Possibly, had I not expected our commander to write the history of those campaigns, I should have written it myself a decade or so earlier than I have done. But, personally, I am not sorry that I write of the war thirty years after its close, instead of ten or twenty. While I am so constituted, temperamentally, that I could View then almost exactly as I do now the great struggle in which I bore a part, I do not know that others, in any considerable number, might have so regarded it at the earlier periods to which I refer. I believe that now, more fully than then, the public is ready to receive, in the spirit in which it is written, the story which I present.