This valley of “Jeems River,” and the three other valleys which radiate like the four fingers of an open hand, and send their waters down into the great conduit of Chesapeake Bay, which is the palm to these four fingers, are in this very month of April, when I write, to become the great battle-field of the continent.  How strangely history repeats itself, that, after eighty-one years, we should be looking out on the map the Rapid Ann and the Chickahominy, and Williamsburg and Fredericksburg, just as our fathers did in 1781,—­that the grandchildren of the men who marched under Lafayette from Baltimore to Richmond, by the forced march which saved that infant capital from the enemy, should be marching now, with a more Fabian tread, to save the same Richmond from worse enemies!  Does the Comte de Paris trace the footprints of the young Marquis-General, who afterwards, among other things, made his grandfather King?  How strange it all is!  While I wait to know where Fabius is hidden, and where those army-corps of hundreds of thousands are, which seem to have sunk into the ground at Warrenton the other day, you and I, Reader, will familiarize ourselves with the geography a little, by brushing the dust off those old campaigns.

They began by mere predatory excursions, which occupied, for a few weeks at a time, the English forces which could be detached from New York.  “We march up and down the country,” said Cornwallis, not overmuch pleased, “stealing tobacco.”  As early as 1779, on the 8th of May, the Raisonnable, sixty-four, five smaller ships of the English navy, and a number of privateers acting as convoy to a cloud of transports, entered the Capes of the Chesapeake.  The Raisonnable drew too much water to go farther than Hampton Roads:  they probably did not know the channel as well as the Merrimack’s pilots do.  But the rest of them went up Elizabeth River, as one Pawnee did afterwards,—­and there, at Gosport, found the State’s navy-yard, as the Pawnee found a nation’s.  There was a vessel of war, unfinished, of twenty-eight guns, and many smaller vessels,—­and they burned them all.  How exactly it begins as the history of another war begins!  Different branches of this expedition destroyed one hundred and thirty-seven vessels, and tobacco beyond account,—­and they were all snugly back in New York in twenty-four days after they started.

It is the second campaign which is the most picturesque, varied, and exciting of the campaigns of the American Revolution,—­and which was fought on ground which will have been made sacred by another campaign, perhaps even before these words meet the reader’s eye.  The men engaged in it were men who have left their mark.  Cornwallis and Baron Steuben share with each other the honor of inventing the present light-infantry tactics of the world.  Cornwallis. in Carolina, had seen the necessity of divesting his troops of their impediments.  Steuben had been doing the same with the American line, ever since