That was what is technically called a drawn battle, a battle in which neither army can claim advantage over the other. And in fact that was the exact situation. Lee's men prided themselves upon the fact that they had held their own against nearly or quite twice their numbers, McClellan's men were proud to think that they had not been beaten as other armies had been by this phenomenal fighting machine of Robert E. Lee's; that they had not been flanked or caught in the rear, or in any other way outmaneuvered or outfought, but had been able to hold their own throughout the day and to maintain their ground when the day was done. Considered by itself this was in fact a drawn battle. But considered more broadly in its relation to the general course of the war, it was very clearly a defeat for Lee, and a victory for his adversary. It made a final end of the Confederate general's scheme of invasion. It baffled all of his cherished purposes. It rendered utterly futile the plans in pursuit of which he had crossed the Potomac. It ended his hope of winning the war by the conquest of Washington or Baltimore, or both. It referred military operations again to Virginia, relieving all states north of the Potomac of their share in the sufferings incident to battles and campaigning. Lee, being too badly crippled to continue his campaign, retired after a day's rest, to Virginia. McClellan, being too badly hurt to risk another contest, declined to follow him or in any way to interfere with his purposes. The net results of Lee's campaign were that he had captured 11,500 prisoners at Harper's Ferry together with seventy-three guns and a vast store of food and munitions. He had inflicted upon his enemy in battle a loss of 12,469 men. On the other hand he had suffered a loss of 9,000 or 10,000 men; his army was reduced to 30,000 or less, and the strategic purpose of the campaign had utterly failed. He had encountered no disaster, but the expedition undertaken with high hopes and positively Napoleonic purposes had come to naught. Then occurred one of those prolonged and unexplainable pauses in the war to which wondering reference has been made in an earlier chapter of this work. With all the superb autumn weather before them--the very best campaigning weather known to Virginia--neither side did anything or tried to do anything. Lee remained in the neighborhood of Winchester for a month, at once inactive and unmolested. Then he slowly retired to Fredericksburg, where he fortified himself to meet the advance which Burnside, who had succeeded McClellan, seemed to threaten by taking up a position at Acquia Creek, seven miles or so in Fredericksburg's front. But the battle at Sharpsburg or Antietam, had occurred on the seventeenth of September and it was not until near the middle of December that either of these two armies again challenged the other to a contest of arms. END OF VOL. I. * * * * * * Transcribers' note: