If, since March, 1861, instead of being in the hands of pettifoggers, Mr. Lincoln had been in the hands of a man of one idea as is Stanton, nine-tenths of the work would have been accomplished.
McClellan's flunkeys claim for him the victories in the West. It is impossible to settle which is more to be scorned in them, their flunkeyism or their stupidity.
Lock-jaw expedition. For any other government whatever, in one even of the most abject favoritism, such a humbug and silly conduct of the commander and of his chief of the staff would open the eyes even of a Pompadour or of a Dubarry. Here, our great rulers and ministers shut the more closely their mind's (?) eyes * * * * *
For the first time in one of his dispatches Mr. Corporal Adams dares to act against orders, and mentions—but very slightly—slavery. Mr. Adams observes to his chief that in England public opinion is very sensitive; at last the old freesoiler found it out.
How this public opinion in America is unable to see the things as they naturally are. Now the public fights to whom to ascribe the victories in the West. Common sense says, Ascribe them, 1st, to the person who ordered the fight (Stanton); 2d, exclusively to the generals who personally commanded the battles and the assaults of forts. Even Napoleon did not claim for himself the glory for battles won by his generals when in his, Napoleon's, absence.
For weeks McClellan and his thus called staff diligently study international law, strategy (hear, hear!), tactics, etc. His aids translate for his use French and German writers. One cannot even apply in this case the proverb, "Better late than never," as the like hastily scraped and undigested sham-knowledge unavoidably must obfuscate and wholly confuse McClellan's—not Napoleonic—brains.
The intriguers and imbeciles claim the Western victories as the illustration of McClellan's great strategy. Why shows he not a little strategy under his nose here? Any old woman would surround and take the rebels in Manassas.
Now they dispute to Grant his deserved laurels. If he had failed at Donelson, the strategians would have washed their hands, and thrown on Grant the disaster. So did Scott after Bull Run.
Mr. Lincoln, McClellan, Seward, Blair, etc., forget the terrible responsibility for thus recklessly squandering the best blood, the best men, the best generation of the people, and its treasures. But sooner or later they will be taken to a terrible account even by the Congress, and at any rate by history.
It is by their policy, by their support of McClellan, that the war is so slow, and the longer it lasts the more human sacrifices it will devour, and the greater the costs of the devastation. Stanton alone feels and acts differently, and it seems that the rats in the Cabinet already begin their nightly work against him. These rats are so ignorant and conceited!