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Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863

by Adam Gurowski · English · Gutenberg #29264 · 483,557 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863

Author: Adam Gurowski


        
Release date: June 28, 2009 [eBook #29264]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29264

Credits: Produced by David Edwards, Christine P. Travers and the
        Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
        (This file was produced from images generously made
        available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DIARY FROM NOVEMBER 12, 1862, TO OCTOBER 18, 1863 ***




Produced by David Edwards, Christine P. Travers and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive)





[Transcriber's note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected.
Hyphenation and accentuation have been standardised, all
other inconsistencies are as in the original. The author's spelling
has been maintained.

Page 94: The word "of" has been added in "If the Army of the Potomac".]




DIARY,

FROM

NOVEMBER 18, 1862, TO OCTOBER 18, 1863.


BY

ADAM GUROWSKI.




VOLUME SECOND.




NEW-YORK:

_Carleton, Publisher, 413 Broadway._

MDCCCLXIV.




Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864,

By GEO. W. CARLETON,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern
District of New York.




Of all the peoples known in history, the American people most
readily forgets YESTERDAY;

I publish this DIARY in order to recall YESTERDAY to the memory of
my countrymen.

                                                        GUROWSKI.

WASHINGTON, October, 1863.




CONTENTS.


  NOVEMBER, 1862.                                                   11

Secretary Chase -- French Mediation -- The Decembriseur --
Diplomatic Bendings.


  DECEMBER, 1862.                                                   22

President's Message -- Political Position -- Fredericksburgh -- Fog
-- Accident -- Crisis in the Cabinet -- Secretary Chase -- Burnside
-- Halleck -- The Butchers -- The Lickspittle Republican Press --
War Committee Patriots -- Youth -- People -- Ring out.


  JANUARY, 1863.                                                    61

Proclamation -- Parade -- Halleck -- Diplomats -- Herodians --
Inspired Men -- War Powers -- Rosecrans -- Butler -- Seward --
Doctores Constitutionis -- Hogarth -- Rhetors -- European Enemies --
Second Sight -- Senator Wright, the Patriot -- Populus Romanus --
Future Historian -- English People -- Gen. Mitchel -- Hooker in
Command -- Staffs -- Arming Africo-Americans -- Thurlow Weed, &c.


  FEBRUARY, 1863.                                                  119

The Problems before the People -- The Circassian -- Department of
State and International Laws -- Foresight -- Patriot Stanton and the
Rats -- Honest Conventions -- Sanitary Commission -- Harper's Ferry
-- John Brown -- The Yellow Book -- The Republican Party -- Epitaph
-- Prize Courts -- Suum cuique -- Academy of Sciences -- Democratic
Rank and File, etc.


  MARCH, 1863.                                                     159

Press -- Ethics -- President's Powers -- Seward's Manifestoes --
Cavalry -- Letters of Marque -- Halleck -- Sigel -- Fighting --
McDowell -- Schalk -- Hooker -- Etat Major-General -- Gold -- Cloaca
Maxima -- Alliance -- Burnside -- Halleckiana -- Had we but
Generals, how often Lee could have been destroyed, etc.


  APRIL, 1863.                                                     182

Lord Lyons -- Blue Book -- Diplomats -- Butler -- Franklin --
Bancroft -- Homunculi -- Fetishism -- Committee on the Conduct of
the War -- Non-intercourse -- Peterhoff -- Sultan's Firman -- Seward
-- Halleck -- Race -- Capua -- Feint -- Letter-writing -- England --
Russia -- American Revolution -- Renovation -- Women -- Monroe
Doctrine, etc.


  MAY, 1863.                                                       215

Advance -- Crossing -- Chancellorsville -- Hooker -- Staff -- Lee --
Jackson -- Stunned -- Suggestions -- Meade -- Swinton -- La Fayette
-- Happy Grant -- Rosecrans -- Halleck -- Foote -- Elections --
Re-elections -- Tracks -- Seward -- 413, etc.


  JUNE, 1863.                                                      238

Banks -- "The Enemy Crippled" -- Count Zeppelin -- Hooker -- Stanton
-- "Give Him a Chance" -- Mr. Lincoln's Looks -- Rappahannock --
Slaughter -- North Invaded -- "To be Stirred up" -- Blasphemous
Curtin -- Banquetting -- Groping -- Retaliation -- Foote -- Hooker
-- Seward -- Panama -- Chase -- Relieved -- Meade -- Nobody's Fault
-- Staffs, etc.


  JULY, 1863.                                                      257

Eneas -- Anchises -- General Warren -- Aldie -- General Pleasanton
-- Superior Mettle -- Gettysburgh -- Cholera Morbus -- Vicksburgh --
Army of Heroes -- Apotheosis -- "Not Name the Generals" -- Indian
Warfare -- Politicians -- Spittoons -- Riots -- Council of War --
Lords and Lordlings -- Williamsport -- Shame -- Wadsworth -- "To
meet the Empress Eugénie," etc.


  AUGUST, 1863.                                                    286

Stanton -- Twenty Thousand -- Canadians -- Peterhoff -- Coffey --
Initiation -- Electioneering -- Reports -- Grant -- McClellan --
Belligerent Rights -- Menagerie -- Watson -- Jury -- Democrats --
Bristles -- "Where is Stanton?" -- "Fight the Monster" -- Chasiana
-- Luminaries -- Ballistic -- Political Economy, etc.


  SEPTEMBER, 1863.                                                 310

Jeff Davis -- Incubuerunt -- O, Youth! -- Lucubrations -- Genuine
Europe -- It is Forgotten -- Fremont -- Prof. Draper -- New Yorkers
-- Senator Sumner's Gauntlet -- Prince Gortschakoff -- Governor
Andrew -- New Englanders -- Re-elections -- Loyalty -- Cruizers --
Matamoras -- Hurrah for Lincoln -- Rosecrans -- Strategy -- Sabine
Pass, etc.


  OCTOBER, 1863.                                                   338

Aghast -- Firing -- Supported -- Russian Fleet -- Opposition -- Amor
scelerated -- Cautious -- Mastiffs -- _Grande Guerre_ -- Manoeuvring
-- Tambour battant -- Warning, etc.




DIARY.




NOVEMBER, 1862.

     Secretary Chase -- French Mediation -- the Decembriseur --
     Diplomatic Bendings.


_November 18._--In the street a soldier offered to sell me the pay
already several months overdue to him. As I could not help him, as
gladly I would have done, being poor, he sold it to a curb-stone
broker, a street note-shaver. I need not say that the poor soldier
sustained a loss of twenty-five per cent. by the operation! He
wanted to send the money home to his poor wife and children; yet one
fourth of it was thus given into the hands of a stay-at-home
speculator. Alas, for me! I could not save the poor fellow from the
remorseless shaver, but I could and did join him in a very energetic
cursing of Chase, that at once pompous and passive patriot.

This induced me to enter upon a further and more particular
investigation, and I found that hundreds of similar cases were of
almost daily occurrence; and that this cheating of the soldiers out
of their nobly and patriotically earned pay, may quite fairly be
denounced as rather the rule than as the exception. The army is
unpaid! Unspeakable infamy! Before,--long before the intellectually
poor occupant of the White House, long before _any_ civil employé,
big or little, the ARMY ought to be paid. Common humanity, common
sense, and sound policy affirm this; and common decency, to say
nothing about chivalric feelings, adds that when paymasters are sent
to the army at all, their first payments should be made to the rank
and file; the generals and their subordinate officers to be paid,
not before, but afterwards. Oh! for the Congress, for the Congress
to meet once again! My hope is in the Congress, to resist, and
sternly put an end to, such heaven-defying and man-torturing
injustice as now braves the curses of outraged men, and the anger of
God. How this pompous Chase disappoints every one, even those who at
first were inclined to be even weakly credulous and hopeful of his
official career. And why is Stanton silent? He ought to roar. As for
Lincoln--he, ah! * * * * The curses of all the books of all the
prophets be upon the culprits who have thus compelled our gallant
and patriotic soldiery to mingle their tears with their own blood
and the blood of the enemy!

_Nov. 18._--Again Seward assures Lord Lyons that the national
troubles will soon be over, and that the general affairs of the
country "stand where he wanted them." Seward's crew circulate in the
most positive terms, that the country will be pacified by the State
Department! England, moved by the State papers and official
notes--England, officially and non-officially, will stop the
iron-clads, built and launched in English ports and harbors for the
use of the rebels, and for the annoyance and injury of the United
States. England, these Americans say, England, no doubt, has said
some hard words, and has been guilty of some detestably treacherous
actions; but all will probably be settled by the benign influence of
Mr. Seward's despatches, which, as everyone knows, are perfectly
irresistible. How the wily Palmerston must chuckle in Downing
Street.

The difference between Seward and a real statesman, is this: that a
statesman is always, and very wisely, chary about committing himself
in writing, and only does it when compelled by absolutely
irresistible circumstances, or by temptations brilliant enough to
overrule all other considerations; for, such a statesman never for
one moment forgets or disregards the old adage which saith that
"_Verba volant, scripta manent_." But Seward, on the contrary,
literally revels in a flood of ink, and fancies that the more he
writes, the greater statesman he becomes.

At the beginning of this month, I wrote to the French minister, M.
Mercier, a friendly and respectful note, warning him against
meddling with politicians and busybodies. I told him that, before he
could even suspect it, such men would bring his name before the
public in a way neither pleasant nor profitable to him. M. Mercier
took it in good part, and cordially thanked me for my advice.

_Nov. 19._--Burnside means well, and has a good heart; but something
more is required to make a capable captain, more especially in such
times as those in which we are living. It is said that his staff is
well organized; God be praised for that, if it really is so. In that
case, Burnside will be the first among the loudly-lauded and
self-conceited West-Point men, forcibly to impress both the military
and the civilian mind in America, with a wholesome consciousness of
the paramount importance to an army of a thoroughly competent and
trustworthy staff.

The division of the army into three grand corps is good; it is at
once wise and well-timed, following the example set by Napoleon,
when he invaded Russia in 1812. If his subordinate generals will but
do well, I have entire confidence in Hooker. He is the man for the
time and for the place. As a fighting man, Sumner is fully and
unquestionably reliable; but I have my doubts about Franklin. He is
cold, calculating, and ambitious, and he has the especially bad
quality of being addicted to the alternate blowing of hot and cold.
Burnside did a good thing in confiding to General Siegel a separate
command.

The _New York Times_ begins to mend its bad ways; but how long will
it continue in the better path?

_Nov. 20._--England stirs up and backs up rebellion and disunion
here; but, in Europe, for the sake of the unity of barbarism,
Islamism, and Turkey, England throttles, and manacles, and lays
prostrate beneath the feet of the Osmanli, the Greeks, the Sclavi,
the heroic Montenegrins. England is the very incarnation of a
treachery and a perfidy previously unexampled in the history of the
world. The _Punica fides_, so fiercely denounced and so bitterly
satirized by the historians and poets of old Rome, was truthful if
compared to the _Fides Anglica_ of our own day.

_Nov. 22._--Our army seems to be massed so as to be able to wedge
itself in between Jackson in the valley and Lee at Gordonsville. By
a bold manoeuvre, each of them could be separately attacked, and, I
firmly believe, destroyed. But, unfortunately, boldness and
manoeuvre, that highest gift, that supreme inspiration of the
consummate captain, have no abiding place in the bemuddled brains of
the West-Pointers, who are a dead weight and drag-chain upon the
victimised and humiliated Army of the Potomac.

_Nov. 25._--The Army is stuck fast in the mud, and the march towards
Fredericksburgh is not at all unlikely to end in smoke. There seems
to be an utter absence of executive energy. Why not mask our
movements before Gordonsville from the observation of Lee? Or, if
preferable, what is to hinder the interposition of _un rideau
vivant_, a _living curtain_, in the form of a false attack, a feint
in considerable force, behind which the whole army might be securely
thrown across the Rappahannock, by which at least two days' march
would be gained on Lee, and our troops would be on the direct line
for Fredericksburg, if Fredericksburg is really to be the base for
future operations. In this way, the army would have marched against
Fredericksburg on both sides of the river. Or, supposing those plans
to be rejected, why not throw a whole army corps at once, say 40,000
to 50,000 strong, across the Rappahannock. On either plan, I repeat
it, at least two days' march would have been stolen upon Lee; three
or four days of forced marches would have been healthy for our army,
and a bloodless victory would have been obtained by the taking of
the seemingly undefended Fredericksburg. A dense cloud enveloped
this whole enterprise, and it is not even improbable, that the
campaign may become a dead failure even before it has accomplished
the half of its projected and loudly vaunted course. But bold
conceptions, and energetic movements to match them, are just about
as possible to Halleck or Burnside as railroad speed to the tedious
tortoise.

_Nov. 25._--Oh! So Louis Napoleon could not keep quiet. He offers
his mediation, which, in plain English, means his moral support to
the South. Oh! that enemy to the whole human race. That
_Decembriseur_.[1] Our military slowness, if nothing else is the
matter, our administrative and governmental helplessness, and
Seward's lying and all-confusing foreign policy have encouraged
foreign impertinence and foreign meddling. I have all along
anticipated them as an at least very possible result of the above
mentioned causes. [See vol. I of the Diary.] Nevertheless, I
scarcely expected such results to appear so soon. Perhaps this same
impertinent French action may prove a second French _faux pas_, to
follow in the wake of the first and very egregious _faux pas_ in
Mexico. The best that we can say for the _Decembriseur_ is, that he
is getting old. England refuses to join in his at once wild and
atrocious schemes, and makes a very Tomfool of the bloody Fox of the
Tuileries. My, Russia--ah! I am very confident of that--will refuse
to join in the dirty and treacherous conspiracy for the
preservation of slavery. Well for mediation. But Mr. _Decembriseur_,
what think you and your diplomatic lackeys; what judgment and what
determination do you and they form as to the terms and the
termination, too, of your diabolical scheme? Descend, sir, from your
shilly-shally generalities and verbal fallacies. Is it to be a
commercial union, this hobby of your minister here? What is it; let
us in all plainness of speech know what it is that you really and
positively intend. Propound to us the plain meaning and scope of
your imperial proposition.

         [Footnote 1: The men who, in the great French revolution,
         and under the leadership of Danton and of the municipality
         of Paris, massacred the political prisoners in September,
         1792, are recorded in history under the name of
         _Septembriseurs_. Louis Napoleon may no less justly be
         called the _Decembriseur_, from that frightful massacre on
         the 2nd of December, from which he dates his despotism.]

_Nov. 27._--Lee, with his army, marches or marched on the south side
of the river, in a parallel to the line of Burnside on the north
side of the river, and Jackson quietly, but quickly follows. They
are at Fredericksburg, and our army looms up, calm, but stern;
still, but defiant and menacing. I heartily wish that Burnside may
be successful, and that I may prove to have been a false prophet.
But the great _Fatum_, FATE, seems to declare against Burnside, and
Fate generally takes sides with bold conceptions and their energetic
execution.

_Nov. 28._--The French despatch-scheme reads very like a Washington
concoction, and does not at all bear the marks of Parisian origin. I
find in it whole phrases which, for months past, I have repeatedly
heard from the French minister here. Perhaps Mr. Mercier, in his
turn, may have caught many of Mr. Seward's much-cherished
generalities, unintelligible, very probably, even to himself, and
quite certainly so to every one but himself. Perhaps, I say, Mr.
Mercier may have caught up some of them, and making them up at
hap-hazard into a _macedoine_, a hash, a hotch-potch, has served up
the second-hand and heterogeneous mess to his master in Paris. The
despatch expresses the fear of a servile war; this may very well
have been copied from Mr. Seward's despatch to Mr. Adams, (May,
1862,) wherein Seward attempted to frighten England by a prophecy of
a servile war in this country.

_Nov. 30._--Mr. Seward semi-officially and conveniently accepts the
French impudence. Computing the time and space, the scheme
corresponds with McClellan's inactivity after Antietam, and with the
raising of the banner of the Copperheads. I spoke of this before,
(see Diary for November and December, 1861, in Vol. I.) and
repeatedly warned Stanton.

_Nov. 30._--Mercier, the French diplomat, rapidly gravitates towards
the Copperheads--Democrats. Is he acting thus _in obedience to
orders_? After all, some of the diplomats here, and especially those
of what call themselves the "three great powers," almost openly
sympathize and side with secessionists, and patronize Copperheads,
traitors, and spies. The exceptions to this rule are but few;
strictly speaking, indeed, I should except only one young man. Some
diplomats justify this conduct on the plea that the Republican
Congressmen are "great bores," who will not play at cards, or dine
and drink copiously; accomplishments in which the Secesh was so
pre-eminent as to win his way to the inner depths of the diplomatic
heart. The people, I am sure, will heartily applaud those of its
representatives for thus incurring the contempt of dissipated
diplomats.

Some persons maintain that Stanton breaks down, perhaps that he
suffers, physically as well as mentally, from his necessitated
contact with his official colleagues and his and their persistent,
inevitable and inexorable hangers-on and supplicants. I do not
perceive the alleged failure of his health or powers, and I do not
believe it; but assuredly, it were no marvel if such really were the
case. It must be an adamantine constitution and temper that could
long bear with impunity the daily contact with a Lincoln, a Seward,
a Halleck, and others less noted, indeed, but not the less
contagious.




DECEMBER, 1862

     President's Message -- Political position -- Fredericksburgh --
     Fog -- Accident -- Crisis in the Cabinet -- Secretary Chase --
     Burnside -- Halleck -- the Butchers -- The Lickspittle Republican
     Press -- War Committee patriots -- Youth -- People -- Ring out.


Grammarians may criticize the syntax of the President's message, and
the style. It reads uneasy, forced, tortuous, and it declares that
it is _impossible_ to subdue the rebels by force of arms. Of course
it is impossible with Lincoln for President, and first McClellan
and then Halleck to counterfeit the parts of the first Napoleon, and
the at once energetic and scientific Carnot. Were the great heart of
THE PEOPLE left to itself, it would be very _possible_ and even
quite easily _possible_.

The message is written with an eye turned towards the Democrats;
they are to be satisfied with the prospect of a convention. Seward
puts lies into Lincoln's pen, in relation to foreign nations. But
all is well, in the judgment of our _Great Statesmen_. Even the poor
logic is, according to them, quite admirable.

Contrariwise, Stanton's report corresponds to the height and the
gravity of events, and is worthy alike of the writer, and of the
people to whom it is addressed.

_Dec. 6._--Nearly four weeks the campaign has been opened; the enemy
adds fortifications to fortifications before the very eyes of our
army, yet nothing has been done towards preventing the rebels from
working upon the formidable strongholds.

Does Halleck-Burnside intend to wait until the rebels shall be
thoroughly prepared to repel any attack that may be made upon them?
Either there is foul play going on, or there is stupendous
stupidity pervading the entire management. But no one sees it, or
rather few, if any, wish to see it. Stanton, I am quite sure, has
nothing to do with the special plans of this enterprise. All is
planned and ruled by Lincoln, Halleck and Burnside.

_Dec. 7._--The political situation to-day, may be summarily stated
as follows: the Republicans are confused by recent electoral
defeats, and by the administrative and governmental helplessness, as
exhibited every day by their leaders; the Democrats, flushed with
success, display an unusual activity in evil doing, and are risking
everything to preserve Slavery and the South from destruction. I
speak of the Simon-pure Democrats, _alias_ Copperheads, such as the
Woods, the Seymours, the Vallandighams, the Coxes, the Biddles, &c.
The Sewards and the Weeds are ready for a compromise. The masses of
the people, staggered by all this bewildering turmoil and impure
factiousness, are nevertheless, stubbornly determined to persevere
and to succeed in saving their country.

_Dec. 7._--The European wiseacres, the would-be statesmen, whether
in or out of power, especially in England, and that opprobrium of
our century, the English and the Franco-Bonapartist press, have
decided to do all that their clever brains can scheme towards
preventing this noble American people from working out its mighty
and beneficent destinies, and from elaborating and making more
glorious than ever its own already very glorious history. As well
might the brainless and heartless conspirators against human
progress and human liberty endeavor to arrest the rotation of a
planet by the stroke of a pickaxe.

Ah! Mr. _Decembriseur_, with your base crew of lickspittles, your
pigmy, though treacherous efforts, even contending with those of the
English enemies of light, and of right, your common hatred of
Freedom and Freemen will end in being the destruction of yourself.

