John Adair, who was then in command of the Kentucky brigade, General Thomas being unwell, took great offence at Jackson’s account of the battle on the west bank. “The detachment on the other side of the river,” he reported to Governor Shelby,[569] “were obliged to retire before a superior force. They have been calumniated by those who ought to have fought with them, but did not.” The tone of Jackson’s report, and his language afterward, showed a willingness to load the Kentucky troops on the west bank with the responsibility for a military oversight with which they had nothing to do; but the oversight was not the less serious, whoever was responsible for it. The Kentucky and Louisiana troops did not easily yield. The British returns of killed and wounded showed that Thornton’s column suffered a considerable loss. Thornton himself was wounded; his regiment, the Eighty-fifth, numbering two hundred and ninetyeight rank-and file, reported a loss of forty-three men killed, wounded, and missing, besides their colonel. Of one hundred sailors employed in the attack[570] twenty were killed or wounded, besides Captain Money of the royal navy, “who, I am sorry to say, was severely wounded,” said Thornton. The Americans made as good a resistance as could have been expected, and had they resisted longer they would merely have been captured when the next detachment of Thornton’s column came up. The chief blame for the disaster did not rest on them. Jackson was helpless to interpose. As he and his men, lining the river bank, watched the progress of Thornton’s column on the opposite shore, Jackson could do nothing; but he ordered his men “that they should take off their hats, and give our troops on the right bank three cheers.” Adair, who inclined to a severe judgment of Jackson’s generalship, told the story more picturesquely:[571]-- “I was standing by him when he gave his order, and with a smile, not of approbation, observed I was afraid they could not hear us. The distance from us to them, on a straight line, was upward of one mile and a half; there was a thick fog, and I confess I could not see the troops of either army. All I could discover was the blaze from the guns; and seeing that continue to progress up the river was the only knowledge we had that our men were retreating.”