All around helplessness and confusion. Conscientiously I make all possible efforts to record what I believe to be true, and then truth will take care of herself.
After the study of the campaigns of Frederick II., above all, after the study of those marvellous campaigns, combinations, manœuvres of Napoleon, to witness every day the combinations of McClellan is more disgusting, more nauseous for the mind, than can be for the stomach the strongest dose of emetic.
The last catastrophe at Bull Run and at Manassas has a slight resemblance with the catastrophe at Waterloo. The conduct of the mutinous generals here is similar to the conduct of some of the French generals during the battle of Ligny and Quatre-Bras. But here was mutiny, and there demoralization produced by general and deeply rooted and fatally unavoidable causes. The demoralization of the French generals came at the end of a terrible epoch of struggles and sacrifices, of material exhaustion, when the faith in the destinies of Napoleon was extinct; here mutiny and demoralization seize upon the newly-born era.
September 13.—What a good-natured people are the Americans! A regiment of Pennsylvania infantry quartered for the night on the sidewalk of the streets; officers, of course, absent; the poor soldiers stretched on the stones, when so many empty large buildings, when the empty (intellectually and materially empty) White House could have given to the soldiers comfortable night quarters. It can give an idea how they treat the soldiers in the field, if here in Washington they care so little for them. But McClellan has forty wagons for his staff, and forty ambulances—no danger for the latter to be used. In European armies aristocratic officers would not dare to treat soldiers in this way—to throw them on the pavement without any necessity.
More than once in my life, after heavy fighting, I laid down the knapsack for a cushion, snow for a mattrass and for a blanket; but by the side of the soldiers, the generals, the staffs, and the officers shared similar bedsteads.
I hear strange stories about Stanton, and about his having ruefully fallen in McClellan's lap. If so, then one more man, one more illusion, and one more creed in manhood gone overboard, drowned in meanness, in moral cowardice, and subserviency.
The worshippers of strategy and of Gen. McClellan try to make the public swallow, that the investment of Richmond by him was a magnificent display of science, and would have been a success but for 50,000 more men under his command.
To invest any place whatever is to cut that place from the principal, if not from all communications with the country around, and thus prevent, or make dangerous or difficult, the arrival of provisions, of support, etc.
Our gunboats, etc., in the York and the James rivers have virtually invested Richmond on the eastern side; but that part of the Peninsula did not constitute the great source of life for the rebel army. The principal life-arteries for Richmond ran through four-fifths of a circle, beginning from the southern banks of the James river and running to the southern banks of the Rapidan and of the Rappahannock. Through that region men, material, provisions poured into Richmond from the whole South, and that whole region around Richmond was left perfectly open; but strategy concentrated its wisdom on the comparatively indifferent eastern side of the Chickahominy marshes, and cut off the rebels from—nothing at all.
September 13.—General McClellan, in search of the enemy, during the first six days makes thirty miles! Finds the enemy near Hagerstown. No more time for strategy.