A secretary of the French consul is here, and confirms my speculations concerning the numbers of the rebels in the last battles on the Chickahominy. The current and authoritative opinion in Richmond is, that from the Potomac to the Rio Grande the rebel force never exceeded 300,000 men. If so, the more glory; and it must be so, according to the rational analysis of statistics.
Mr. Seward writes a skilful dispatch to explain the battles on the Chickahominy. But no skill can succeed to bamboozle the cold, clear-sighted European statesmen.
No doubt Mr. Seward sincerely wished to save the Union in his own way and according to his peculiar conception, and, after having accomplished it, disappear from the political arena, surrounded by the halo of national gratitude.
But even for this aim of reconstruction of the Union as it was, Mr. Seward, at the start, took the wrong track, and took it because he is ignorant of history and of the logic in human affairs. To save the Union as it was, it was imperatively necessary to strike quick and crushing blows, and to do this in May, June, etc., 1861. Mr. Seward could have realized then what now is only a throttling nightmare—the Union as it was. But Mr. Seward sustained a policy of delays and not of blows; the struggle protracts, and, for reasons repeatedly mentioned, the suppression of rebellion becomes more and more difficult, and the reconstruction of the old Union as it was a mirage of his imagination.
But it is not Thurlow Weed, and others of that stamp, who could enlighten Mr. Seward on such subjects—far, far above their vulgar and mean politicianism. It is now useless to accuse and condemn Congress for its so-called violence, as does Mr. Seward, and to assert that but for Congress he, Mr. Seward, would have long ago patched up the quarrel. The Congress may be as tame as a lamb, and as subject as a foot-sole. Mr. Seward may on his knees proffer to the rebels a compromise and the most stringent safeguards for slavery; to-day the rebels will spurn all as they would have spurned it during the whole year. The rebels will act as Mason did when in the Senate hall Mr. Seward asked the traitor to be introduced to Mr. Lincoln.
The country is in more need of a man than of the many hundreds of thousands of new levies.
Some time ago Mr. Seward gathered around him his devotees in Congress (few in number), and unveiled to them that nobody can imagine what superhuman efforts it cost him to avert foreign intervention. Very unnecessary demonstration, as he knows it well himself, and, if it gets into the papers, may turn out to be offensive to the two cabinets, as they give to Mr. Seward no reason for making such statements. Should England and France ever decide upon any such step, then Mr. Seward may write as a Cicero, have all the learning of a Hugo Grotius, of a Vattel, and of all other publicists combined; he may send legions of Weeds and Sandfords to Europe, and all this will not weigh a feather with the cabinets of London and of Paris.
Further, no foreign powers occasioned our defeats in the Chickahominy, but those who were enraptured with the Peninsula strategy.
Mr. Seward's letter to the great meeting in New York shows that not his patriotism, but his confidence in success, is slightly notched.
Nobody doubts his patriotism; but Mr. Seward tried to shape mighty events into a mould after his not-over-gigantic mind, and now he frets because these events tear his sacrilegious hand.