General Joseph E. Johnston, Narrative of Military Operations During the Civil War

From the observation of our most experienced officers, daily statements of prisoners, and publications which we read in the newspapers of Louisville, Cincinnati, and Chicago, the Federal loss in killed and wounded must have been six times as great as ours. The only occasions on which we had opportunities to estimate it were, the attack on our right by the Fourth Corps, May 27th, and that on our whole army, June 27th. If, as is probable, the proportion of killed to wounded was the ordinary one of one to five, in the Federal army, its losses, on those two occasions, exceeded ours by more than ten to one. The Federal prisoners concurred in saying that their greatest losses occurred in the daily attacks made by them in line of battle upon our skirmishers in their rifle-pits. Whether these attacks were successful or not, they exposed the assailants to heavy losses, and the assailed to almost none. In memoranda of the service of his own corps in this campaign, General Hardee wrote: “But the heaviest losses of the enemy were not in the assaults and partial engagements of the campaign, but in the daily skirmishing. This was kept up continuously for seventy days, during which the two armies never lost their grapple. It soon became customary, in taking up a new position, to intrench the skirmish-line, until it was only less strong than the main one. This line was well manned, and the roar of musketry on it was sometimes scarcely distinguishable from the sound of a general engagement. It was not unfrequently the case that one, two, and even three lines of battle of the enemy were repulsed in an assault upon one of our skirmish-lines.” The Federal cemetery at Marietta contains