_Tel brille au second rang qui s'éclipse au premier_, is almost all to be said in Hooker's defense. I tremble to know all the minute details. A paroled prisoner returned from Richmond said to me that terror was terrible in Richmond--that Lee and his army had no supplies. No troops in Richmond--Stoneman cut the bridges. The rebels were on the brink of a precipice, and extricated themselves.
_May 8._--Boutwell, Member of Congress, told me that the district of St. Louis paid more new taxes to January than any other district in the United States. Bravo, Missourians. That is loyalty.
_May 8: Evening_--More details about this unhappy Chancellorsville. Lee and the rebel generals have been decidedly surprised--in the military sense--by the crossing of the river, and by Hooker coming thus in part in their rear. But we lost time, they retrieved and _manoeuvred_ splendidly; better than they ever have done before. Lee showed that he has learned something. Lee showed that, by a year's practice, he has at length acquired skill in handling a large army. The apprenticeship on our side is not so successful; our generals have no experience therein, and McClellan was worse at Harper's Ferry in November than at Williamsburg in the spring. McClellan learned nothing. Will it be possible to find among our Potomac generals one in whom revelation will supply experience?
The more I learn about that affair the more thoroughly I am convinced that Hooker's misfortune had the same cause and source as the misfortunes of those before him. No military scientific staff and chief-of-staff. Butterfield was not even with Hooker, but at Falmouth at the telegraph. If it is so, then no words can sufficiently condemn them all.
If Kepler, or Herschel, or Fulton, or Ericcson had violated axioms and laws of mathematics and dynamics, their labors would have been as so much chaff and dust. War is mechanism and science, inspiration and rule; a genuine staff for an army is a scientific law, and if this law is not recognized and is violated, then the disasters become a mathematically certain result.
_May 8._--The defenders of Hooker call the result a drawn battle. Mr. Lincoln calls it a lost battle. I call it a miscarried, if not altogether lost, campaign.