Dec. 15.—Slaughter and infamy! Slaughter of our troops who fought like Titans, though handled in a style to reflect nothing but infamy upon their commanders. When the rebel works had become impregnable, then, but not until then, our troops were hurled against them! The flower of the army has thus been butchered by the surpassing stupidity of its commanders. The details of that slaughter, and of the imbecility displayed by our officers in high command,—those details, when published, will be horrible. The Lincoln-Seward-Halleck-influence gave Burnside the command because he was to take care of the army. And how Burnside has fulfilled their expectations! It seems that the best way to take care of an army is to make it victorious.
My brave and patriotic Wadsworth has gone in the field, also his two sons; one of them, (Tick,) was at Fredericksburgh, and his bravery was remarkable, even among all the heroism of that most glorious and most accursed day. How many such patriots as Wadsworth, can we boast of? Yet the miserable Halleck had the impudence to say—"Wadsworth may go wherever he pleases, even if he pleases to go to Hell!"
Hell itself, would be too good a place for Halleck; imbeciles are not admitted there!
Dec. 17.—The details are coming in. The disaster of our army is terrible—indescribable; the heroic people bleeds, bleeds! And all this calamity and all this suffering and humiliation, are brought on by the stupidity of Burnside and Halleck, or both of them. The curse of the people ought to rest for centuries upon the very names of the authors of such frightful disaster. They are fiends, yea, worse, even, than the very fiends themselves.
Why, even the very rabble in Constantinople would storm the seraglio after such a massacre. But here—oh, here, it just reminds Mr. Lincoln of a little anecdote.
Dec. 17.—I meet with but few such as Wade, Grimes, Chandler and other radicals in both Houses of Congress, who seem to feel all the heart burning and bitterness of soul at this awful Fredericksburgh disaster. The real criminals, those who ought, in the agonies of a great shame, call upon the rocks and the mountains to fall upon them not, blush not, sorrow not.
In many of the general public, I have no doubt that the feeling of shame and sympathy, are blunted by these repeated military calamities, and by Mr. Lincoln's undaunted i..........
* * * * * and men,
Have wept enough, for what? To weep,
To weep again.
Dec. 17.—About ten days ago, Mr. Seward again sent forth to Europe and to her Cabinets, one of his stale, and by no means Delphic oracles, predicting the success of Burnside's campaign, and immediately follows a bloody and disgraceful calamity! Such is always the result of Seward's prophecies! A diplomat calls Seward the evil eye of the Cabinet, and of the country. I suggested to some of the senators that a resolution be passed prohibiting Mr. Seward from playing either the prophet or the fool.
Burnside took care of the army, no doubt, but it was of the rebel army. Our soldiers have been brought by him to the block, to an easy slaughter, he himself being some few miles in the rear, and having between him the river, and the intervening miles of land. All this, however, was according to the regulations, and on the most approved Halleck-McClellan fashion of fighting great battles.