_Dec. 7._--Burnside complains of the manner in which he is
victimised, and explains his inactivity by the fact that the War
Department neglected to furnish him with the necessary pontoons.
How, in fact, was Burnside to move a great army without pontoons?
But it was the duty of Halleck, and his lazy or incompetent, or
traitorous staff, to have seen to the sending on of the pontoons.
However, supposing Burnside and _his_ staff to have as much wit as
an average twelve-year-old school boy, they could have found in the
army not merely hundreds, but even thousands of proficient workmen
in a variety of mechanical trades, who would have constructed on the
spot, and at the shortest notice, any number of bridges, pontoons,
&c. Oh, how little are those wiseacre generals, the conceited and
swaggering West Pointers; oh, how very little, if at all are they
aware of the inexhaustible ingenuity and resources, the marvelous
skill and power of such intelligent masses as those of which they
are the unintelligent, the unsympathising and the thoroughly
unblessed leaders!

On a Sunday, exactly four weeks back from the day which I wrote
these lines, McClellan was dismissed, and was succeeded by Burnside.
But, after the established McClellan fashion, the great, great army
was marched 30 to 50 miles, and then halts for weeks up to its knees
in mud, and occupies itself in throwing up earthworks. And this is
called making War! and the Hallecks are great men in the sight of
Abraham Lincoln, and of all who profess and call themselves
Lincolnites, and the rest stand around wondering and agape:

  _Conticuere omnes intentique ora (asinina) tenebant._

Stanton's magnificent report states that there are about 700,000 men
under arms; yet this tremendous force is paralysed by the inactivity
of most of the generals; those in the West, however, forming a
bright and truly honorable exception. But, to be candid, how can
activity and dash be expected from generals who have at their head,
a shallow brained pedant like Halleck? Napoleon had about 500,000
men, when, in between four and five months, he marched from the
Rhine to Moscow. Yet he had the aid of no railroad, on land, no
steam, that practical annihilator of distance, no electric
telegraph, with which to be in all but instantaneous communication
with his distant generals, and had not similar material resources.

_Dec. 10._--Mr. Seward's long correspondence with Mr. Adams shows to
Europe that Mr. Seward imitated the rebels, and tried to frighten
England with the bugbear of King Cotton; and also that he has no
solid and abiding convictions whatever. Now, he preaches
emancipation, yet, at the beginning of his _great_ diplomatic
activity, he openly sided with slavery; aye, he is still willing to
save it for the sake of the Union, and, above all, and before all,
for his own chances for the next Presidency.

_Dec. 10._--Burnside has finally crossed the Rappahannock. Of course
I do not know the respective positions. But I am sure that if the
rebels have not a perfectly enormous advantage of position, and if
the leading of the generals be worthy of the courage of their men,
the victory must be ours. Oh! were all our generals Hookers, and not
Burnsides!

General McDowell's Court of Inquiry produces some strange revelations.
The inquiry will not end in making a thorough general of McDowell. He
may have been somewhat unfortunate, no doubt; but his want of good
fortune was at least equalled by his want of good generalship. I, and
many others besides, were quite mistaken in our early estimate of
McDowell. He should not so easily have swallowed the second Bull Run.
He should at least have been wounded, if only ever so slightly; his
best friends must wish that. But to be defeated, and come out without
even a scratch! What a digestion the man must have for the hardest
kinds of humiliation! But neither the President nor that curse of the
country, McClellan, has great reason to plume himself much upon his
share in the revelations that are made in the course of this Inquiry.
McDowell himself seems to have been intended, by nature for a scheming
and adroit politician. * * * *

_Dec. 10._--The Congress feels the ground, hesitates, and apparently
lacks the necessary energy to come to a determination. Lincoln, even
such as he is, contrives to humbug most of the Congressmen. Well!
The first of January is close at hand, and Seward, the Congressional
cook, will concoct unpalatable and costly dishes for Congressional
digestion. Seward is the incarnation of confusion, and of political
faithlessness.

I have only now discovered certain of the reasons why the Battle of
Antietam, so bravely fought by our army, had no _ensemble_ and such
marvelously poor results. Burnside, with his corps, got into line
many hours too late. The rebels were thus enabled to concentrate on
the wing opposed to Hooker and Sumner, the right wing and centre of
the rebels being for the time unthreatened. And that is generalship!
The blame of a blunder so glaring, and in its effect so mischievous,
attaches equally to Burnside and to McClellan. The victory, such as
it was, was due to the subordinate generals, and to the heroic
bravery of the rank and file of the army.

When Burnside was invested with the command of the Army of the
Potomac, he for nearly twenty-four hours retained McClellan in camp,
with the intention of returning the command of the army to him if
the rebels had attacked, as it was expected they would, during
Sunday and Monday.

_Dec. 13._--Night. Fight at Fredericksburgh. No news. O God!

_Dec. 14._--As the consequence of Halleck-Burnside's slowness, our
troops storm positions which are said to be impregnable by nature,
and still farther strengthened by artificial works.

The President is even worse than I had imagined him to be. He has no
earnestness, but is altogether in the hands of Seward and Halleck.
He cannot, even in this supreme crisis, be earnest and serious for
half an hour. Such was the severe but terribly true verdict passed
upon him by Fessenden of Maine.

_Dec. 15._--Slaughter and infamy! Slaughter of our troops who fought
like Titans, though handled in a style to reflect nothing but infamy
upon their commanders. When the rebel works had become impregnable,
then, but not until then, our troops were hurled against them! The
flower of the army has thus been butchered by the surpassing stupidity
of its commanders. The details of that slaughter, and of the
imbecility displayed by our officers in high command,--those details,
when published, will be horrible. The Lincoln-Seward-Halleck-influence
gave Burnside the command because he was to take care of the army. And
how Burnside has fulfilled their expectations! It seems that the best
way to take care of an army is to make it victorious.

My brave and patriotic Wadsworth has gone in the field, also his two
sons; one of them, (Tick,) was at Fredericksburgh, and his bravery
was remarkable, even among all the heroism of that most glorious and
most accursed day. How many such patriots as Wadsworth, can we boast
of? Yet the miserable Halleck had the impudence to say--"Wadsworth
may go wherever he pleases, even if he pleases to go to Hell!"

Hell itself, would be too good a place for Halleck; imbeciles are
not admitted there!

_Dec. 17._--The details are coming in. The disaster of our army is
terrible--indescribable; the heroic people bleeds, bleeds! And all
this calamity and all this suffering and humiliation, are brought on
by the stupidity of Burnside and Halleck, or both of them. The curse
of the people ought to rest for centuries upon the very names of the
authors of such frightful disaster. They are fiends, yea, worse,
even, than the very fiends themselves.

Why, even the very rabble in Constantinople would storm the seraglio
after such a massacre. But here--oh, here, it just reminds Mr.
Lincoln of a little anecdote.

_Dec. 17._--I meet with but few such as Wade, Grimes, Chandler and
other radicals in both Houses of Congress, who seem to feel all the
heart burning and bitterness of soul at this awful Fredericksburgh
disaster. The real criminals, those who ought, in the agonies of a
great shame, call upon the rocks and the mountains to fall upon them
not, blush not, sorrow not.

In many of the general public, I have no doubt that the feeling of
shame and sympathy, are blunted by these repeated military
calamities, and by Mr. Lincoln's undaunted i..........

  * * * * * and men,
  Have wept enough, for what? To weep,
  To weep again.

_Dec. 17._--About ten days ago, Mr. Seward again sent forth to
Europe and to her Cabinets, one of his stale, and by no means
Delphic oracles, predicting the success of Burnside's campaign, and
immediately follows a bloody and disgraceful calamity! Such is
always the result of Seward's prophecies! A diplomat calls Seward
the evil eye of the Cabinet, and of the country. I suggested to some
of the senators that a resolution be passed prohibiting Mr. Seward
from playing either the prophet or the fool.

Burnside took care of the army, no doubt, but it was of the rebel
army. Our soldiers have been brought by him to the block, to an easy
slaughter, he himself being some few miles in the rear, and having
between him the river, and the intervening miles of land. All this,
however, was according to the regulations, and on the most approved
Halleck-McClellan fashion of fighting great battles.

_Dec. 18._--The disaster was inaugurated by the shelling of
Fredericksburgh. One hundred and forty-seven (147!) guns playing
upon a few houses. It was the play of a maddened child, exhibiting
in equal proportions, reckless ferocity and egregious stupidity; and
it is difficult to find one dyslogistic term which will adequately
describe and condemn it.

From what I can already gather of the details of the attack, it may
be peremptorily concluded that Burnside, Sumner, and above all,
Franklin, are utterly incompetent of a skillful and effective
handling of great masses of troops. They attacked by brigades,
positions so formidable, that if they could possibly be carried by
any exertion of human skill and strength, they could only be carried
by large masses impetuously hurled against them. Franklin seems
especially to have acted ill in not at once throwing in 10,000 men
to be followed rapidly and again and again by 10,000 more. In that
wise and only in that wise, he might possibly have broken and turned
the enemy, and thrown him on his own centre. It is said that
Franklin had 60,000. If so, he could easily have risked some 20,000
in the first onslaught. Sixty thousand! Great God! Why, it is an
army in itself, in the hands of a general at all deserving of that
name. If those great West Pointers had only even the slightest idea
of military history! More battles have been fought and won with
60,000 men, and with fewer still, than with larger numbers, and at
Fredericksburgh Franklin's force formed only a wing against an enemy
whose whole army could number but little more than 60,000. I want
the reports with the full and positive details.

The clear-sighted and warlike TRIBUNE discovered in Burnside high,
brilliant, and soldier-like qualities--admirably borne out and
illustrated no doubt, by the Fredericksburgh butchery! To the
hospital of imbeciles with all such imbeciles!

The _Times_ was manly in its appreciation, and flunkeyed to no one
under hand, that is, confidentially and for newspaper publication.

Mr. Seward reveals to the world at large, that, besides his volume
of 700 pages, containing the last diplomatic correspondence, he has
still an equal number of masterpieces as yet not published. What a
dreadful dysentery of despatch-writing the poor man and his still
more afflicted readers must labor under.

The Lincoln-Seward policy, has rebuilt the awful Democratic party,
which was broken up, prostrated in the dust. Lincoln--Seward--Weed,
partially emasculated the Republican party, and may even emasculate
the thus far thoroughly virile and devoted patriotism of the people.

A helpless imbecile in the hands of a cunning and selfish and
ruthless charlatan, is the sight that daily meets our eyes in
Washington.

General Bayard, one of the slaughtered at Fredericksburgh, was a
true Bayard of the army, and one of the very few West Pointers free
from conceit, that corrosive and terribly prevalent malady of the
West Point clique.

_Dec. 18._--Senators waking up to their duties, and to the
consciousness of their power. These patriots have said to Seward,
_Averte Sathanas_, and overboard he goes, after having done as much
evil as only _he_ could do.

The most contradictory rumors are in circulation about Stanton. I
cannot find out the truth. I do not believe all that is said, but it
is necessary to put the rumors on record. It is said then, that
Stanton stands up for the butchers and asses in the army and in his
department. I believe that in all this, there is not a single word
of truth; but if it were true, then I should say, Stanton is ruined
by bad company, and down with him and with them!

_Quoniam sic Fata tulerunt._ But worthy Senators and
Representatives, believe still in Stanton, and so do I; only the
Seward-Blair-McClellan clique tears Stanton's reputation to pieces.
Stanton seems to be, in some measure, infatuated with Halleck, who,
perhaps, humbugs Stanton with military technicalities, which Halleck
so well knows how to pass current for military science.

_Dec. 20._--The American generals, at least those in the Army of the
Potomac, for the sake of shirking responsibility, maintain that
when once in line of battle, they must rigidly abide by the orders
given to them. No doubt, such is the military law and rule, but it
is susceptible of exceptions. The generals of the Potomac shun the
exceptions, and thus deprive their action of all spontaneity.
Perhaps, indeed, spontaneity of action is not among their military
gifts. Thus we have from them, none of those _coups d'éclat_, those
sudden, brilliant, and impetuously improvised dashes, which so often
decide the fate of the day, and turn imminent defeat and partial
panic into glorious and crowning victory. We find none such, if we
except some actions of Hooker and Kearney, on a small scale, and at
the beginning of the campaign in the Chickahominy, or the Peninsula.
The most celebrated _coups d'éclat_ in general military history,
have mostly been, so to speak, the children of inspiration, seizing
Time by the forelock,--thus using opportunity which sometimes exists
but for a few minutes, and thus a doubtful struggle terminates in a
brilliant success. At such critical moments, the commander of a
wing, or a corps, nay, even a division, ought to have the courage,
the lofty self-abnegation, and firm confidence in his star or good
luck, and still more in the enduring pluck of his men, and boldly
strike for the accomplishment of that which the "Orders" have not
mentioned or foreseen. Such a general acts on his own inspiration,
and at the same time reports to the Commander-in-Chief, what he has
determined upon. If instead of acting thus promptly, he sends and
waits for further orders, the auspicious opportunity may pass away;
the decisive moments in a battle are very rapid, and a single hour
lost, loses the day, or reduces the results of a victory.

I respectfully submit these undeniable but much disregarded truths
to the Hallecks, McClellans, McDowells, and other great West
Pointers.

_Dec. 20._--The political cesspool is deeper, broader, filthier and
more feculent than ever. Seward is triumphant, and the patriots have
very much elongated countenances.

_Dec. 21._--Senator Wilson has learned from Halleck, Burnside, and
from some other and similarly _great_ captains, that the affair of
Fredericksburgh, and the recrossing of the river, brilliantly
compares with the countermarchings of Wagram, and with that
celebrated crossing of the Danube. As there is not, in reality, a
single point of similitude, the comparison is well selected, and
does great honor to the judgment of the military wiseacres. At all
events, never was the memory of a Napoleon, a Massena, or a Davoust,
more ignominiously desecrated than by this comparison.

_Dec. 22._--So, then, Sathanas Seward remains, and Mr. Lincoln
scorns the advice of the wisest and most patriotic Senators. To be
snubbed by Lincoln and Seward, is the greatest of all possible
humiliations. Border-state politicians, Harrises, Brownings and
other etceteras of grain, are the confidential advisers. Political
manhood is utterly, and to all seeming, irretrievably lost.

Stanton still holds with Seward. _Embrassons nous, et que cela
finisse._

How brilliantly do even the very basest times of any government
whatever, Parliamentary, royal or despotic, compare with what I now
daily see here in the capital of the great republic!

Since the earliest existence of political parties, rarely, if ever,
has a party been in such a difficult, and, at times, even disgraceful
position, as that of the patriots of both houses of Congress. Against
the combined attacks of all stripes of traitors, such as ultra
Conservatives, Constitutionalists, Copperheads and pure and impure
Democrats, the patriots must defend an administration which they
themselves condemn, and with the personnel of which, (Stanton and
Wells excepted,) they have no sympathy and no identity of ideas. They
must defend an administration which opposes even measures which they,
the patriots, demand,--an administration which, in the recent
elections, either betrayed or disgraced the whole party, and which
brought into suspicion, if not into actual contempt, the name, nay,
even the principles of the Republicans. And thus the patriots have the
dead weight to support, and are wholly unsupported. The narrow-minded
and shallow Republican press, has no comprehension of the difficulty
of the position in which the patriots are placed; and that press,
being in various ways connected with the administration, rarely, if
ever, supports the patriots, and even mostly neutralises their best
and noblest efforts. Thus, in the move against Seward, and for a
reform in the Cabinet, the enlightened and patriotic Republican press
of New York, was either persistently mute or hostile to the movement.
Every day I am the more firmly convinced that Seward is the great
stumbling block alike to Mr. Lincoln and the country at large.

_Dec, 22._--Utterly incapable as is McClellan, and absolutely
unfitted by nature to be a great captain as is Burnside, yet I think
it quite clear that neither of them would have blundered quite so
terribly if he had been provided with a really competent, zealous
and faithful staff, as the generals of continental Europe invariably
are. But it seems that here, neither the generals nor the government
even desire to understand the true nature, duty, and value of the
staff of an army, or what the chief of such a staff ought to know
and ought to do. What, in fact, can we at all reasonably expect from
a Halleck! After all, however, and shallow as are his brains, this
mock Carnot must have read books on military science; and yet he has
not learned either the use or the composition of a staff for an
army! Had he done so, he would have organized a staff for himself,
and one for each of the commanders in the field. It is true that in
this country there is no school of staffs, and West Pointers are
generally ignorant on that point. Nevertheless, with a little good
will and care, it would be easy enough to find intelligent officers
of all grades fit for staff duties as arranged for staff officers in
Europe. But then, the necessary good will and good judgment are
wanting in the head of this military organization. And this Halleck,
this Halleck is a mere mockery, a mere sciolist, a shallow pretender
to military science. He may have the capacity to translate a book,
but nothing of all that he translates effects any hold upon his
brain, or he would, long before now, have done something towards
organising the army. A general inspector is the first necessity.
Then establish the necessary proportions of each arm of the service,
_i. e._, of infantry, cavalry and artillery for each division. Then
organise the cavalry as a body. When you do this, or even a
considerable part of all this, oh, sham-Carnot, Halleck! then your
chance to be considered a military authority will be established.
Oh, science, oh, insulted science! How desecrated is thy name in the
high places here, and especially on the right and left of the White
House. And oh! you really great and intelligent American PEOPLE, how
ignominiously you are cheated of your blood, your time, your money,
and most of all, of your so recently magnificent national
reputation!

What your military wiseacres show you as an organized army, would
actually thrill, as with the death-shudder, any European military
organizer.

_Dec. 23._--I learn that the day following the butchery at
Fredericksburgh, Burnside wished to renew the attack. What madness!
The generals protested, and Burnside, greatly exasperated, declared
that at the head of his former corps, the 9th, he would himself
storm the miniature Torres Vedras. If all this is true, then
Burnside is weaker headed than I had judged him to be; but I will
not do him the injustice to say that he really intended to play a
mere farce. What, in the name of common sense, could he do with a
single corps, when the whole army was repulsed?

I am warned by a friend, that the Army of the Potomac is so infected
with McClellanism, that is to say, by presumption, intriguing, envy
and misconception of what is true generalship,--that the army must
undergo the process of strong purification, fumigation, pruning and
weeding, (and especially among the higher branches,) before it can
ever again be made truly useful and reliable.

_Dec. 22._--Burnside's report. I am sure that the great luminaries
of the press, and the declaimers, the intriguants and the imbeciles,
will be thrown into fits of ecstatic admiration of what they will
call the manly and straight-forward conduct of Burnside in assuming
the responsibility and confessing his own fault. But what else could
he do? And if he acted thus in obedience to the orders of Halleck,
then instead of manliness, his conduct is almost treasonable towards
the people, for in withholding the truth as to the orders given by
Halleck, he gives that incarnation of calamity the power to repeat
the butchery and ensure the ill success of our armies.

The report is altogether unsoldierly; it is fussy and inflated; a
full blown specimen of the pompously inane. How can Burnside venture
to say that after the repulse, during three days he expected the
enemy to leave his stronghold and attack him--Burnside? The rebels
never did anything to justify such a supposition. They are neither
idiots nor madmen, and only from a McClellan, or some bright pupils
of the McClellan school, could such imbecility, such gratuitously
ruinous playing into the hands of an enemy be expected. A commander
ought to be on the watch for any mistake that his antagonist may
commit, but he is not justified in setting that antagonist down as
an ass. For two days the army was unnecessarily kept under the guns
of the enemy, that is the truth, and I will make the truth known, no
matter who may try to conceal it. Here, for the present, I stop in
sheer and uncontrollable disgust. By and by, however, I will return
to the consideration of this report.

Oh! American people! In so very many respects, truly great people!
Far, very far beyond my poor powers of expression are the great love
and veneration with which ever and always I look upon you. But allow
me, pray allow me to use the frank familiarity of a true friend, so
far as just plainly to tell you, that even I, your sincere friend,
should love you none the less, and certainly should hold you in all
the greater reverence, were you not quite so ultra-favorable in
judgment of your civil and military rulers and pastors and masters
and nincompoops generally!

Further back in this diary, I termed Mr. Secretary Chase a _passive
patriot_. _Peccavi._ And here let me write down my recantation!
Chase exerted himself for the retaining of Seward in the cabinet,
and it was by Chase alone that the efforts of the patriots to expel
Seward, were baffled. And yet, from the first day of the official
assemblage of this cabinet down to the day of the meeting of the
present session of Congress, Chase was more vigorously vicious than
any other living man in daily, hourly, _all the time_, denunciation
of Seward,--of course, behind Seward's back! Several insoluble
problems, no doubt, there are; but there is not one thing, physical
or not physical, which so completely defies any comprehension and
baffles my most persistent inquiry, as just this.

