I am told that Stanton took sides with Seward. I deny it; Stanton remained rather passive. But were it true that Stanton, too, is Sewardized,—then, Oh Mud, how powerful thou art!
In Boston, the B.s and Curtises, and all of that kidney, make a great fuss and invoke the name of Webster. If so, they are only excrementa Websteriana.
Dec. 24.—Patriots in both Houses of Congress! your efforts to put the conduct of the national affairs in honorable hands, and on honorable tracks, to prevent the very life blood of the people from being sacrilegiously wasted, to prevent the people's wealth from being recklessly squandered; your efforts to introduce order and spirit in certain parts of a spiritless Administration, to fill the higher and inferior offices with men whose hearts and minds are in the cause, and to expel therefrom, if not absolute disloyalty, at least, the most criminal indifference to the people's cause and welfare; your efforts to make us speak to Europe like men of sense, and not in the senseless oracles which justly evoke the scorn and the sneers of all European statesmen; all these your efforts as patriots rebounded against a nameless stubbornness.
Nevertheless you fulfilled a noble, sacred and patriotic duty. Whatever be to-day the outcry of the Flatfoots, lickspittles, intriguers, imbeciles; whatever be the subserviency or want of civic courage in the public press—when all these stinking, suffocating, deleterious vapors shall be destroyed by the ever-living light of truth, then the grateful people will bless your names, which, pure and luminous, will shine high above the stupidity, conceit, heartlessness, turpitude, selfish ambition, indirect and direct treason darkening now the national horizon.
Dec. 25.—Christmas. The Angel of Death hovers over thousands and thousands of hearths. Thousands and thousands of families in tears and shrouds. Communities, villages, huts and log-houses, nursing their crippled, invalid, patriotic heroes! A year ago, all was quiet on the Potomac—now all is quiet on the Rappahannock.
What a progress we have made in a year! and at the small, insignificant cost of about sixty to eighty thousand killed or crippled, and of one thousand millions of dollars! But it matters not! The quietude of the official butchers and money squanderers is, and must remain undisturbed in their mansions, whatever be the moral leprosy dwelling therein!
A young man from New England, (whom I saw for the first time,) told me that my Diary stirred up the youth. Oh, if so, then I feel happy. Youth! youth! you are all the promise and the realization! But why do you suffer yourselves to be crushed down by the upper-crust of senile nincompoops? Oh youth, arise, and sun-like penetrate through and through the magnitude of the work to be accomplished, and save the cause of humanity!
Dec. 25.—As it was and is in all Revolutions and upheavals, so here. A part of the people constitute the winners, in various ways, (through shoddy names, jobs, positions, etc.) while the immense majority bleeds and sacrifices. Here many people left poorly salaried desks, railroads, shops, &c. to become great men but poor statesmen, cursed Generals, and mischief-makers in every possible way and manner. The people's true children abandoned homes, families, honest pursuits of an industrious and laborious life—in one word, their ALL, to bleed, to be butcherer, to die in the country's cause. The former are the winners, the sacrificers, and the butchers; the second are the victims.
The evidence before the War Committee shows, to a most disgusting satiety, that General Halleck is exclusively a red-tapist, and a small pettifogger, who is unworthy to be even a non-commissioned officer; General Burnside an honest, well intentioned soldier, thoroughly brave, but as thoroughly destitute of generalship; General Sumner an unquestionably brave but headlong trooper; and Hooker alone in possession of all the capacity and resources of a captain. General Woodbury's evidence is that of a man under difficulties, on whom his superiors in rank have thrown the responsibility of their own crime.
Halleck alone is responsible for the non-arrival of the pontoons. Burnside could not look for them; it was the duty of Halleck to order some of the semi-geniuses of his staff to the special duty of seeing to their delivery at Fredericksburgh, to give them necessary power to use roads, steamers, water, animals and men for transportation, and make it a capital responsibility if Sumner finds not the pontoons on the spot, and at the precise day and hour when he wanted them. Then, Gen. Meigs, who coolly asserts that he "gave orders." O yes! but he never dreamed it was his duty to look for their execution. The fate of the campaign depended upon the pontoons, and Halleck-Meigs "gave orders," and there was an end of it. In any other country, such culprits would have been at the least dismissed—cashiered, if not shot; here, their influence is on the increase. Halleck and Meigs are still great before Mr. Lincoln, and before the mass of nincompoops.