Jan. 7.—The city crowded with Major Generals and Brigadier-Generals not in activity. When Mr. Lincoln is cornered, then he makes a Brigadier or a Major General, according to circumstances and in obedience to political or to backstairs influence. From the beginning of the war, no sound notions directed the nominations, either under Cameron, Scott, or McClellan, or now; at the beginning of the war they had Generals without troops, then troops without Generals, and now they have Generals who have not commanded, or cannot command, troops. If, during the war in Poland in 1831, Warsaw, the Capital, had been overrun in such a way by do-nothing Generals, the chambermaids in the city would have taken the affair into their fair hands, and armed with certain night effluvia made short work with the military drones.
Jan. 8.—A poor negro woman with her child was refused entrance into the cars. It snowed and stormed, and she was allowed to shiver on the platform. A so-called abolitionist Congress and President gave the charter to the constructors of the city railroad and the members of Congress have free tickets, and the Africo-American is treated as a dog. Human honesty and justice!
Jan. 8.—Horse contracts the word. Never in my life saw I the horse so maltreated and the cavalry so poorly, badly, brainlessly organised, drilled and used. Some few exceptions change not the truth of my assertions, and McClellan is considered a great organiser. They ruin more horses here in this war than did Napoleon I. in Russia, (I speak not of the cold which killed thousands at once.)
How ignorant and conceited! Halleck solicits Rarey, the horse-tamer, for instructions. O, Halleck, you are unique! Officers who have served in armies with large, good, well-organised and well-drilled cavalry—such officers will teach you more than Rarey. But such officers are from Europe, and it would be a shame for a West-Point incarnation of ignorance and conceit to learn anything from an officer of European experience. Bayard, however, thought not so. Justice to his name.
The rebels are not so conceited as the simon pure West-Pointers. Above all the rebels wish success, and have no objections to learn; they imported good European cavalry officers, and have now under Stuart (his chief of staff is a Prussian officer) a cavalry which has made a mark in this war.
Jan. 8.—O rhetors! O, rhetors! malediction upon you and upon the politicians! You have no heart, no sensibilities. Not one, not one has yet uttered a single word for the fallen, for the suffering, the dying and nameless heroes of our armies. It seems, O rhetors and politicians! that the people ought to bleed that you may prosper. Corpses are needed for your stepping stones! The fallen are not mentioned now in Congress, as you never mentioned them in your poor stump speeches. O, you whitened sepulchres!
O rhetors and politicians! O, powers on, before, and "behind the throne!" In your selfish, heartless conceit, you imagine that the Emancipation is and will be your work, and will be credited to you. Oh yes, but by old women.
The people's blood, the fallen heroes, tore the divine work of emancipation, from the hands of jealously watching demons. To the shadows of the fallen the glory, and not to your round, polished or unpolished phrases. Not the pen with which the proclamation was written is a trophy and a relic, but the blood steaming to heaven, the corpses of the fallen, corpses mouldering scattered on all the fields of the Union.
Jan. 8.—As a rapid spring tide, so higher and higher, and with all parties—even, with the decided Copperheads—rises the haughty contempt toward the crowned, the official, the aristocratic, and the flatfooted (livery stable) part of Europe. Good and just! Marshy, rotten rulers and aristocrats who scarcely can keep your various shaky and undermined seats, you and your lackeys, you take on airs of advisors, of guardians, of initiators of civilization! Forsooth! I except Russia. In Russia the sovereign, his ministers and nine-tenths of the aristocracy are in uni sono with the whole nation; and all are against slavery, against the rebels, against traitors. The Russian government and the Russian nation often are misrepresented by their official or diplomatic agents.
Any well organized American village in the free States contains more genuine, moral and intellectual civilization than prevails among European higher circles, those gilded pasteboards. This is all that you, you conceited advisors, represent in that splendid, all-embracing edifice of civilization! At the best you are ornaments, or—with Wilhelm von Humboldt—you are culture, but not the higher, man-inspiring civilization. A John S. Mill, a Godwin Smith, and those many outside of the would-be-something strata in England, in France, almost the whole Germany, those are the representatives of the genuine civilized Europe.