s of
operation known to the Administration; for operating on any safe base,
on any of these known lines, the Union armies were not numerically
strong enough to reach the vital point in the Confederate power. The
enemy were in strong force on a line extending from the Potomac,
westward through Bowling Green, to Columbus, on the Mississippi, and
was complete master of all the territory to the Gulf. Kentucky and
Missouri had been admitted formally into the Confederacy, and they had
resolved to move the Capital to Nashville and extend their battle
lines to the northern limits of those States, and the Secretary of
War, after a tour of inspection, reported that these States had not
sufficient force to hold them to the Union.

The war had then been waged seven months, and between 700,000 and
800,000 men had been mustered in the field; the public debt aggregated
over $500,000,000; and the daily average expenses of maintaining the
army was upward of $2,000,000, besides the hundreds of precious lives
which were being daily sacrificed.

Thus, while the two armies were confronting each other in sight of
Washington, events were rapidly pressing in the Southwest which, if
unchecked, would change the destiny of the American people for ages to
come.

Thus, in that ominous silence which preceded the shock and storm, the
two sections stood, each watching and awaiting the movements of the
other. Both were confident; the South greatly strengthened from her
successes and impregnable position; the North strong in its large
excess of numbers, wealth, and the justice of its cause.

The Army of the Potomac and the Army of the West were the two
expeditions on which the Administration relied.

All others were auxiliary to these great movements. The first named,
though seeming to the country of such signal moment, occupied a
position of comparative insignificance when contrasted with the army
of the Southwest, and had chance thrown Richmond under national
control at an earlier day it could not have materially affected the
destiny of the war. Capitals in an insurgent and unrecognized power
can have but very little strategic value, and from the geographical
position of Richmond it had none at all, and they were ready to move
it any day.

They could have surrendered all the Atlantic States to Florida and yet
maintained their independence; indeed, it was upon this theory that
the disunion party had ever based its expectations of separate and