McClellan's Lessees.
We stated, some time ago, our belief that McClellan had lost, since he landed in Virginia, at least 80,000 men. That we made a good guess, we are now enabled to prove from the showing of the Yankees themselves.
- 1st Chandler, in his speech, says that, first and last, 158,000 men had been sent to him. this information he obtained from the War office. It cannot therefore, he called in question.
- 2d ‘"Agate,"’ the correspondent of the Cincinnati --a thorough war paper — says that President Lincoln, after his visit to McClellan at Berkley said to four gentlemen, only the Friday before the day on which he was writing, ‘"with marked emphasis"’ I can't tell where the men have gone in that army. I have sent there, at one time and another, one hundred and--(perhaps prudence quires that I should leave the next two places for figures blank.) one hundred and.-- thousand and I can only find just half that many now. Where can they have gone! Burnside accounts to for every man he has taken — so many killed in so many wounded; so many sick in the hospital; so many absent on furlough. So does so does Buell, and so do others. But what has become of half the Army I down to the Peninsula."
They lost, say, 3,000 men before York. They 5000 at Williamsburg. They lost 2,000 at Bar Hansville. They lost, according to Chandler, 10,000 by digging on the Chickahominy. They lost 13,000 at Seven Pines. The remaining 45,000 they either in the battles of the last of June and 1st of July, from disease or straggling off and perishing in the swamps. Thus we account for the whole eighty thousand, and thus it appears that when we their entire loss in the last- named battles, at between 40,000 and 50,000, we did not miss the mark very far.
This loss we believe to be unparallel in the history of any modern besieging army. The French did not sustain the fourth part of it in the siege of the allies did not sustain a greater in the of Sebastopol. When we take these facts into consideration, and add to them that the army which has undergone this tremendous loss has abandoned a line of entrenchments unequalled in strength. and is now twenty-five miles off from the lately beleaguered city, whereas it was before only five we stand in utter amazement at the impudence which claims a victory. Still more are we astounded at the effrontery which supports a man who can tell soldiers thus beaten and demoralized they have earned the right of inscribing on their banners the names of the fields on which they had been signally and ignominiously routed! Surely those soldiers must have known that they had been beaten, and all the inscriptions in the world could not have made them believe themselves victories.
