refore, that he would
attack us, it was not deemed expedient to lose the advantages of
our position and expose the troops to the fire of his inaccessible
batteries beyond the river, by advancing against him. But we were
necessarily ignorant of the extent to which he had suffered, and only
became aware of it when, on the morning of the 16th, it was discovered
that he had availed himself of the darkness of night, and the
prevalence of a violent storm of wind and rain, to recross the river."

This statement was no doubt framed by General Lee to meet the
criticisms which the result of the battle occasioned. In conversing
with General Stuart on the subject, he added that he felt too great
responsibility for the preservation of his troops to unnecessarily
hazard them. "No one knows," he said, "how _brittle_ an army is."

The word may appear strange, applied to the Army of Northern Virginia,
which had certainly vindicated its claim, under many arduous trials,
to the virtues of toughness and endurance. But Lee's meaning was
plain, and his view seems to have been founded on good sense. The
enemy had in all, probably, two hundred pieces of artillery, a large
portion of which were posted on the high ground north of the river.
Had Lee descended from his ridge and advanced into the plain to
attack, this large number of guns would have greeted him with a rapid
and destructive fire, which must have inflicted upon him a loss as
nearly heavy as he had inflicted upon General Burnside at Marye's
Hill. From such a result he naturally shrunk. It has been seen that
the Federal troops, brave as they were, had been demoralized by such
a fire; and Lee was unwilling to expose his own troops to similar
slaughter.

There is little question, it seems, that an advance of the description
mentioned would have resulted in a conclusive victory, and the
probable surrender of the whole or a large portion of the Federal
army. Whether the probability of such a result was sufficient to
compensate for the certain slaughter, the reader will decide for
himself. General Lee did not think so, and did not order the advance.
He preferred awaiting, in his strong position, the second assault
which General Burnside would probably make; and, while he thus waited,
the enemy secretly recrossed the river, rendering an attack upon them
by Lee impossible.

General Burnside made a second movement to cross the
Rappahannock--this time at Banks's Ford, above Fredericksburg