All others were auxiliary to these great movements. The first named, though seeming to the country of such signal moment, occupied a position of comparative insignificance when contrasted with the army of the Southwest, and had chance thrown Richmond under national control at an earlier day it could not have materially affected the destiny of the war. Capitals in an insurgent and unrecognized power can have but very little strategic value, and from the geographical position of Richmond it had none at all, and they were ready to move it any day. They could have surrendered all the Atlantic States to Florida and yet maintained their independence; indeed, it was upon this theory that the disunion party had ever based its expectations of separate and independent nationality. Could the Confederates have held their power over the Mississippi Valley but a few more months they would have so connected themselves with France through Texas and with England through the States of the great northwest as not only to have made good their own independence but to have dwarfed the United States to the area of their old thirteen and taken the lead as the controlling political power on this continent. With the Mississippi in their possession to the mouth of the Ohio, the presence of the English and French fleets at New Orleans would have brought about that result. The Army of the Potomac, after having been put upon a scale of the rarest magnificence consistent with mobility, and with several changes of commanders, took three years and a half to reach Richmond, and was not then half way to a decisive point, and never would have been strong enough had the expedition to open the Mississippi been executed on the plan as originally devised. Strategically an invasion always leads to deep lines of operations which, on account of the difficulty of maintaining communications with its base, are always dangerous in a hostile country, and every mile the national armies advanced, every victory they gained, carried them farther from their base, and required an increase of force to protect their communications; while every retreat of the enemy brought him nearer to his resources, and it is mathematically certain that he would soon have reached the point on that line where he would have been the superior power. Nothing but the results of the Tennessee campaign prevented Lee from recruiting his army and extorted from him his sword at Appomatox Court-House.