For many months the country in front of Washington was converted into a vast drill-ground, over which Drill-Sergeant McClellan exercised the weary feet of over one hundred thousand soldiers, and the wearier patience of many millions of citizens. During this time the echoes of Bull Run, as numerous and diversified as an Irishman’s, haunted the consciences and journals of America, and the hollow faith of Europe. If it was all quiet on the Potomac, it was very unquiet elsewhere. General McClellan was always a believer in the Italian proverb,
“Chi va piano.
Va sano:
Chi va forte,
Va alla morte,”
and so he held his ground near Washington.
In September, a series of severe skirmishes, lasting three days, between General Robert E. Lee, now fifty-three years old, and General Reynolds, at Cheat Mountain and Elk Water, Virginia, followed by another October 3d at Greenbrier, disagreeably shook up the Confederate commander. These first attempts to turn against his countrymen the science and skill which he had gained at their expense and in their service, were creditable to his conscience, if not to his head and skill.
The sleeper turned over with a sense of smothering, as in his nightmare horror he saw the drawn sword of his favorite sons pointed at him.
On the 29th of October a fleet under Commodore Du Pont, with General T. W. Sherman and twenty thousand men on board, sailed for Port Royal, and after three elliptical turnings in the harbor, threw out such pills as they passed that Forts Walker and Beauregard, suddenly swallowing them, fell into such a vertigo, that they lost their heads, and tumbled helpless upon the ground. To balance this fatal bill of mortality, however, the Confederate General Evans, defeated with great loss a detachment of two thousand one hundred men under General Stone, at Ball’s Bluff, when Oregon lost one of her best senators and citizens, Colonel E. D. Baker.
The cotton veil was becoming very soiled and flecked. November brought out a variety of colors in American affairs, some light with yellow hues, others as dark as the gusty season loves to whirl over a surface ever freezing and thawing. General Scott retired from the chief command of the army, to which General McClellan succeeded; the lean Davis was made high-priest for six years to the Southern fetich, and Mason and Slidell, Confederate commissioners, hurriedly shunning Mr. Welles and his cruisers, were captured by Captain Wilkes off the Trent. They were of course promptly spied by the large, vigilant English telescope, which, in its rapid shifting for the occasion, read English international law backwards, and spelled out our duty from our own precedents. The alacrity with which their surrender was demanded showed that the still anxious young lady had survived the alarm, caused by the unwilling kiss six months before, and was desirous to escape, in precisely the same way, any further impertinences.