to be in consultation with several generals. If the language above quoted should have been misinterpreted by any one, I avail myself gladly of this opportunity to state its real meaning.

I am, general, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

C. SCHURZ,

Brigadier-General, Commanding Third Division, Eleventh Corps.

Major-General McDOWELL,

Washington.

Numbers 2. WASHINGTON, October 8, 1862.

GENERAL: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your note of October 7, saying the language used in your report was not intended to convey the impression that Major-General McDowell and staff were in full retreat, for such was not the case, &c. Will you pardon me for now troubling you further in relation to that part of your report which has been the subject of our correspondence?

The circumstances attending my meeting you; our conversation about the battery which I had posted near your troops; the instructions I gave it; the direction I took when I left you (which was not in retreat); my remaining near that part of the ground till dark; my posting Gibbon's brigade on that ground after yours had retired from it to Bull Run (which brigade remained there two hours after dark and then passed you while you were in bivouac near the stream), the most of which facts could not but have been known to you, seemed to leave no other interception than the one you have since placed upon your report. Yet the impression was strong in my mind, and strong to conviction on that of my friends, who did not know the facts of the case as I now give them, that in the picture you so clearly drew of what you saw when you ascended the crest you designed that General McDowell and staff should appear as the principal group in a discreditable retreat-this as much from what you did not say as from what you did say; for after introducing Major-General McDowell, without qualifying his presence in any way whatever, as the central figure in this retreat, you left him there as if you had brought him into notice for no other purpose. This impression was strengthened by a knowledge of your reputation as an able, clear-headed writer, having the full use of our language and a precise knowledge of the value and force of words.

Thus it is that you have done me-unintentionally, it now seems-a wrong, and I leave it to your sense of justice if that wrong should not be righted-as far as such wrongs can be righted-by a correction by you of the impression you have given in the paper in which your report was published.

I have the honor to remain, general, very respectfully, your most obedient servant,

IRVIN McDOWELL,

Major-General.

Brigadier General CARL. SCHURZ,

Commanding Division, &c., Fairfax Court-House, Va.

P. S. - Permit me to correct the impression you have that I went to the little farm-house to join General Pope "in consultation with several generals." If there was any such consultation I was and am ignorant