.

According to the Official Records, the North, at the beginning of
April, had more than 900,000 soldiers under arms; the South, so far
as can be ascertained, not more than 600,000. The Army of the Potomac
was receiving constant reinforcements, and at the beginning of April,
130,000 men were encamped on the Stafford Heights. In the West, the
whole extent of the Mississippi, with the exception of the hundred
miles between Vicksburg and Port Hudson, was held by the Federals,
and those important fortresses were both threatened by large armies,
acting in concert with a formidable fleet of gunboats. A third army,
over 50,000 strong, was posted at Murfreesboro', in the heart of
Tennessee, and large detached forces were operating in Louisiana and
Arkansas. The inroads of the enemy in the West, greatly aided by the
waterways, were in fact far more serious than in the East; but even
in Virginia, although the Army of the Potomac had spent nearly two
years in advancing fifty miles, the Federals had a strong foothold.
Winchester had been reoccupied. Fortress Monroe was still garrisoned.
Suffolk, on the south bank of the James, seventy miles from Richmond,
was held by a force of 20,000 men; while another small army, of about
the same strength, occupied New Berne, on the North Carolina coast.

Slowly but surely, before the pressure of vastly superior numbers,
the frontiers of the Confederacy were contracting; and although in no
single direction had a Federal army moved more than a few miles from
the river which supplied it, yet the hostile occupation of these
rivers, so essential to internal traffic, was making the question of
subsistence more difficult every day. Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas,
the cattle-raising States, were practically cut off from the
remainder; and in a country where railways were few, distances long,
and roads indifferent, it was impossible, in default of communication
by water, to accumulate and distribute the produce of the farms.
Moreover, the dark menace of the blockade had assumed more formidable
proportions. The Federal navy, gradually increasing in numbers and
activity, held the highway of the ocean in an iron grip; and proudly
though the Confederacy bore her isolation, men looked across the
waters with dread foreboding, for the shadow of their doom was
already rising from the pitiless sea.

If, then, his staff officers had some reason to complain of their
chief's silence and abstraction, it was by no