McClellan and the party which fears to make a bold advance on the enemy make so much fuss about the country being cut up and wooded; it proves only that they have no brains and no fertility of expedients. This country is not more cut up than is the Caucasus, and the woods are no great, endless, primitive forests. They are rather groves. In the Caucasus the Russians continually attack great and dense forests; they fire in them several round shots, then grape, and then storm them with the bayonet; and the Circassians are no worse soldiers than are the Southrons.
European papers talk much of mediation, of a peaceful arrangement, of compromise. By intuition of the future the Northern people know very well the utter impossibility of such an arrangement. A peace could not stand; any such peace will establish the military superiority of the arrogant, reckless, piratical South. The South would teem with hundreds of thousands of men ready for any piratical, fillibustering raid, enterprise, or excursion, of which the free States north and west would become the principal theatres. Such a marauding community as the South would become, in case of success, will be unexampled in history. The Cylician pirates, the Barbary robbers, nay, the Tartars of the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries, were virtuous and civilized in comparison with what would be an independent, man-stealing, and man-whipping Southern agglomeration of lawless men. The free States could have no security, even if all the thus called gentlemen and men of honor were to sign a treaty or a compromise. The Southern pestilential influence would poison not only the North, but this whole hemisphere. The history of the past has nothing to be compared with organized, legal piracy, as would become the thus-called Southern chivalry on land and on sea; and soon European maritime powers would be obliged to make costly expeditions for the sake of extirpating, crushing, uprooting the nest of pirates, which then will embrace about twelve millions,—every Southern gentleman being a pirate at heart.
This is what the Northern people know by experience and by intuition, and what makes the people so uneasy about the inertia of the administration.
Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Seward, Gen. Scott, and other great men, are soured against the people and public opinion for distrusting, or rather for criticising their little display of statesmanlike activity. How unjust! As a general rule, of all human sentiments, confidence is the most scrutinizing one. If confidence is bestowed, it wants to perfectly know the why. But from the outset of this war the American people gave and give to everybody full, unsuspecting confidence, without asking the why, without even scrutinizing the actions which were to justify the claim.
Up to this day Secesh is the positive pole; the Union is the negative,—it is the blow recipient. When, oh, when will come the opposite? When will we deal blows? Not under McClellan, I suspect.
NOVEMBER, 1861.
Ball's Bluff — Whitewashing — "Victoria! Old Scott gone overboard!" — His fatal influence — His conceit — Cameron — Intervention — More reviews — Weed, Everett, Hughes — Gov. Andrew — Boutwell — Mason and Slidell caught — Lincoln frightened by the South Carolina success — Waits unnoticed in McClellan's library — Gen. Thomas — Traitors and pedants — The Virginia campaign — West Point — McClellan's speciality — When will they begin to see through him?
The season is excellent for military operations, such as any Napoleon could wish it. And we, lying not on our oars or arms, but in our beds, as our spes patriæ is warmly and cosily established in a large house, receiving there the incense and salutations of all flunkeys. Even cabinet ministers crowd McClellan's antechambers!
The massacre at Ball's Bluff is the work either of treason, or of stupidity, or of cowardice, or most probably of all three united.
No European government and no European nation would thus coolly bear it. Any commander culpable of such stupidity would be forever disgraced, and dismissed from the army. Here the administration, the Cabinet, and all the Scotts, the McClellans, the Thomases, etc., strain their brains and muscles to whitewash themselves or the culprit—to represent this massacre as something very innocent.