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[224] this been done, Jackson's position would have been wholly untenable. Besides, Burnside held the deboiche of the bridge on the extreme left, and threatened the Confederate right; and Porter's corps was fresh—having been in reserve the day previous. If these considerations may be regarded as overruling the reasons that prompted McClellan to postpone attack, then his conduct must be looked upon as an error.

The Confederate campaign in Maryland lasted precisely two weeks. Its failure was signal. Designed as an invasion, it degenerated into a raid. Aiming to raise the standard of revolt in Maryland, and rally the citizens of that State around the secession cause, it resulted in the almost complete disruption of that army itself. Instead of the flocks of recruits he had expected, Lee was doomed to the mortification of seeing his force disintegrating so rapidly as to threaten its utter dissolution, and he confessed with anguish that his army was ‘ruined by straggling.’1 Thoroughly disillusionized, therefore, respecting co-operation in Maryland, on which he had counted so confidently, it is not probable that Lee would have sought to push the invasion far, even had its military incidents turned out better for him; but from the moment he set foot across the Potomac circumstances so shaped themselves as to thwart his designs. The retention of the garrison at Harper's Ferry compelled him to turn aside

1 The Confederate reports are replete with evidence of the enormous straggling that attended the Maryland campaign. Says Lee: ‘The arduous service in which our troops had been engaged, their great privations of rest and food, and the long marches without shoes over mountain roads, had greatly reduced our ranks before the action began. These causes had compelled thousands of brave men to absent themselves, and many more had done so from unworthy motices. This great battle was fought by less than forty thousand men on our side.’—Report, p. 35. Says Hill: ‘Had all our stragglers been up, McClellan's army would have been completely crushed or annihilated. Thousands of thievish poltroons had kept away from sheer cowardice. The straggler is generally a thief, and always a coward, lost to all sense of shame: he can only be kept in the ranks by a strict and sanguinary discipline.’—Reports of Maryland Campaign, vol. II., p. 119.

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Manassas Lee (3)
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