THE author continues in this volume, and closes with it, his Popular Annals of the War. He is well aware that he has made but a rude compilation of events, in this hasty and unpretending work; but he hopes that in his four volumes of plain narrative, he has at least laid a foundation for an elaborate and well-digested History of the War, which he proposes to himself as the work of years, and entertains as the literary ambition of his life.
The writer may properly say here, with the completion of this volume of hasty narrative, that he designs now to betake himself to the composition of a fair and standard history of the War in America; of which so far he has constructed scarcely more than the skeleton. Resolved as he is by just and patient labors to rescue the truth from the peculiarly industrious misrepresentation of the Yankee, and ambitious thus to do a most important service to his countrymen of the South, and duly vindicate their name to posterity, he shall, in his large and new design, trust much to their aid—especially that of their military leaders and public men—in giving him the benefit of intelligent advice, and in collecting the ill-preserved and disjected historical testimony of the struggle of the Confederates.
The announcement of this new work will be shortly made in a more proper form, and with a fuller detail of the author's purposes and requests.
