William Swinton, Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac

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[407] Fredericksburg route; by Pope and Meade by the Orange and Alexandria Railroad. Uniform ill-success had attended each attempted advance, and the many repulses the Army of the Potomac had met on that line had marked it with a bloody condemnation.¹ The distance to Richmond by this route, from any front held along the Rappahannock or Rapidan, is between sixty and seventy miles. This necessarily involves communications excessively long and difficult to maintain for an army dependent for its supplies on its wagons, while the march must be made in a region full of the finest defensive positions. Whether the movement be made by the Fredericksburg or by the Orange and Alexandria Railroad—the only two lines of manoeuvres available in the overland routepeculiar difficulties beset it on each. But assuming these to be severally overpassed, the successful execution of the long march only results in bringing the army abreast the fortifications of Richmond, within which the defending force, with its communications south and west all open and intact, might stand an indefinite siege. In other words, the aggressive army is brought to a dead-lock; and if it be attempted to undo this by shifting to the south side of the James River, with the view of operating against Richmond's communications, the transfer is made at the expense of the one advantage of the overland route (namely, that it covers the national capital), and the same line of operations is taken up, after enormous cost, that might have been assumed at first, without any sacrifice whatever. If the army, therefore, is strong enough, and so placed by the presence of such a garrison and covering force for the defence of Washington as to leave that city out of the question, there would seem to be every advantage in taking up, at the start, a line of operations that obviates the peculiar difficulties of the overland route.