HHHaight CAMPAIGNS OF THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC A CRITICAL HISTORY OF OPERATIONS IN VIRGINIA MARYLAND TO THE CLOSE OF THE WAR 1861-5 BY WILLIAM SWINTON 1 LIBRAR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA NEW YORK CHARLES B. RICHARDSON 540 BROADWAY Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, BY CHARLES B. RICHARDSON, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. JOHN G. SHEA, STEREOTYPER AND ELECTROTYPER, N. Y. E493 1886 PREFACE. Ir is not without diffidence that I give to the world a volume in cluding within its single self the history of events so vast and complicated, so little understood and so greatly misunderstood, as those that filled up the momentous four years during which the chief armies of the North and the South fought the war of secession to an issue upon the soil of Virginia. Yet, I should not have attempted the task, had I not been met both by an inward prompting in the desire to speak truly of actions and men whereof there has been hitherto little else than false witness, and by outward solicitations, in the possession of such a mass of documentary material as it seldom falls to the writer of contemporaneous history to obtain. While the Army of the Potomac was yet in the field, there were many who, believing that I would in time make fitter record of the doings and sufferings of that army than was possible in the brief chronicles which it was my duty to prepare for the press, began even then to furnish me with oral and written information. And no sooner had the war closed, and it was known that I had ad dressed myself to this work in earnest, than, from all sides, reports. dispatches, and memorials poured in upon me. It soon came about that, respecting every important action of the Army of the Potomac, there were brought to my hand, not only the manuscript official reports of its corps, division, and brigade commanders, but, for the illustration of its inner life and history, a prodigious mass of memoirs, private note-books, dispatches, letter-books, etc. In addition, I have had the benefit of the memory and judgment of most of the chief officers; and, both from these and others, have had so many proofs of their kindly solicitude that nothing which could be of use to me should be wanting, that I have been led to believe they did not regard me as entirely unworthy to record the history of their army. For the elucidation of the deeds of the Army of Northern Virginia, the mighty rival of the Army of the Potomac, my sources of information have been scarcely less ample. These embrace the complete "Reports of the Army of Northern Virginia," and many manuscript reports and documents kindly forwarded to me. I have also had the advantage of full conversations with most of the chief commanders of the Confederate army; and I think the result cannot fail to appear in the explanation of many things hitherto wrongly interpreted, many things hitherto wholly incomprehensible. I have seldom needed to refer for the corroboration of statements to what I personally saw; and indeed the individual knowledge of any one man respecting such actions as were waged in Virginia, is necessarily slight. But that which has been of such use that without it the history of the Army of the Potomac never could have been written, is the power, gained by personal experience in the field, of |