Mr. Cooke had placed that letter in my hands, and had Mr. Davis furnished me with the suggested denial, it was my purpose to print that and General Lee's letter in facsimile, leaving it for every reader to choose between them. To my regret Mr. Davis declined to put his denial into writing, so that General Lee's letter, which I returned to Mr. Cooke, has never been published, and now never can be.
[Sidenote: A Futile Effort to Make Peace]
On another point I found General Beauregard more amenable to editorial suggestion, though reluctantly so. In discussing his defense of Charleston with utterly inadequate means--a defense everywhere recognized as the sufficient foundation of a military fame--his book included a chapter or so of masterly military criticism, intended to show that if the commanders on the other side at Charleston had been as alert and capable as they should have been, there was no time when they could not have taken Charleston with ease and certainty.
I pointed out to him that all this was a discrediting of himself; that it attributed to the enemy's weakness a success which military criticism attributed to his own military and engineering strength, thus stripping him of credit at the very point at which his credit was least open to dispute or question. I advised the elimination or material alteration of this part of the book, and after due consideration he consented, though with sore reluctance, for the reason that the modification made involved the sacrifice of a very brilliant essay in military criticism, of which any writer might well have been proud, and which I should have advised any other writer to publish as a distinguished feature of his work.
To descend from large things to small ones, it was in seeing this work through the press that I encountered the most extreme case I have ever known of dangerous interference with copy on the part of the "intelligent compositor," passed by the "alert proofreader." The printing department of the Harpers was as nearly perfect, in its organization and in the supervision given to it by the two highly-skilled superintendents of its rival composing rooms, as any printing department well can be. And yet it was there that the error occurred.