Then occurred one of those prolonged and unexplainable pauses in the war to which wondering reference has been made in an earlier chapter of this work. With all the superb autumn weather before them—the very best campaigning weather known to Virginia—neither side did anything or tried to do anything. Lee remained in the neighborhood of Winchester for a month, at once inactive and unmolested. Then he slowly retired to Fredericksburg, where he fortified himself to meet the advance which Burnside, who had succeeded McClellan, seemed to threaten by taking up a position at Acquia Creek, seven miles or so in Fredericksburg's front.
But the battle at Sharpsburg or Antietam, had occurred on the seventeenth of September and it was not until near the middle of December that either of these two armies again challenged the other to a contest of arms.
End of Vol. I.
[Transcribers' Note]
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors, including occasional unpaired quotation marks, were corrected.
Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.
Page [340]: "Pass á l'Outre" was printed with that accent mark.
The book cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the Public Domain.