How, unless Chase has drank of the waters of Lethe, how can he
possibly look, now, in the face of, for instance, Fessenden of
Maine, to whom he has said so many bitter things against the now
belauded "Secretary Seward!" Bah! Chase most certainly must have a
forty-or-fifty-diplomatist power of commanding--literally and not
slangishly be it spoken!--his _cheek_, if, without burning blushes
he can look in the face of Fessenden, Sumner or any honest man and
say,--"I admire and I support Secretary Seward!" God! If all who,
during the last two years, have come into contact with Chase, would
but come forward and speak out! In that case, thousands would stand
forth, a "cloud of witnesses," to confirm this statement. Chase!
Faugh! I hereby brand him, and leave him to the bitter judgment of
all men who can conscientiously claim to be even _half honest_.

In merest and barest justice to Seward, greatly as I disapprove of
his general course, I must here note the fact that he is by no means
addicted to evil speaking about any one. Not that this reticence
proceeds from scrupulous feeling or a proud stern spirit. Seward,
however, never speaks evil of any one unless to destroy, and to one
who sympathises in that same amiable wish. To undermine a rival or
to destroy an enemy, Seward will expend any amount of slander; but,
in the absence of personal interest, Seward, though officially
civilian, is, by nature, far too good and too old a soldier to waste
ammunition upon worthless game.

_Dec. 23._--Why could not Mr. Lincoln choose for his Secretary of
State some man who has a holy and wholesome horror of pen, ink, and
paper? Some man gifted with a sound brain, who never is quick at
writing a dispatch, and would demand double salary as the price of
writing one? Oh! Mr. Lincoln, had you but done this, not only would
all America, but all Europe also be truly thankful for great
immunity from the curse of morbid attempts at diplomacy and
statesmanship.

_Dec. 23._--Mr. Lincoln's proclamation to the butchered army! For
heaven's sake let us know, pray, _pray_ let us know who was
Lincoln's amanuensis? I hope it was not Stanton. The army is
defiled. "An accident," says this precious proclamation, "has
prevented victory." _What_ accident? Let the country know the
precise nature of that same accident, and the manner, time, and
place of its occurrence! Burnside talks about a fog! Oh! yes, a
deep, dense terribly foul fog--in the _cerebellum_! Is that the
_accident_ of which the precious proclamation so impudently speaks?
Lincoln makes the wonderful discovery that the crossing and the
recrossing of the river are quite peerless, absolutely unparallelled
military achievements.

Happy it was for the army, and happy for the country that at
Fredericksburgh, our heroic soldiers gave far other and nobler
proofs of more than human courage and fortitude than the mere
crossing and recrossing of a river.

The _Tribune_ is either in its dotage, or still worse. Burnside's
unsoldierly blundering is compared to the great victorious splendors
of Asperm, Esslingen, Wagram, and the tyrant-crushing three days of
immortal Waterloo! The _Tribune_ lauds the crossing and the
recrossing of the river, as an act of superhuman bravery; and
Lincoln sympathises with the heavily wounded, and twaddles
extensively about _comparative_ losses. Comparative to what? Oh!
spirits of Napoleon and his braves; oh! spirit of true history,
veil your blushing brows! And the _Tribune_ dares to make this
impudent attempt at befogging the American people, and at the same
time dares to tell that people that it is "intelligent."

But let us not forget those comparative losses! Comparative to what?
To those of the enemy? What knows he about them?

_Dec. 24._--Crisis in the Seward cabinet. The "little Villain" of
the _Times_, repeated what he did after the first "Bull Run." But he
did not now confess to his dining with Seward, as formerly he did
with the great "anaconda Scott!" The New York Republican press is
attracted to Seward by natural affinity of election. Seward,
however, holds the honey pot, and the flies are all eager to dip
into it.

I wish, yet dread to hear the exact particulars of Stanton's
behavior during the crisis in the cabinet. It is so very, _very_
painful to be rudely awakened to distrust of those whom once we have
too implicitly, too fondly believed. Lincoln has now become
accustomed to Seward, as the hunchback is to his protuberance. What
man who has an ugly excrescence on his face does not dread the
surgeon's knife, although he knows that momentary pain will be
followed by permanent relief?

At the public dinner of "The New England Society," John Van Buren
nominated McClellan for next President, and proposed the health of
Secretary Seward. _Oh! quam pulchra societas!_

I am charged with being "dissatisfied with every thing, and abusing
every body." The charge is unjust. I speak most lovingly and in most
sincere admiration of the millions, of the great, toiling, brave,
honest People, and of the hundreds of thousands of the gallant
people-militant--the army! But I _do_ censure some thirty or forty
individuals who dispense favors and appoint to fat offices, and,
quite naturally, every dirty-souled lickspittle is indignant against
me therefor! The blame of such people is far preferable to their
praise!

I am rejoiced, I am almost proud that Hooker insisted upon crossing
the Rappahannock, and marching to Fredericksburgh, and that he
opposed the subsequent attack.

But of what benefit to me is this fatal, this Cassandra gift of
foreseeing? Alas! Better, happier would it be for me could I not
have foreseen and vainly, all vainly foretold, the terrible butchery
of a brave people during two long and fatal years!

_Dec. 24._--It is impossible to keep cool while reading Burnside's
report. Once more this report justifies and corroborates Prince
Napoleon's judgment on American generals, _i. e._, that their plan
of campaigns will always be deficient in practice, like the
theoretical war-exercises of schoolboys. From this sweeping and
terribly true charge, however, we must except the Grants and
the--alas! how few!--Rosecranses.

The report says, "but for the fog," etc. All lost battles in the
world had for cause some _buts_--except the genuine _but_--in the
brains of the commander.

"How near we came to accomplishing," etc.--is only a repetition of
what, _ad nauseam_, is recorded by history as lamentations of
defeated generals.

"The battle would have been far more decisive." Of course it would
have been so, if--won.

"As it was, we were very near success," etc. So the man who takes
the chance in the lottery. He has No. 4, and No. 3 wins the prize.

The apostrophe to the heroism of the soldiers is sickly and pale.
The heroism of the soldiers! It is as brilliant, as pure, and as
certain as the sun.

The attack was planned, (see paragraph 2 of the report,) on the
circumstance or supposition that the enemy extended too much his
line, and thus scattered his forces. But in paragraph 4, Burnside
stated that the fog, (O, fog!) etc., gave the enemy twenty-four
hours' time to concentrate his forces in his strong positions--when
the calculation based on the enemy's _division of forces_ failed,
and the attack lost all the chances considered propitious.

The whole plan had for its basis probabilities and
impossibilities--schoolroom speculations--instead of being, as it
ought to have been, as every plan of a battle should be, based on
the chances of the _terrain_, by the position of the enemy, and
other conditions, almost wholly depending upon which the armies
operate. It is natural that martial Hooker objected to it.

Oh! could I have blood, blood, blood, instead of ink!

Constructing the bridge over the Rappahannock, our engineers were
killed in scores by the sharp-shooters of the enemy. Malediction on
those imbecile staffs! The _A B C_ of warfare, and of sound common
sense teach, that such works are to be made either under cover of a
powerful artillery fire, or, what is still better, if possible, a
general sends over the river in some way, with infantry to clear its
banks, and to dislodge the enemy. In such cases one engineer saved,
and time won, justify the loss of almost twenty soldiers to one
workman. Some one finally suggested an expedition and they did at
the end what ought to have been done at the start. O West Point! thy
science is marvellous! The staff treated the construction of a
bridge over the Rappahannock as if it were building some railroad
bridge, in times of peace!

I am told that Stanton took sides with Seward. I deny it; Stanton
remained rather passive. But were it true that Stanton, too, is
_Sewardized_,--then, Oh Mud, how powerful thou art!

In Boston, the B.s and Curtises, and all of that kidney, make a
great fuss and invoke the name of Webster. If so, they are only
_excrementa Websteriana_.

_Dec. 24._--Patriots in both Houses of Congress! your efforts to put
the conduct of the national affairs in honorable hands, and on
honorable tracks, to prevent the very life blood of the people from
being sacrilegiously wasted, to prevent the people's wealth from
being recklessly squandered; your efforts to introduce order and
spirit in certain parts of a spiritless Administration, to fill the
higher and inferior offices with men whose hearts and minds are in
the cause, and to expel therefrom, if not absolute disloyalty, at
least, the most criminal indifference to the people's cause and
welfare; your efforts to make us speak to Europe like men of sense,
and not in the senseless oracles which justly evoke the scorn and
the sneers of all European statesmen; all these your efforts as
patriots rebounded against a nameless stubbornness.

Nevertheless you fulfilled a noble, sacred and patriotic duty.
Whatever be to-day the outcry of the Flatfoots, lickspittles,
intriguers, imbeciles; whatever be the subserviency or want of civic
courage in the public press--when all these stinking, suffocating,
deleterious vapors shall be destroyed by the ever-living light of
truth, then the grateful people will bless your names, which, pure
and luminous, will shine high above the stupidity, conceit,
heartlessness, turpitude, selfish ambition, indirect and direct
treason darkening now the national horizon.

_Dec. 25._--_Christmas._ The Angel of Death hovers over thousands
and thousands of hearths. Thousands and thousands of families in
tears and shrouds. Communities, villages, huts and log-houses,
nursing their crippled, invalid, patriotic heroes! A year ago, all
was quiet on the _Potomac_--now all is quiet on the _Rappahannock_.

What a progress we have made in a year! and at the small,
insignificant cost of about sixty to eighty thousand killed or
crippled, and of one thousand millions of dollars! But it matters
not! The quietude of the official butchers and money squanderers is,
and must remain undisturbed in their mansions, whatever be the moral
leprosy dwelling therein!

A young man from New England, (whom I saw for the first time,) told
me that my Diary stirred up the youth. Oh, if so, then I feel happy.
Youth! youth! you are all the promise and the realization! But why
do you suffer yourselves to be crushed down by the upper-crust of
senile nincompoops? Oh youth, arise, and sun-like penetrate through
and through the magnitude of the work to be accomplished, and save
the cause of humanity!

_Dec. 25._--As it was and is in all Revolutions and upheavals, so
here. A part of the people constitute the winners, in various ways,
(through shoddy names, jobs, positions, etc.) while the immense
majority bleeds and sacrifices. Here many people left poorly
salaried desks, railroads, shops, &c. to become great men but poor
statesmen, cursed Generals, and mischief-makers in every possible
way and manner. The people's true children abandoned homes,
families, honest pursuits of an industrious and laborious life--in
one word, their ALL, to bleed, to be butcherer, to die in the
country's cause. The former are the winners, the sacrificers, and
the butchers; the second are the victims.

The evidence before the War Committee shows, to a most disgusting
satiety, that General Halleck is exclusively a red-tapist, and a
small pettifogger, who is unworthy to be even a non-commissioned
officer; General Burnside an honest, well intentioned soldier,
thoroughly brave, but as thoroughly destitute of generalship;
General Sumner an unquestionably brave but headlong trooper; and
Hooker alone in possession of all the capacity and resources of a
captain. General Woodbury's evidence is that of a man under
difficulties, on whom his superiors in rank have thrown the
responsibility of their own crime.

Halleck alone is responsible for the non-arrival of the pontoons.
Burnside could not look for them; it was the duty of Halleck to
order some of the semi-geniuses of his staff to the special duty of
seeing to their delivery at Fredericksburgh, to give them necessary
power to use roads, steamers, water, animals and men for
transportation, and make it a capital responsibility if Sumner finds
not the pontoons on the spot, and at the precise day and hour when
he wanted them. Then, Gen. Meigs, who coolly asserts that he "gave
orders." O yes! but he never dreamed it was his duty to look for
their execution. The fate of the campaign depended upon the
pontoons, and Halleck-Meigs "gave orders," and there was an end of
it. In any other country, such culprits would have been at the least
dismissed--cashiered, if not shot; here, their influence is on the
increase. Halleck and Meigs are still great before Mr. Lincoln, and
before the mass of nincompoops.

Rhetors and sham-erudites are ecstatic about Burnside's conduct.
Well! Burnside is good-natured--that is all. They forget the example
of Canrobert and Pellisier, in the Crimea. Canrobert, after having
commanded the army, gave up the command, and served under Pellisier.
Oh declaimers! Oh imbeciles! ransack not the world--let Rome alone,
and its Punic wars, its Varrus, etc.--Disturb not history, which,
for you, is a book with seventy-seven seals. You understand not
events under your long noses, and before your opaque eyes.

When in animal bodies the brains are diseased, the whole body's
functions are more or less paralyzed. The official brains of the
nation are in a morbid condition. _That_ explains all.

_Dec. 27._--I wish I could succeed in bringing about the
organization of a good Staff for the army. _Etat Major General de
l'Armée_ Stanton seems to understand it, but the Hallecks and other
West Pointers have neither the first idea of it, nor the will to see
it done.

_Dec. 28._--The so-called great papers of the Republican party in
New York, as well as some would-be statesmen here, discuss the
probability of some new manifestation by Louis Napoleon, or by
other European powers, of interference in our internal affairs. The
probability of such a demonstration by European meddlers can only
have one of the following causes:--Our terrible disaster at
Fredericksburg, or, what even is worse than that slaughter, the
absolute incapacity of our leaders to cope with such great and
terrible events as this last one. The bravery, the heroism of our
soldiers will be applauded, admired, and pitied in Europe, but the
utter intellectual marasmus, as shown by our administration, will
and must embolden the European marplots to attempt to stop what they
consider a further unnecessary massacre. General Burnside's report,
and the evidence before the War Committee are before the country and
before Europe. Therefore Europe and our country are to judge.

During his last visit in summer to New York, etc. the French
Minister came in contact with low French adventurers, (Courriers des
États Unis) with copperheads and with democrats, and now he is taken
with sickly diplomatic sentimentalism to conciliate, to mediate, to
unite, to meddle, and to get a feather in his diplomatic cap. I am
sorry for him, for in other respects he has considerable sound
judgment. _Mais il est toqué sur cette question çi._ He is ignorant
of the temper of the masses, and considers the assertions of
adventurers, of traitors, and of meddlers, as being the expression
of the sentiments of the people. But sensible diplomats are _rari
aves_.

Hooker, because he alone is a _captain_, cannot be in command.
Infamous intriguers, traitors, and imbeciles, prevent Hooker from
being intrusted with the destinies of our army. Whole regiments
claim to serve under him, and above all such regiments as fought
under others in the peninsula, and always have been worsted, and who
wish once to be led to success and victory, as were always Hooker's
soldiers. The Franklins, and other marplotters in the Potomac Army,
menace to resign if Hooker is put in command. The sooner the better
for the army to get rid of such trash. But the imbeciles and the
intriguers in power think not so; and all may remain as it was, and
a new slaughter of our heroes may loom in the future.

_Dec. 29._--General Butler's proclamation to his soldiers in New
Orleans is the best and noblest document written since this war. It
is good, because it records noble and patriotic deeds. During those
eighteen months General Butler has shown capacity, activity, energy,
fertility of resources and readiness to meet any emergency,
unequalled by any one in the administration or in command. And for
this, Butler is superseded, because Seward promised it to the
_Decembriseur_ in the Tuilleries, and because he is a _man_, and
_conservative patriots_, _alias_ traitors, could not get at him.

_Dec. 30._--Angel of wrath, smite, smite! Oh, genius of humanity,
take into thy mercy this noble people! Oh, eternal reason, send the
feeblest breath of divine emanation and arrest this all-devouring
torrent of imbecility, selfishness and conceit that is reigning
paramount here. Only the PEOPLE'S devotion and patriotism, only the
_unnamed_ save the country!

_Dec. 30._--Those foreign caterwaulings against Butler. England, in
1848-9, whipped women in Ireland, and how many thousands have been
murdered by the _Decembriseur_? And the Russian minister joining in
this music. A shame for him and for his government!

_Dec. 30._--Poor Greeley looks for intervention, mediation,
arbitration; and selects Switzerland for the fitting arbitrator! How
little--nay--nothing at all, he knows about Switzerland and the
Swiss! Stop! stop! respectable old man!

_Dec. 31._--Stanton is not at all responsible for the slaughter at
Fredericksburgh, or for the infamy of the belated pontoons. Halleck
has the exclusive control of all military movements, etc., in the
field. But Stanton ought not be benumbed by a Halleck or a Meigs.

The people at large cannot realize the really awful position of
patriotic members of Congress, and above all, of such senators as
Wade, Grimes, Fessenden, Wilson, Morrill, Chandler and others, or
the almost similar position of Stanton, in his contact with the
double-dealings or the obstinacy of Lincoln.

_Dec. 31._--To-morrow few, if any, shall miss the occasion to shake
hands with the official butchers, with men dripping with the gore of
their brethren. Oh, Cains! oh, fratricides!

_Dec. 31._--_Midnight._--Disappear! oh year of disgraces, year of
slaughters and of sacrifices.

  _Tschto den griadoustchi nam gotowit?_ (Puschkine.)


  Ring out the false, ring in the true,
  Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
         *             *            *
         *             *            *
  Ring in REDRESS _for all mankind_!




JANUARY, 1863.

     Proclamation -- Parade -- Halleck -- Diplomats -- Herodians --
     Inspired Men -- War Powers -- Rosecrans -- Butler -- Seward --
     Doctores Constitutionis -- Hogarth -- Rhetors -- European Enemies
     -- Second Sight -- Senator Wright the Patriot -- Populus Romanus
     -- Future Historian -- English People -- Gen. Mitchell -- Hooker
     in Command -- Staffs -- Arming Africo-Americans -- Thurlow Weed,
     &c.


_Jan. 1._--The morning papers. No proclamation! Has Lincoln played
false to humanity?

The proclamation will appear. All right so far! Hallelujah! How the
friends of darkness, how the demons must wince and tremble.

There! Red-tape commander-in-chief, field marshal (who never saw a
field of battle!) parades at the head of victorious generals, of
intelligent staffs, of active pontoon providers, and of really and
highly qualified quartermasters general. To the White House! They
will congratulate Mr. Lincoln. Upon what? Upon Fredericksburgh and
other massacres; but especially they will congratulate Mr. Lincoln
upon the fact of his being surrounded by such a bright galaxy of
know-nothings and do-nothings!

Death-knell to slavery and to the slaveocracy. The foulest relic of
the past will at length be destroyed. The new era has a glorious
dawn; it rises in the glories of sacrifices made by a generous and
inspired people. Yes! The new era rises above darkness, selfishness,
and imbecility. The shades of the slaughtered are now at length
propitiated; their slaughter is at least in part atoned for; and
outraged humanity is, at least in part, avenged! Let rebels and
conservatives remain hardened in crime; a just and condign vengeance
shall overtake them.

  _Nunc pede libero
   Pulsanda tellus._

_Jan. 2._--Shallow and brainless diplomats sneer at the
proclamation. So did the Herodians sneer at the star of Bethlehem;
and where now are the Herodians? Oh! shallow and heartless
diplomats, your days are numbered, too!

_Jan. 2._--A man inspired by conviction and glowing with a fervent
faith, thoroughly knows what he is about. Strong in his faith, and
by his faith, he clearly sees his way, and steadily walks in it,
while others grope hither and thither amidst shadows and darkness
and bewildering doubts! Such a man boldly takes the initiative,
marches onward, and is as a beacon-light to a nation, to a people;
often, sometimes, even for all humanity. A man who has a profound
faith in his convictions has coruscations, fierce flashes of that
second-sight for the signs of the times. The mere trimming and
selfish politician is ever ready to swim with the stream which he
had neither strength nor skill to breast; he never ventures to take
the initiative. In issuing the proclamation, Mr. Lincoln gives legal
sanction, form, and record to what the storm of events and the loud
cry of the best of the people have long demanded and now inexorably
dictate.

History will pitilessly tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth; and small credit will history give to Lincoln beyond
that of being the legal recorder of a righteous deed, and not even
that credit will be given to the countersigner, Seward.

Mr. Seward countersigned both proclamations of freedom. Europe is
filled with his despatches, written at first plainly for, then
lukewarmly tolerating, and, at length, flatly against, slavery.
European statesmen have thus the exact measure of Mr. Seward's
political character. They know that to the very last he defended
slavery, and then countersigned the decree of its destruction! In
Europe, self-respecting statesmen resign rather than countersign a
measure which they disapprove or have strongly opposed.

_Jan. 3._--Emancipation under war powers. A mistake by a
contradiction. Spoke of it before. And nevertheless: under war
powers alone, emancipation is palatable to a great many, nay, almost
to millions of small, narrow intellects, dried up by the formulas,
and who in the Constitution see only the latter, and not the
expanding, all-embracing principle and spirit. O, Rabbis! O,
Talmudists!

