Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 06.djvu/189

Rh getting back to the regiment. These men reported to me that Round Top was even at that late hour only occupied by a skirmish line.

By a survey of the field, made since the war by United States engineers, it has been demonstrated that Round Top is 116 feet higher than Little Round Top—the latter being 548 feet and the former 664 feet high—and only about 1,000 yards distant from the latter, which is almost in a direct line from the summit of Round Top with Cemetery Ridge, which was occupied by the Federal line of battle; so that it is manifest that if General Longstreet had crowned Round Top with his artillery any time that afternoon, even though it had only been supported by the two Alabama regiments, who had possession of it until sunset, he would have won the battle. General Longstreet, in his article of the 3d of November last, claims that Little Round Top was the key to the Federal position. In this he is evidently in error.

In the same article he also says:

This statement is manifestly erroneous, as I have already shown, for although Longstreet was a lieutenant-general commanding a corps, and I but a colonel commanding one regiment, my testimony is to be preferedpreferred [sic] to his, for the plain reason that I was there, on Round Top, while he was not.

Major-General G. K. Warren, in his testimony before the Committee of Congress on the Conduct of the War, volume I, page 377, says: