The newspaper accounts of . . .

. . . the battles, skirmishes, sieges and marches are most unjust and unfair in three cases out of five.  We have had it well illustrated in the West, in the accounts of the various battles given to the public through the medium of Chicago papers.  The real heroes were never heard of through these mendacious historians.  The praise was uniformly bestowed upon some favorite Regiment or Division and upon [officers] who had bought and paid for their favors.  At the recent battle of Williamsburgh the same thing occurred.  The public were led to believe that Gen. Hancock did all the fighting, which consisted simply in one gallant bayonet charge.  This is very unjust and unfair, and the correspondents who wrote these lying accounts ought to be kicked out of the army, – drummed out of camp.  The truth is Hancock had only between twenty and thirty killed and wounded, and only four regiments engaged.  His affair was but a skirmish.  On the left, Heintzelman was compelled to fight a great battle, of vastly more consequence than Bull Run, and he won it, too.  He had seventeen regiments engaged from first to last – twelve of Hooker’s and five of Kearney’s; and his loss in killed, wounded and missing, was two thousand and forty-six!  The facts are that the courage of our men enabled Heintzelman to fight for six hours against the odds of three to one, and against other and greater odds than disciplined troops ever before encountered. – And wider and wider spreads the opinion through the army every hour that it only needed that Sumner should have spared Heintzelman a third or half his force standing idle in the woods, only have a mile off, to have enabled him to crush the enemy right at Williamsburgh, and have taken or dispersed the great force which we may now have to fight again in the Chickahominy swamp.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, May 24, 1862, p. 1