skip to Section \[Haxial\] where, by generalizing Refs. [@LTYL; @LNT] to the lattice, we show how to fix the axial gauge in the Hamiltonian formalism. Since such gauge fixing is less familiar than the gauge fixing in the Euclidean formalism, we do so in detail. Next, in Section \[GLresolve\], we show how to resolve Gauss law and re-write the electric fields in terms of the fermion color charge densities. This rewriting can be done for all components of the electric field except for those conjugate to the eigenvalues of the spatial Polyakov loops. This set of eigenvalues and their conjugate electric fields is what we refer to above as zero modes, and in Section \[0mode\] we focus on them. Specifically, we show how to represent the zero modes’ electric fields in the Schröedinger picture as differential operators. The end result of Sections \[LQCDH\]-\[Hrecap\] is a Hamiltonian that depends only on the fermions and on the zero-modes, with an overall color neutrality enforced on its Hilbert space. For the convenience of the reader we summarize this emerging structure in Section \[Hrecap\]. We then turn to find the ground state of this Hamiltonian. At large-$N$ this is done in two steps : 