And now, in conclusion, I challenge those who have brought on this discussion to make up the issue tangibly as one purely of historical and military import and concern—that is, divested of all family vanities and personal ambitions, for submission, in effect, to the judicial decision of a few such men as Judge Campbell, Secretary Lamar, Senators Vance, Pugh, Colquitt and Eustis, Governor Haygood, General E. P. Alexander, or many score of such other gentlemen of the South whom I could name as capable of deciding according to the clear documentary evidence. But let the issue be made so broad as to embrace several subjects which have not been touched upon in my papers. For example to begin with, “Was the military situation on the part of the Confederates in the department under the command of General A. S. Johnston such as to make the loss of Fort Donelson an inevitable result?” Or, in other words, was it not in the power of General Johnston, in February, 1862, with the resources of men and transportation at his position, immediately after General Grant invested Fort Henry, to have readily concentrated upon and overcome him with a decisively superior force? Or, in fact, did not the failure on the part of General Johnston to essay such an enterprise, as early as the 7th of February, 1862, cause the loss of Fort Donelson from the outset with the ten thousand troops sent thither after the capture of Fort Henry, and thus make the immediate abandonment of Bowling Green and Columbus absolutely a necessary consequence, with the early abandonment also of Nashville and Middle Tennessee? Let the issue also embrace the question, whether there was not such tardiness and hesitancy on the part of the Confederate movement from Murfreesboro to Corinth, that the junction of Johnson's forces with those of Beauregard at that point, late in March, 1862, was a sheer casualty, due to the want of enterprise on the part of the Federal general to so interpose the forces at his disposition between the divided fragments of his adversary as to make their concentration at Corinth an impossibility? That is to say, was it not in the power of the Confederate commander-in-chief to have assembled his forces a week earlier than he did, and therefore been in the condition to fight General Grant at latest on the first instead of the 6th of April, 1862?
