of rest for
the remainder of the summer. We reached our camps on the 27th of
July.

Meantime, a division of troops, commanded by Brigadier-General W.
Sooy Smith, had been added to my corps. General Smith applied for
and received a sick-leave on the 20th of July; Brigadier-General
Hugh Ewing was assigned to its command; and from that time it
constituted the Fourth Division of the Fifteenth Army Corps.

Port Hudson had surrendered to General Banks on the 8th of July (a
necessary consequence of the fall of Vicksburg), and thus
terminated probably the most important enterprise of the civil
war--the recovery of the complete control of the Mississippi River,
from its source to its mouth--or, in the language of Mr. Lincoln,
the Mississippi went "unvexed to the sea."

I put my four divisions into handsome, clean camps, looking to
health and comfort alone, and had my headquarters in a beautiful
grove near the house of that same Parson Fox where I had found the
crowd of weeping rebel women waiting for the fate of their friends
in Vicksburg.

The loss sustained by the Fifteenth Corps in the assault of May
19th, at Vicksburg, was mostly confined to the battalion of the
Thirteenth Regulars, whose commanding officer, Captain Washington,
was mortally wounded, and afterward died in the hands of the enemy,
which battalion lost seventy-seven men out of the two hundred and
fifty engaged; the Eighty-third Indiana (Colonel Spooner), and the
One Hundred and Twenty seventh Illinois (Lieutenant-Colonel
Eldridge), the aggregate being about two hundred.

In the assaults of the 22d, the loss in the Fifteenth Corps was
about six hundred.

In the attack on Jackson, Mississippi, during the 11th-16th of
July, General Ord reported the loss in the Thirteenth Army Corps
seven hundred and sixty-two, of which five hundred and thirty-three
were confined to Lauman's division; General Parkes reported, in the
Ninth Corps, thirty-seven killed, two hundred and fifty-eight
wounded, and thirty-three missing: total, three hundred and
twenty-eight. In the Fifteenth Corps the loss was less; so that,
in the aggregate, the loss as reported by me at the time was less
than a thousand men, while we took that number alone of prisoners.

In General Grant's entire army before Vicksburg, composed of the
Ninth, part of the Sixteenth, and the whole of the Thirteenth;
Fifteenth, and Seventeenth Corps, the aggregate loss, as stated by
Badeau, was:

Killed: .....