Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 24.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

Having seen it stated in several papers published in the United States that I am an applicant for pardon, I desire to say, through your columns, that there is no truth whatever in this statement. I have neither made nor authorized such application, and would not accept a pardon from the President of the United States if gratuitously tendered me without conditions or restrictions of any kind. I have nothing to regret in the course pursued by me during the war, except that my services were not of more avail to the cause for which I fought; and my faith in the justice of that cause is not at all shaken by the result.

I have not given a parole or incurred any obligation to the authorities of the United States, and I utterly disclaim all allegiance to, or dependence upon, the government of that country. I am a voluntary exile from my own country, because I am not willing to submit to the foreign yoke imposed upon it. All declarations attributed to me which are inconsistent with the above statements are entirely without foundation, and I hope there will be no further misapprehension as to my position.

The reports of the campaigns of 1864 and 1865 by Secretary Stanton and Lieutenant-General Grant, recently published, contain many erroneous statements, which do great injustice to the Confederate armies. The press in the Southern States is at present effectually [177] muzzled by military rule, and the Confederate cause has no appropriate organ by which the ears of the world can be reached. The time will arrive, however, when a true history of the warfare can be written so as to enable foreign nations and posterity to do justice to the character of those who have sustained so unequal a struggle for all that is dear to man. In anticipation of that time, I will call attention to some facts which will show the tremendous odds the Confederate armies had to encounter.

Mr. Secretary Stanton's report shows that the available strength present for duty in the army with which General Grant commenced the campaign of 1864 was, on 1st of May, 1864, as follows:

The Army of the Potomac (under Gen. Meade）	120,386
The Ninth Army Corps (under Gen. Burnside）	20,780
	———
Aggregate	141,166

Beside this, he says the chief part of the force designed to guard the Middle Department and the Department of Washington ‘was called to the front to repair losses in the Army of the Potomac,’ which doubtless was done before that army left the vicinity of Spotsylvania Courthouse, as General Grant says: ‘The 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th (of May, 1864) were consumed in manoeuvering and waiting for re inforcements from Washington,’ and Mr. Stanton says the sending of these troops to the front caused the detaching from General Lee's army of the force under me to threaten Baltimore and Washington. The available strength of the forces in those departments, on the 1st of May, according to Mr. Stanton's report, was as follows:

In the Department of Washington	42,124
In the Middle Department	5,627
	———
Aggregate	47,751

of which it may be safely assumed that at least 40,000 men were sent to the front, as General Grant says that when I approached Washington, the garrisons of that place and Baltimore were ‘made up of heavy artillery regiments, hundred days men, and detachments from the Invalid Corps,’ and hence it became necessary to send troops from his army to meet me. This, therefore, made an army of over 180,000 men which General Lee's army had to meet before, as I will show, it had received any re-inforcements whatever. This estimate does not include the re-inforcements received in the [178] way of recruits from voluntary enlistments and the draft, which were entirely going on, nor does it include re-inforcements from the Northern Department and the Department of the East and the Susquehanna, where they were, by Mr. Stanton's showing, 15,344 available men for duty, the greater part of which, it is presumed, were sent to Grant, as, otherwise, they might have been brought to Washington to meet my force with more ease than troops from his army.