Lincoln is very unhappy in his phraseology. He invites the
sympathies of humanity on a measure decided by him to favor the war.
It is a contradiction; humanity and war are antipodic.

The papers in the confidence of Seward, such as the _Intelligencer_
(without intelligence,) the border-state friends of Lincoln, and all
that is muddy and rotten, even the supposed to be well-informed
diplomats unanimously assert that Mr. Lincoln has no confidence in
his proclamation. As for Seward--this Lincoln's evil genius--no
doubt exists concerning his contempt for the proclamation. Ask the
diplomats. But these highest pilots in this administration are
bound--as by a terrible oath--to violate all the laws of psychology,
of human nature, of sense, of logic and of honor, to make the people
bleed and suffer in its honor.

Well, pompous Chase; how do you feel for having sided with Seward?

Gen. Butler's farewell proclamation to New Orleans rings the purest
and most patriotic harmony. Compare Butler's with Lincoln's
writings. All the hearts in the country resounded with Butler; and
because he acted as he did, Lincoln-Seward-Blair-Halleck's policy
shelved Butler.

_Jan. 3._--By the united efforts of Lincoln-Seward-Blair, of the
_Herald_, and of that cesspool of infamies, the _World_, of
McClellan, and of his tail, by the stupifying influence of Halleck,
the Potomac army, notwithstanding its matchless heroism, and
equipped as well as any army in Europe; up to this day the Potomac
army serves to--establish--the military superiority of the rebels,
to morally strengthen, nay, even to nurse the rebellion.
Lincoln-Halleck dare not entrust the army into the hands of a true
soldier,--Stanton is outvoted. The next commander inherits all the
faults generated by Lincoln, McClellan, Halleck, Burnside, and it
would otherwise tax a Napoleon's brains to reorganize the army but
for the patriotic spirit of the rank and file and most of the
officers.

_Jan. 3._--What a pity that petty, quibbling constitutionalism
alone is understood by Lincoln and by his followers. To
emancipate in virtue of a war power is scarcely to perform half the
work, and is a full logical incongruity. Like all kind of war power,
that of the president has for its geographical limits the pickets of
his army--has no executive authority beyond, besides being
obligatory only as long as bayonets back it. Such a power cannot
change social and municipal conditions, laws or relations (see Vol.
I.)

The civil power of the president penetrates beyond the pickets, and
in virtue of that civil power, and of the sacred duty to save the
fatherland, the President of the United States, and not the
Commander-in-Chief, can say to the slaves: "Arise, you are free, you
have no servitude, no duties towards a rebel and traitor to the
Union. I, the president, dissolve your bonds in the name of the
American people."

_Jan. 4._--How the tempest of events changes or modifies principles.
The South rebelled in the name of State rights, and now Jeff Davis
absorbs all States and all parliamentary rights for the sake of
_salus populi_ or rather of _salus_ of slavocracy. Jeff Davis
nominates officers in the regiments whatever be the opposition of
the respective Governors. In the North, the Governors, all of them,
(Seymour?) true patriots, insist upon power and the right to
organize new regiments, and resist the centralization by the United
States Government. Perhaps--as the satraps and martinets
assert--thereby the organisation of the army is thrown on a false
track. Whether so or not, one thing is certain, but for the States
and Governors, Lincoln, Scott, Seward, McClellan, Halleck, or the
Union, would be nowhere.

_Jan. 4._--They fight battles in the West. Generals, to be
victorious, must be in spiritual and in electric communion with the
heroic soldiers. So it was at Murfreesborough. Rosecrans, at the
head of his cavalry or body guard, dashes in the thickest, and turns
the dame fortune, who smiles on heroes, but never smiled on
McClellan nor on his tail. Rosecrans sticks not to regulations, and
keeps not a few miles in the rear. Franklin, at Fredericksburgh
mounted not even his horse but stood in front of his tent. Similar
to Rosecrans here was Kearney, the bravest of the brave, more of a
captain than any of the West-Point high-nosed nurslings; so is
Heintzelman, Hooker, Reno, Sigel and many, many others, whom
McClellanism, Halleckism, Lincolnism kept or keeps down.

I positively learned that in the last days of the summer of 1862, a
list without heading circulated in the Potomac army, and all who
signed it bound themselves to obey only McClellan. The McClellan
clique originated this conspiracy, which extended throughout all the
grades.

What confusion prevails about the rights of existence of slavery.
How they discuss it. How they pettifog. Why not establish the
rights of existence of syphilis, of _plica_ in the human body. O,
casuists. O, _Intelligencers_. O, _Worlds_!

Well, to me, slavery seems to legally (cursed legality) exist in
virtue of the special State rights, and not in virtue of the
Constitution. But for the State rights, the Africo-American is a man
and citizen of the United States--and this under the Constitution
which is paramount to State rights. The rebellion annihilates the
State rights, and all special constitutions guaranteed by the Union,
and at the same time annihilates the relation of the Africo-American
to the specific States or constitutions. It restores to him the
rights of man guaranteed to him as man by the Union and the
Constitution of the United States. The Africo-American recovers his
rights, lost and annihilated by specific State rights and municipal,
local laws. The president had to issue his proclamation as guardian
and executor of the Constitution, and then Africo-Americans
recovered their citizenship on firmer and broader grounds than
under, or by the war power. Calhoun, the father of the rebellion--as
Milton's Satan--and all the rebels now curse or cursed the preamble
of the Constitution as Satan cursed the light. I suppose Calhoun's
and the rebels' reasons are similar to me. _Inde iræ._

The commanders in the West bear evidence of the devotion, the
heroism and the endurance of the Africo-Americans, sacrificing their
lives without hope; martyrs by the rebels as well as by Hallecks and
the like.

I met a farmer from Maine. He was rather old and poor. Had two
sons--lost them both--they were all his hope. He spoke simply of it,
but to break one's heart. _He grudged not_, (his own words,) his
hopes and blood for the cause, and considered it good luck to have
recovered the body of one of his boys, and brought it back home to
the "old woman," (wife, mother.) I shook hands with him. I ought to
have kissed him. Unknown, unnamed hero-patriot! and similar are
hundreds of thousands, and such is the true people. And so
sacrilegiously dealt with by insane helplessness.

_Jan. 5._--The _Doctors Constitutionis_ break their formula brains
concerning the constitutionality of the proclamation, and foretell
endless complications. If so, if complications arise, the reasons
thereof are moral, logical and practical. 1st.--The emancipation was
neither conceived nor executed in love; but it was for Lincoln as
Vulcan for Jupiter. The proclamation is generated neither by
Lincoln's brains, heart or soul, and what is born in such a way is
always monstrous. 2d.--Legally and logically, the proclamation has
the smallest and the most narrow basis that could have been
selected. When one has the free choice between two bases, it is more
logical to select the broader one. The written Constitution had
neither slavery nor emancipation in view, but it is in the preamble,
and the emancipation ought to be deduced from the preamble. Many
other reasons can be enumerated pregnant with complications and
above all when Lincoln-Seward are the _accoucheurs_. My hope and
confidence is in the logic of events always stronger than man's
helplessness and imbecility.

_Jan. 5._--European rulers, wiseacres, meddlers, humbugs, traitors,
demons, diplomats, assert that they must interfere here because
European interests suffer by the war. Indeed! You have the whole old
continent and Australia to boot, and about nine hundreds millions of
population; can you not organise yourself so as not to depend from
us? And if by your misrules, etc., our interests were to suffer, you
would find very strange any complaint made on our part. Keep aloof
with your good wishes, and with your advices, and with your
interference. You may burn your noses, and even lose your little
scalps. You robbers, murderers, hypocrites, surrounded by your
liveried lackeys, you presumptuous, arrogant curses of the human
race, stand off, and let these people whose worst criminal is a
saint when compared to a Decembriseur--let this people work out its
destinies, be it for good or for evil.

_Jan. 5._--Early in December, 1860, therefore soon after Mr.
Lincoln's election, a shrewd and clear-sighted politician, Gen.
Walsh, from New York, visited Springfield, and made his bow to the
rising sun. On his return from the Illinois Medira, I asked the
general what was his opinion concerning the new President. "Well,
sir," was the general's answer, "in parting, I advised Mr. Lincoln
to get a very eminent man for his private secretary."--_Sapienti
sat._

_Jan. 6._--Oh for a voice of thousand storms to render justice to
the patriots in Congress, to make the masses of the people know and
appreciate them, and to show up the littleness and the ignorance of
the pillars of the Republican press. Never and in no country has the
so-called good press shown itself so below the great emergencies of
the day as are the old hacks semperliving in the press.

_Jan. 7._--The great military qualities shown by Gen. Rosecrans,
thrilled with joy all the best men in the Potomac Army. The war
horse Hooker is the loudest to admire Rosecrans. Happy the Western
heroes to be beyond the immediate influence of Washington--of the
White House--and above all, of such as Halleck!

Rosecrans has revealed all the higher qualities of a captain;
coolness, resolution, stubbornness and inspiration. His army began
to break,--he ordered the attack on the whole line, and thus
transformed defeat into victory. Not of McClellan's school, is
Rosecrans.

_Jan. 7._--Senator Sumner who, during the ministerial crisis, ought
to have exposed to the country the mischievous direction given by
Mr. Seward to our foreign relations, and who ought to have done it
nobly, boldly, authoritatively, patriotically, and from his
Senatorial chair, Senator Sumner's preferred to keep stoically
quiet, notwithstanding that his personal friends and the country
expected it from him. Yet next to Chase, Senator Sumner, more than
any body, attacks Seward in private conversation! I read in the
papers that Senator Sumner's influence on Mr. Lincoln is
considerable (nevertheless Seward remained as the greatest curse to
the country,) and that he, Sumner, is a _power behind the throne_.
Has Sumner insinuated this himself to some newspaper reporter in
_extremis_ for news? _Power behind the throne_, what a tableau:
Sumner and Lincoln! O, Hogarth, O, Callot! Oh, for your crayon! and
now--of course--the country is safe, having such _Power behind the
throne_.

_Mr. Lincoln's good intentions_ I hear talked about right and left.
Oh, for one sensible, good, energetic action, and all his intentions
may go where the French proverb puts them.

_Jan. 7._--The city crowded with Major Generals and
Brigadier-Generals not in activity. When Mr. Lincoln is cornered,
then he makes a Brigadier or a Major General, according to
circumstances and in obedience to political or to backstairs
influence. From the beginning of the war, no sound notions directed
the nominations, either under Cameron, Scott, or McClellan, or now;
at the beginning of the war they had Generals without troops, then
troops without Generals, and now they have Generals who have not
commanded, or cannot command, troops. If, during the war in Poland
in 1831, Warsaw, the Capital, had been overrun in such a way by
do-nothing Generals, the chambermaids in the city would have taken
the affair into their fair hands, and armed with certain night
effluvia made short work with the military drones.

_Jan. 8._--A poor negro woman with her child was refused entrance
into the cars. It snowed and stormed, and she was allowed to shiver
on the platform. A so-called abolitionist Congress and President
gave the charter to the constructors of the city railroad and the
members of Congress have free tickets, and the Africo-American is
treated as a dog. Human honesty and justice!

_Jan. 8._--Horse contracts the word. Never in my life saw I the
horse so maltreated and the cavalry so poorly, badly, brainlessly
organised, drilled and used. Some few exceptions change not the
truth of my assertions, and McClellan is considered a great
organiser. They ruin more horses here in this war than did Napoleon
I. in Russia, (I speak not of the cold which killed thousands at
once.)

How ignorant and conceited! Halleck solicits Rarey, the horse-tamer,
for instructions. O, Halleck, you are unique! Officers who have
served in armies with large, good, well-organised and well-drilled
cavalry--such officers will teach you more than Rarey. But such
officers are from Europe, and it would be a shame for a West-Point
incarnation of ignorance and conceit to learn anything from an
officer of European experience. Bayard, however, thought not so.
Justice to his name.

The rebels are not so conceited as the simon pure West-Pointers.
Above all the rebels wish success, and have no objections to learn;
they imported good European cavalry officers, and have now under
Stuart (his chief of staff is a Prussian officer) a cavalry which
has made a mark in this war.

_Jan. 8._--O rhetors! O, rhetors! malediction upon you and upon the
politicians! You have no heart, no sensibilities. Not one, not one
has yet uttered a single word for the fallen, for the suffering, the
dying and nameless heroes of our armies. It seems, O rhetors and
politicians! that the people ought to bleed that you may prosper.
Corpses are needed for your stepping stones! The fallen are not
mentioned now in Congress, as you never mentioned them in your poor
stump speeches. O, you whitened sepulchres!

O rhetors and politicians! O, powers on, before, and "behind the
throne!" In your selfish, heartless conceit, you imagine that the
Emancipation is and will be your work, and will be credited to you.
Oh yes, but by old women.

The people's blood, the fallen heroes, tore the divine work of
emancipation, from the hands of jealously watching demons. To the
shadows of the fallen the glory, and not to your round, polished or
unpolished phrases. Not the pen with which the proclamation was
written is a trophy and a relic, but the blood steaming to heaven,
the corpses of the fallen, corpses mouldering scattered on all the
fields of the Union.

_Jan. 8._--As a rapid spring tide, so higher and higher, and with
all parties--even, with the decided Copperheads--rises the haughty
contempt toward the crowned, the official, the aristocratic, and the
flatfooted (livery stable) part of Europe. Good and just! Marshy,
rotten rulers and aristocrats who scarcely can keep your various
shaky and undermined seats, you and your lackeys, you take on airs
of advisors, of guardians, of initiators of civilization! Forsooth!
I except Russia. In Russia the sovereign, his ministers and
nine-tenths of the aristocracy are in _uni sono_ with the whole
nation; and all are against slavery, against the rebels, against
traitors. The Russian government and the Russian nation often are
misrepresented by their official or diplomatic agents.

Any well organized American village in the free States contains more
genuine, moral and intellectual civilization than prevails among
European higher circles, those gilded pasteboards. This is all that
you, you conceited advisors, represent in that splendid,
all-embracing edifice of civilization! At the best you are
ornaments, or--with Wilhelm von Humboldt--you are culture, but not
the higher, man-inspiring civilization. A John S. Mill, a Godwin
Smith, and those many outside of the _would-be-something_ strata in
England, in France, almost the whole Germany, those are the
representatives of the genuine civilized Europe.

The freemen of the North, on whom you European exquisites look
superciliously down with your albino eyes, the freemen of the North,
bleeding in this deadly struggle, are the confessors for the general
civilization, and stand on the level with any martyrs, with any
progressive people on record on history.

_Jan. 9._--Quo, quo scelesti ruitis.........

It is maddening to witness for so many months the reckless waste of
men, of time, of money, and of material means, and all this
squandered by governmental and administrative helplessness and
conceit. In the military part, notwithstanding Stanton's devotion
and efforts, that Halleck, _excrementum Scotti_, as by appointment,
carries out everything contrary to common sense, to well established
and experienced (Halleck and experience, ah!... military practice,
and Mr. Lincoln is as perfectly) charmed by it, as is the innocent
bird by the snake.

And thus the sacrifices and the blood of the people run out as does
the mighty Rhine--they run out in sand. O, Lincoln-Seward's domestic
policy. O, Lincoln-Halleck's war power! You make one shudder as with
a death pang.

_January 9._--The worshippers of slavery, that is, the Democrats, of
the Seymour's, Wood's, and the _World's_ church, call the war waged
for the defence of human rights, for civilization and for
maintaining the genuine rational self-government, they call it an
unholy war. In some respects the Copperheads are right. The holy war
loses its holiness in the hands of Lincoln, Seward, Halleck, and
their disciples and followers, because those leaders violate all the
laws of logic and of reason, this holy of holies. At times I would
prefer peace than see devoted men so recklessly murdered by such....

A critique of the first volume of the "Diary" asserts that all my
statements are made after the events occurred, _ex post_. To a very
respectable General I showed a part of the original manuscript which
squared with the printed book. Often I am ashamed to find that the
bit of study and experience acquired by me goes so far when compared
with many around me, and in action. I foresee, because I have no
earthly personal views, no cares, nothing in the world to think of
or to aim at, no charms, no ties--only my heart, my ideas, my
convictions, and civilization is my worship. Nothing prevents me,
day and night, from concentrating whatever powers and reading I can
have in one single focus. This cause, this people, this war, its
conduct, are the events amidst which I breathe. Uninterruptedly I
turn and return all that is in my mind--that is all. And I am proud
to have my heart in harmony with my head.

Almost every event has its undercurrent, and of ten the little
undercurrents pre-eminently shape the events themselves. The truth
of this axiom is illustrated principally in the recall of the
resolute, indefatigable, far and clear-sighted patriot and
statesman, General Butler. To jump to a conclusion without much ado,
the recall of Butler from New Orleans is due principally, if not
even exclusively, to the united efforts--or conspiracy--of Mr.
Seward and Mr. Reverdy Johnson. Thirteen months ago Mr. Seward
expected, as he still expects for the future, an uprising of a Union
Party in the hottest hot-bed of Secessia. That such are the
Secretary of State's expectations, I emphatically assert, and as
proof, it may be stated that only yesterday, January 9th, Mr. Seward
most authoritatively tried to impress upon foreign diplomats the
speedy reunion and _restoration_ of the Union as it was,
notwithstanding the Proclamation, _still considered by the Secretary
of State_ as being _a waste of paper_. How far the foreign diplomats
believe the like oracular decisions, is another question; certain it
is that they shrug their shoulders.

But to return to Butler and New Orleans. The patriotic activity by
which General Butler won, conquered and maintained the rebel city
for the Union, was emphatically considered by Mr. Seward, as
crushing out every spark of any latent Union feeling among the
rebels. Thurlow Weed, then abroad, urged Mr. Seward to find out the
said Union feeling, to blow it into almighty fire and to rely
exclusively upon it. Here Reverdy Johnson was and is, the principal
Union crony of the Secretary of State, and Seaton of the
_Intelligencer_; but above all, since the murder of Massachusetts
men at Baltimore in 1861, Reverdy Johnson was the devoted advocate
of all rich traitors, as the Winans and others, who were called by
him "misled Union men." When Gen. Butler dealt deserved justice to
rich traitors in New Orleans, the Washington Unionists surrounding
Mr. Chase and Mr. Seward--some of them from New Orleans--urged an
investigation. The Secretary of State eagerly seized the occasion to
dispatch to the Crescent City Mr. Reverdy Johnson with the principal
secret mission to gather together the elements of the scattered
Union feeling in Louisiana and in the South, and to make them
blaze--in honor of the Secretary of State. It was a rich harvest in
every way for Reverdy Johnson; he harvested it, and on his return
fully convinced the Secretary of State, that the Union could not be
saved if Gen. Butler remained in his command in the Department of
the Gulf.

This surreptitious undermining of General Butler by the Secretary of
State, is one more evidence of how truly patriotic was the effort of
the Republican Senators and Congressmen to liberate the President
and the country from the all-choking and all-poisoning influence of
Mr. Seward, and how cursed must remain forever the conduct of Mr.
Chase, who, after having during two years cried against Seward,
accusing him almost of treason, when the hour struck, preferred to
embarrass the patriots and the President rather that to let Mr.
Seward retire and deprive the people of his _patriotic_ services. It
was moreover expected that, thus warned by the patriots, the
President would seize the first occasion to infuse energy into his
Cabinet. But there is a Mr. Usher, a docile nonentity, made
Secretary of the Interior; of course the Secretary of State will be
strengthened thereby.

_January 10._--Senator Wright of Indiana, in an ardent and lofty--of
course, not rhetorical, speech, hit the nail on the head, when,
rendering due homage to Rosecrans, he called him "the first general
who fights for the people and not for the White House." The greatest
praise for the man, and the most saddening picture of our internal
sores.

_January 10._--As the pure _populus Romanus_ had an inborn aversion
to Kings and diadems, and could not patiently bear their
neighborhood, so the genuine American Democrat, one by principles
and not by a party name or by a party organization, such a Democrat
feels it to be death for his institutions to have slavocracy in his
country or in its neighborhood.

_Jan. 10._--O how is to be pitied the future historian of this
bloody tragedy! Through what a loathsome cesspool of documentary
evidence, preserved in the various State Archives, the unhappy
historian will have to wade, and wade deep to his chin. Original
works of Lincoln, Seward, etc.

It is easy to play a game at chess with a far superior player, then
at least one learns something; but impossible to sit at a chess
board with a child who throws all into confusion. The national
chessboard is very confused in the White House. Cunning is good for,
and only succeeds in dealing with, mean and petty facts.

