Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 1.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

The second extended along the right bank of the Mississippi, the home of the Indian and the buffalo, and the new country of the pioneer, the eternal enemy of both—a country the immensity of which seems to stimulate individual energy, and where the laws are as vague as its boundaries. There, under the influence of violent passions, the legal struggle which was going on elsewhere between slavery and free labor had already for some time assumed a fierce and sanguinary character, and the outposts of two hostile institutions, constantly facing each other, had anticipated the declaration of war by many years. So, no doubt, we shall see the still burning embers of that great conflagration lurking in their ashes for a long time to come. But, at the critical moment, the irregular warfare of which those too spacious regions were the theatre exercised no influence upon the great plan of military operations.

Finally, the third part, bounded on the west by the Mississippi, and on the north by the Ohio, comprising West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and portions of the neighboring States, was the territory the possession of which the Federals, taking the offensive, disputed with their adversaries. This almost virgin soil was to be trodden by the largest armies that were ever assembled on either side, and witnessed such torrents of human blood as it is the sad privilege of an advanced civilization to shed.

In those vast regions, some of the most decisive blows of the war have brought into unexpected notice the name of some humble settler of the wilderness who had helped to clear it with his own hands; while, by some singular coincidence, the mysterious meaning of some curious appellation, the only legacy left by an unhappy race, as a fatal prophecy to the country it had been dispossessed of, has been unravelled. When the Indian called one of the thousand rivulets which meander across the upper ridges of Georgia, Chickamauga, or ‘The River of Death,’ could he have foreseen, by a secret instinct, the fratricidal war which was to strike down the white men in expiation of their past crimes, and the autumnal evening which was to witness the destruction