“I have not failed to see that every wrong this country has been called to endure at the hands of any foreign Power has been a natural if not a logical consequence of the first grave error which that Power committed in conceding to an insurrection, which would otherwise have been ephemeral, the rights of a public belligerent. It has seemed, therefore, to be wise, as well as more dignified, to urge the retrogression upon that false step, rather than to elaborate complaints of the injuries that have followed it.”
It would have been well had he done so; but instead he has, without ceasing to urge retrogression, indulged in ceaseless complaints. Wrapt in his delusions, he drifts calmly on the tide of events that is bearing him and his despatches to chaos, and takes the crack of doom for a wholesome thunderstorm which is to clear the political atmosphere. Nothing can surpass the feeble complacency with which he records his perpetual illusions as incontrovertible facts. On Feb. 19, 1862, he writes to Mr Adams:—
“I was just about instructing you how to answer the querulous complaints in Parliament which you have anticipated, the chief of which is the assumed incompetency of Government to suppress the insurrection. But a very shrewd observer, a loyal, and at present exiled Virginian, fell in at the moment, and expressed to me the opinion that the end of the war is in sight; that there will be a short and rapid series of successes over a disheartened conspiracy, and then all will be over. I give you these opinions as entitling us to what is sometimes granted by candid tribunals—namely, a suspension of judgment.”
It is a pity that the name of the shrewd observer has not been preserved. So sagacious a man ought not to be anonymous.
On the 10th of February he tells us:—
“The process of preparation has steadily gone on in the loyal States, while that of exhaustion has been going on in the disloyal.... We have the most satisfactory evidence that the Union will be hailed in every quarter just as fast as the army shall emancipate the people from the oppression of the insurgent leaders.”
March 15—“The financial and moral, as well as the physical, elements of the insurrection seem to be rapidly approaching exhaustion.” On 25th March it seems impossible to the sanguine Secretary that the organisation of the insurgents can be longer maintained. On 28th April he asserts that “to-day the country is assuming that the fate of this unnatural war is determined by the great event of the capture of New Orleans.” On the 5th May the fiscal system of the insurgents must, he calculates, have exploded, and their military connections be everywhere broken. On 28th May the Federal Government is said to possess the Mississippi and all the other great natural highways. And on June 2—
“The war in the Mississippi valley may be deemed virtually ended.... The army of General M‘Clellan will be rapidly strengthened, although it is already deemed adequate to the capture of Richmond.... No American now indulges any doubt that the integrity of the Union will be triumphantly maintained.”
24th June:—
“You tell me that in England they still point to the delays at Richmond and Corinth, and they enlarge upon the absence of displays of Union feeling in New Orleans and Norfolk. Ah, well! scepticism must be expected in this world in regard to new political systems, insomuch as even Divine revelation needs the aid of miracles to make converts to a new religious faith.”