_Jan. 10._--Halleck's congratulatory order to Rosecrans and to the
Western heroes. How cold and pedantic. How differently, how
enthusiastically and fiery rang Stanton's words on the capture of
forts Henry and Donelson and to Lander's (now dead) troops. Why is
Stanton silent? Is it the Constitution, the Statute, is it the
incarnate four years formula which seals Stanton's heart and brains?
or is Stanton eaten up by the rats in the Cabinet?

_January 10._--The messages of the loyal Governors, not copperheads,
(as is Seymour of N. Y.) above all, the message of Andrew of
Massachusetts, throw a ray of hope and promise over this dark, cold,
unpatriotic confusion so eminent here in Washington. This confusion,
this groping, double-dealing and helplessness can be only cured by a
wonder, or else all will be lost. The wonder is daily perpetrated by
the all enduring, all-sacrificing people.

Those criminals who ought to have been shot, or, at the mildest,
cashiered for the slaughter at Fredericksburgh, the engineers,
mock-Jominis, the sham soldiers: all these Washington engineers of
that recent butchery, assert now, that, after all, the possession of
Fredericksburgh was immaterial; that Lee would have then selected a
better position. All this is thrown to the public to palliate the
crime of the Washington military conclave, and to weaken and
invalidate Hooker's evidence before the War Committee. It must be
admitted that if Hooker--having fifty thousand in hand, and one
hundred thousand in his rear, had seized the Fredericksburgh
heights, he would not have allowed Lee to so easily select a
position and to fortify it. Nay, I suppose, that not only Hooker,
but even a Halleck, a Cullum or a Meigs would have prevented Lee
from settling in any comfortable position. However, I might be
mistaken. Corinth, Corinth, for Halleck. Those great nightcaps here
have so original and so new military conceptions, their general
comprehension of warfare so widely differs from science, experience,
and from common sense, that, holding Fredericksburgh they might have
invited Lee to select whatever he wanted as a strong position.

I learn that Halleck is at work to translate some French military
book. What an inimitable narrow-minded pedant. If Halleck had
brains, he could not have an hour leisure for translation. But in
such way he humbugs Mr. Lincoln, who looks on Halleck as the
quintessence of military knowledge and genius. A man who can
translate a French book must be a genius. Is it not so, Lincoln? And
thus Halleck translates a book instead of taking care that the
pontoons be sent in time; and Halleck prepared sheets for the press,
and our soldiers to be massacred.

Burnside prepares a movement; Franklin, to undermine Burnside, to
appear great, or to get hold of the army, denounces Burnside
secretly to the President: the President forbids the movement. What
a confusion! Mr. Lincoln, either accept Burnside's resignation,
which he has repeatedly offered, or kick down the denouncers.
Accident made me discover almost next day, the names of the two
generals sent by Franklin on this denunciatory errand--John Cochran
and Newton. I instantly told all to Stanton, who was almost ignorant
of Franklin's surreptitiousness. I also told it to several Senators.

The Army of the Potomac is altogether demoralized--above all, in the
higher grades. It could not be otherwise if they were angels.
McClellanism was and is propitious to general disorder, and how Mr.
Lincoln improves is exemplified above. Independent men, independent
Senators and Representatives who approach Mr. Lincoln, find him
peevish, irritable, intractable to all patriots. _All these are
criteria of a lofty mind and character._ Weed, Seward, Harris,
Blair, and such ones alone, are agreeable in the White House.

So much is spoken of the war powers of the President; I study, and
study, and cannot find them as absolute as the Lincolnites construe
them. All that I read in the Constitution are the real _war powers_
in the Congress, and the President is only the executor of those
powers. The President must have permission for every thing, almost
at every step--and has no right to issue decrees. He has no war
powers over those of Congress, and can act very little on his own
hook. It seems to me that Congress, misled, confused by casuists,
expounders, and by small intellects worshipping routine, that
Congress rather abdicated their powers, and that the bunglers around
Lincoln, in his name greedily seized the above powers.

Poor Lincoln! As the devil dreads holy water, so Mr. Lincoln dreads
to be surrounded with stern, earnest, ardent, patriotic advisers.
Such men would not listen to stories!

_January 11._--The thus-called metropolitan press is in the hands of
old politicians, old hacks--and no new forces or intellects pierce
through. It is a phenomenon. In any whatever country in Europe, at
every convulsion the press bristles with new, fresh intellects.
Here, the old nightcaps have the monopoly. Farther: those
respectable fossils reside at a distance from the focus of affairs,
are not directly in contact with events and men, and are in no
communion with them. The Grand Lamas of the press depend for
information upon the correspondents, who catch news and ideas at
random, and nourish with them their employers and the public.

_January 11._--Senator Sumner has made a motion to give homesteads
to the liberated Africo-Americans. That is a better and a nobler
action than all his declamations put together.

_January 12._--Sentinels in double line surrounding the White House.
Odious, ridiculous, unnecessary, and an aspect unwonted in this
country--giving the aspect to the White House of an abode of a
tyrant, when it is only that of a shifting politician. It is
Halleck, who, with the like futilities and absurdities, amuses
Lincoln and gets the better of him.

Mr. Lincoln is very depressed at the condition of the Army of the
Potomac, and decides--nothing for its reorganization. But for
Halleck, Stanton would reorganize and give a new and healthy life to
the army. I mean the upper grades, and not the rank and file, who
are patriotic and healthy.

After Corinth, Halleck-Buell disorganized the Western, now Halleck
is at work to do the same with the Potomac Army. I know that in the
presence of a diplomat, Halleck complained that he is paid only five
thousand dollars, and earned by far more in California. He had
better return to California and to his pettifogging.

Since the beginning of this Administration, Mr. Seward wrote, I am
sure, more dispatches than France, England, Prussia, Russia,
Austria, Spain, and Italy put together during the Crimean war, and
up to this day. Great is ink, and paper is patient!

_January 13._--It is more than probable that Mr. Mercier stirred up,
or at least heartily supported the mediation scheme. The Frenchmen
in New York maintain that Mr. Mercier derives his knowledge of
America and his political inspirations from that foul sheet, the
_Courrier des États Unis_. There is some truth in this assertion, as
the reasons enumerated to justify mediation can be found in various
numbers of that sheet. I am sorry that Mr. Mercier has fallen so
low; as for his master, he is a fit associate for the _Courrier_.

_January 13._--Ralph Waldo Emerson, inspired and not silenced by the
storm. He alone stands up from among the Athenian school. He alone
is undaunted. So would be Longfellow, but for the terrible domestic
calamity whose crushing blow no man's heart could resist. I never
was a great admirer of Emerson, but now I bow, and burn to him my
humble incense.

_January 15._--The patriotic, and at times inspired orator--not
rhetor--Kelly, from Pennsylvania, told me that all is at sixes and
sevens in the Administration, and in the army. I believe it. How
could it be otherwise, with Lincoln, Seward and Halleck at the head?

Mr. Seward did his utmost to defeat the re-election of Judge Potter
from Wisconsin, one among the best and noblest patriots in the
country. For this object Mr. Seward used the influence of the
pro-Catholic Bonzes. Then Mr. Seward wrote a letter denying all
this--a letter which not in the least convinced the brave Judge, as
I have it from himself.

If all the lies could only be ferreted out with which Seward
bamboozles Lincoln, even the God of Lies himself would shudder.

_January 15._--The noble and lofty voice of the genuine English
people, the voice of the working classes, begins to be heard. The
people re-echo the key-note struck by a J. S. Mills, by a Bright, a
Cobden, and others of like pure mind and noble heart. The voice of
the genuine English people resounds altogether differently from the
shrill _falsetto_ with which turf hunters, rent-roll devourers,
lords, lordlings, and all the like shams and whelps try to
intimidate the patriotic North, and comfort the traitors, the
rebels.

_January 16._--But for the truly enlightened and patriotic efforts
of the Senators Wade, Lane, (of Kansas) and Trumbull, the debate of
yesterday, Thursday, on the appropriation for the West Point
Military Academy would have gone to the country, absolutely
misleading and stultifying the noble and enlightened people. It was
most sorrowful, nay, wholly disgusting to witness how Senators who,
until then, had stood firmly against small influences and narrow
prejudices, blended together in an unholy alliance to sustain the
accursed clique of West Point engineers. Much allowance is to be
made for the allied Senators' ignorance of the matter, and for the
natural wish to appear wise. The country, the people, ought to
treasure the names of the ten patriotic Senators whose voices
protested against further sustaining that cursed nursery of
arrogance, of pro-slavery, or of something worse.

Whatever might have been the efforts of the Senatorial patrons and
the allies of the engineers, the following facts remained for ever
unalterable: 1st. That the spirit of close educational corporation
which have exclusive monopoly and patronage, is perfectly similar to
the spirit which prevailed and still prevails in monasteries, and
permeates the pupils during their whole after life; 2d. That the
prevailing spirit in West Point was and is rather monarchical and
altogether Pro-Slavery; 3d, that of course some noble exceptions
are to be found and made,--but they are exceptions; 4th, that such
educational monasteries nurse conceit and arrogance; and this the
mass of West Pointers have prominently shown during this war in
their relations with the noble and devoted volunteers, and that this
arrogant spirit of clique and of caste works mischievously in the
army; 5th, that exceptions, noble and patriotic, as a Reno, a Lyons,
a Bayard, a Stevens, and other such heroes and patriots, do not
disprove the general rule; 6th, that Lyons, Grant, Rosecrans,
Hooker, Heintzelman, etc., have shown glorious qualities not on
account of what they learnt in West Point, but by what they did not
learn there; 7th, that these heroes rose above the dry and narrow
school wisdom, and are what they are, not because educated in West
Point, but notwithstanding their education there. And here I
interrupt the further enumeration to give an extract from a private
letter directed to me by one of the most eminent pupils from West
Point, and the ablest _true_, not _mock_, engineer in our army:

     "In regard to your views of West Point's influence I am at a loss
     to make any answer," (the writer is a great defender of West
     Point,) "but would suggest that it may be after all not West
     Point, but the want of _a supreme hand_ to our military affairs
     to _combine_ and _use_ the materials West Point furnishes, that
     is in fault. * * * _West Point cannot make a general_--no
     military school can--but it can and does furnish good soldiers.
     All the distinguished Confederate generals are West Pointers, and
     yet we know the men, and know that neither Lee, nor Johnson nor
     Jackson, nor Beauregard, nor the Hills are men of any very
     extraordinary ability," etc., etc., etc.

To this I answer: the rebels are with their heart and soul in their
cause, and thus their capacities are expanded, they are inspired on
the field of battle. (Similar answer I gave to General McDowell
about six months ago.) So was our Lyon, so are Rosecrans, Hooker,
Grant, and a few others; and for such generals, Senators Trumbull,
Wade and Lane ardently called in the above debate.

I continue the enumeration: 8th. The military direction of the war is
exclusively in the hands of a West Point clique, and of West Point
engineers,--not _very much_ with their hearts in the people's cause;
9th, that that clique of West Point engineers from McClellan down to
Halleck prevents any truly higher military capacity getting a free
untrammelled scope, (General Halleck with all his might opposes giving
the command of the army to Hooker,) and this Halleck, an engineer from
West Point, who never saw a cartridge burnt or a file of soldiers
fighting, to-day decides the military fate of our country on the
authority of a book said to be on military science, but if such a book
had been written by any officer in the armies of France, Prussia or
Russia, the ignorant author would have had the friendly advice from
his superiors to resign and select some pursuit in life more congenial
to his intellectual capacities; further, this Halleck complains in
following words: "that they (the Administration) made him leave a
profitable business in San Francisco, and pay him only 5,000 dollars
to fight THEIR (not his) battles." So much for a Halleck. 10th. That
the West Point clique of engineers, the McClellans, the Hallecks, the
Franklins, etc., have brought the country to the verge of the grave,
as stated by Senator Lane.

Such were the facts established by the patriotic and not
would-be-wise Senators; and there is an illustration recorded in
history as proof that the above not engineering Senators were right
in their assertions. Frederick II. was in no military school; the
captains second to Napoleon in the French wars were Hoche, Moreau,
and Massena, all of them from private life.

--The clique of engineers has the Potomac Army altogether in its
grasp, and has reduced and perverted the spirit of the noble
children of the people. Oh, the sooner this army shall be torn from
the hands of the clique the nearer and surer will be the salvation
of the country.

The clique accuses the volunteers; but the clique, the engineers in
power have disorganized, morally and materially, and disgraced the
Army of the Potomac. They did this from the day of the encampments
around Washington, in the fall of 1861, down to the day of
Fredericksburgh. Fredericksburgh was altogether prepared by
engineers; at Fredericksburgh the engineer Franklin did not even
mount his horse when his soldiers were misled and miscommanded--by
himself.

--Stragglers are generated by generals. Besides, to explain
straggling, I quote from a _genuine_ book on genuine military
science, published in Berlin in 1862, by Captain Boehn, the most
eminent professor at the military school in Potsdam: "The greatest
losses, during a war, inflicted on an army are by maladies and by
straggling. Such losses are five times greater than those of killed
and wounded; and an _intelligent administration_ takes preparatory
measures to meet the losses and to compensate them. Such measures of
foresight consist in organizing depots for battalions, which depots
ought to equal one sixth of the number of the active army." O,
Halleck, where are the depots?

--"In any ordinary campaign, excepting a winter campaign, the losses
amount (as established by experience) to one half in infantry, one
fourth in cavalry, and to one third in artillery." (Do you know any
thing about it, O, Halleck?)

Let the people be warned, and they may understand the location of
the cause generating further disasters. If the Army of the Potomac
shall win glory, it will win it notwithstanding the West Point
clique of engineers. The disasters have root in the White House,
where the advice of such a Halleck prevails.

--I know very well that the formation of the volunteers in
respective States and by the Governors of such States raises a great
difficulty in organizing and preparing reserves. But talent and
genius reveal themselves by overpowering difficulties considered to
be insurmountable. And Halleck is a man both of genius and talent.

Taking into account the patriotism, the devotion of the governors of
the respective states, [not _à la_ Copperhead Seymour], it would
have been possible, nay, even easy to organize some kind of
reserves. O, Halleck, O, fogies!

_January 17._--Mr. Lincoln loads on his shoulders all kinds of
responsibilities, more so than even Jackson would have dared to
take. Admirable if generated by the boldness of self-consciousness,
of faith, and of convictions. True men measure the danger--and the
means in their grasp to meet the emergency; others play
unconsciously with events, as do children with explosive and
death-dealing matters.

_January 17._--General and astronomer Mitchel's death may be credited
to Halleck. Halleck and Buell's envy--if not worse--paralysed Mitchel
and Turtschin's activity in the West. Mitchel and Turtschin were too
quick, that is, too patriotic. In early summer, 1862, they were sure
to take Chattanooga, a genuine strategic point, one of those principal
knots and nurseries in the life of the secesh. How imprudent!
Chattanooga is still in the hands of the rebels, and if we ever take
it, it will cost streams of blood and millions of money. Down with
Mitchel and Turtschin. Mitchel's _excrementa_ were more valuable than
are Halleck's heavy, but not expanding, brains. Mitchel revealed at
once all the qualities of an eminent, if not of a great general.
Quickness of mind, fertility of resources. An astronomer, a
mathematician, Mitchel's mind was familiar with broad combinations.
Such a mind penetrated space, calculated means and chances, balanced
forces and probabilities. Not to compare, however, is it to be borne
in mind that Napoleon was a mathematician in the fullest sense, and
not an engineer, not a translator.

_January 18._--Mr. Lincoln's letter to McClellan when the hero of
the Copperheads was in search of mud in the Peninsula. The letter
rings as sound common sense; it shows, however, that common sense
debarred of strong will remains unproductive of good. Mr. Lincoln
commonly shows strong will, in the wrong place.

  ----ein Theil von jener Krafft,
  Die stehts das Guthe will, und stehts das Boese schaff.

_January 18._--The emancipation proclamation is out. Very well. But
until yet not the slightest signs of any measures to execute the
proclamation, at once, and in its broadest sense. Now days, even
hours, are equal to years in common times. Had Lincoln his heart in
the proclamation, on January 2d he would begin to work out its
expansion, realization, execution. I wish Lincoln may lift himself,
or be lifted by angels to the grandeur of the work. But it is
impossible. Surrounded as he is, and led in the strings by Seward,
Blair, Halleck, and by border-state politicians, the best that can
be expected are belated half measures.

Stanton comprehends broadly and thoroughly the question of
emancipation and of arming the Africo-Americans. As I intend to
realize my plans of last year and organise Africo-American
regiments, I had conversations with Stanton, and find him more
thorough about the matter than is any body whom I met. He agreed
with me, that the cursed land of Secessia ought to be surrounded by
camps to enlist and organise the enslaved, as a scorpion surrounded
with burning coals. Such organizations introduced rapidly and
simultaneously on all points, would shake Secessia to its
foundations, and put an end to guerillas, _alias_ murderers and
robbers. We will again think and talk it over. But as is wont with
Lincoln, he will hesitate, hesitate, until much of precious time
will be lost.

_January 18._--A surgeon in one of the hospitals in Alexandria
writes in a private note:

     "Our wounded bear their sufferings nobly; I have hardly heard a
     word of complaint from one of them. A soldier from the 'stern and
     rock bound coast' of Maine--a victim of the slaughter at
     Fredericksburgh--lay in this hospital, his life ebbing away from
     a fatal wound. He had a father, brothers and sisters, a wife, and
     one little boy of two or three years old, on whom his heart
     seemed set. Half an hour before he ceased to breathe, I stood by
     his side, holding his hand. He was in the full exercise of his
     intellectual faculties, and knew he had but a brief time to live.
     He was asked if he had any message to leave for his dear ones
     whom he loved so well. "_Tell them_," said he, "_how I died--they
     know how I lived!_"

_January 19._--Senator Wright, of Indiana, stirred the hearts of the
Senate and of the people. It was not the oration of a rhetor--it was
the confession of an ardent, pure patriot. I never heard or
witnessed anything so inspiring and so kindling to soul and heart.

_January 20._--General Butler palsied and shelved, Halleck all
powerful and with full steam running the country and the army to
destruction--such is the truest photograph of the situation. But as
an adamantine rock among storms, so Mr. Lincoln remains unmoved.
Unmoved by the yawning, bleeding wounds of the devoted, noble
people--unmoved by the prayers and supplication of patriots--of
his--once--best friends. Mr. Lincoln answers, with dignity not
Roman, and with obstinacy unparallelled even by Jackson, that he
will stand or fall with his present advisers, and that he takes the
responsibility for all the cursed misdeeds of Seward, Halleck,
Chase, and others. So children are ready to set a match to a powder
magazine unconscious of the terrible results--unconscious of the
awful responsibility for its destructive action.

A death pang runs through one's body to see how rapidly the dial
marks the disappearing hours, and how unrelentingly approaches March
4th, and the death-knell of this present patriotic, devoted
Congress. For this terrible storm and clash of events, the people,
perhaps, feel not the immensity of the loss. Paralyzed as Congress
has been and now is, by the infernal machinations of Seward, Chase,
and others, and by Mr. Lincoln's stubborn helplessness, the patriots
in both Houses nevertheless, succeeded in redeeming the pledge which
the name of America gives to the expansive progress of humanity. The
patriots of both Houses, as the exponents of the noble and loftiest
aspirations of the American people, whipped in--and this literally,
not figuratively--whipped Mr. Lincoln into the glory of having
issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The laws promulgated by this
dying Congress initiated the Emancipation--generated the
Proclamation of the 22d September, and of January 1st. History will
not allow one to wear borrowed plumage.

--Congress ought not to have so easily abdicated its well established
rights of more absolute and direct control of the deeds of the
Administration and of its clerks, _alias_ Secretaries of Departments.
It is to be eternally regretted that Congress has shown such
unnecessary leniency; but in justice it must be said that the
patriotic and high-minded members of Congress wished to avoid the
degrading necessity of showing the nation the prurient administrative
sores. Advised, directed, tutored and pushed by Seward, Blair and
Chase, Mr. Lincoln is--innocently--as grasping for power, as are any
of those despots not over respectfully recorded by history.

With all this, the presence of Congress keeps in awe the reckless
and unscrupulous Administration, as, according to the pious belief
of medieval times, holy water awed the devil. But Congress once out
of the way, without having succeeded in rescuing Mr. Lincoln from
the hands of those mean, ignorant, egotistic bunglers, all the time
squinting towards the succession to the White House, and unable to
surround the President with men and patriots, then all the plagues
of Egypt may easily overrun this fated country. Such conjurors of
evil as the Sewards, Hallecks, and others, will have no dread of any
holy water before them, and they will be sure that the great party
of the "Copperheads" in the future Congress will applaud them for
all the mischief done, and lift them sky high, if they succeed in
treading down in the gutter, or in any way palsying emancipation,
tarnishing the people's noble creed, and endangering the country's
holiest cause.

