ROUGHING UP JULY 4

I did not realize that two major Union victories: Gettysburg and Vicksburg both ended on July 4, 1863, until reading Mark Twain's ROUGHING IT, today, wherein he writes: "All the vast eastern front of Mount Davidson, overlooking the city, put on a funereal gloom...This unaccustomed sight turned all eyes toward the mountain; and as they looked, a little tongue of rich golden flame was seen waving and quivering in the heart of the midnight, away up on the extreme summit! In a few minutes the streets were packed with people gazing with hardly an uttered word, at the one brilliant mote in the brooding world of darkness....It was the flag!--though no one suspected it at first, it seemed so like a supernatural visitor of some kind...For a whole hour the weird visitor winked and blinked in lofty solitude ...And all that time one sorely tired man, the telegraph operator sworn to secrecy, had to lock his lips and chain his tongue with a silence that was like to rend them; for he, and only he, of all the speculating multitude, knew the great things this sinking sun had seen that day in the east--Vicksburg fallen, and the Union arms victorious at Gettysburg !" P. 831-832, Chapter LV, (1984) http://www.uc.edu/news/NR.aspx?id=17932