The traveller lands in a metropolis as large as Paris; before a few hours have passed he may find himself in a wilderness as solitary as the Transvaal; and although within the boundaries of the townships he sees little that differs from the England of the nineteenth century—­beyond them there is much that resembles the England of the Restoration.  Except over a comparatively small area an army operating in the United States would meet with the same obstacles as did the soldiers of Cromwell and Turenne.  Roads are few and indifferent; towns few and far between; food and forage are not easily obtainable, for the country is but partially cultivated; great rivers, bridged at rare intervals, issue from the barren solitudes of rugged plateaus; in many low-lying regions a single storm is sufficient to convert the undrained alluvial into a fetid swamp, and tracts as large as an English county are covered with pathless forest.  Steam and the telegraph, penetrating even the most lonely jungles, afford, it is true, such facilities for moving and feeding large bodies of men that the difficulties presented by untamed Nature have undoubtedly been much reduced.  Nevertheless the whole country, even to-day, would be essentially different from any European theatre of war, save the steppes of Russia; and in 1861 railways were few, and the population comparatively insignificant.

The impediments, then, in the way of military operations were such as no soldier of experience would willingly encounter with an improvised army.  It was no petty republic that the North had undertaken to coerce.  The frontiers of the Confederacy were far apart.  The coast washed by the Gulf of Mexico is eight hundred miles south of Harper’s Ferry on the Potomac; the Rio Grande, the river boundary of Texas, is seventeen hundred miles west of Charleston on the Atlantic.  And over this vast expanse ran but six continuous lines of railway:—­

From the Potomac.

1. [Washington,] Richmond, Lynchburg, Chattanooga, Memphis, New Orleans.

2. [Washington,] Richmond, Weldon, Greensboro, Columbia, Atlanta, New Orleans.

(These connected Richmond with the Mississippi.)

From the Ohio.

3.  Cairo, Memphis, New Orleans.

4.  Cairo, Corinth, Mobile.

5.  Louisville, Nashville, Dalton, Atlanta, Mobile.

(These connected the Ohio with the Gulf of Mexico.)

6.  Richmond, Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah.

(This connected Richmond with the ports on the Atlantic.)