General Fitz-John Porter's trial before court-martial ended in his
dismissal, but ought punishment to fall on him alone, when the
butchers of Fredericksburgh and when the pontoon men are in high
command? when a Franklin is still sustained, when a Seward and a
Halleck remain firm in their high places as the gates of hell?

_January 20._--Wrote a respectful letter to the President on
Halleck's military science, his book, and capacity. Told
respectfully to Mr. Lincoln that not even the Sultan would dare to
palm such a Halleck on his army and on his people.

Mr. Lincoln in his greatness says that "he will stand and fall with
his Cabinet." O, Mr. Lincoln! O, Mr. Lincoln! purple-born sovereigns
can no more speak so!

Mr. Lincoln! with the gang of politicians, your advisers and
friends, _you all desire immensely, and will feebly_. You desire the
reconstruction of the Union, and you almost shun the ways and means
to do it. And thus this noble people is dragged to a slaughter
house.

  Parumne campis atque Neptuno super
  Fusum est--[Yankee] sanguinis?

_January 21._--Deep, irreconcilable as is my hatred of slavocrats
and rebels, nevertheless I am forced to admire the high intellectual
qualities of their chiefs, when compared with that of ours. Of
Lincoln _versus_ Jeff Davis I spoke in the first volume. But now
Lee, Jackson, Hill, Ewall, _versus_ Halleck, McClellan, McDowell,
Franklin, etc.

_January 22._--Wendell Phillips's _Amen_ oration to the Proclamation
is noble and torrent-like oratory. Greeley is the better Greeley of
former times. I heartily wish to admire and speak well of Greeley,
as of every body else. Is it my fault that they give me no occasion?

_January 23._--General Fitz-John Porter, McClellan's pet, told me
to-day, that after the battle at Hanover Court House, he supplicated
McClellan to attack Richmond at once--which in Porter's opinion
could have been taken without much ado,--and not to change his base
to James River; and even Fitz-John could not prevail on this demigod
of imbeciles, traitors and intriguers.

_January 24._--Here is one of the thousand flagrant lies with which
Seward entangles Lincoln, as with a net of steel. Lincoln assured
General Ashley that the public is unjust toward Seward in accusing
him of having worked for the defeat of Wadsworth. That they have
been the best friends for long years; that, when Military Governor
of Washington, Wadsworth was a daily visitor in Seward's house; and
that, during the canvass, Wadsworth consulted with Seward concerning
his (Wadsworth's) actions.

Mr. Seward knows that every one of those assertions which he or
Thurlow Weed pushed down the throat of Mr. Lincoln is a flagrant
lie. Every one knows that for many, many years the high-toned
Wadsworth had in utter detestation Mr. Seward's character as a
lawyer or as a public man, and that he never spoke to him, and never
was his political or private friend.

I am sorry to bring such details before the public, but how
otherwise convict a liar? As for Thurlow Weed's secret and open
machinations against the election of Wadsworth, only an idiot or a
s.... doubts them. Ask the New York politicians, provided they have
manhood to tell the truth.

_January 24th._--_Caveant Senators and Representatives!_ cannot be
too often hurled into the ears of the people and of the Congressmen.
The time runs lightning like--the 4th of March approaches with
comet-like velocity. If the tempest is not roaring, its signs are
visible, and most of the helmsmen are blind or unsteady. Oh! could
every move of the pendulums of the clocks of the Senate Chamber and
the Representatives' Hall, thunder-like repeat that _caveant_,
transmitted by the purest and best days of Rome! The Republicans and
many of the war Democrats are faithful and true to the people and to
its sacred cause; but the names of the "filibustering" traitors in
both houses ought to be nailed to the gallows!

European winds bring Louis Napoleon's opening speech, and the
confession, that although once rebuked, he, the dissolute, the
profligate, with his corrosive breath still intends to pollute the
virginity of our country; for such is the indelible stain to any
nation, to any people which accepts or submits to any, even the most
friendly, foreign mediation or arbitration. Never, never any great
nation or any self-respecting government, accepted or submitted to
any similar foreign interference. Of the peoples, nations and
governments, which allowed such interference, some collapsed into
degradation for a long time, only slowly recovering, like Spain;
others, like Poland, disappeared. Those who advocate such mediation
unveil their weakness, their thorough ignorance of the world's
history and of the historic and political bearings of the words,
_mediation_, and _arbitration_; and to crown all, these advocates
bring to market their imbecility.

The Africo-Americans ought to receive military organization and be
armed. But it ought to be done instantly and without loss of time;
it ought to be done earnestly, boldly, broadly; it ought to be done
at once on all points and on the largest scale; it ought to be done
here in Washington, under the eyes of the chief of the people; here
in the heart of the country; here, so to speak, in the face of
slave-breeding Virginia, this most intense focus of treason; it
ought to be done here, that the loyal freemen of Virginia's soil be
enabled to fight and crush the F. F. V's, the progeny of hell; it
ought to be done here on every inch of soil covered with shattered
shackles; and not partially on the outskirts, in the Carolinas and
Louisiana. Stanton, alone, and Welles among the helmsmen, are so
inspired; but alas, for the rest of the crew.

On the flags of the Africo-Americans under my command, I shall
inscribe: _Hic niger est! hunc tu (rebel) caveto!_ I shall inculcate
upon my men that they had better not make prisoners in the battle,
and not allow themselves to be taken alive.

_January 25th._--So Gen. McClellan's services to the rebellion are
acknowledged by the gift of a splendid mansion situated in New York,
in the social sewer of American society. The donors, are the shavers
from Wall Street, individuals who coin money from the blood and from
the misfortunes of the people, and who by high rents mercilessly
crush the poor; who sacrifice nothing for the sacred cause; who, if
they put their names as voluntary contributors of a trifle for the
war, thousand and thousand times recover that trifle which they
ostentatiously throw to gull the good-natured public opinion; not to
speak of those so numerous among the McClellanites, who openly or
secretly are in mental communion with treason and rebellion.
Naturally, all this gang honors its hero.

McClellan's pedestal is already built of the corpses of hundreds of
thousands butchered by his generalship, poisoned in the
Chickahominy, and decimated by diseases. His trophies are the wooden
guns from Centreville and Manassas.

_January 25th._--What from the beginning of this war, I witness as
administrative acts and dispositions, and further the debates in
Congress on the various bills for military organizations and for the
organization of the various branches of the military medical,
surgical, and quartermaster's service; all this fully convinces me
that the military and administrative routine, as transmitted by Gen.
Scott, or by his school, and as continued by his pets and remnants,
is almost the paramount cause of all mischief and evils. In the
medical, surgical, and in the quartermasters' offices, ought have
been appointed young civilians and business men as chiefs, having
under them some old routinists for the sake of technicalities of the
service. Such men would have done by far better than those old
intellectual drones. A merchant accustomed to carry on an extensive
and complicated business would have been by far a better
quartermaster-general--_Intendant des armées_--than the wholly
inexperienced Gen. Meigs. This last would serve as an aid to the
merchant. At the beginning of the war, I suggested to Senator Wilson
to import such quartermasters from France or Russia, men experienced
and accustomed to provide for armies of 100,000 men each. By paying
well, such men could have been easily found, and the military
medical and surgical bureau, as organized by Scott, was about sixty
years behind real science. These senile representatives of
non-science snubbed off Professor Van Buren of the New York
academy, to whom they compare as the light of a common match to that
of calcium. If men like Dr. Van Buren, Dr. Barker, and others of
real science from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, etc., had been
listened to, thousands and thousands of limbs and lives would have
been saved and preserved.

_January 25th._--Mr. Lincoln relishes the idea that if the cause of
the North is victorious, no one can claim much credit for it. I put
this on record for some future assumptions. Mr. Lincoln is the best
judge of the merits of his clerks and lieutenants. But Mr. Lincoln
forgets that the success will be due exclusively to the people--and,
_per contra_, he alone will be arrayed for the failure. His friends
and advisers, as the Sewards, the Weeds, the Blairs, the Hallecks,
will very cleverly wash their gored hands from any complicity with
him--Lincoln.

The army to be formed from Africo-Americans is to be entrusted to
converted conservatives. It is feared that sincere abolitionists if
entrusted with the command, may use the forces for some awful,
untold aims. It is feared that abolitionists once possessed of arms
and troops, may use them indiscriminately, and emancipate right and
left, by friend and foe, paying no attention to the shrieks of
border-States, of old women, of politicians, of cowards, of
Sewardites; nay, it is feared that genuine abolitionists may carry
too far their notions of absolute equality of races, and without
hesitation treat the white rebels with even more severity than they
threaten to treat loyal armed Africo-Americans. And why not?...

The history of England, the history of any free country has not on
record a position thus anomalous, even humiliating, as is that of
the patriots in Congress, thanks to Mr. Lincoln's helpless
stubbornness. The patriots forcibly must consider Mr. Lincoln, even
Sewardised, Blairised, Halleckised as he is, as being the only legal
power for the salvation of the country. The patriots must support
him, and instead of exposing the wretched faults, mistakes, often
ill-will of his administration, must defend the administration
against the attacks of the Copperheads, who try to destroy or
disorganize the administration on account of that atom of good that
it accidentally carries out on its own hook. And thus the patriots
must suffer and bear patiently abuses heaped on them by the
treasonable or by the stupid press, by intriguers and traitors; and
patriots cannot make even the slightest attempt to vindicate their
names.

_January 26th._--The visits to the White House and the "_I had a
talk with the President_," are among the prominent causes of the
distracted condition of affairs. With comparatively few exceptions,
almost everybody expands a few inches in his own estimation, when he
says to his listeners, nay, to his friends: "I had a talk with the
President." Of course it is no harm in private individuals to have
such _a talk_, but I have frequently observed and experienced that
public men had better refrain from having any talk with him. Very
often he is not a jot improved by their talk, and they come out from
the interview worsted in some sort or other.

Sumner, the Roman, the Cicero, was to-day urged by several
abolitionists from Boston to expose the mischief of both the foreign
and the domestic policy of Seward. The Senator replied that he is
more certain to succeed against that public nuisance and public
enemy by not attacking him openly. I vainly ransack my recollection
of my classic reading for the name of any Roman who ever made such a
reply.

_January 26th: Two o'clock P. M._--Hooker is in command! And
patriotic hearts thrill with joy! Mud, bad season, mortality, loss
of time, demoralization, such is the inheritance left by McClellan,
Halleck and Burnside--such are the results prepared by the infamous
West Point and other muddy intriguers in Washington, and in the
army,--such is the inheritance transmitted to Hooker, by the cursed
Administration procrastinations. In all military history there is
seldom, if ever, a record of a commander receiving an army under
such ominous circumstances. If Hooker succeeds, then his genius will
astonish even his warmest friends.

When Hooker was wounded, and in the hospital, he repeatedly
complained to me of the deficiency of the staffs. I reminded him of
it, and he promised to do his best to organize a staff without a
flaw.

I immediately wrote to Stanton, sending him several pages translated
from the German works of Boehn (before spoken of) to give to the
Secretary a general idea of what are the qualities, the science, the
knowledge and the duties of a good chief of staff. I explained that
the staff and the chief of the staff of an army are to it what the
brains and the nervous system are to the human body.

_9 o'clock, P. M._--I am told that Hooker wished to have for his
chief of staff General Stone, (white-washed) who is considered to be
one of the most brilliant capacities of the army. If so, it was a
good choice, and the opposition made by Stanton is for me--at the
best--unintelligible.

Hooker selected Butterfield. What a fall from Stone to Butterfield.
Between the two extend hundreds, nay, thousands, of various
gradations. Gen. Butterfield is brave, can well organize a regiment
or a brigade, but he has not and can not have the first atom of
knowledge required in a chief of staff of such a large army. Staff
duties require special studies, they are the highest military
science; and where, in the name of all, could Butterfield have
acquired it? I am certain Butterfield is not even aware that staff
duties are a special science. All this is a very bad omen, very bad,
very bad. Literally they laugh at me; now they hurrah for Hooker.
May they not cry very soon on account of Hooker's staff. When I
warn, Senators and Representatives tell me that I am very difficult
to be satisfied. We will see.

_January 27._--It is said that Franklin, Sumner, and even
Heintzelman declared they would not serve under Hooker. Let them go.
Bow them out, the hole in the army will be invisible. I am sorry
that Heintzelman plays such pranks, as he is a very good general and
a very good man. Well, a new galaxy of generals and commanders is
the inevitable gestation of every war. Seldom if ever the same men
end a war who began it. New men will prove better than the present
sickly reputations consecrated by Scott, West Point and Washington.

_January 27._--Governor Andrew--the man always to the point, or as the
French would say _toujours à la hauteur de la question_--insists on
forming African or black regiments in Boston from free blacks. Such
formations interfere not with my project, as I principally, nay
exclusively, look to contrabands, to actual slaves. Governor Andrew
wishes to give the start, to stir up the Government and other
Governors and to drag them in his footsteps. He is the representative
man of the new and better generation which ought to have the affairs
of the country in hand, and not these old worn-out hacks who are at it
now. If such new men were at the helm in both civil and military
affairs, Secesh would have been already crushed and Emancipation
accomplished. To such a new generation belongs Coffey, one of the
Assistant Attorney Generals, Austin Stevens, Jr., Charles Dana,
Woodman, etc., etc. The country bristles with such men, and only
prejudices, stupidity, and routine prevents them from becoming really
active and from saving the country.

_January 27._--The patriotic majorities of both Houses of Congress
pass laws after laws concerning the finances, arming the
Africo-Americans, increasing the powers of the President, etc., each
of which taken alone, would not only save the cause but raise it
triumphant over the ruins of crime and of slavery, if used by
patriotic, firm, devoted, unegotistic hands and brains. But alas!
alas! very little of such, except in one or two individuals, is
located in the various edifices in and around the presidential
quarters.

The military organization of Africo-Americans is a powerful social
and military engine by which slavery, secession, rebellion, and all
other dark and criminal Northern and Southern excrescences can be
crushed and pulverized to atoms, and this in a trice. But as is the
case with all other powerful and explosive gases, elements, forces,
etc. this mighty element put in the hands of the Administration must
be handled resolutely, and with unquivering hands and intellect;
otherwise the explosion may turn out useless for the country and for
humanity.

At present the indications are very small that the administration
has a decided, clear comprehension how to use this accession of
loyal forces on a large scale; how to bring them boldly into action
in Virginia, as the heart of the rebellion. Nothing yet indicates
that the administration intends to arm and equip Africo-Americans
here under the eyes of the government. Nothing indicates that it
intends to do this avowedly and openly, and thereby terrify and
strike the proud slave-breeders, the F. F. V's. of Virginia, in the
heart of treason, and do it by their own once chattels, now their
betters.

_January 28._--The Congress almost expires; and will or can the
incarnated constitutional formula save the country? It is a chilling
thought to doubt, yet how can we have confidence! All in the
people! the people alone and its true men will not and cannot
fail, and they alone are up to the mission.

The dying Congress can no more reconquer its abdicated power. This
noble and patriotic majority--many of them, are not re-elected,
thanks to Lincoln-Seward--provide the incarnate formula with all
imaginable legal, constitutional powers, more than twice sufficient
to save the country. Could only the brains and hands entrusted with
laws, be able to execute them! Oh for a legal, constitutional,
statute Cromwell, ready to behead treason, rebellion, slavocracy and
slavo-sympathy, as the great Oliver beheaded and crushed the
poisonous weeds of his time. If the democratic-copperhead vermin
had the possibility, they would make a McClellan-Seymour
dictatorship, and extinguish for a century at least, light, right,
justice, and freedom. Not yet! Oh, Copperheads! not yet.

_January 29._--They dance to madness in New York, they dance here
and give dancing parties! O what a heartlessness, recklessness,
flippancy, and crime, of those mothers, wives and young crinolines,
when one half of the population is already in mourning, when they
have fathers, brothers, husbands in the army. I hope that Boston and
New England as well as the towns and villages of the country all
over, spit on this example given by New York and Washington. My
friend N----, progressive, enlightened and therefore a true Russian,
is amazed and displeased with such an intolerable flippancy. During
the Crimean war, no one danced in Russia from the Imperial palace
down to the remotest village; the people's indignation would have
prevented any body--even the Czar, from such a sacrilegious display
of recklessness when the country's integrity and honor were at
stake, when the nation's blood was pouring in torrents.

Unspeakably worse, is the cold indifference with which many
generals, many men in power, the rhetors and the politicians, speak
of what is more than a sacrifice in a sacred cause, is an unholy and
demoniac waste of human life. But some one--some avenging angel,
will call them all to a terrible account.

_January 30._--I would have ex-Governor Boutwell, of Massachusetts,
Secretary of State. The conduct of European affairs requires pure
patriotism--that is, conscientiousness of being an American by
principle, in the noblest philosophical sense, sound common sense,
discretion, simplicity, sobriety of mind, firmness, clear-sightedness.
Boutwell would be a Secretary of State similar to Marcy.

_January 30._--Wrote a letter to Stanton with the following
suggestions for the organization of a large and efficacious force,
nay, army, from the Africo-Americans.

Some of the points submitted to this genuine patriot have been
already variously mentioned above; here are some others.

1. It may be possible--even probable--on account of inveterate
prejudices and stupidity, that an Africo-American regiment may be
left unsupported during a battle.

2. It would be therefore more available to organize such a force at
once on a large scale, so as to be able to have strong brigades, and
even divisions. At the head of six to eight thousand men, resistance
is possible for several hours if the enemy outnumbers not in too
great proportions--four or five to one, and if the terrain is not
altogether against the smaller force.

3. The Africo-Americans ought to be formed, drilled and armed
principally with the view to constitute light infantry--and, if
possible, light cavalry--but above all, for a _set fight_.

4. Their dress must be adapted to such a light service--as ought to
be the dress of our whole infantry, facilitating to the utmost the
quick and easy movements of the body and of the feet; both
impossible or at least difficult in the present equipment of the
American infantry. On account of the modern improvements in fire
arms, the fights begin at longer distances, and it is important that
the soldier be trained to march as quickly as possible, so as to
force the enemy from their positions at the point of the bayonet. In
this country of clay, bad roads, forests and underbrush, even more
than care must be bestowed upon the feet and legs of the infantry. I
suggested an imitation of the equipment of the French infantry.

5. In the case of the arsenals not having the requisite number of
fire-arms, I would have the third line armed with scythes. As a
Pole, I am familiar with that really terrible weapon.

6. To adapt the drill to the object in view--to free it as far as
possible from needless technicalities, and to reduce it to the most
urgently needed and the most readily comprehended particulars.

7. In view of the above-mentioned reasons, I would have the Tactics
now in use very carefully revised, or have an entirely new book of
Tactics and Regulations.

8. Suggested that General Casey should be entrusted with the matters
treated of in suggestions 6 and 7.

_January 31._--The Copperheads in Congress are shedding crocodile
tears over the doom that awaits those Africo-Americans who may
unfortunately be taken prisoners by the rebels. Now, in the first
place enlisted Africo-Americans are under the protection of the
United States Government, and that Government will not be guilty of
the infamy of seeing its captured soldiers murdered in cold
blood--and in the next place the Africo-American will prove anything
rather than an easily-made captive to Southern murderers. The
Africo-Americans will sell their lives so dearly as to disgust the
rebels with the task of attempting to capture them.

_January 31._--Few people can understand the intensity of the
disgust with which I find myself often obliged to mention Thurlow
Weed--that darkest incarnation of all that is evil in black mail,
lobbyism, and all hideous corruptions. It is not my fault that such
a man is allowed to exert a malign influence on the country's fate,
and I am obliged to give the dark as well as the bright parts of the
great social picture. How deeply I regret my inability to collect
and record, in part at least, if not as a whole, all the deeds of
heroism and devotion, of generous and brave self-abnegation, which
have been done by thousands, even by millions of those who are both
falsely and foolishly called the lower classes.




FEBRUARY, 1863.

     The Problems before the People -- the Circassian -- Department of
     State and International Laws -- Foresight -- Patriot Stanton and
     the Rats -- Honest Conventions -- Sanitary Commission -- Harper's
     Ferry -- John Brown -- the Yellow Book -- the Republican Party --
     Epitaph -- Prize Courts -- Suum cuique -- Academy of Sciences --
     Democratic Rank and File, etc. etc. etc.


