What your military wiseacres show you as an organized army, would actually thrill, as with the death-shudder, any European military organizer.
Dec. 23.—I learn that the day following the butchery at Fredericksburgh, Burnside wished to renew the attack. What madness! The generals protested, and Burnside, greatly exasperated, declared that at the head of his former corps, the 9th, he would himself storm the miniature Torres Vedras. If all this is true, then Burnside is weaker headed than I had judged him to be; but I will not do him the injustice to say that he really intended to play a mere farce. What, in the name of common sense, could he do with a single corps, when the whole army was repulsed?
I am warned by a friend, that the Army of the Potomac is so infected with McClellanism, that is to say, by presumption, intriguing, envy and misconception of what is true generalship,—that the army must undergo the process of strong purification, fumigation, pruning and weeding, (and especially among the higher branches,) before it can ever again be made truly useful and reliable.
Dec. 22.—Burnside's report. I am sure that the great luminaries of the press, and the declaimers, the intriguants and the imbeciles, will be thrown into fits of ecstatic admiration of what they will call the manly and straight-forward conduct of Burnside in assuming the responsibility and confessing his own fault. But what else could he do? And if he acted thus in obedience to the orders of Halleck, then instead of manliness, his conduct is almost treasonable towards the people, for in withholding the truth as to the orders given by Halleck, he gives that incarnation of calamity the power to repeat the butchery and ensure the ill success of our armies.
The report is altogether unsoldierly; it is fussy and inflated; a full blown specimen of the pompously inane. How can Burnside venture to say that after the repulse, during three days he expected the enemy to leave his stronghold and attack him—Burnside? The rebels never did anything to justify such a supposition. They are neither idiots nor madmen, and only from a McClellan, or some bright pupils of the McClellan school, could such imbecility, such gratuitously ruinous playing into the hands of an enemy be expected. A commander ought to be on the watch for any mistake that his antagonist may commit, but he is not justified in setting that antagonist down as an ass. For two days the army was unnecessarily kept under the guns of the enemy, that is the truth, and I will make the truth known, no matter who may try to conceal it. Here, for the present, I stop in sheer and uncontrollable disgust. By and by, however, I will return to the consideration of this report.
Oh! American people! In so very many respects, truly great people! Far, very far beyond my poor powers of expression are the great love and veneration with which ever and always I look upon you. But allow me, pray allow me to use the frank familiarity of a true friend, so far as just plainly to tell you, that even I, your sincere friend, should love you none the less, and certainly should hold you in all the greater reverence, were you not quite so ultra-favorable in judgment of your civil and military rulers and pastors and masters and nincompoops generally!
Further back in this diary, I termed Mr. Secretary Chase a passive patriot. Peccavi. And here let me write down my recantation! Chase exerted himself for the retaining of Seward in the cabinet, and it was by Chase alone that the efforts of the patriots to expel Seward, were baffled. And yet, from the first day of the official assemblage of this cabinet down to the day of the meeting of the present session of Congress, Chase was more vigorously vicious than any other living man in daily, hourly, all the time, denunciation of Seward,—of course, behind Seward's back! Several insoluble problems, no doubt, there are; but there is not one thing, physical or not physical, which so completely defies any comprehension and baffles my most persistent inquiry, as just this.
How, unless Chase has drank of the waters of Lethe, how can he possibly look, now, in the face of, for instance, Fessenden of Maine, to whom he has said so many bitter things against the now belauded "Secretary Seward!" Bah! Chase most certainly must have a forty-or-fifty-diplomatist power of commanding—literally and not slangishly be it spoken!—his cheek, if, without burning blushes he can look in the face of Fessenden, Sumner or any honest man and say,—"I admire and I support Secretary Seward!" God! If all who, during the last two years, have come into contact with Chase, would but come forward and speak out! In that case, thousands would stand forth, a "cloud of witnesses," to confirm this statement. Chase! Faugh! I hereby brand him, and leave him to the bitter judgment of all men who can conscientiously claim to be even half honest.
In merest and barest justice to Seward, greatly as I disapprove of his general course, I must here note the fact that he is by no means addicted to evil speaking about any one. Not that this reticence proceeds from scrupulous feeling or a proud stern spirit. Seward, however, never speaks evil of any one unless to destroy, and to one who sympathises in that same amiable wish. To undermine a rival or to destroy an enemy, Seward will expend any amount of slander; but, in the absence of personal interest, Seward, though officially civilian, is, by nature, far too good and too old a soldier to waste ammunition upon worthless game.
Dec. 23.—Why could not Mr. Lincoln choose for his Secretary of State some man who has a holy and wholesome horror of pen, ink, and paper? Some man gifted with a sound brain, who never is quick at writing a dispatch, and would demand double salary as the price of writing one? Oh! Mr. Lincoln, had you but done this, not only would all America, but all Europe also be truly thankful for great immunity from the curse of morbid attempts at diplomacy and statesmanship.