The Mystery of the Rebel Campaign in Virginia––Mr. Seward's Programme.
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This distinction between the warlike activity and unmistakeable fighting disposition of the rebel troops along the lower Potomac, and round about Norfolk and Fortress Monroe, on the one hand, and the flight of Johnston from Harper's Ferry on the other hand, will afford us the key to a solution of the mystery of the whole rebel campaign in Virginia. It no longer embraces the seizure of Washington––it does not comprehend the subjugation of Western Virginia; but the great and paramount object of the "Confederates," in all their combinations and movements, is to keep this war, if they can, outside the populous slaveholding section of Southwestern Virginia. Between the Manassas Junction southwestwardly, via Lynchburg, to the North Carolina boundary, on the one side, and the Potomac river, Chesapeake bay and the Atlantic seaboard on the other side, perhaps not less than four hundred thousand of the half a million of slaves of Virginia are concentrated. At any point on the Potomac below Mount Vernon this populous slaveholding region is invaded; but from General Butler's position near the mouth of the James river, an advance on his part of twenty miles up the stream, or to the right or the left, would probably soon create a stampede towards his camp of thousands of fugitive slaves.
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[Editor's Note: The majority of this article has been omitted from our transcription except for the portions directly mentioning the term "slave stampedes" or some variant.]
"The Mystery of the Rebel Campaign in Virginia," New York (NY) Herald, June 29, 1861, p. 4..