recommended must be worth reading, in order to see a standard Northern history, if for no other reason. We have read it with interest, and may, at some future time, publish a full review of it. We can only say now that the author seems to have bestowed on it a great deal of labor, and has produced a book of historic value which will be widely read. It was not remarkable, perhaps, that Federal commanders during the war should have so egregiously overestimated our numbers; but it is entirely inexcusable that a historian at this day (with easy access to the official reports of the Confederate generals) should commit the same blunders. Mr. Bates puts Hill's corps at Fredericksburg at 30,000 men, Stuart's cavalry at Brandy Station at 12,000, the force that environed Milroy at Winchester at 60,000, and General Lee's entire force at Gettysburg at 107,000 men. Now the truth is that these figures are most inexcusable exaggerations. General Lee's entire force at Gettysburg was not quite 57,000 men. Ah! if our grand old chieftain had commanded the numbers which Northern generals and Northern writers attribute to him, then the story of Gettysburg and of the war would have been far different.
Sherman's Historical Raid. By H. V. Boynton. Cincinnati: Wilstach, Boynton & Co.
The author has kindly sent us a copy of this able and scathing review of Sherman's Memoirs, and we have read it with very great interest.
He shows most conclusively from the official records that Sherman has done great injustice to Grant, Buel, Rosencranz, Thomas, McPherson, Schofield, and almost every other officer to whom he alludes in his book, and he carries the war into Africa by severely criticising Sherman's generalship, upon some of his most important fields, and showing that he was actually saved from terrible disaster again and again by the very men whom he now disparages.
We cannot, of course, accept all that General Boynton has written; but we rejoice to see this well merited rebuke to "the General of the Army," who not only makes himself "the hero of his own story," but oversteps all bounds of delicacy and propriety (not to say common decency), and well illustrates in his Memoirs the proverb, "Oh! that mine enemy would write a book."
