CAMPAIGNS OF THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC. I THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC IN HISTORY. So soon as the passionate rushing to arms that succeeded the bombardment and fall of Fort Sumter had indicated that a great war was upon the sundered sections of the American Union, it became manifest that Virginia was marked out as the principal theatre of the impending conflict. The tidings of what had happened in the harbor of Charleston found that State assembled at Richmond in high debate on the question of Secession; and then whatever there was in its councils of what men called "Unionism" or conservatism was hushed, and in wild tumult Virginia was voted out of the Union and into the Confederacy. her This, Virginia voted on the 16th of April, 1861; but from eyes was hid what else she voted-to wit, a War destined to redden all her streams, to desolate her fertile fields, to cut off the flower of her young men, and to leave her at its close a wreck and waif of fortune. When Virginia linked her destiny with the Confederacy, those who controlled the Secession Revolution signified their appreciation of the accession of that ancient and powerful Commonwealth by transferring to her chief city the capital of the Confederate Government; and whereas that Government had borne the profix "provisional" at Montgomery, at Richmond it assumed to itself the style and title of "permanent." Thus marked out as a seat of war by virtue of being the administrative centre of the insurgent power, Virginia was furthermore marked out as the main seat of war by her geographical relations as a frontier State. For upon her wwwssion the Potomac, her northern boundary, became, for all The region between the Atlantic and the Alleghanies, the dividing line betwixt those "points of mighty opposites" the |