and as mildly as possible. Laying aside the moral question of guilt in parading before the public the confidential conferences of the generals of our army, especially when they occur without witnesses or records, I cannot reconcile it to my sense of military subordination for a junior in an official record to assail his commanding general, or, as occurred in your case once, for a general to assal the President for not yielding his own views, formed with superior means of information, to those of his subordinates. No harmony can ever prevail, in an army where these buncombe reports are made for the public, instead of a simple narrative of facts for the War Office. In my report I have deemed it necessary to refer to General Polk only by name, as General Hardee was a subordinate under him, and could not officially communicate with me except through him. As I did not see General Hardee for ten days preceding the battle of Perryville, he can only have reference to his private and "confidential" notes written to me from the field of Perryville on the evening and night before the battle. In these he advises concentration in general terms; says the fight must come off on the next morning, the 8th, "as the enemy will attack if we do not," and insists on my superseding General Polk in command. If he was correct, any other concentration than the one I ordered was impracticable, as Smith was thirty-five miles off. Again on the field, where the action was delayed beyond what he knew to be my orders, he came to me and expressed the belief that General Polk would not attack, and it wason this appeal that I rode forward and put the troops in motion. Another point will appear to you more strange. In the first case of disobedience to my orders at Bardstown on the 3rd of October, you cannot but be surprised to know I have notes from both these generals, dated on the 2d, the same as my order, suggesting the very movement they refused to make the next day, when my order was received. Copies of all these papers will be sent to you if you desire them. I had hoped they would never be needed, and safely filed them away as sacred. Even now, I think it will be better for our cause, better for us all that you should assume the responsibility of suppressing these points in the reports, though I shall still bear the burden of having failed when I am confident a prompt execution of my orders would have secured to our army the most brilliant results. A desire to preserve harmony has heretofore kept me silent. Not even to you have I disclosed these facts now made known from a sense of duty to myself and the Government. In my report from Bryantsville, recently published,* full justice was surelyy done both these generals. They got all the credit, if any was due, and I took all the responsibility. That letter was read to General Polk before it was forwarded, and he said emphatically I had done him more and myself much less than justice. With all his ability, energy, and zeal, General Polk, by education and habit, is unfitted for executing the orders of others. He will convince himself his own vies are better, and will follow them without reflecting on the consequnces. General Kirby Smith's appeals to me were more frequent, and much more urgent than Polk's or Hardee's, for a concentration of the whole forces to accomplish that object, for our only hope of success was lost when the supplies accumulated by him in Leuch risk and with so much labor, were sacrificed. Yet he is too good a soldier to assail his superior in an official report for having failed to accomplish what he advised, though he is even yet ignorant

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* See VOL. XVI, Part I, p. 1087.

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