the national flag while a grateful tribute to valor and heroism serve at the same time to keep ever fresh and active sentiments of martial valor and a warmer pride in all that adds glory to the country and illustrates its military prowess.

Nothing could more strongly and nobly testify to the fact that all the issues and controversies which culminated in a long and bloody war have been closed and settled and relegated to the past than the measures now in process of execution to convert the trenches and bastions around the city of Vicksburg