General Lee's army, at the beginning of the campaign, consisted of two divisions of Longstreet's Corps, Ewell's Corps, A. P. Hill's Corps, three divisions of cavalry and the artillery. I commanded, at different times during the campaign, Hill's and Ewell's Corps, and am, therefore, able to state very nearly the entire strength of the army. Ewell's Corps, to which I belonged, did not exceed 14,000 muskets at the beginning of the campaign. When I was placed in command of Hill's Corps on the 8th of May, by reason of General Hill's sickness, its effective strength was less than 13,000 muskets, and it could not have exceeded 18,000 in the beginning. Longstreet's Corps was the weakest of the three, when all the divisions were present, and the two with him had just returned from an arduous and exhausting winter campaign in East Tennessee. His effective strength could not have exceeded 8,000 muskets. General Lee's whole effective infantry, therefore, did not exceed 40,000 muskets, if it reached that number. The cavalry divisions were all weak, neither of them exceeding the strength of a good brigade. The artillery was in proportion to the other arms, and was far exceeded by Grant's, not only in the number of men and guns, but in weight of metal, and especially in the quality of the ammunition. General Lee's whole effective strength at the opening of the campaign was not over 50,000 men of all arms. There were no means of recruiting the ranks of his army, and no reinforcements were received until it reached Hanover Junction on the 23d of May. It was this force, therefore, which compelled Grant, after the fighting at the Wilderness and around Spotsylvania Courthouse, including the memorable 12th of May, to wait six days for reinforcements from Washington before he could move, and baffled his favorite plan of reaching Richmond. At Hanover Junction General Lee was joined by Pickett's Division of Longstreet's Corps, one small brigade of my division of Ewell's Corps, which had been in North Carolina with Hoke, and two small brigades, with a battalion of artillery, under Breckinridge. This force under Breckinridge, which General Grant estimates at 15,000, and which was subsequently united to mine at Lynchburg, [179] did not exceed 2,000 muskets. At Cold Harbor, about the 1st of June, Hoke's Division, from Petersburg, joined General Lee, but Breckinridge's force was sent back immediately after its arrival near that place, on account of the defeat and death of General William E. Jones, at Piedmont, in the Shenandoah Valley, and Ewell's Corps, with two battalions of artillery, was detached under my command on the morning of the 13th of June to meet Hunter. This counterbalanced all reinforcements. The foregoing statement, which fully covers General Lee's strength, shows the disparity of forces between the two armies in the beginning, and it was never lessened after they reached the vicinity of Richmond and Petersburg, but was greatly increased. The curious may speculate as to what would have been the result if the resources in men and munitions of war of the two commanders had been reversed, or if Lee's strength had approximated Grant's. Occupying a neutral position, as between the two Federal commanders, Grant and Butler, and certainly having no reason to admire the latter, I cannot but be amused at the effort of Grant, by the use of few flash phrases, to make Butler the scapegoat of all his failures.

The disparity between the forces of Sheridan and myself in the Valley campaign was even greater than that between Lee and Grant. My force, when I arrived in front of the fortifications of Washington on the 11th of July, 1864, was 8,000 muskets, three small battalions of artillery with about forty field pieces, of which the largest were twelve pounder Napoleons, and about 2,000 badly mounted and equipped cavalry, of which a large portion had been detached to cut the railroads leading from Baltimore north. General Grant says that two divisions of the 6th Corps and the advance of the 19th Corps arrived at Washington before I did, and Mr. Stanton says I was met there by the 6th Corps, a part of the 19th Corps under General Emory, and a part of the 8th Corps under General Gilmore. My force had then marched over 500 miles, marching at least twenty miles each day, except the day of the fight at Monocacy, when it marched fourteen miles and fought and defeated Wallace.

