The battle of the Wilderness . Washington; Lees at OrangeCourt House, sixteen or eighteen miles farther south,were in the vicinity of seventy miles northwest fromRichmond; in geometrical terms, the armies wereat the apex of a flat isosceles triangle, its base a linerunning almost due north and south from Washing-ton to Richmond. Twenty-odd miles to the west,beyond the camps of both armies, rose in matchlesssplendor the azure sky-line of the Blue Ridge, behindwhich lies the Valley of the Shenandoah, Lees gate-way for his two invasions of the North, and availedof by him for repeated strategical
The battle of the Wilderness . Washington; Lees at OrangeCourt House, sixteen or eighteen miles farther south,were in the vicinity of seventy miles northwest fromRichmond; in geometrical terms, the armies wereat the apex of a flat isosceles triangle, its base a linerunning almost due north and south from Washing-ton to Richmond. Twenty-odd miles to the west,beyond the camps of both armies, rose in matchlesssplendor the azure sky-line of the Blue Ridge, behindwhich lies the Valley of the Shenandoah, Lees gate-way for his two invasions of the North, and availedof by him for repeated strategical movementswhereby he forced the Army of the Potomac to fallback for the safety of Washington. We all see nowthat a point convenient to the Baltimore and Ohioroad at the foot of the valley should have been forti-fied, garrisoned, and guarded as tenaciously as W^ash-ington itself. Down from this beautiful range come the Rappa-hannock and the Rapidan, — rivers whose names weshall repeat so often, — which, after flowing through. THE BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS 53 many an oak and chestnut wood and by many asmiling plantation, meet in the northern belt of theWilderness, about twenty miles as the crow flies eastof Culpeper, and nearly the same distance west ofFredericksburg. These rivers, the Rappahannocksomewhat the larger, the Rapidan the faster, holdrich secrets of the struggle, for many a night thearmies camped on their banks, and many a timecrossed and recrossed them, sometimes in victory,and after Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville indismal defeat. And now that I speak of them, Isee them flowing in their willow-fringed channelsand I hear their low musical tongues once more. -The country through which they run, and our corpscamps during the winter of 1863-4, can best be seenfrom the top of Mt. Pony, a wooded detached foothillof the Blue Ridge, that rises abruptly near its top, looking north, the railroad is seen bear-ing on from the Rappahannock, through an undu-la
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, bookpublisherbosto, bookyear1910
