Adam Badeau, Military history of Ulysses S. Grant from April 1861 to April 1865. Volume 1

[5] of whom had long been preparing for the very emergency which now occurred; armies were organized with extraordinary diligence and energy by the self-styled Confederate government, and the American civil war began.

From the intestine nature of the struggle and the geographical formation of the continent, the principal theatre of the war, it was evident, must lie in the states bordering on both sections. The belt of territory reaching from the Atlantic westward, and comprising Maryland and Virginia east of the Alleghanies, and Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri west of those mountains, constitutes this border region, and was the stage on which the first acts of the drama were performed. The Potomac and the James, at the east; the Ohio, the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and the Mississippi, at the west, are the great streams, the control of which, and of the populations and regions that lie in their valleys, is indispensable to a mastery of the continent. The Ohio flows westward from Pennsylvania to Missouri, a thousand miles; the prolific States of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois lie along its northern bank, while Virginia and Kentucky form the southern shore; it was the natural line of demarcation at the west between the slave states and the free, the boundary between disaffection and loyalty. The Tennessee and Cumberland, rising in the recesses of the Alleghany mountains, flow southward into the state of Tennessee, and then run west for hundreds of miles, the larger river making a wide detour into Alabama and Mississippi; when, turning to the north again, they traverse Kentucky side by side, and empty into the Ohio, near the point where that still greater stream becomes itself a tributary, and pours