Late 1st Lieut, and A. D. C. 3d Brigade Army of Northern
Virginia. Author of "A Soldier's Recollections."
Exigui numero sed bello vivida virtus—Virgil
It will be difficult to get the world to understand
the odds against which we fought.
—General Robert E. Lee
NEW YORK
THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY
1912
Copyright, 1912, by
The Neale Publishing Company
PREFACE
The distinguished soldier and critic whose name appears on the title page argues, as do various other Northern critics, that the usual Southern estimate of the strength of the Confederate army is too small by half. This conclusion is supported, they contend, both by the census of 1860, according to which there were at the very beginning of the war between the States nearly a million men in the Southern States of military age, and by the number of regiments of the several armies, as shown by the muster rolls of the Confederate army, captured on Lee's retreat from Richmond, and now stored among the archives in Washington. This second line of argument has been developed, among others, by two well-known military critics, Colonel Wm. F. Fox, in his monumental work entitled "Regimental Losses in the Civil War" (who concludes that the Southern Armies contained the equivalent of 764 regiments, of ten companies each), and by Thomas L. Livermore, Colonel of the 18th New Hampshire Volunteers, in his laborious and painstaking monograph, "Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America," published in 1901.