regard, but I may be permitted to say that he is certainly the last officer against whom the charge of want of military enterprise can be established; for he is the commander who, before the metal of our troops had been tested, arranged his command of 18,500 men to accept battle with the army of McDowell, 50,000 strong, whose forces he actually engaged the 18th of July at Bull Run. Animated by the plain dictates of prudence and foresight, he sought to be ready for the coming storm, which he had anticipated and predicted as early as the afternoon of the 5th.
To have continued the conflict another hour—that is, until darkness on the 6th instant—would not have resulted in the capture of Grant's army, wrecked even as it was and cowering under the high river banks, yet sheltered by his gunboats, but in the greater dispersion and disorganization of our own jaded troops, and to such an extent, indeed, in such a field as to have rendered it impossible to have collected them on the next morning in any order to have offered resistance even to Wallace's fresh division of Grant's army. Even as it was, at no time during the 7th of April were we able to engage the enemy with more than 15,000 men, with whom, however, properly massed and handled, we held the field against Wallace, the debris of Grant's division and Buell's army (35,000) until it became evidently wrong to maintain longer so unequal a battle; our forces were withdrawn from the field in an order and spirit without a parallel in war, and without abatement of the honor they had won for our arms, leaving the enemy stunned and unable to follow.
Chattanooga, Tennessee, August 8, 1862.
