Excerpt from The Twelve Decisive Battles of the War: A History of the Eastern and Western Campaigns, in Relation to the Actions That Decided Their Issue During the late War it was common to speak of the in. Decisiveness of its greatest battles. In one sense, the reflec tion was just; since the very occurrence of so many engage ments showed that no one had been finally decisive. But in the more important sense, the comment was false; and its error lay in forgetting that a battle inconclusive as to the whole problem of the war may yet be conclusive as to one stage of that problem. This distinction could not easily be drawn during the heat and ferment of actual conflict; and especially when popular criticism was more in the way of impatient complaint against the conduct of operations than of thoughtful study of their weight and meaning. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.