_February 1._--The task which this great American people has on its
hands is one utterly unexampled in the history of the world. While
in the midst of a great civil war, and struggling as it were in very
death-throes, to emancipate and organize four millions of men, most
of whom, up to this very day, have by deliberate legislation been
kept in ignorance and savagery. Thoroughly to comprehend the
immensity of such a task, we must also reflect that the men to whom
that task is intrusted are anything rather than intellectual
giants. Yet the true solution of the problem will be given by the
principle of self-government and by the self-governing People. And
it is therein that consists the genuine American originality which
Europe finds it so impossible to understand. And it is just as
little understood by most of the diplomatists here, and what
is still worse, it is not even studied by them. It is wretched
work to be obliged to witness the low, the actually ignoble parts
which many men play in the great farce of political life. I could
easily mention a full score of would-be-eminent men, who are
unsurpassed by the meanest of the vulgar herd in flippancy and an
utter want of self-respect.

The diary published in London by Bull Run Russell deserves to be read
by every American. Russell deals blows to slavery which will tell in
England. However annoying may be to many the disclosures made by this
indiscreet confidant of their vanity, Russell's revelations establish
firmly the broad historical--not gossipping--fact, that before and
after Sumter, the most absolute want of earnestness, of statesmanlike
foresight, and the most childish but fathomless vanity inspired all
the actions of the American Secretary of State. I am one of the few
who, having often met Russell here, never fawned to him, nay who not
even took any notice of him; but I am grateful to him for his
falsely-called indiscreetness--for his having done the utmost to bring
out truth--in his own way. It is the best that I have seen, or heard,
or read of him. Flatterers, Secretaries, Senators, and Generals
crowded to Russell and to his table, and he exposes them. Among
others, General McDowell was Russell's guest, very likely to show his
gratitude to the slanderer of the volunteers, whom McDowell did not
understand how to lead to victory.

Seward showed to Russell his dispatches to Lord John Russell. Mr.
Sumner, at Bull Run Russell's table, asked Russell's aid to keep
peace with England. Good! Unspeakably good!

Not only the Emancipation problem must be solved, so to speak,
amidst the storm of battle--but other and very mighty problems,
social, constitutional, jurisprudential, and financial, must be
similarly and promptly dealt with. And these great questions must be
debated to the accompaniment of the music of musketry and cannon. In
some respects the situation of America at present may be said to
resemble that of France in the days of her great Revolution. But
affairs here and now are still more complicated than they were in
France from 1789 to 1793.

Formerly I took a more active part than I now take in revolutionary
and reformatory struggles, and was seldom daunted by their difficult
problems, or by their most violent tempests. But now I have a
chilling sense of weariness and disgust as I note the strange things
that are done under my very eyes.

The burden of taxes laid upon a people who have an inborn hatred of
taxation, a debt created in a few months surpassing that which
England and France contracted in half a century; and that debt
contracted as if by magic, and in the very crisis of a civil
war such as any foreign war would be mere baby's play to.

The people at large see the precipice, and hear the roaring of the
breakers ahead, but despair not! Sublime phenomena for the future
historian to dwell upon! All this is genuine American originality.
In its sublime presence, down, down upon your knees in the dust, all
you European wiseacres!

The capture of the _Circassian_, an English blockade runner, gave
birth to some very delicate international complications. The
decision of the Prize Court shows up the absolute destitution of
statesmanship in the Department of State, generally coruscated with
ignorance of international principles, rules of judicial
international decisions, and of belligerent rights and observances.
Every day shows what a masterly stroke it was of the Secretary of
State to have proclaimed the blockade in April, 1861, and to have
been the first to recognize the rebels in the character of
independent belligerents. The more blockade runners will be captured
by our cruisers, the more the complications will grow. A false first
step generates false conditions _ad infinitum_. The question of the
_Circassian_ is only the beginning, and not even the worst. The
worst will come by and by. But Seward is great before Allah! The
truth is, that Mr. Seward and the Department are as innocent of
any familiarity with international laws, as can be. The people,
the intelligent people would be horror-stricken could they suddenly
be made acquainted with all the shameful ignorance which is
corrosively fermenting in the State Department.

To every intelligent and well regulated Government in Europe, the
Department of Foreign Affairs--which in America is called the State
Department--has attached to it a board of advisers for the solution
of all international questions.

In England, for instance, all such questions are referred to the
Crown Lawyers, i.e. the Attorney and Solicitor General, and, in
specially important cases, to the Lord High Chancellor, and one or
two of the Judges. And in order to obtain the advice he obviously
stands so much in need of, Mr. Seward ought to have consulted two or
three American juriconsults of eminence. Mr. Seward ought to have
foreseen that the war would necessarily give rise to international,
commercial, and maritime complications. Such men as Charles Eames,
Upton, etc. would have been excellent advisers on all international
and statutory questions. Presumptuous that I am--to venture upon
the mere supposition that Seward the Great can possibly need advice!
Not he, of course--not he. Mr. Seward is the Alpha and Omega--knows
everything, and can do every thing himself. Happily, the people at
large is the genuine statesman, and can correct the mistakes--and
worse--of its blundering, bungling servants.

American pilots and statesmen! Forget not that foresight is the germ
of action. Foresight reveals to the mind the opportuneness of the
needed measure by which a solution is to be given, a question
decided, and the hoped-for results obtained.

American people! How much foresight have your--dearly-paid--servants
shown? You, the people alone, you have been far-seeing and
prophetic; but not they.

_February 2._--All the efforts of the worshippers of treason, of
darkness, of barbarism, of cruelty, and of infamy--all their
manoeuvres and menaces could not prevail. The majority of the
Congress has decided that the powerful element of Africo-Americans
is to be used on behalf of justice, of freedom, and of human rights.
The bill passed both the Houses. It is to be observed that the "big"
diplomats swallowed _col gusto_ all the pro-slavery speeches, and
snubbed off the patriotic ones. The noblest eulogy of the patriots!

The patriots may throb with joy! The President intends great changes
in his policy, and has telegraphed for----Thurlow Weed, that prince
of dregs, to get from him light about the condition of the country.

The conservative "Copperheads" of Boston and of other places in New
England press as a baby to their bosom, and lift to worship
McClellan, the conservative, and all this out of deepest hatred
towards all that is noble, humane, and lofty in the genuine American
people. Well they may! If by his generalship McClellan butchered
hundreds of thousands in the field, he was always very conservative
of his precious little self.

Biting snow storm all over Virginia! Our soldiers! our soldiers in
the camp! It is heart-rending to think of them. Conservative
McClellan so conservatively campaigned until last November as to
preserve--the rebel armies, and make a terrible winter campaign an
inevitable necessity. O, Copperheads and Boston conservatives! When
you bend your knees before McClellan, you dip them in the best and
purest blood of the people!

_February 3._--The Secretary of War appointed General Casey to
shorten the general tactics for the use of Africo-American regiments
to use them as light infantry.

The devotion of American women to the sick and wounded soldiers,
makes them be envied by the angels in Heaven (provided there are
any). This devotion of these genuine gentlewomen atones for the
ignoble flippancy of dancing crinolines.

Down, down goes slavery notwithstanding the _gates of hell_, and
their guard, the McClellans, the Sewards, amorously embracing the
Copperheads and all that is dark and criminal. Humanity is avenged
and Eternal Justice is satisfied.

_February 4._--Sumner is re-elected to the Senate. His re-election
vindicates a sound principle, because his opponents were all the
Copperheads and slavery-saviours in Massachusetts. Sumner's
influence in the Senate is rather limited. Politically he is on all
points most honest; but his conduct towards Seward is not calculated
to impress one with any very high esteem for his manhood.

It is not force, or decision, or power, that is cruel in
revolutionary times--but, weakness. All societies have had their
epochs of progress and of retrogression. Sylla was a conservative,
and so too was Phocion. The Pharisees were reactionists and
conservatives. Europe has millions of them, of various hues, shapes,
tendencies and convictions. But the reactionists and conservatives
in the past of Europe all have been and are of a purer metal than
the conservatives here, and their impure organs, as the National
Intelligencer, the World, the Boston Courier, and the rest of that
fetish creed.

_February 4._--The French Yellow Book, or State Correspondence,
justifies my forebodings of November last. Mr. Mercier's diplomatic
sentimentalism, and his associations, germinated the _Decembriseur's_
scheme for mediation and humiliation.

Further is to be found in the Yellow Book the evidence how, from the
start of this dark rebellion, Mr. Seward, the master spirit of the
Administration, dealt death blows to all energetic, unyielding
prosecution of the war for crushing the rebellion, and that he was
double-dealing in all his public actions. The published state papers
of the French government disclose the fact that nine months ago Mr.
Seward sent the French minister to Richmond with a mission to invite
the Jeff. Davises, Hunters, Wigfalls, Benjamins and others to come
back to their seats in the Senate, and in the name of the cruelly
outraged North, Mr. Seward proffered to the traitors a hearty
welcome. So says the French diplomat in his official dispatch to the
French Secretary of Foreign Affairs. Such underhanded dealings
should not be allowed, and most assuredly would be stringently
punished, if perpetrated under similar circumstances by the minister
of any European government dealing with treason in arms. But here,
Mr. Seward's impudence--if not worse--displays its flying colors.
The Republican press will swallow all this, and Senator Sumner as
Chairman of the Committee will--keep quiet.

That confidential mission entrusted to the French diplomat by Mr.
Seward, was more than sufficient to evoke the subsequent attempt at
mediation, because it revealed to the piercing eye of European
statesmanship, how the Administration, and above all how its master
spirit had little confidence in the cause; it revealed the want of
earnestness in official quarters. I hate and denounce all attempts,
even by the most friendly foreign power, to meddle with the internal
affairs of our country. But I have some little knowledge of European
statecraft, of European diplomacy, of European rulers, and of
European diplomats; and I assert, emphatically, that they are
emboldened to offer their meddlesome services because they have very
little if any respect for our official leaders; and because the want
of energy and of good faith to the principles of the North as
displayed by Seward, he nevertheless remaining at the helm, has
firmly settled the conviction in European minds, that the rebels
cannot be crushed by such traffickers and used up politicians as
have in their hands the destinies of the Union.

_February 5._--The new Copperhead Senators--in their appearance
resembling bushwhackers; the pillars of Copperheadism in the House,
take umbrage at the sight and the name of New England, and abuse the
New England spirit with all their coppery might. Well they may. So
did Satan hate and abuse light.

Patriot Stanton is earnestly at work concerning the organization of
Africo-Americans on a mighty scale; busy against him, likewise, are
the intriguers, the traitors, the cavillers, the Sewardites and the
McClellanites, all being of the same kidney. Seward sighs for
McClellan. But Stanton will override the muddy storm. He has at his
side men as pure, energetic and devoted as Watson, a patriot without
a flaw.

Stanton surrounds himself and selects young men--as far as he can,
he crowds out the remains of Scott, so tenderly protected by
Lincoln. Could he only have swept out the rest of the old fogies!
Undoubtedly these young men in the War Department would give new
life to it.

_February 6._--The people at large are at a loss to find the cause
of the recent disasters. The general axiom is, "we are not a
military nation." Neither is the South. But here they forget that
every great or small effect has its--not only--cause, but several
causes. Many such causes have been repeatedly pointed out. Old
routine in military organization stands foremost. Few, if any,
understand wherein consists the proper organization of an army, and
most have notions reaching back sixty years. The medical and
surgical bureaus are obsolete. Governor Andrew of Massachusetts, who
is always on the right side, and with him many young men, insisted
upon organizing the above services as they are organized in the
Continental armies of Europe. But even in the Senate prevailed the
respect for dusty, rusty, domestic tradition. The few changes forced
by the outcry of the people cure not the evil. Skeletons and not
men are at work, and if they are not skeletons they are leeches of
the government and of the people's blood.

Thus likewise, when the organizations of the staffs was discussed,
no one had the first notion of the nature and duties of a staff; and
the military authorities were as ignorant as the civilians. Of
course a McClellan, then a Halleck, Meigs, Hitchcock, etc., could
not disperse the fog. Many Congressmen were thunderstruck by the
display of words which, as they were purely technical terms, the
Congressmen in question could not understand. Others sought for
guidance in the Staff of Wellington, and thus oddly but unmistakably
proved themselves completely in the dark as to the difference
between the personal staff of the commander of an army, and the
Staff of that Army itself. And all this in a country of the most
rapid movement and progress, and amongst a people which
unhesitatingly adopts and adapts to its own needs and welfare almost
every novelty from almost every part of the world. The great fault
committed by the People is its too great respect for false
authorities and false prophets.

The so-called honest Conservatives have exercised and still continue
to exercise a most fatal influence on public affairs, and especially
on what is called the domestic policy. These same "honest
Conservatives" are more dangerous than the out-spoken Copperheads;
more dangerous, perhaps, than all the friends of slavery and foes
of the Union combined. These "honest Conservatives" have contrived
to surround themselves with a halo of honesty and respectability.
But they as cordially hate and dread every vivid light and vigorous
progress as the traitors themselves do. Those Conservatives opposed
every vigorous measure. They spoke tenderly of the "misguided
brethren" in the South, and took their own servile and blundering,
though quite possibly sincere fancies, for actual and tangible
facts. The honest Conservatives will support whatever is slow,
double-dealing, and, therefore, conservative. The honest
Conservatives took McClellan to their honest hearts, and not one of
them has any clear notion of military affairs, and still less can
any of them fathom the awful depth of McClellan's military
criminality. I repeat what I said in the first volume of my Diary:
McClellan and his tail fell, not on account of their Democratism, or
their pro-slavery creed, but because McClellan repeatedly displayed
all the worst qualities of a thoroughly unsoldierly commander. No
one would have uttered a word of censure if McClellan with his
hundred and eighty thousand men had surrounded the thirty to forty
thousand rebels in Centreville and Manassas in the winter of 1861-2,
and taken some nobler trophies than camp manure and maple guns! The
honest Conservatives attack and hate Stanton, yet not one of them
has any notion whatever of Stanton's action towards McClellan.
Stanton would have been the first to raise McClellan sky-high if
McClellan had preferred to fight instead of reposing in his bed in
Washington, and then in various muds. Such is your knowledge of this
and of all other public affairs, O respectable soul and spiritless
body of honest Conservatives! Historians of this country! collect
the names of the _honest_ Conservatives, but expose them not to the
abomination of coming generations.

_February 7._--The Sanitary Commission, with all its branches and
subdivisions, is among the noblest manifestations of what can be
done by a free people, and how private enterprise of intelligent,
patriotic and unselfish men can confer benefit. Nor must the praise
of that great work be limited to men. Warm-hearted gentlewomen also
have done their share in it. The Sanitary Commission is one of the
best out-croppings of self-government, and does honor to the people,
and softens and ameliorates the warlike roughness of the times.

The Sanitary Commission marks a new era in the history of genuine
and not bogus and merely verbal philanthropy, and its spontaneity
and expansion were only possible in free, and therefore humane and
enlightened America.

_February 8._--Mr. Seward is busily at work endeavoring to crush the
radicals, and to make the Emancipation Proclamation a mere sheet of
waste paper. All that is mean and nasty, all that is reeking and
foul with all kinds of corruptions, takes Seward for its
standard-bearer. The so-called radical press aids Seward with all
its might.

_February 9._--Gen. Casey adopts some of my ideas and suggestions,
which I discussed with him. Gen. Casey is honestly at work, and the
new tactics will be in print.

Stanton would wish to establish a thorough military camp on a large
scale, for organizing Africo-Americans. But the higher powers are
against it. Virginia, the most populous slave state, the nursery of
slaves, must, scorpion-like, be surrounded with glowing contraband
camps. What a splendid position for such a camp is Harper's Ferry
under the shadow of immortal John Brown!

A few days ago, Mr. Lincoln was full of joy because the defences of
Washington are in excellent condition. Thus the country will learn
with joy that the----spade is still at work, that the military curse
hurled by Scott and McClellan is still influencing the operation of
the war, that Halleck is the worthy continuator of his predecessors,
that Mr. Lincoln's fears and uneasiness about the fate of the city
of Washington are slowly, slowly assuaged, that the President's
fancy is nursed, that the construction of the extensive
fortifications around the capital is still continued, that new forts
are continually erected, that the fear of an attack on Washington is
still paramount, and that to-day--sixty to seventy thousand troops
are kept idle in these old and new forts--when Rosecrans has no
succor, when Texas is lost, and when the whole rebel region
trembles under the tread of savage hordes.

Through one of its clerks, the State Department intends to sue me
for libel, contained, as they say, in the first volume of my
_Diary_. Well, great masters, if you swallow me, you may not digest
me. Let us try.[2]

         [Footnote 2: I must here record that Mr. Carlisle, the
         eminent lawyer in Washington, although in every respect
         opposed to my political and social views, behaved, in this
         affair, as a thorough man of honor. I am sorry that on a
         similar former occasion, not in Washington, my political
         friends showed themselves not Carlisles.]

_February 10._--... mens agitat molem ... oh, could I only believe
that such is the case with Mr. Lincoln, how devoted I could become,
and loyal to him, according to the new theory of the lickspittles
and politicians!

_February 10._--Resolute Senator Grimes did what was the duty of
Sumner to have done long ago. Grimes presented resolutions relative
to the mission of Mercier to Richmond, a mission allowed, almost
authorized by Mr. Seward. Mercier cannot be blamed, and his veracity
is supported by the fact that Lord Lyons was at once informed of the
whole transaction, and Lord Lyons is to be believed. Seward will
play the innocent, and take his refuge in the god of--lies.

_February 12._--In his answer to the Senate, Mr. Seward gives to
Mercier the lie direct. It will be rich if Mercier stands square.

_February 12._--Congress draws to its close. Lincoln accumulates
powers, responsibilities, and hereafter perhaps curses, sufficient
to break the turtle on which stands the elephant that sustains the
Sanscrit world.

_February 13._--The almost imperceptible ripple on the diplomatic pool
of Washington has disappeared. Simple people might have believed that
there was an issue of veracity between Mr. Seward and the French
Minister. But since a long, a very long time, Seward and veracity have
run in different orbits, and diplomats, Talleyrand-like, ought to be
the incarnation of equanimity even if any one--diplomatically--treads
on their toes. Besides, the answer given to the Senate before it
reached its destination _might have been arranged_ at any such
confidential chat as was that one where the little innocent,
nobody-hurting (no, not even the people's honour) trip to Richmond was
concocted. The French Minister's name _appears not_ in the document
sent to the Senate; so the lie direct is after all only a constructive
lie; nobody is hurt. A general shaking of hands and all is well. But
strange things may come out yet, and others may not be so blazened
out.

The soap bubble of mediation exploded under the nose of the French
schemers. The soap used by them was of the finest and most aromatic
quality, but the democratic nerves of the American people resisted
the Franco-diplomatic cunningly mixed aroma. The applause gained by
Mr. Seward's very indifferent document, wherein the great initiator
of the Latin race on this free continent was rebuked, the
satisfaction shown by the public, ought to open the eyes of the
sentimental French trio. They ought to understand, by this time,
that Seward's argumentative dispatch, incomplete and below mark as
it is, won applause, although it expresses only the hundredth of the
patriotic ire bursting from the people's bosom. Otherwise the people
would have at once found out all skillfully, cunningly,
chameleon-like Seward dodges, which ignore before Europe the sublime
character of the struggle forced by treason upon the loyal free
States; and in which how he avoids to hurt the slavocracy.

The Imperial mediator and bottle-holder to slavocracy belies not his
bloody origin and his bloody appetites. The events in Egypt, the
negro kidnapping in Alexandria, have torn the mask from his astute
policy. If, for his filibustering raid into Mexico, Louis Napoleon
wanted colored soldiers accustomed to the climate, he could raise
them among the free colored population of the French possessions in
Martinique, Guadaloupe, etc. But to use the freemen from the
Antilles would have set a bad example to the Africo-Americans in the
revolted States; Louis Napoleon wished not to hurt or offend his
slaveocratic pets and traitors; by kidnapping slaves in Egypt the
French ruler showed how highly he values the stealing qualities of
the Southern chivalry--and he paid a tribute to the principle of
slavery.

But while treating with all possible horror and disrespect the
French officiousness, the American people ought not to forget the
innermost interconnection of events. If the French diplomacy, if the
French Cabinet became sentimental at the sight of our deadly
struggle with the demon of treason, it was because they witnessed
our helplessness, and witnessed the uninterrupted chain of faults
and of bad policy; it was because they and the whole world saw the
want of earnestness in our official leaders; and from all this these
_Messieurs_ concluded that the patriots of the North never will be
able to crush the traitors in the South. So speak the French
diplomatic documents, so speaks Mercier, Drouyn de l'Huys and Louis
Napoleon; and has not the Seward-Weed influence, paramount in the
policy of the Government, brought about all these bad results,
palsied the war, and thus almost justified the officiousness of the
_Messieurs_?

