The Battle Of Westport PDF Download

Excerpt from The Battle of Westport The student of military and political history will readily note a marked resemblance between the engagements fought on July 1st to 3d, 1863, before Gettysburg, in the State of Pennsylvania, and that of October 21st to 23d, 1864, near Kansas City, in the State of Missouri. Barring only the numbers engaged and the corresponding losses, the battles of Gettysburg and of Westport had much in common. Each was the result of a campaign of invasion planned by the Confederate War Department for the purpose of severing the Union territory at the point of attack, the one in the East, the other in the West. Each such campaign was intended seriously to embarrass the Federal defence by necessitating the summoning of distant forces to resist the invasion, thus setting other Confederate forces freer to conduct their own lines of action. Each seriously threatened the principal cities in the invaded territory, and in each case that territory was chosen for the reason that it contained such places of importance - Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia in the eastern campaign; St. Louis, Kansas City and the important military post of Fort Leavenworth in the western. The engagement in which each campaign culminated occupied three days of incessant fighting, and the defeat to the Confederate arms with which each closed put an end forever to further attempts at carrying the war northward in their respective portions of the Union. 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.