previous next
[77] army; that the whole country was applying for arms and troops; that he could take none from other points for that army, and could do no more to increase its strength than send it as many recruits as there were arms in our ordnance-store-twenty-five hundred. This, of course decided the question of active operations then.

Mr. Davis then proposed some operations of a partisan character, especially an expedition, by a detachment, against Hooker's division, in Maryland, opposite to Evansport. I objected to this proposition, because we had no means of transporting any sufficient body of men to the Maryland shore quickly; and the Potomac being controlled by Federal vessels-of-war, such a body, if thrown into Maryland, would inevitably be captured or destroyed in attempting to return, even if successful against the land forces. Upon my declining such an enterprise, the conference terminated.

The army had advanced to Fairfax Court-House, for the contingency of being made strong enough to assume the offensive while General McClellan's was still unprepared to take the field. The semicircular course of the Potomac, and roads converging from different points on it to our position, made it easy for the Federal army to turn either of our flanks without exposing its own communications. As that great army became capable of manoeuvring, the position of ours, of course, became more hazardous. On the 19th of October, therefore, it was drawn back to Centreville — a position much stronger in front, as well as less easily and safely turned. Van Dorn's and Longstreet's divisions occupied the

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Maryland (Maryland, United States) (2)
Evansport (Ohio, United States) (1)
Centreville (Virginia, United States) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
G. B. McClellan (1)
J. Longstreet (1)
Hooker (1)
E. Van Dorn (1)
Jefferson Davis (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
October 19th (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: