Campaigns Of The Army Of The Potomac PDF Download

Excerpt from Report on the Organization and Campaigns: Of the Army of the Potomac; To Which Is Added an Account of the Campaign in Western Virginia, With Plans of Battle-Fields The attack upon Fort Sumter on the 12th of April, 1861, took the Northern people by surprise, and found them entirely unprepared to carry on a serious contest. Our people were born and educated amidst the blessings of peace and material prosperity; they were in the habit of yielding obedience to the laws of the country and the will of the majority as expressed in the elections, and had become accustomed to see great political excitement and animosity calmly subside through the deference of the minority to the decision of the majority. Thus to the last moment it was difficult to realize that a great civil war was imminent; and men clung fondly to the hope that the good sense of both sections would in the eleventh hour find some honorable solution to the difficulty, as had so often been the case before. It is probable that neither section fully realized the power and violence of the passions evoked, and that each flattered itself with the delusive hope that the other would yield something, rather than risk the inevitable and terrible consequences of an appeal to arms. Each underrated the strength, resources and courage of the other. These mutual misunderstandings, ably used by a comparatively small number of ambitious and unscrupulous men, were at their height when the insult offered the national flag in the harbor of Charleston aroused both parties to something like a true sense of their condition. The South were warned that they were irrevocably committed to make good their threats, and to establish by force their vaunted right of secession. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.