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[300] Second Corps (Ewell's) had present for duty 1,374 officers and 15,705 enlisted men, making an aggregate of 17,079, as shown by a statement copied from the returns in the Archive Office at Washington by Col. Walter H. Taylor, and given in his “Four years with Gen. Lee,” page 176. That corps had been engaged in the heaviest of the fighting from the Wilderness to James river, and on the 12th of May nearly one entire division (Johnson's) had been captured. The other divisions had suffered very heavy losses, and there had been no accessions to the corps, except in the return of a small brigade of my own division and two regiments of Rodes's, which had been detached. When I was detached from General Lee's army the whole corps did not amount to 9,000 effectives. At Lynchburg I found Breckinridge with his small division of infantry, with which was serving a small part of a brigade of cavalry which had been dismounted. There were also with him four small brigades of cavalry and a battalion of artillery. The greater part of the cavalry had been with W. E. Jones in his defeat by Hunter at Piedmont, in the Valley, and was very much disorganized and demoralized. None of it belonged to the cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia, but it had been for the most part on service in Western Virginia and East Tennessee. It was not armed as cavalry proper, but had for its armament almost exclusively Enfield rifles. It was, in fact, nothing more than mounted infantry. My very rapid march from Lynchburg in pursuit of Hunter, and then down the Valley and across the Potomac, had caused a considerable number of the infantry to be left behind from inability to keep up, as my men were very badly shod. I had left an officer with a small command at Winchester to collect the stragglers, and on my return to the Valley, after the advance on Washington, I found that something over fifteen hundred stragglers had been collected at Winchester. Moreover, I had sustained a loss of some seven or eight hundred men in killed and wounded in some slight actions in the Valley before crossing the Potomac, and in the fight at the Monocacy. The force of infantry with which I moved on Washington did not, therefore, exceed eight thousand muskets, if it reached that number. In the three battalions of artillery I had nine batteries, neither of which had more than four field-pieces, and some of them not that many. Besides these there were one or two batteries of horse artillery, with the cavalry, the entire number of field-pieces in all the artillery not exceeding forty. Much the largest brigade of cavalry had been detached at Frederick on the expedition that threatened Baltimore and cut the railroads and telegraph between that city and Washington and Philadelphia. Some idea of my strength at the time of the advance on


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Robert Edward Lee (2)
W. Hunter (2)
Walter H. Taylor (1)
Rodes (1)
W. E. Jones (1)
Andrew Johnson (1)
Ewell (1)
John C. Breckinridge (1)
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May 12th (1)
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