And what did we do then? We found another big swamp, and we sat down in the center of it and went to digging. We began to throw up intrenchments when there were no intrenchments in our front, no enemy that was not utterly broken. We never took advantage of the battle of Fair Oaks. Again Michigan soldiers were cut to pieces by hundreds. Go into the Judiciary square hospital in this city, and you will find more than half the occupants are Michigan men who were shot at Fair Oaks and Williamsburg, men who stood until a regiment of 1,000 men was reduced to 105, and even then did not run. Sir, these men have been sacrificed, uselessly sacrificed. They have been put to hard digging, and hard fare, and hard sleeping, and if there was any hard fighting to do they have been put to that; and, besides all this, at night they have had to guard the property of rebels in arms. They have been so sacrificed that two or three of the Michigan regiments to-day cannot bring into the field 250 men each out of 1,000 with whom they started. Fair Oaks was lost; that is to say, we won a brilliant victory, but it did us no good; we did not take advantage of it. Of course it would have been very unfair to take advantage of a routed army [laughter]; it would not have been according to our "strategy." We magnanimously stopped, and commenced digging. There was no army in our front, there were no intrenchments in our front; but we did not know what else to do, and so we began to dig and ditch, and we kept digging and ditching until the rebels had impressed and drilled and armed and made soldiers of their entire population. But that was not enough; they sent Jackson up on his raid to Winchester, and we waited for him to come back with his twenty or thirty thousand men. We heard that Corinth was being evacuated, and of course it would have been very unfair to commence an attack until they brought their troops from Corinth, and so we waited for the army at Corinth to get to Richmond. After the rebels had got all the troops they ever hoped to raise from any source, we did not attack them, but they attacked us, as we had reason to suppose they would. They attacked our right wing, and, as I am informed upon what I must deem reliable authority, they hurled the majority of their entire force upon our right wing of 30,000 men, and during the whole of that Thursday our right wing of 30,000 men held their ground, and repulsed that vast horde of the enemy over and over again, and held their ground at night. Of course you will say a reinforcement of twenty or thirty thousand men was sent to these brave troops that they might not only hold their ground the next day, but send this dastardly army into Richmond a second time, as at Fair Oaks. No, sir, nothing of the sort was done.