In 1864, the Confederate House followed the CS Senate and two-thirds the Confederate States in passage of the Emancipation Amendment, which repealed every endorsement of slavery in the Confederate Constitution and established a prohibition against slavery or any sort of involuntary bondage.

Gettysburg Prayer Part Two by Raymond SpeerThe celebration of the Greatest Christmas Present continued in every Confederate State well into the new year of 1865, (Winston S. Churchill's Commentary, 1933.)

When the Confederate Congress returned to session, there were eight different bills of impeachment on file at the House Judiciary Committee to the effect that President Davis ought to be removed from office. It was pointed out that the president had disparaged the guarantees of slavery written into the CSA Constitution, and one complaint went to the core of the issue and declared Davis had gone insane for love of the Negro.

News of the Gettysburg Prayer were passed off as inconsequential by radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens, who grumbled that Southerners could admit that they were defeated and be rid of slavery without arguing the issue among themselves. The Lincolns held a reception for General Grant, who was cheered on the assumption that he would soon take the battle to Lee. But every federal general was either dead (like Hancock) or in a Richmond jail like George Meade (whose nerves were shattered), so it was no easy matter to get a new federal Army ready to try to defeat Lee.

Around Washington DC went higher walls, deeper trenches, new artillery batteries and even telegraph lines to the new entrenchments. Though Lee have famously replenished his artillery by seizure of the heavy guns of the Army of the Potomac, Lee was hardly disposed to strike the fortress that was Washington and so quiet returned to the East theatre of the War.

At the next big battle between the Union and the Confederacy, Chickamauga on September 20, 1863, the South had reinforced its Western Army with Longstreet's Corps which featured Hood's Texas division and Pickett's Virginians. The men of Hood and Pickett co-operated and broke the position of Union General Thomas, putting out of commission the Army that Grant had great plans for.

The British Cabinet voted to offer the two sides in America the services of the British Foreign Officer as mediators to end the ongoing War. Made in the first week of October 1863, the British offer to act as a mediator was rejected by Abraham Lincoln two weeks later even as Davis accepted the proposal. The "People's Militia of New York, the ruffians and hooligans who had dominated the streets in most parts of the metropolis since the Gettysburg-caused shortage of Union regular troops, took up arms again when Lincoln spurned a peace conference and were reduced in urban combat by Yankee arms which encircled the city.

Adroit maneuvers by General Jackson's infantry and General Stuart's horse soldiers permitted the Confederacy to exploit eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey from their base in central Pennsylvania. While Grant used his talents and men to suppress rioters block by bloody block, Lee waited on the strategic periphery of New York, certain that his foe could not take any substantive maneuver against the Army of Northern Virginia.

The great successes of the winter of '63 and '64 were Stuart's rescue of 4,000 prisoners of war from a camp in the far north, and Jackson's candy raid, when Jackson's men had brought to the South so much in the way of supplies that many of the wagons were hauling candy!

Given time illuminated by victories, support grew for implementation of emancipation. Foes of Davis forced votes in Congress on the issue. The Senate gave an emancipation amendment majority support and the House was ten votes shy of a majority, but no one could argue that there was no reasonable support for the deal.

Negroes in gray uniforms were usually in garrisons in Confederate territory and public opinion was galvanized around Christmas when black Confederates near Trenton, New Jersey, atacked and ran off an equal number of federal white troops, who began reciting the Gettysburg Prayer on the field of battle.

In spite of everything, given the size of the Union's edge over the Confederacy in population and in productive capabity, the South still stared defeat in the face at the beginning of 1864.