I ardently hope that this war will breed and educate a population strong, clear-sighted, manly, decided in ideas and in action; and such a population will be scattered all over this extensive country. Men who stood the test of battles, will not submit to the village, township, or to politicians at large, but will judge for themselves, and will take the lead. These men went into the field a common iron ore, they will return steel. The shock will tear the scales from the people's eyes, and the people easily will discern between pure grain and chaff. I am sure that a man who fought for the great cause, who brought home honorable wounds and scars, whose limbs are rotting on fields of battle; such a man will become an authority; and death-knell to the abject race of politicians; the days of shallow, cold, rhetors are numbered, and vanity and selfishness will be doomed. Non vobis, non vobis—sed populo....
April 25.—Mr. Seward is elated, triumphant, grand. Emigration from Europe, evoked, beckoned by him is to replace the population lost in the war.
What is to be more scorned? Seward's heartless cruelty or his reckless ignorance, to believe that such a numerous emigration will pour in, as to at once make up for those of whom at least one third were butchered by flippancy of Mr. Seward's policy to which Lincoln became committed.
April 26.—The people are bound onwards per aspera ad astra: the giddy brained helmsmen, military and civil chiefs and commanders may hurl the people in an opposite direction.
April 26.—Whoever will dispassionately read the various statutes published by the 37th Congress; will speak of its labors as I do, and the future historian will find in those statutes the best light by which to comprehend and to appreciate the prevailing temper of the people.
April 27.—Rhetors and some abolitionists of the small church—not Wendell Phillips—still are satisfied with mistakes and disasters, because otherwise slavery would not have been destroyed. If they have a heart, it is a clump of ice, and their brains are common jelly. With men at the head who would have had faith and a lofty consciousness of their task, the rebellion and slavery could have been both crushed in the year 1861, or any time in 1862. Any one but an idiot ought to have seen at the start, that as the rebels fight to maintain slavery, in striking slavery you strike at the rebels. The blood spilt because of the narrow-mindedness of the leaders, that blood will cry to heaven, whatever be the absolution granted by the rhetors and by the small church.
April 27.—Mr. Seward went on a visit to the army, dragging with him some diplomats. The army was not to forget the existence of the Secretary of State, this foremost Union-saviour, and the candidate for the next Presidency. Others say that Seward ran away to dodge the Peterhoff case.
April 27.—How the politicians of the Times and of the Chronicle lustily attack—NOW—McClellan. If I am well informed, it was the editor of the Chronicle, himself a leading politician, and influential in both Houses, who instigated Lovejoy, Member of Congress, to move resolutions in favor of McClellan for the battle at Williamsburgh, where McClellan did what he could to have his own army destroyed.
April 28.—Mr. Seward elaborated for the President a paper in the Peterhoff case—and, horribile dictu, as I am told—even the President found the argument, or whatever else it was, very, very light. The President sent for the chief clerk to explain to him the unintelligible document—and more darkness prevailed. Bravo, Mr. Seward! your name and your place in the history of the times are firmly nailed!
April 28.—The time will come, and even I may yet witness it, when these deep wounds struck by the rebellion will be healed; when even the scars of blows dealt to the people by such Lincolns, Sewards, McClellans, Hallecks, the other minor gens, will be invisible—and this great people, steeled by events, will be more powerful than it ever was. Then the Monroe doctrine will be applied in all its sternness and rigor, and from pole to pole no European power will defile this continent. The so-called Americo-Hispano-Latin races humbugged by Europe, will have found how cursed is any whatever European influence. The main land and the Isles must be purified therefrom. Will any European government, power, or statesman permit the United States to acquire even the most barren rock on the European continent? The American continent is equal, if not more to Europe, and the degrading stigma of European colonies and possessions must be blotted from this American soil.