There's a piece of domestic philosophy for you, my boy.
When the General heard of his removal, my boy, he said that it was like divorcing a husband from a wife, who had always supported him, and immediately let fly the following
Farewell Address.
Head-quarters of the Army of Accomac,
Foot of the Blue Ridge.
My Children:
An order from the Honest Abe divorces us, and gives the command of all these attached beings to Major-General Wobert Wobinson. (Heartrending and enthusiastic cheers.)
In parting with you, I cannot express how much I love your dear bosoms. As an army, you have grown from youth to old age under my care. In you I have never found doubt nor coldness, nor anything else. The victories you have won under my command will live in the nation's works of fiction. The strategy we have achieved, the graves of many unripe Mackerels, the broken forms of those disabled by the Emancipation Proclamation—the strongest associations that can
exist among men—still make it advisable that you should vote for me as President of the United States in 1865. Thus we shall ever be comrades in supporting the Constitution, and making the Constitution support us.
The General of the Mackerel Brigade.
[Green Seal.]
It was while this affecting document was being read to the Army, my boy, that a procession of political chaps with banners and a small cannon, landed from a boat on Awlkwyet River, and came filing affably into camp. Only pausing to insult two correspondents of the Tribune, and to fire the cannon so close to a farmhouse that it broke all the windows, these pleasant chaps at once organized a meeting and gave orders that all fighting should be postponed till after the session.
The Hon. Mr. X. Stream proceeded to say that he considered Mr. Lincoln a strictly honest, upright, able, and noble-hearted man (cheers); but it could not be denied that his Administration was a wretched failure—a blending of brutal imbecility with hellish despotism. (Much enthusiasm). While it continued so, everything in the stock-market would go up—up—UP! until the bubble burst. The General of the Mackerel Brigade had been removed (universal sobbing) but it was only that he might shine the brighter before a Democratic Convention in 1865.