er 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.

WILSON J. VANCE

NEWARK, N. J., JULY 14, 1914.

INTRODUCTION

On the banks of a shallow winding stream, traversing the region known as
Middle Tennessee, on the last day of December, 1862, and on the first and
second days of January, 1863, a great battle was fought,--a battle that
marked the turning point of the Civil War. Stone's River, as the North
designated it, or Murfreesboro,--to give it the Southern name,--has
hitherto not been estimated at its true importance. To the people of the
two sections it seemed at the time but another Shiloh,--horrifying,
saddening, and bitterly disappointing. Its significance, likewise, has
escaped almost all historians and military critics. But now the
perspective of half a century gives it its proper place in the panorama of
the great conflict.

Gettysburg, indeed, may have been the wound mortal of the Confederacy. But
Gettysburg was, in very truth, a counsel of desperation, undertaken when
the South was bleeding from many a vein. When Lee turned the faces of his
veterans toward the fruitful fields of Pennsylvania, a wall of steel and
fire encompassed his whole country. Warworn Virginia cried out for relief
from the marchings of armies, that her people might raise the crops that
would save them from starvation. Grant had at last established his lines
around the fortress that dominated the Mississippi, and only by such a
diversion, was there hope that his death-grip would be shaken. The day
after Pickett's shattered columns had drifted