[287]
To this there is a foot note as follows:
The officer named is my authority for this statement.On page 358 there is this foot note:
The absence of Pickett's division on the day before made General Longstreet very loth to make the attack; but Lee, thinking the Union force was not all up, would not wait. Longstreet urged in reply that this advantage (or supposed advantage, for the Union force was all up) was countervailed by the fact that he was not all up either, but the Confederate commander was not minded to delay. My authority is again General Longstreet.These uncontradicted statements by Swinton, the genuineness of which is now verified by similar statements under General Longstreet's direct authority, not only justified me in the remarks I made, but imperatively demanded a defence of General Lee against the severe criticisms based on them, in the address delivered on the occasion referred to, which necessarily involved a review of his military career. When General Longstreet had thus thrown down the gauntlet, he had no right to complain that a friend of General Lee took it up. After he had begun to muddy the stream at as early a period as twenty days after the battle of Gettysburg, by his letter to his uncle, and when he resumed the work then begun immediately after the war by his communications to Mr. Swinton, his complaint now of being “rancorously assailed by those whose intimacy with the Commanding-General in that battle gives an apparent importance to their assaults,” brings to mind very forcibly the fable of the wolf and the lamb. In February, 1876, he made a bitter assault on myself, among others, in a long article published in a New Orleans paper, the gravimen of his complaint against me being the remarks about Gettysburg contained in my address which I have given. I replied to him, and I think I demonstrated beyond all question that he was responsible for the loss of the battle of Gettysburg. I did not in either of my. articles in reply to him assert that an order was given him to attack at sunrise on the 2nd. As before stated, I do not know what orders were given him, nor when they were given. I only know the declared purpose of General Lee, and I cannot believe that he did not take every step necessary to
