There McClellan's diggings and strategy neutralize the gallantry of the generals and of the troops. There action, not digging, is needed. I wrote to the President; suggesting to make Sigel his chief of the staff (Sigel has been educated for it), and then to let our generals fight under his, the President's, eyes.
Great injustice was and is done to Mr. Seward by the lying and very extensively spread rumor that he is often intoxicated. I am sure that it is not so, and I contradict it with all my might. At last I discovered the reason of the rumor. It is Mr. Seward's unhappy passion for generalizations. He goes off like a rocket. Most people hearing him become confused, understand nothing, are unable to follow him in his soarings, and believe him to be intoxicated. His devotees alone get in ecstacies when these rockets fly.
Every time after any success of our troops, that perfidious sheet, the London Times, puts on innocent airs, and asks, "Why are the Americans so bitter against England?" Why? At every disaster the Times pours upon the North the most malicious, poisonous, and lacerating derisions; derisions to pierce the skin of a rhinoceros. When in that strain no feeling is respected by this lying paper.
Derision of the North was the Times's order of the day even before the civil war really began. People, who probably have it from the fountain itself, assert that in one of his hours of whiskey expansion the great Russell let the cat out, and confessed that the Times's firm purpose was, and is, to definitely break the Union.
Until this hour that reptile's efforts have been unsuccessful; it could not even bring the Cabinet over to its heinous purposes. A counterpoise and a counter poison exist in England's higher spheres, and I credit it to that noblest woman the queen, to Earl Russell, and to some few others.
The would-be English noblesse, the Tories, and all the like genuine nobodies, or would-be somebodies, affect to side with the South. They are welcome to such an alliance, and even parentage. Similis simili gaudet. Nobody with his senses considers the like gentlemen as representing the progressive, humane, and enlightened part of the English nation; the American people may look down upon their snobbish hostility. J. S. Mill—not to speak of his followers—has declared for the cause of the North. His intellectual support more than gorgeously compensates the cause of right and of freedom, even for the loss or for the sneers of the whole aristocracy, and of snobdom, of somebodies and of would-be gentlemen of the whole Britannia Empire, including the Canadian beggarly manikins.
By their arrogance the Englishmen are offensive to all the nations of the world; but they are still more so by their ingrained snobbyism. (See about it Hugo Grotius.) Further: During the last thirty years the London Times and the Lord Fussmaker Palmerston have done more to make us hate England than even did the certain inborn and not over-amiable traits in the English character.
A part of the young foreign diplomacy here have a very strong secesh bend; they consider the slaveholders to be aristocrats, and thus like to acquire an aristocratic perfume. But, aristocratically speaking, most of this promiscuous young Europa are parvenus, and the few titled among them have heraldically no noble blood in their veins. No wonder that here they mistake monstrosities for real noblesse. Enthusiastic is young Germany—that is, young Bremen.
Young European Spain here is remarkably discreet, as in the times of a Philip II., of an Alba.
Corinth evacuated under the nose of Halleck, as Manassas and Yorktown have been evacuated under the nose of McClellan. Nay, Halleck, equally strong as was the enemy, the first day of the evacuation ignores what became of Beauregard with between sixty and eighty thousand men. Oh generalship! Gen. Halleck is a gift from Gen. Scott. If Halleck makes not something better, it will turn out to be a very poor gift. Timeo Danaos, etc., concerning the North and the gifts from "the highest military authority in the land."