191 23 War s Aftermath 



careful and intelligently written answers. The con- 

 clusions reached were published in 191 3 by "Cousin 

 Harvey" and myself under the title of "War's 

 Aftermath." ^ 



The nature of our investigation was set forth in 

 the preface as follows: 



It will be freely admitted that all conclusions must be tenta- 

 tive, and that no mathematical accuracy in the statement of the 

 eugenic loss of the Civil War is possible. But, on the other hand, 

 the evidence of the magnitude of such loss grows, in cumulating 

 degree, with every additional survey of the facts concerned. The 

 writers are under special obligation to hundreds of veterans of 

 the Confederate Army in Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, and 

 other states for frank and friendly discussion of the questions 

 involved, and to about one hundred others, not personally 

 known to us, who have sympathetically answered our letters of 

 inquiry. 



Commencing, as I have said, at Fredericksburg on Battu of 

 the Rappahannock River, we were especially im- ^^'^^^J' 

 pressed with the physical conditions surrounding the 

 futile attack made there in 1863 by General Burnside. 

 In assaulting Marye's Heights, a fortified hill, his men 

 were forced into a narrow sunken street crossed by a 

 ditch, being meanwhile swept by cannon from the 

 elevation at its end — a terribly disastrous adventure 

 which cost 13,000 Union lives. But this ill-conceived 

 move was almost forced on Burnside by the Northern 

 press, which demanded an immediate "on to Rich- 

 mond" campaign against obstacles which made 

 success impossible. To attack the capital of the 

 Confederacy through the swamps of the Chicka- 

 hominy to the east or the tangled woodlands of "the 

 Wilderness" of Spottsylvania was alike impossible, 



1 Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. 



1:425 n 



