William Swinton, Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac

I design in this volume to record, as far as may now be done, what that Army did and suffered in ten campaigns and twoscore battles, in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. This history, if adequately made, must be the history also of much the larger part of that gigantic war that, originating in the secession of eleven States from the Federal Union, ended, after four years, in the establishment of that Union on a lasting basis. For though this conflict assumed continental proportions and raged around a circumference of many thousand miles, it was observed that its head and front remained alway in that stretch of territory between the Potomac and the James, and between the Blue Ridge and the Chesapeake. Here, from the start, each belligerent, as by common consent, concentrated its richest resources; here, throughout the struggle, each continued to sustain its greatest armies, under its ablest commanders: and never for a day did it lose its military primacy in the eyes of either party to the conflict. It is estimated that out of the half million men who met death, and the two million who suffered wound in the war—the losses of both sides, and the casualties of all the battles and sieges over the whole continental field of action, being included— above one-half this appalling aggregate belongs to the Army of the Potomac and its adversary. These losses are the summing up of a series of campaigns and battles as grand in their proportions as any on record, waged with a remorseless energy, wrought out with all the resources that modern art has devised to make war deadly, and fought upon a theatre peculiar in its character and the conditions of warfare. That theatre is Virginia—a colossal canvas whereon moving masses and the forms of wrestling armies appear.

The history of the War for the Union would set forth that majestic exhibition of power by which a free People, without military traditions, created great armies, waged a national