On the journey from Harper’s Ferry, the concentration of masses of troops along the road, and the march of heavy artillery trains, caused me to think a renewal of the offensive movement against Richmond was immediate, but at Washington I heard that all M‘Clellan wanted or hoped for at present, was to make Maryland safe and to gain time for the formation of his army. The Confederates appear to be moving towards their left, and M‘Clellan is very uneasy lest they should make a vigorous attack before he is prepared to receive them.
In the evening the New York papers came in with the extracts from the London papers containing my account of the battle of Bull’s Run. Utterly forgetting their own versions of the engagement, the New York editors now find it convenient to divert attention from the bitter truth that was in them, to the letter of the foreign newspaper correspondent, who, because he is a British subject, will prove not only useful as a conductor to carry off the popular wrath from the American journalists themselves, but as a means by induction of charging the vials afresh against the British people, inasmuch as they have not condoled with the North on the defeat of armies which they were assured would, if successful, be immediately led to effect the disruption of the British empire. At the outset I had foreseen this would be the case, and deliberately accepted the issue; but when I found the Northern journals far exceeding in severity anything I could have said, and indulging in general invective against whole classes of American soldiery, officers, and statesmen, I was foolish enough to expect a little justice, not to say a word of the smallest generosity.
August 21st.—The echoes of Bull Run are coming back with a vengeance. This day a month ago the miserable fragments of a beaten, washed out, demoralised army, were flooding in disorder and dismay the streets of the capital from which they had issued forth to repel the tide of invasion. This day month and all the editors and journalists in the States, weeping, wailing, and gnashing their teeth, infused extra gall into their ink, and poured out invective, abuse, and obloquy on their defeated general and their broken hosts. The President and his ministers, stunned by the tremendous calamity, sat listening in fear and trembling for the sound of the enemy’s cannon. The veteran soldier, on whom the boasted hopes of the nation rested, heart-sick and beaten down, had neither counsel to give nor action to offer. At any moment the Confederate columns might be expected in Pennsylvania Avenue to receive the welcome of their friends and the submission of their helpless and disheartened enemies.
All this is forgotten—and much more, which need not now be repeated. Saved from a great peril, even the bitterness of death, they forget the danger that has passed, deny that they uttered cries of distress and appeals for help, and swagger in all the insolence of recovered strength. Not only that, but they turn and rend those whose writing has been dug up after thirty days, and comes back as a rebuke to their pride.
Conscious that they have insulted and irritated their own army, that they have earned the bitter hostility of men in power, and have for once inflicted a wound on the vanity to which they have given such offensive dimensions, if not life itself, they now seek to run a drag scent between the public nose and their own unpopularity, and to create such an amount of indignation and to cast so much odium upon one who has had greater facilities to know, and is more willing to tell the truth, than any of their organs, that he will be unable henceforth to perform his duties in a country where unpopularity means simply a political and moral atrophy or death. In the telegraphic summary some days ago a few phrases were picked out of my letters, which were but very faint paraphrases of some of the sentences which might be culled from Northern newspapers, but the storm has been gathering ever since, and I am no doubt to experience the truth of De Tocqueville’s remark, “that a stranger who injures American vanity, no matter how justly, may make up his mind to be a martyr.”
August 22nd.—
“The little dogs and all,
Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart,
See they bark at me.”
The North have recovered their wind, and their pipers are blowing with might and main. The time given them to breathe after Bull Run has certainly been accompanied with a greater development of lung and power of blowing than could have been expected. The volunteer army which dispersed and returned home to receive the Io Pæans of the North, has been replaced by better and more numerous levies, which have the strong finger and thumb of General M‘Clellan on their windpipe, and find it is not quite so easy as it was to do as they pleased. The North, besides, has received supplies of money, and is using its great resources, by land and sea, to some purpose, and as they wax fat they kick.