The reputation earned by Colonel Davis at Buena Vista could not fail to provoke the assaults of envy. An effort, equally unwarranted and unsuccessful, has since been made to deprive him of a portion of his merited fame of having conceived and executed a movement decisive of the battle. It has been pretended, in disparagement of the strategy of Colonel Davis, that his celebrated V movement (for so it is, and will always be known) had not the merit of originality, and besides was forced upon him by the circumstances in which he was placed, and especially by the conformation of the ground, which would not admit of a different disposition of his troops. Such a judgment is merely hypercritical. There is no account in military history, from the campaigns of Cæsar to those of Napoleon, of such a tactical conception, unless we include a slightly-analogous case at Waterloo. The movement in the latter engagement, however, differs essentially from that executed by Davis at Buena Vista. A party of Hanoverian cavalry, assailed by French huzzars, at the intersection of two roads, by forming a salient, repulsed their assailants almost as effectually as did the reëntrant angle of the Mississippians at Buena Vista. As to the second criticism, it is certainly a novel accusation against an officer, that he should, by a quick appreciation of his situation, avail himself of the only possible means by which he could not only extricate his own command from imminent peril of destruction, but also avert a blow delivered at the safety of the entire army.