and the second, composed of Steele’s and Stuart’s divisions, to be commanded by me.  Up to that time the army had been styled the right wing of (General Grant’s) Thirteenth Army Corps, and numbered about thirty thousand men.  The aggregate loss during the time of any command, mostly on the 29th of December, was one hundred and seventy-five killed, nine hundred and thirty wounded, and seven hundred and forty-three prisoners.  According to Badeau, the rebels lost sixty-three killed, one hundred and thirty-four wounded, and ten prisoners.  It afterward transpired that Van Dorn had captured Holly Springs on the 20th of December, and that General Grant fell back very soon after.  General Pemberton, who had telegraphic and railroad communication with Vicksburg, was therefore at perfect liberty to reenforce the place with a garrison equal, if not superior, to my command.  The rebels held high, commanding ground, and could see every movement of our men and boats, so that the only possible hope of success consisted in celerity and surprise, and in General Grant’s holding all of Pemberton’s army hard pressed meantime.  General Grant was perfectly aware of this, and had sent me word of the change, but it did not reach me in time; indeed, I was not aware of it until after my assault of December 29th, and until the news was brought me by General McClernand as related.  General McClernand was appointed to this command by President Lincoln in person, who had no knowledge of what was then going on down the river.  Still, my relief, on the heels of a failure, raised the usual cry, at the North, of “repulse, failure, and bungling.”  There was no bungling on my part, for I never worked harder or with more intensity of purpose in my life; and General Grant, long after, in his report of the operations of the siege of Vicksburg, gave us all full credit for the skill of the movement, and described the almost impregnable nature of the ground; and, although in all official reports I assumed the whole responsibility, I have ever felt that had General Morgan promptly and skillfully sustained the lead of Frank Blair’s brigade on that day, we should have broken the rebel line, and effected a lodgment on the hills behind Vicksburg.  General Frank Blair was outspoken and indignant against Generals Morgan and De Courcey at the time, and always abused me for assuming the whole blame.  But, had we succeeded, we might have found ourselves in a worse trap, when General Pemberton was at full liberty to turn his whole force against us.  While I was engaged at Chickasaw Bayou, Admiral Porter was equally busy in the Yazoo River, threatening the enemy’s batteries at Haines’s and Snyder’s Bluffs above.  In a sharp engagement he lost one of his best officers, in the person of Captain Gwin, United States Navy, who, though on board an ironclad, insisted on keeping his post on deck, where he was struck in the breast by a round shot, which carried away the muscle, and contused the lung within, from which he died a few days after.  We of the army deplored his loss quite as much as his fellows of the navy, for he had been intimately associated with us in our previous operations on the Tennessee River, at Shiloh and above, and we had come to regard him as one of us.