hazardous” march around Hooker’s flank, he ought, by all rules of war, to have been destroyed, but when he was not he upset all Hooker’s calculations, and that therefore Hooker was forced to retreat,—­it is quite beyond my ability to reply.  When Gen. Sickles throws the blame upon Howard for the defeat of the Eleventh Corps, by reading the 9.30 A.M. order, without saying one word about Hooker’s actions, change of plans, and despatches from that hour till the attack at 6 P.M., he makes any thinking man question seriously the sincerity of what he calls history.  When Gen. Butterfield indulges in innuendoes against Gen. Meade, whose chief of staff he was, and insults his memory in the effort to exculpate the Third Corps from a charge no one has ever made, or thought of making, against it, the fair-minded can only wonder why he goes out of his way to call any one to task for criticising Hooker.  Not one word was spoken on Fast Day which does not find its full and entire answer in the already published works on Chancellorsville.  It was all a mere re-hash, and poorly cooked at that.  To rely on the four reasons given by the Committee on the Conduct of the War as a purgation of Hooker from responsibility for our defeat at Chancellorsville, simply deserves no notice.  It is all of a piece with the discussion of the Third-Corps fight at Gettysburg on July 2.  No one ever doubted that the Third Corps fought, as they always did, like heroes that day.  What has been alleged is merely that Sickles did not occupy and protect Little Round Top, as he would have done if he had had the military coup d’oeil.

Now, I desire to compare with Hooker’s recorded words, and the utterances of Fast Day, the actual performance, and see what “loyalty to Hooker,” as voted in Music Hall, means.  Chancellorsville bristles with points of criticism, and there are some few points of possible disagreement.  Of the latter the principal ones upon which Hooker’s formal apologists rely, are the destruction of the Eleventh Corps through Howard’s alleged carelessness, and the failure of Sedgwick to perform the herculean task assigned to him in coming to Hooker’s support.  Allowing, for the moment, that Howard and Sedgwick were entirely at fault, and eliminating these two questions entirely from the issue, let us see what Hooker himself did, bearing in mind that he has officially acknowledged that he knew, substantially, the number of Lee’s army, and bearing also in mind that the following are facts which can be disputed only by denying the truth and accuracy of all the reports, Federal and Confederate, taken as a body; and these happen to dovetail into each other in one so consistent whole, that they leave to the careful student none but entirely insignificant items open to doubt.