Gen. Howe’s testimony is very positive as to the possibility of the Sixth Corps complying with Hooker’s order as given.  He thinks a night attack could have been made on the Fredericksburg heights, and that they could have been speedily carried, and the corps have been well on the road to Chancellorsville long before daylight.  He also is of opinion that Brooks’s division could have forced its way beyond Salem Church, with proper support.  But we also know how gallant an attempt Brooks made to do this very thing, and how hard he struggled before yielding to failure.

It is in no wise intended to begrudge Gen. Howe his opinion; but he has certainly arrived at some of his conclusions, from premises founded on errors of fact.

The testimony of Col.  Johns, which follows Gen. Howe’s before the Committee on the Conduct of the War, bears only the weight to which the report of the commander of a brigade is entitled, whose duties allowed him to have but a partial view of the general features of the march.  Though his opinion agrees with Gen. Howe’s, he, too, mistakes the hour of the urgent order; and it is difficult to see why he was summoned before the Committee, unless as a partisan.

“My object” (continues Hooker) “in ordering Gen. Sedgwick forward at the time named, was to relieve me from the position in which I found myself at Chancellorsville on the night of the 2d of May.”  This statement is not only characteristic of Hooker’s illogical method, but disingenuous to the degree of mockery.  For this position, it will be remembered, was a strongly intrenched line, held by eighty thousand men, well armed and equipped, having in their front less than half their number of Confederates.  In view of Hooker’s above-quoted opinion about rifle-pits; of the fact that in his testimony he says:  “Throughout the Rebellion I have acted on the principle that if I had as large a force as the enemy, I had no apprehensions of the result of an encounter;” of the fact that the enemy in his front had been cut in two, and would so remain if he only kept the salient, just seized by Sickles and Pleasonton, at the angle south-west of Fairview, well manned; and of the fact that he had unused reserves greater in number than the entire force of the enemy,—­is it not remarkable that, in Hooker’s opinion, nothing short of a countermarch of three miles by the Sixth Corps, the capture of formidable and sufficiently manned intrenchments, (the work of the Army of Northern Virginia during an entire half year,) and an advance of nearly twelve miles,—­all of which was to be accomplished between eleven and daylight of a day in May,—­could operate to “relieve him from the position in which he found himself on the night of the 2d of May”?

“I was of the opinion, that if a portion of the army advanced on Lee’s rear, sooner than allow his troops to remain between me and Sedgwick, Lee would take the road Jackson had marched over on the morning of the 2d, and thus open for me a short road to Richmond, while the enemy, severed from his depot, would have to retire by way of Gordonsville.”  Well enough, but was Sedgwick’s corps the only one to accomplish this?  Where were Reynolds, and Meade, and Howard, forsooth?