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

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[215] sixteen days supply. These figures fully show that experience in the war had succeeded in rendering certain operations possible which, in the beginning, were not so with the improvised troops whose first campaigns we are about to narrate.

The amount of transportation that can be effected by means of railways enters as a no less important element in the movements of armies, and will prove a source of embarrassment when those armies are large and depend upon a single line for their supplies. Frequent examples of this will appear in our narrative; consequently, the organization of the railway service, and the skill with which all its details were regulated, contributed essentially to success during this difficult war. We will only cite one instance at present—that of Hooker's army, 23,000 strong, which in 1863 was transported with all its materiel, its horses and wagons, from the Rapidan to Stevenson in Alabama, a distance of nearly 2000 kilometres, by rail in seven days. This shows the great services railways were able to render by concentrating an army on any given point of the continent; but it was much easier to accomplish a movement of this kind than to supply a large army daily with provisions at the terminus of one of those long single-track lines which run through the Southern States; in fact, their rude construction required constant repairs, and consequently occasioned frequent interruptions, so that beyond a certain distance, varying naturally according to circumstances, they were not sufficient to transport the required supply without the aid of another line, or, better still, of a river.

Naturally, the amount of transportation that could be made by water was only limited by the number of vessels at hand. But, as we have said before, the rivers afford at once the best means for provisioning an army, and a powerful auxiliary for all offensive operations. We shall always find, therefore, that whenever the Federals were supported by a river, their progress was certain and their conquests decisive; whilst the successes they obtained by following a simple line of railways were always precarious, new dangers springing up in their rear in proportion as they advanced. The revictualling of an army in sight of the enemy