"That's very true. But I must first know what are the sentiments of Colonel Wobinson on the negro question."
The orderly might have responded, my boy, had he not fainted just then from weakness. In pity for his comrades, orders were at once given for the transportation of provisions, and re-enforcements to Company 3 before the end of the month; and had the before mentioned Confederacies delayed marching into Accomac until that time, I should not be obliged now to chronicle another of those disasters to our arms, which the traitorous harangues of Wendell Philips have so outrageously produced.
If this war is to be prosecuted with vigor, my boy, we must repose unlimited confidence in the ability of the Administration and of our generals, resolutely frowning down all Jacobin demonstrations at home, and suffering our leaders to be interfered with by no one but each other. If we permit civilians to manage matters, the country will be undone; but if, on the contrary, we trust everything to our generals, the country will be "done"—brown.
Luckily for us all, the occupation of Accomac by the celebrated Southern Confederacy, is a part of the great plan of the General of the Mackerel Brigade to end this rebellion in one crushing blow, and as soon as the entire Confederacy shall have entered Accomac in safety, the Mackerel Brigade will proceed to bag it.
You don't see exactly how this is to be done, eh?
There you go again, my boy! always meddling with what you don't understand, and presuming, in your civilian imbecility, to doubt the practicability—not to say the utility—of a covert invincibility, rendering it a futility on the part of Southern agility to take for weak debility what is really strategic facility, and bound, in its great fertility of warlike inventibility and utter reliability, to turn all the foe's agility to a final accountability, that shall cause him, in future humility, to treat us, at least, with civility.
Such, my boy, is the Mackerel plan, to a T.
This strategy's like some plan for grain depending so much on a fall of rain, that, in less than a week, should the drought remain, 'twould ruin it altogether. It pondereth blindly whether or no the opposite hosts will do so-and-so: and how it will end at last, you know, dependeth upon the "whether".
Yours, calmly,
Orpheus C. Kerr.