June 30, 1863, Weekly Columbus Enquirer (Georgia)
An exchanged Massachusetts officer, who was taken prisoner on the Rappahannock, says of our soldiers:
Doubtless a great many reasons are given for our most disgraceful and disastrous defeat at Chancellorsville. There is only one real reason, and that the simplest possible. Our army didn’t fight as well as that of our enemies. We had every possible advantage. Our numbers more than doubled theirs till Longstreet’s reinforcements came up, which didn’t then bring their forces up to 100,000 to oppose our 130,000. Indeed, it would now seem that Longstreet didn’t come up at all. We had the advantage of position and no inconsiderable amount of entrenchment. Gen. Hooker’s plan was admirably arranged and excellently carried out, until the fighting took place.–He exposed himself in the hottest place of danger and set an electrifying example of heroism to the whole army. The terrible loss of life among our Generals shows that on the whole they were not found wanting at their posts of duty. We had men enough, well enough equipped and well enough posted, to have devoured the ragged, imperfectly armed and equipped host of our enemies from the face of the earth.
Their artillery horses are poor, starved frames of beasts, tied on to their carriages and caissons with odds and ends of rope and strips of raw hide. Their supply and ammunition trains look like a congregation of all the crippled California emigrant trains that ever escaped off the desert out of the clutches of the rampaging Commanche Indians. The men are ill-dressed, ill-equipped, and ill-provided, a set of ragamuffins that a man is ashamed to be seen among, even when he is a prisoner and can’t help it. And yet they have beaten us fairly, beaten us all to pieces, beaten us so easily that we are objects of contempt even to their commonest private soldiers, with no shirts to hang out of the holes of their pantaloons, and cartridge boxes tied round their waists with strands of ropes. I say they beat us easily, for there hasn’t been much of a fight up here on the Rappahannock after all, the newspapers to the contrary notwithstanding. There was an awful noise, for I heard it. There was a tremendous amount of powder exploded, for I saw the smoke of it ascend up to heaven. There was a vast amount of running done “faced by the rear rank,” but I cannot learn that there was in any part of the field very much real fighting.