Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 12.djvu/272

 262 Southern Historical Society Papers.

gard, and in which the immortal Jackson alone is acknowledged to have been his peer." Over and over again, with tiresome iteration, are Davis, Cooper and Lee denounced for not committing themselves without hesitation to a scheme utterly impracticable as Beauregard put it, since it assumed nearly three times as many troops with John- ston as he actually had. Had the troops been at hand, half-drilled, inexperienced, badly equipped, with insufhcient transportation, as they were, the chances of success would not have been more than one in one hundred, and there is nothing in General Beauregard's subsequent career to lead to the conviction that he was the man to seize that single chance. Again, the dispatch of the 19th is tortured to mean a withdrawal of assent to the union of Johnston and Beaure- gard, and the latter is highly praised for pocketing the dispatch and thus insuring the junction of the two forces, while Mr. Davis is un- sparingly condemned for sending it. The dispatch shows for itself. Johnston was not to be stopped unless McDowell had abandoned his immediate attack, and even then discretion was left with Johnston (the senior officer) as to his movements. McDowell had not abandoned his attack, and therefore Beauregard did simply his duty in holding the dispatch. Colonel Roman goes on to say :

" We assert it as an incontrovertible truth, fully proved by later events, that the President of the Confederacy, by neglecting to com- pel his Quartermaster-General to procure the transportation which could have been easily procured more than a month before the battle of Manassas ; by refusing, as early as the 13th of June, to assent to General Beauregard's urgent request that authority should be given to concentrate our forces at the proper moment at Manassas Junc- tion ; by again refusing, on the 15th of July, to allow him to execute his bold, offensive plans against the enemy, the certain result of which would have been the taking of Washington— that the President of the Confederacy, by thus persisting in these three lamentable errors, lost the South her indepcjidencer

It is hard to know how to characterize this wild statement seriously. That the Quartermaster and Commissary, as well as all other depart- ments of the Confederate Government and army, were new and in many respects inefficient, was certainly the case ; but probably no country without any military establishment or central government, and peopled by citizens untrained to war for generations, ever acted with greater energy than did the South in the three months between the opening of the war and the battle of Manassas in raising and supplying armies. The victory of Manassas is itself one of the best