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Clellan referred to it as a mighty contest in which 200,000 men contended for mastery!
General Lee reported it as a protracted and sanguinary conflict in which every effort of the enemy to dislodge him from his position had been defeated with severe loss.
The battle was not renewed on the 18th.
General McClellan, reporting to his government, said that a sense of duty to the army and the country forbade a renewal of the fight on the 18th without reinforcements, the probabilities of defeat being too great.
Whatever
General McClellan's strength, it is certain
General Lee fought around
Sharpsburg with less than 40,000 men of all arms.
When
Lee was at Fredericks-town, his army numbered, by its returns, in round numbers, 6,000 of all arms.
The battles of
Boonsboro, Crampton's Gap and
Harper's Ferry, with the cavalry engagements, followed.
These, of course, reduced the fighting force, but his heaviest losses were from straggling incident to the rapid marches and the actual suffering of the troops for the want of sleep and food between
Boonsboro and
Sharpsburg.
The remarks of
Gen. D. H. Hill will apply to most of the divisions.
He says:
My ranks had diminished by straggling, and on the morning of the 17th I had but 3,000 infantry. . . . Our wagons had been sent off across the river on Sunday, and for three days the men had been sustaining life on green corn and such cattle as they could kill in the field.
In charging through an apple orchard with the immediate prospect of death before them, I noticed men eagerly devouring apples. . . . Had all our stragglers been up, McClellan's army would have been completely crushed.
In leaving the battlefield of Sharpsburg, the writer pauses to pay a tribute of respect and love to a brave and accomplished soldier, his preceptor at the South Carolina military academy, and his honored friend.
Col. Charles Courtney Tew, the gallant commander of the Second North Carolina, in Anderson's brigade of D. H. Hill's division, fell at the head of his regiment in Hill's defense of the center against the attack of Richardson in
