THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
who knew the truth as to where the responsibility for the disaster rested, would have spoken a frank and sympathetic word to remove the stain of ignominy from the slandered troops. It would have been much to the honor of the corps commander, General O. O. Howard, had he done so promptly. He would have stood before his countrymen as Burnside did when, after the bloody defeat at Fredericksburg, he frankly shouldered the responsibility for that calamity, and exonerated his officers and men; or as, two months after the battle of Chancellorsville, General Lee did on the third day of the battle of Gettysburg when that great soldier said to his distressed men, looking up to him: “It is my fault, my men! It is my fault!” Alas, the attitude of our corps commander was different. In a council of war during the night of the 2d to the 3d of May, as was reported, he complained of the “bad conduct” of his corps. In his official report on the battle he spoke of the density of the woods preventing the whereabouts of the enemy from being discovered by scouts and patrols and reconnaissances—an assertion glaringly at variance with the facts, for the scouts and patrols saw and reported the advance of Jackson. He actually spoke of a “panic produced by the enemy's reverse fire, regiments and artillery being thrown suddenly upon those in position,” and of a “blind panic and a great confusion at the center and near the plank-road,” about “a rout which he and his staff officers struggled to check,”—but not a word about a large part of the corps being so posted that it could not fight; not a word to take the responsibility for the disaster from the troops; not a word to confess that he was warned early in the day, and repeatedly as the day advanced, of what was coming; not a word to take the stigma of cowardice from his corps.
Even twenty-three years later, when he contributed an
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