Sumner's principal attack was made, as I have already indicated, at right angles to that of Hooker. He had thus crossed the line of Hooker's movement in both the advance and the retreat of the latter. This led to some misconceptions on Sumner's part. Crawford's division had retired to the right and rear to make way for Sedgwick as he came up. It thus happened that Greene's division was the only part of the Twelfth Corps troops Sumner saw, and he led Sedgwick's men to the right of these. Ignorant as he necessarily was of what had occurred before, he assumed that he formed on the extreme right of the Twelfth Corps, and that he fronted in the same direction as Hooker had done. This misconception of the situation led him into another error. He had seen only stragglers and wounded men on the line of his own advance, and hence concluded that Hooker's Corps was completely dispersed and its division and brigade organizations broken up. He not only gave this report to McClellan at the time, but reiterated it later in his statement before the Committee on the Conduct of the War. [Footnote: C. W., vol. i. p. 368.] The truth was that he had marched westward more than a mile south of the Poffenberger hill where Meade was with the sadly diminished but still organized First Corps, and half that distance south of the Miller farm buildings, near which Goodrich's brigade had entered the north end of the West Wood, and in front of which part of Williams's men had held the ground along the turnpike till they were relieved by Sedgwick's advance. Sedgwick had gone in, therefore, between Greene and Crawford, and the four divisions of the two corps alternated in their order from left to right, thus: French, Greene, Sedgwick, Crawford, the last being Williams's, of which Crawford was in command. It was not Sumner's fault that he was so ill-informed of the actual situation on our right; but it is plain that in the absence of McClellan from that part of the field he should have left the personal leadership of the men to the division commanders, and should himself have found out by rapid examination the positions of all the troops operating there. It was his part to combine and give intelligent direction to the whole, instead of charging forward at haphazard with Sedgwick's division. Both Meade and Williams had men enough in hand to have joined in a concerted movement with him; and had he found either of those officers before plunging into the West Wood, he would not have taken a direction which left his flank wholly exposed, with the terrible but natural results which followed. The original cause of the mischief, however, was McClellan's failure to send Sumner to his position before daybreak, so that the three corps could have acted together from the beginning of Hooker's attack.