Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 1.djvu/426

392 of night and the prevalence of a violent storm of wind and rain to recross the river.” To assume that, with a knowledge of our condition, Lee would not have launched his columns, under the protecting fire of his artillery, down upon our broken, shattered, cowed, huddled-up right, would be simply to deny, as I have already said, his indisputable mastery of the art of war. It is true that the line of the right on the first crest, from which our attacks were started, was held during the night following the battle and during the next day by the organizations that last came into the fight. But, owing to casualties and depletion through skulking, they numbered barely one-third of their strength before the battle, and hence could have offered but a weak resistance.

The discredit to the Federal arms on account of the battle of Fredericksburg is not diminished by the relative strength of the two armies. The Army of Northern Virginia was composed of the First Army Corps under General James Longstreet and the Second under General Thomas J. Jackson; the former opposed to our right and the latter to our left. The First Corps consisted of five divisions with a total of sixteen brigades, varying from two to five regiments. The Second Corps was made up of four divisions with nineteen brigades of from two to seven regiments. The two corps thus represented an aggregate of nine divisions with thirty-five brigades. There was a cavalry force also, but it played as little part in the battle as our own. There appear to have been fifty-one batteries attached to the rebel army. The Army of the Potomac consisted, as set forth, of six army corps of eighteen divisions and fifty-six brigades, with seventy batteries of from four to six guns each. A comparison of the respective organizations shows that our brigades averaged more regiments than those of the enemy. The entire effective force of Lee, according to rebel authority, was, indeed, under fifty thousand, while Burnside's before the battle was more than double that number. Nor is this all. Lee, in his