but remained inactive and by no
means certain (as his dispatches show) that his great adversary would
not return to attack him. It was not until late in October, that the
Federal army again advanced, and its march was then slow and irresolute.
It will be seen then, that on the 17th, the day on which Bragg took
Munfordsville, General Lee was fighting in Maryland. Ought not General
Bragg to have risked a battle (with his superior force) in Kentucky,
which (if successful), would have ruined the army opposed to him and
have laid the whole Northwest open to him, unless McClellan had
furnished the troops to oppose him, and have placed himself at the mercy
of Lee?

General Bragg did not (of course) know, on the 17th of September, 1862,
that the battle of Antietam was being fought, but he knew that General
Lee had achieved great successes, and that he was marching into
Maryland. Again, what effect are we at liberty to suppose that a
decisive victory won by General Bragg, at Perryville, on the 6th of
October, would have had upon the general result. General Buell, pressed
by Bragg's entire army, would have had some trouble to cross the Ohio
river, after reaching Louisville; and the defense of the Western States
would have been then intrusted with many misgivings to his shattered
army. And yet the West would have been left with no other defense,
unless the army of the Potomac had (in the event of such a necessity)
been weakened and endangered, that reinforcements might go to Buell. It
may be said that all this is hypothetical. Of course it is. But what
General ever yet inaugurated and conducted a campaign, or planned and
fought a battle, and banished such hypotheses altogether from his
calculations? Why then should they be forbidden in the criticism of
campaigns and battles? It is not infallibly certain that General Bragg
could have defeated Buell. Nothing is positively certain in a military
sense, not even the impregnability of a work built by a West Pointer,
and pronounced so by a committee of his classmates. War is a game of
various and varying chances. What I mean to urge, is, that General Bragg
should, under all the circumstances, have, by all the rules of the game,
risked the chances of a battle. But if there were strong military
reasons why an effort should have been made to accomplish decisive
results in this campaign, there were other and even stronger reasons for
it, to be found in the political condition, North and Sout