Does any man doubt that this army, ably handled, was sufficiently strong to have captured Richmond and crushed the rebel army? I think not, if promptly led against the enemy; but instead of that, it sat down in malarious swamps and awaited the drafting, arming, drilling, and making soldiers of an army to fight it, and in the meantime our own army was rapidly wasting away. Unwholesome water, inadequate food, overwork, and sleeping in marshes, were rapidly filling the hospitals, and overloading the return boats with the sick. Sir, we have lost more men by the spade than the bullet, five to one, since the army started from Yorktown under McClellan. Had the soldiers been relieved from digging and menial labor by the substitution of negro laborers, the Army of the Potomac would to-day, in my estimation, contain 30,000 more brave and efficient soldiers than it does. Had it been relieved from guarding the property of rebels in arms, many valuable lives would have been saved. Yorktown was evacuated after a sacrifice of more men by sickness than the enemy had in their works when our army landed at Fortress Monroe. The battle of Williamsburg was fought by a small fraction of our army, and the enemy routed. During the battle, General McClellan wrote a dispatch, miles from the field of battle, saying he should try to "hold them in check" there.... He would try to "hold them in check!" He could not hold them. He could not stop his eager troops from chasing them. After a small fraction of his army had whipped their entire force and had been chasing them for hours, he penned that dispatch and sent it to the Secretary of War, and, if I remember aright, it was read in one of the two houses of Congress. As you may suppose from that dispatch, there was no great eagerness in following up that victory. Three Michigan regiments were not only decimated, they were divided in twain, in that bloody battle at Williamsburg. They fought there all day without reinforcements. One Michigan regiment went into the trenches and left sixty-three dead rebels, killed by the bayonet, weltering in their blood. But who has ever heard, by any official communication from the head of the army, that a Michigan regiment was in the fight at Williamsburg? I do not blame him for not giving credit where credit is due, for I do not believe he knew anything more of that fight than you or I.