November 19th.—I rarely sat down to write under a sense of greater responsibility, for it is just possible my letter may contain the first account of the seizure of the Southern Commissioners which will reach England; and, having heard all opinions and looked at authorities, as far as I could, it appears to me that the conduct of the American officer, now sustained by his Government, is without excuse. I dined at Mr. Corcoran’s, where the Ministers of Prussia, Brazil, and Chili, and the Secretary of the French Legation, were present; and, although we did not talk politics, enough was said to show there was no dissent from the opinion expressed by intelligent and uninterested foreigners.
November 20th.—To-day a grand review, the most remarkable feature of which was the able disposition made by General M‘Dowell to march seventy infantry regiments, seventeen batteries, and seven cavalry regiments, into a very contracted space, from the adjoining camps. Of the display itself I wrote a long account, which is not worth repeating here. Among the 55,000 men present there were at least 20,000 Germans and 12,000 Irish.
November 22nd.—All the American papers have agreed that the Trent business is quite according to law, custom, and international comity, and that England can do nothing. They cry out so loudly in this one key there is reason to suspect they have some inward doubts. General M‘Clellan invited all the world, including myself, to see a performance given by Hermann, the conjuror, at his quarters, which will be aggravating news to the bloody-minded, serious people in New England.
Day after day passes on, and finds our Micawbers in Washington waiting for something to turn up. The Trent affair, having been proved to be legal and right beyond yea or nay, has dropped out of the minds of all save those who are waiting for news from England; and on looking over my diary I can see nothing but memoranda relating to quiet rides, visits to camps, conversations with this one or the other, a fresh outburst of anonymous threatening letters, as if I had anything to do with the Trent affair, and notes of small social reunions at our own rooms and the Washington houses which were open to us.
November 25th.—I remarked the other evening that, with all the disorder in Washington, there are no thieves. Next night, as we were sitting in our little symposium, a thirsty soldier knocked at the door for a glass of water. He was brought in and civilly treated. Under the date of the 27th, accordingly, I find it duly entered that “the vagabond who came in for water must have had a confederate, who got into the hall whilst we were attending to his comrade, for yesterday there was a great lamentation over cloaks and great-coats missing from the hall, and as the day wore on the area of plunder was extended. Carl discovers he has been robbed of his best clothes, and Caroline has lost her watch and many petticoats.”
Thanksgiving Day on the 28th was celebrated by enormous drunkenness in the army. The weather varied between days of delicious summer—soft, bright, balmy, and beautiful beyond expression—and days of wintry storm, with torrents of rain.
Some excitement was caused at the end of the month by the report I had received information from England that the law officers of the Crown had given it as their opinion that a United States man-of-war would be justified by Lord Stowell’s decisions in taking Mason and Slidell even in the British Channel, if the Nashville transferred them to a British mail steamer. This opinion was called for in consequence of the Tuscarora appearing in Southampton Water; and, having heard of it, I repeated it in strict confidence to some one else, till at last Baron de Stoeckl came to ask me if it was true. Receiving passengers from the Nashville, however, would have been an act of direct intercourse with an enemy’s ship. In the case of the Trent the persons seized had come on board as lawful passengers at a neutral port.
The tide of success runs strongly in favour of the North at present, although they generally get the worst of it in the small affairs in the front of Washington. The entrance to Savannah has been occupied, and by degrees the fleets are biting into the Confederate lines along the coast, and establishing positions which will afford bases of operations to the Federals hereafter. The President and Cabinet seem in better spirits, and the former indulges in quaint speculations, which he transfers even to State papers. He calculates, for instance, there are human beings now alive who may ere they die behold the United States peopled by 250 millions of souls. Talking of a high mound on the prairie, in Illinois, he remarked, “that if all the nations of the earth were assembled there, a man standing on its top would see them all, for that the whole human race would fit on a space twelve miles square, which was about the extent of the plain.”