We spread before the reader the enemy’s account on a two day’s fight at Gettysburg, Pa. There is a great straining to produce the impression that they were not beaten, but the fact is pretty evident notwithstanding.—When we remember how uniformly and how egregiously they have lied in their accounts of former battles, especially in the first bulletins from the field—how they claimed a victory in early every light in Virginia, not excepting each of the several combats before this city—we may readily infer from the subdued tone in which they report this engagement, that they were very seriously worsted. They furnish, indeed, positive evidence of this when they tell us that the fight was brought on by their pushing through Gettysburg from the East side of the town to the West, but towards its close “no other alternative was left us (them) but to retire to the East of the town.” True they pretend after this, and upon being reinforced, to have driven us out of the town, back into the position we occupied early in the morning, but they confute their own statement by confessing that at the end of the action our cavalry dashed into the town capturing and cutting them off from their hospitals. “Our approach to many hospitals being cut off,” they say, “it is impossible to obtain a correct list of casualties.” Now, we have only to remember that hospitals are always in rear of the battle-field to know that if an army is cut off from them, it can only be because they have been driven from the field, back beyond the safe ground they had selected for their hospitals. The only officer quoted in the accounts we publish admits that the fight of the first day “was rather unfavorable, to our (Yankee) arms, and states that the enemy (Confederates) held the field at the close of the day, our (Yankee) forces having fallen back.”—And the Governor of Pennsylvania sends a Macedonian cry to the Governor of New York for help—”send all the troops you can raise, without delay, as the need for them is pressing.” This, and the confession that their losses are “enormously heavy,” we take to be the gist of the Yankee accounts. The rest is mere surplusage and fiction. Their own labored effort to prove that they were not beaten (for, strangely enough, they do not claim to have been victorious), when scrutinized and sifted, must satisfy any intelligent mind that they were defeated, perhaps badly. We have not the slightest doubt that Gen. Lee’s despatch, when it comes, will confirm this conclusion. All hail, then, to our frist victory on the soil of the enemy.
Richmond Whig, Richmond, VA
