![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It was an enormous advantage for the Confederates and under different leadership might possibly have been decisive.įamiliarity with the “topography” - which means the collective physical and cultural features of a given place: the rivers, the roads, the land forms, the population, the crops - is critical in any military operation. The sympathetic locals were not merely informing the Confederates, they were also misleading the Federals. They also had the advantage of a legion of spies in the local population. The poignant stories of Rebel soldiers dying on their own doorsteps or in their own fields indicate that within the ranks of their armies were men who knew the location of fording sites, the destination of roads, and the grade of mountain passes. The Confederate army was operating in familiar surroundings and in the midst of a strongly supportive population. It was the Union forces that had by far the greater need for maps and it was the Union forces that were helpless without them. It was the unusual, strictly sectional nature of this particular civil war that made maps far more of a factor for the Union. However, the effect maps (again really the absence of maps) had during the war is undoubted and can be repeatedly demonstrated. It might be too much to claim that maps could somehow have changed the outcome of the war one way or the other. The story of maps in the Civil War is really more the story of the lack of maps in the Civil War. ![]()
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