While many authorities were consulted in the preparation of this work, particular acknowledgment is due John Formby’s “The American Civil War,” wherein was suggested the proposition that is here laid down and expanded; to Van Horne’s “History of the Army of the Cumberland,” which gives the campaigns of that organization in minute detail; to several of the papers and books of Charles Francis Adams,—documents that deal principally with the diplomacy of the Civil War, and to the published and spoken words of the author’s father,—the late Wilson Vance,—orderly to the brigade commander whose charge against orders turned defeat into victory in the battle here described. The book grows out of a short article published in the Newark Sunday Call, December 29, 1912,—an article that attracted considerable attention, rather because of the novelty of the theory advanced than because of other merit.It may be permissible to add that few persons,—comparatively,—conceive the bearing on the outcome of the Civil War, of the campaigns and battles that took place beyond the Alleghanies. There is more than one pretentious history, which would lead a reader to suppose that all of the events of importance took place upon the Atlantic seaboard. It does not diminish in the least either the merit or the renown of the armies that measured their strength in that confined arena to suggest that the movements that resulted in the transfer of the control over hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory,—territory that teemed with the fruits of the earth,—was, taken in connection with the naval blockade, a very considerable factor in the wearing down and final collapse of the Southern Confederacy.