] when Sumner entered the West
Wood, and in fifteen minutes or a little more the one-sided combat
was over.
Sumner's principal attack was made, as I have already indicated, at
right angles to that of Hooker. He had thus crossed the line of
Hooker's movement in both the advance and the retreat of the latter.
This led to some misconceptions on Sumner's part. Crawford's
division had retired to the right and rear to make way for Sedgwick
as he came up. It thus happened that Greene's division was the only
part of the Twelfth Corps troops Sumner saw, and he led Sedgwick's
men to the right of these. Ignorant as he necessarily was of what
had occurred before, he assumed that he formed on the extreme right
of the Twelfth Corps, and that he fronted in the same direction as
Hooker had done. This misconception of the situation led him into
another error. He had seen only stragglers and wounded men on the
line of his own advance, and hence concluded that Hooker's Corps was
completely dispersed and its division and brigade organizations
broken up. He not only gave this report to McClellan at the time,
but reiterated it later in his statement before the Committee on the
Conduct of the War.
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