I had sufficient force to beat the enemy if he attacked me, but had not subsistence sufficient to keep my troops two weeks longer from starvation.

In his report of December 2 General Halleck says that just before the evacuation I reported that I had "several weeks' supplies;" but in his letter of February 8 he asserts that in a dispatch of September 11, 1862, alleged to have been written by me six days before the evacuation, I said that I had "supplies for seventy or eighty days." But in that same letter General Halleck says, "it is true that he (Morgan) stated in his dispatches that his supplies were limitedJanuary

How then does General Halleck reconcile the assertion of seventy or eighty days' supplies with his admission that I reported that my supplies were limited? He says that I so stated in my dispatch of September 11, 1862. But I deny having at any time written such a dispatch to General Halleck, General Wright, or any other officer. No such dispatch were ever written by or for me, and if any purporting to be such is in existence I denounce it as a forgery.

In my official report of October 10, 1862, to General Wright (Exhibit I) I said:

On the 9th of September (Exhibit J) I addressed a letter to Major-General Wright by one of my aides-de-camp, with a verbal message, that by eating mules we could hold out sixty days (Exhibit K, statement of aide). But on the 12th of September the able and energetic division quartermaster informed me that it was impossible longer to feed the mules, and suggested that they should be sent to the Ohio River.

I further stated that my troops had been six days without bread, and that De Courcy had failed to obtain the hoped-for supplies at Manchester.

These facts were all before General Halleck while he was writing his report of December 2, for which he so ungracefully apologizes in his letter to General Wright of February 8, 1863.

General Halleck further says:

Had his (Morgan's) true condition been known measures might have been taken to relieve him.

Does General Halleck mean to say that he did not do all he was able to do at Big Hill, Richmond, and Lexington? Does he admit that he did not cause Bragg and Smith to be driven from Kentucky at the earliest possible moment? If so, then it is certain that General Halleck is responsible for the loss of Cumberland Gap, for the enemy maintained his position 100 miles north of Cumberland Ford until more than two months after my troops had been starved out of Cumberland Gap.

However ill-informed General Halleck may have been as to the general theater of operations, I propose to prove that he had no excuse for being ignorant of the condition of my command. He had been duly notified that my division was surrounded on the barren summit of the Cumberland Mountains; that Stevenson was in my immediate front with a force much larger than my own; that Bragg was on only right flank with a vast army; that Kirby Smith had gained my rear with a force three times greater than mine, and that Marshall occupied the sterile region to the north between the Gap and the Ohio River. He had been further informed by my official report of the capture of that stronghold, dated June 22, 1862, that-

While at Cumberland Ford I was compelled to haul forage for my animals (Exhibit L) a distance of 90 miles; and that during the moths of April and May the roads were so bad that a train of ten wagons could only advance 3 or 4 miles per day.

That on the 30th of June, 1862, I telegraphed to Lieutenant-Colonel