"I have been in all the battles before Richmond and at Manassas, but I never experienced such a fire as you gave us yesterday," he said.
"I noticed that you lost heavily at the sunken road."
"Yes. It was a terrible slaughter. We couldn't keep our ranks closed, and if your troops had pressed on they might have broken through our line."
"They came pretty near it as it was, did they not?"
"Yes. We were all tired out. We got up from Harper's Ferry on the morning of the battle. We had no supper Tuesday, marched all night, had no breakfast, and went right into the fight as soon as we reached the field. We have lived on green corn and apples half of the time since we left Richmond. Half of our men are barefoot. We were in no condition to fight. We wondered that McClellan did not renew the battle yesterday. We expected it."
General McClellan was at the hotel, looking careworn and troubled. Lee was beyond his reach. The army was pouring through the town. Some soldiers cheered him as they passed, while others expressed their dissatisfaction because Lee had escaped.
The invasion of the North was ended. Neither Washington nor Baltimore had fallen into the hands of the Rebels. Lee had not dictated terms of peace in Independence Square. Maryland had not responded to the call to join the Confederacy.
The dreams indulged at the South of an uprising of the people of the State had proved delusive. Lee had captured Harper's Ferry through the incompetency of the commander of the place. That was the only material advantage gained. He had won a victory at Groveton, through the treasonable failure of General Porter to join General Pope, and the tardiness of General McClellan's withdrawal from the Peninsula, but had been defeated at South Mountain and Antietam.
General Lee retreated to Martinsburg and Winchester to rest his exhausted troops. General McClellan marched to Harper's Ferry and Berlin, on the Potomac, and went into camp. Lee could not take the offensive. His troops were worn and disheartened. They had marched with great rapidity; fought at Groveton; had moved on to Maryland; fought, some of them at South Mountain, others at Harper's Ferry; had lived on short rations, making up the lack of food with green corn. They were barefoot and ragged. They slept without tents or blankets. They were exposed to all the storms. The men of Georgia and Alabama and Texas shivered with the ague in the keen air of the mountains through the October nights. Some of them, for the first time in their lives, beheld the beautiful spangles of the hoar-frosts. At Winchester, in the heart of one of the loveliest and most fertile valleys in America, they were in want of food. Lee seized all the forage and provisions he could find among the farmers. He was obliged to wagon his supplies from Culpepper, eighty miles distant, over roads which became muddy after a half-hour's rain.
General McClellan, on the other hand, received his supplies by rail within a mile or two of his camp. He thought that the army was not in condition to undertake another campaign; nor to bring on another battle, unless it had great advantages over the enemy.