I do not object to their decision, made, no doubt, upon what
appeared to them sufficient grounds; but as the occasion was turned into
a public debate--one-sided, to be sure--I ask you for space, to reply in
your valued columns.
As an old Third-Corps man, I attended the meeting at Music Hall.
The treasurer did not object to selling me a ticket to the dinner.
I expected to hear some new facts about Hooker and Chancellorsville.
I expected to hear some new deductions from old facts. I do not
consider myself beyond making an occasional lapse even in a carefully
prepared piece of work, and am always open to correction. But, to my
surprise (with the exception of a conjecture that Lee's object in his
march into Pennsylvania was to wreck the anthracite-coal industry),
there was not one single fact or statement laid before the meeting,
or the company at dinner, which has not already been, in its minutest
details, canvassed and argued at a length covering hundreds of pages in
the volumes on Chancellorsville, by Hotchkiss and Allen, Swinton, Bates,
the Comte de Paris, Doubleday, and myself, not to speak of numberless
and valuable brochures by others.
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