good works of very different kinds are: A History of the Civil War in the United States (1905), by W. Birkbeck Wood and Major J. E. Edmonds, and A History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, 8 vols. (1893-1919), by James Ford Rhodes. The first is military, the second political. Mr. Rhodes has also written a single volume History of the Civil War (1917). American Campaigns by Major M. F. Steele, issued under the supervision of the War Department (1909), deals chiefly with the military operations of the Civil War.

The naval side of this, as of all other wars, has been far too much neglected. But that great historian of sea-power, Admiral Mahan, has told the best of the story in his Admiral Farragut (1892).

An interesting contemporary account of the war will be found in the five volumes of Appleton's American Annual Cyclopædia for the years from 1861 to 1865. B. J. Lossing's Pictorial History of the Civil War, 3 vols. (1866-69), and Harper's Pictorial History of the Rebellion, 2 vols. (1868), give graphic pictures of military life as seen by contemporaries. Personal reminiscences of the war, of varying merit, have multiplied rapidly in recent years. These are appraised for the unwary reader in the bibliographies already mentioned. Frank Wilkeson's Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac (1887), George C. Eggleston's A Rebel's Recollections (1905), and Mrs. Mary B. Chestnut's Diary from Dixie (1905) are among the best of these personal recollections.

The political and diplomatic history has been dealt with already in the two preceding Chronicles. Abraham Lincoln: a History, by John G. Nicolay and John Hay,

in ten volumes (1890), and The Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, in twelve volumes (1905), form the quarry from which all true accounts of his war statesmanship must be built up. Lord Charnwood's Abraham Lincoln (1917) is an admirable summary. To these titles should be added Gideon Welles's Diary, 3 vols. (1911), and, on the Confederate side, Jefferson Davis's The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, 2 vols. (1881), and Alexander H. Stephens's A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, 2 vols. (1870). The best life of Jefferson Davis is that by William E. Dodd in the American Crisis Biographies (1907). W. H. Russell's My Diary North and South (1863) records the impressions of an intelligent foreign observer.

The present Chronicle is based entirely on the original evidence, with the convenient use only of such works as have themselves been written by qualified experts directly from the original evidence.