At the battle of Winchester, or Opequan as it is called by General Grant, my effective strength was about 8,500 muskets, the three battalions of artillery and less than 3,000 cavalry. Sheridan's infantry consisted of the 6th, 19th and Cook's Corps, composed one division of the 8th Corps and what was called the ‘Army of West Virginia.’ Some idea may be formed of the strength of the 6th Corps when it is recollected that the Army of the Potomac was composed of [180] three corps on the 1st of May previous, to-wit: the 2d, 5th, and 6th, and that its effective strength then was, according to Mr. Stanton's statement, 120,386. The same statement shows that the available strength of the forces in the ‘Department of West Virginia,’ on the 1st of May, 30,782, and most of the troops in this department were concentrated in the Valley. Documents subsequently captured showed the strength of the 19th Corps to have at the battle of Winchester, not less than 12,000 effective men. Official reports captured at Cedar creek showed that Sheridan's Cavalry, on the 17th of September, two days before the fight, numbered 10,100 present for duty. His artillery was vastly superior to mine in number of men and guns. The 6th Corps alone must have exceeded my entire strength, unless it had met with such tremendous losses as to reduce its strength at least three-fourths. From all the information received and from documents captured at Cedar creek, I am satisfied that Sheridan's effective infantry strength at Winchester could not have been less than 35,000 muskets, and it was probably more. The odds against me, therefore, were fully four to one, and probably more. His very great superiority in cavalry was very disadvantageous to me, as the country was very open and admirably adopted to cavalry operations, and my cavalry, being mostly armed with Enfield rifles without pistols or sabers, could not fight his, whose equipment and arms were complete. At the fight at Cedar creek I had been re-enforced by one division of infantry (Kershaw's) numbering 2,700 muskets, one small battalion of artillery and about 600 cavalry; which about made up my losses at Winchester and Fisher's Hill. I went into this fight with 8,500 muskets, about forty pieces of artillery and about 1,200 cavalry, as the rest of my cavalry, which was guarding the Luray Valley, did not get up in time, though ordered to move at the same time I moved to the attack. Sheridan's infantry had been recruited fully up to its strength at Winchester, and his cavalry numbered 8,700, as shown by the official reports captured. The main cause why the route of his army in the morning was not complete was the fact that my cavalry could not compete with his and the latter, therefore, remained intact. He claimed all his own guns that had been captured in the morning and afterward recaptured, as so many guns captured from me, whereas I lost only twenty-three guns, and the loss of these and the wagons which were taken was mainly owing to the fact that a bridge, on a narrow part of the road between Cedar creek and Fisher's Hill, broke down, and the guns and wagons, which latter were not numerous, could not be [181] brought off. Pursuit was not made to Mount Jackson, as stated by both Grant and Stanton, but my troops were halted for the night at Fisher's Hill, three miles from Cedar creek, and the next day moved back to New Market, six miles from Mount Jackson, without any pursuit at all. So far from its being true, as stated by Mr. Stanton, that no force appeared in the Valley after this, the fact is that I reorganized my force at New Market, and on the 10th of November moved down the Valley again and confronted Sheridan on the 11th and 12th in front of his intrenchments between Newtown and Kearnstown, and then retired back to New Market because provisions and forage could not be obtained in the lower Valley. The expeditions by which the posts of New creek and Beverly were subsequently captured, were sent out also from my force in the Valley. The strong force which General Grant says was entrenched under me at Waynesboro, when Sheridan advanced up the Valley in the latter part of February, 1865, with two divisions of cavalry of 5,000 each (10,000 in all), consisted of about 1,000 infantry and a few pieces of artillery, most of my infantry having been returned to General Lee to meet corresponding detachments from Sheridan to Grant, and all my cavalry and most of the artillery having been sent off on account of the impossibility of foraging the horses in the Valley. Obvious reasons of policy prevented any publication of these facts during the war, and it will now be seen that I was leading a forlorn hope all the time, and the public can appreciate the character of the victories won by Sheridan over me.

The statements I have made are from facts coming within my own knowledge, and they are made to show the disparity between the Confederate armies and those of the United States. These statements will serve to give some idea of the disparities existing in other lines. I now ask which has retired from the contest with more true glory, that heroic band of Confederates who so long withstood the tremendous armies and resources of the United States, or that ‘Grand Army of the Union,’ which, while being recruited from all the world, was enabled by ‘continuous hammering’ to so exhaust it opponent ‘by mere attrition’ as to compel a surrender? The world has never witnessed so great a political crime as that committed in the destruction of the Confederate Government by armed force. Other nations, in ancient as well as modern times, have fallen under the yoke of the conqueror or usurper, because their own follies, vices or crimes had prepared the way for their subjugation. Many tears have been shed over the fate of unhappy Poland, but we [182] cannot shut our eyes to the fact that the Poles had shown their incapacity to manage their own government ere they were consigned to foreign rule. In our case, however, the civilized nations of the earth have stood aloof and seen a brave and patriotic people politically murdered, while maintaining an unprecedented struggle for the right of self-government, and manifesting at every step their capacity for it, and this, too, when under an assumed neutrality, the resources of men, money, and munitions of war of those very nations were being freely used to consummate the monstrous deed, and thereby give the final blow to a genuine Republican Government even in the United States.

On behalf of my down-trodden country, I make the appeal to those nations that they will not commit the further injustice of receiving the history of this struggle from the mouths and pens of our enemies, but that they shall wait until the time shall come for placing a true history before them. In the meantime, let all my countrymen who were in a condition to know the character of the contest, put in a tangible form, to be preserved for the use of the future historian, such facts and materials for that history as are in their knowledge or possession.