_February 13._--Many forebode the downfall, the dissolution, and the
disappearance of the Republican party. That may be, and if so then
one of the cardinal laws of human progress, development and
ascension, will be fullfilled. _The initiator either perishes by the
initiated, or the initiator perishes, disappears because his
special mission, his task is done._

The progress of humanity is marked by the sacrifice and death of its
initiators. Such was the end of the founders of religions, of
societies; such of political bodies. Osiris, Lycurgus, Romulus,
Christ, the martyrs, the apostles, are a few from numberless
illustrations that might be cited. The Long Parliament, the French
Convention, disappeared after having fullfilled the work of
destruction pointed out to them by the genius of progress and of our
race. As an organized political party the Republican may disappear
with the war, for slavery is finally destroyed. This is the noble
initiation and solution fulfilled by the Republican party. To
destroy slavery and the political defenders and props of slavery,
was the mission that was fatally thrown or entrusted by inexorable
destiny to the Republican party. With the destruction of slavery,
disappears from the political life of America the _Northern man with
Southern principles_; those very dregs of dregs of all times and of
all political bodies and societies. Slavery is destroyed both
virtually and _de facto_, new issues are looming, new solutions will
be given, and new men will bear the new word.

All in creation, and in every party, has its light and its shadow,
its pure principle, its pure men and its dregs. Every party has its
faults and its shortcomings. The dregs fall, and the work of the
party is done. Some of the chiefs and leaders of the Republican
party became faithless, (Seward,) went over to darkness, but thereby
the onward march to the sacred aim was not arrested. The
irresistible current of events and of human affairs carried onwards
the Republican party. Perhaps unconsciously, but nevertheless
emphatically, the Republican party in its _ensemble_ was a
providential agency; it became the incarnation of the loftiest
aspirations of the best among the American people. Against its wish
and will, contrary to expectations, the Republican party was
challenged to action; the sword of law, of justice and of right, was
forcibly thrust into the party's hand, and slavocracy, the
challenger, is already bleeding its life-blood, and its death-knell
resounds from pole to pole. To speak the language of politicians;
abolition, emancipation by the sword, was forced upon the Republican
party.

And the Republican party carried out the principle of the preamble
of the bill of rights; a principle eternal as right, but
nevertheless hitherto only partially realized. The Republican party
has borne the brunt, and accomplished the appointed evolutions of
progress; and the Republican party has deserved well of the American
people, of history and of humanity. And the children and
grandchildren of those who to-day cavil, defile and stone the party,
they hereafter will bless the Republican party, who, with noble
consciousness can say to the spirit of light and of duty: _Nunc
dimitte in pacem servum tuum Domine._

One of the best evidences of purity and of the elevation of the
Republican party in its noblest representative men is that the
obtusest among the great diplomats shunned the Republicans as little
monsters shun the daylight. I mention this as a collateral
illustration without intending to raise a diplomat or the poor
diplomacy of the world to an undeserved significance, for I bear in
mind the behest, _ne misceantur sacra prophanis_.

The nobleness of the accomplished mission, the glorious Sunset
wherein will disappear the Republican party, frees, not from
reproaches nor from maledictions, those Republicans who, by their
selfishness and faithlessness, obstructed its progress, and polluted
the party. Their names remain nailed to the pillory.

I may here observe that I never belonged and never claimed to belong
to the Republican party. For nearly half a century my creed has
been--Onward! onward! struggle, fight, sacrifice for light, for
progress, for human rights; for that cause fight and struggle under
every banner, under every name, and in rank and file with every
body.

_February 13._--Seward seizes by the hair the occasion proffered to
him by the _Decembriseur's_ offer of mediation, and tries to
reconquer the confidence of the public. This shows to Drouyn de
l'Huys and to his master, that they are misinformed concerning the
condition of America, (also M. Mercier misinformed them; how could
he do otherwise?) The despatch to Dayton, February 7, will lead
astray public opinion. The majority will forget and lose sight of
the intercatenation of events and actions perpetrated by Mr.
Seward. O Chase! O Sumner! Seward rises with his patient pen and
paper in the inky glory of a patriot, and you----cave in.

Speaking of Mr. Seward's answer to France, a diplomat observed to
me: "The European Cabinets are so accustomed to Mr. Seward's
duplicity and want of veracity, that now that Seward refuses to
accept mediation, in Europe they will conclude that Seward's
acceptation of mediation is at hand."

_February 14._--The struggle is for the rights of man, for the
Christian idea, purified of all dogma and worship. Those who see it
not, are similar to a fish from the Kentucky Cave.

_February 14._--Could Mr. Lincoln only be inspired, be warmed by the
sacred fire of enthusiasm, then his natural and selected affinities
would be other minds than those of a Seward, a Weed, a Halleck,
etc.; then what is night could become light; and where he painfully
gropes along his path, Mr. Lincoln would march with a firm, almost
with a godlike step, at the head of such a peerless people as those
of whom he is the Chief Magistrate.

But as it is now, I may turn the mind in any direction whatever, all
the causes of mishaps and disasters converge on Mr. Lincoln.
According to his partisans, Mr. Lincoln's intentions are the best,
and he is always trying to conciliate--and to shift. It is useless
to discuss Mr. Lincoln's peculiar ways. In most cases, Mr. Lincoln
uses old, rotten tools for a new and heavy work. I have it from the
most truthful and positive authority, that Mr. Lincoln is fully
acquainted with the opinions of the so called _dissatisfied_, of
those with Southern propensities, proclivities and affinities, of
whom many are in the superior civil and military service. Contrary
to the advice of patriots in the Cabinet and out of it, Mr. Lincoln
insists upon keeping such at their post--doubtless always expecting
that they will _turn round_. Such a heavy difficulty and task as is
the present, must be worked out, with absolute devotion and
sincerity; and can this logically be expected from men whose hearts
and minds are not in their actions? Mr. Lincoln forgets that
thousands of lives and millions of money are sacrificed to the
experiment as to whether the insincere officials will _turn round_.

The cause will not fail, light will not be extinguish, even if the
leaders break down or betray, even if the Copperheads frighten some
of the pilots, or if some of the faithless pilots shake hands with
the Copperheads, as was the case in the elections of November last
in New York and elsewhere. The people will save light, dissipate
darkness, save the cause, save the leaders, the pilots and the
politicians.

_February 15._--Some days ago in compliance with summons, that
pedler of all corruptions, Thurlow Weed, came to Washington, and
with Mr. Seward, his _fidus Achates_, was for days or nights
closeted with Mr. Lincoln, pouring into the president's soul as much
poison and darkness as was possible. That such was the case can,
besides, easily be concluded from what that incarnation of all
perversions predicated to all who came within his nauseous
preachings here. According to Mr. T. Weed's revelations, "_The
proclamation is an absurdity, and the Union will soon--as it
ought--be ruled by the rebels._" So it was told me. Perhaps it is
already done through Thurlow Weed's mediation and instrumentality.

Continually inspired by Weed, Mr. Seward is therefore untiring in
his over-patriotic efforts to preserve the former Union and
Slavery--to save the matricide slave-holders.

In what clutches is Mr. Lincoln! Even I pity him. Even I am forced
to give him credit for being what he is--considering his intimacies
and his surroundings. Few men entrusted with power over nations have
resisted such fatal influences,--not even Cromwell and Napoleon.
History has not yet settled how it was with Cæsar, and so far as I
know, Frederick the Great of Prussia is of the very few who have
been unimpressionable. Pericles coruscates over ruins and the night
of the ancient world; Pericles's intimacy was with the best and the
manliest Athenians.

But has Mr. Lincoln an unlimited confidence in the few men with
large brains and with big hearts, brains and hearts burning with the
sacred and purest patriotic fire? Or are not rather all his
favorites--not even whitened--sepulchres of manhood, of mind and of
sacred intellect?

_February 16._--It is asserted, and some day or other it will be
verified, that the Committee on the Conduct of the War have
investigated how far certain generals from the army on the
Rappahannock used their influence with the President to paralyze a
movement against the enemy ordered by Burnside. That facts
discovered may be published or not, for the Administration shuns
publicity. _The Committee discovered that Mr. Seward was implicated
in that conspiracy of generals against Burnside._ Any qualification
of such conduct is impossible, and the vocabulary of crimes has no
name for it; let it, therefore, be _Sewardism_. The editors of the
New York _Tribune_ did their utmost to prevent _Sewardism_ being
exposed.

_February 16._--Often, so to speak, the hand refuses to record what the
head hears and sees, what the reason must judge. To witness how one of
the greatest events in the development of mankind, how the deadly
struggle between right and crime, between good and evil, how the blood
and sweat of _such a people_ are dealt with by--counterfeits!

_February 17._--Poor Banks! He is ruined by having been last year
pressed to Seward's bosom, and having been thus initiated into the
Seward-Weed Union and slavery-restoring policy. Banks and Louis
Napoleon in Mexico and in his mediation scheme; both Banks and
Napoleon were ruined by yielding to bad advice--Banks to that of
Seward, and Louis Napoleon to that of his diplomats. I hope that
Banks will shake off the nightmare that is throttling him now; that
he will no more write senseless proclamations, will give up the
attempt to save slave-holders, and will march straight to the great
task of crushing the rebellion and rebels. He will blot slavery,
that Cain's mark on the brow of the Union; blot it and throw it into
the marshes of the parishes of Louisiana. I rely upon Banks's sound
common sense. He will come out from among the evil ones.

_February 18._--Under no other transcendent leadership than that of
its patriotism and convictions, the majority of this expiring Congress
boldly and squarely faced the emergencies and all the necessities
daily, hourly evoked by the Rebellion, and unhesitatingly met them. If
the majority was at times confused, the confusion was generated by
many acts of the administration, and not by any shrinking before the
mighty and crushing task, or by the attempt to evade the
responsibility. The impartial historian will find in the Statutes an
undisputable confirmation of my assertions. The majority met all the
prejudices against taxation, indebtedness, paper currency, draft, and
other similar cases.

And all the time the majority of Congress was stormed by traitors,
by intriguers, by falsifiers and prisoners of public opinion; the
minority in Congress taking the lead therein. Many who ought to
have supported the majority either fainted or played false. The
so-called good press, neither resolute nor clear-sighted, nor
far-seeing, more than once confused, and as a whole seldom
thoroughly supported the majority.

If the good press had the indomitable courage in behalf of good and
truth, that the _Herald_ has in behalf of untruth and of mischief,
how differently would the affairs look and stand!

_February 19._--Jackson first formed, attracted and led on the
people's opinion. Has not Mr. Lincoln thrown confusion around?

_February 19._--The Supreme Court of the United States has before it
the prize cases resulting from captures made by our navy. The
counsel for the English and rebel blockade-runners and pilferers
find the best point of legal defence in the unstatesmanlike and
unlegal wording of the proclamation of the blockade, as concocted
and issued by Mr. Seward, and in the repeated declarations contained
in the voluminous diplomatic correspondence of our Secretary of
State,--declarations asserting that _no war whatever is going on in
the Federal Republic_. No war, therefore no lawful prizes on the
ocean. So ignorance, and humbug mark every step of this foremost
among the pilots of a noble, high-minded, but too confiding people.

The facts, the rules, and the principles in these prize cases are
almost unprecedented and new; new in the international laws, and
new in the history of governments of nations. Seldom, if ever, were
so complicated the powers of government, its rights, and the duties
of neutrals, the rights and the duties of the captors, and the
condition of the captured. This rebellion is, so to speak, _sui
generis_, almost unprecedented on land and sea. The difficulties and
complications thus arising, became more complicated by the either
reckless or unscientific (or both) turn given by the State
Department in conceding to the rebels the condition of belligerents.
Thus the great statutory power of the sovereign, (that is, of the
Union through its president) for the suppression of the rebellion
was palsied at the start. The insurrection of the Netherlands alone
has some very small similarity with our civil war; however, that
insurrection took place at a time when very few, if any, principles
of international laws were generally laid down and generally
recognized. Here the municipal laws, the right of the sovereign and
his duty to save itself and the people, the rights and the laws of
war, wrongly applied to such virtual outlaws as the rebels, the
maritime code of prize laws and rules, play into and intertwine each
other. When Mr. Seward penned his doleful proclamation of the
blockade, etc., he never had before his mind what a mess he
generated; what complications might arise therefrom. I am sure he
never knew that such proclamation was _a priori_ pregnant with
complications, and that at least its wording ought to have been very
careful. Mr. Seward was not at all cognizant of the fact that the
wording of a proclamation of a blockade, for the time being, lays
down a rule for the judges in the prize courts. For him it was
rather a declamation than a proclamation; he who believed the
rebellion would end in July, 1861, and that no occasion would arise
to apply the rules of the blockade.

Thus Mr. Seward, with his thorough knowledge of international law
rendered difficult the position of the captors; he equally increased
the difficulty for the judge to administer justice. By this
proclamation and the commentaries put on it, Mr. Seward curtailed
the rights of the government of which he is a part, conceded undue
conditions to the rebels, and facilitated to the neutrals the means
of violating his blockade. So much is clear and palpable to-day, and
I am sure more complications and imbecilities are in store. If Mr.
Seward had had good advisors for these nice and difficult questions,
he would not have blundered in this way. Thus Charles Eames, who in
the pleadings before the Superior United States Court has shown a
consummate mastery in prize questions--Eames could teach Mr. Seward
a great deal about the constitutional powers of the president to
suppress the rebellion, and about the meaning and the bearing of
international maritime laws, rights, duties and rules.

_February 20._--A Mr. Funk, a member of the Illinois Senate, a
farmer, and a man of sixty-five years, on February 13, made a speech
in that body which sounds better than all the rhetories and
oratories. It was the sound and genuine utterance of a man from the
people, and I hope some future historian will record the speech and
the name of the old, indomitable patriot.

_February 20._--Stimulated by a pure Athenian breeze, the Congress
passed a law organizing an Academy of Sciences. What a gigantic
folly; the only one committed by this Congress. The pressure was
very great, and exercised by the bottomless vanity of certain
scientific, self-styled magnates, and by the Athenians. Up to this
day, the American scientific development and progress consisted in
its freedom and independence. No legal corporation impeded and
trammeled the limitless scope of the intellectual and scientific
development. That was the soul and secret of our rapid and luminous
onward march. Now fifty patented, incorporated respectabilities will
put the curb on, will hamper the expansion. Academies turn to
fossils. My hope is that the true American spirit will soar above
the vanity and pettiness of corporated wisdom, and that this
scientific Academy bubble will end in inanity and in ridicule. I am
sorry that Congress was taken in, and committed such a blunder. It
was caught napping.

Mr. Chase's bank bill, prospective of money, and as many say,
prospective of presidency, passed the house. What fools are they
already begin to direct their steps and their ardent wishes toward
the White House.

_February 22._--The, at any price, supporters of the Administration,
point with satisfaction to the various successes, and to the space
of land already redeemed from rebellion. I protest against such
explanation given to events, and call to it the attention of every
future historian. Never had the _suum cuique_ required a more
stringent, philosophical application. With the various inexhaustible
means at its disposal, with the unextinguishable enthusiasm of the
people, far different and more conclusive results, _could_ and ought
to have been obtained. The ship makes headway if even, by the
negligence of the officers and of the crew, she drags a cable or an
anchor. The ship is the people dragging its administrators.

A western Democrat, but patriot, said to me that Lincoln compares to
Jeff Davis, as a wheel-barrow does to a steam engine!

The Democrats claim to be the genuine fighting element, and to be
possessed of the civic courage, and of governmental capacity. How,
then, can the Democrats rave for McClellan, the most unfighting
soldier ever known?

The future historian must be warned not to look to the newspapers
for information concerning facts and concerning the spirit of the
people. The _Tribune's_ senile clamor for peace, for arbitration,
for meditation, its Jewitt, Mercier, Napoleon, and Switzerland
combinations, fell dead and in ridicule before the sound judgment of
ninety-nine hundredths of the people.

_February 24._--In Europe I had experience of political prisons and
of their horror. But I would prefer to rot, to be eaten up by rats,
rather than be defended by such arch-copperheads as are the Coxes,
the Biddles, the Powells, etc., etc.

In the discussion concerning the issue of the letters of marque,
Sumner was dwelling in sentimentalities and generalities, altogether
losing sight of the means of defense of the country, and the genuine
national resources. With all respect for high and sentimental
principles and patriotism, with due reverence of the opinion, the
applause or the condemnatory verdict to be issued by philanthropists,
by doctors, and other Tommities, my heart and my brains prefer the
resolute, patriotic, manly Grimes, Wades, etc., the various _skippers_
and masters, all of whom look not over the ocean for applause, but
above all have in view to save or to defend the country, whatever be
the rules or expectations of the self-constituted Doctors of
International laws.

_February 25._--The Union-Slavery saviours, led on by the _Herald_,
by Seward, by Weed, etc., all are busily at work.

_Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from
us._

I hear that great disorder prevails in the Quartermaster's Department.
It is no wonder. In all armies, countries, government and wars, the
Quartermaster's Department is always disorderly. Why shall it not be
so here, when want of energy is the word? At times Napoleon hung or
shot such infamous thieves, as by their thefts skinned and destroyed
the soldiers and the army; at times in Russia, such curses are sent to
Siberia. But as yet, I have not heard that any body was hurt here,
with the exception of the treasury of the country, and of the
soldiers. The chain-gang of those quartermaster's thieves,
contractors, jobbers and lobbyists must be strong, very long, and
composed of all kind of influential and not-influential vampyres.
Somebody told me, perhaps in joke, that all of them constitute a kind
of free-masonry, and have signs of recognition. After all, that may be
true. Impudence, brazen brow, and blank conscience may be among such
signs of recognition.

_February 26._--O, could I only win confidence in Mr. Lincoln, it
would be one of the most cheerful days and events in my life.
Perhaps, elephant-like, Mr. Lincoln slowly, cautiously but surely
feels his way across a bridge leading over a precipice. Perhaps so;
only his slowness is marked with blood and disasters. But the most
discouraging and distressing is his _cortège_, his official and
unofficial friends. Mars Stanton, Neptune Welles, are good and
reliable, but have no decided preponderance. Astrea-Themis-Bates is
mostly right when disinfected from border-State's policy, and from
fear of direct, unconditional emancipation. But neither in Olympus
nor in Tartarus, neither in heaven nor in hell, can I find names of
prototypes for the official and unofficial body-guard which,
commanded by Seward, surrounds and watches Mr. Lincoln, so that no
ray of light, no breath of spirit and energy may reach him.

_February 26._--This civil war with its _cortège_ of losses and
disasters, which after all fall most bloodily and crushingly on the
laborious, and rather comparatively, poorer part of the whole
people; perhaps all this will form the education of the rank and
file of the political Democratic party. The like Democratic masses
are intellectually by far inferior to the Republican masses.
Experience will perhaps teach those unwashed Democrats how degrading
was their submission to slavocracy, which reduced them to the
condition of political helots. This rank and file may find out how
they were blindfolded by slave breeders and their northern abettors.
A part of the Democratic masses were, and still are kept in as
brutal political ignorance and depravity as are the poor whites in
the South, under whatever name one may record them. Now, or never,
is the time for the _unwashed_ to find out that during their
alliance with the Southern traitors, all genuine manhood, all that
ennobles, elevates the man and warms his heart, was poisoned or
violently torn from them--that brutality is not liberty, and
finally, that the Northern leaders have been or are more abject than
abjectness itself. If the rank and file finds out all this, the
blood and disasters are, in part at least, atoned for.

_February 27._--O! could I from every word, from every page of this
Diary, for eternities, make coruscate the nobleness, the simple
faith with which the people sacrifices all to the cause. To be
biblical, the sacrifice of the people is as pure as was that made
by Abel; that made by the people's captains, leaders, pilots is
Cain-like.

_February 27._--All the Copperheads fused together have done less
mischief, have less distorted and less thrown out of the track the
holy cause, they have exercised a less fatal and sacrilegious
influence, they are responsible for less blood and lives, than is
Mr. Seward, with all his arguments and spread-eagleism. Even
McClellan and McClellanism recede before Seward and Sewardism, the
latter having generated the former. In times of political
convulsions, perverse minds and intellects at the helm, more fatally
influence the fate of a nation than do lost battles. Lost battles
often harden the temper of a people; a perverse mind vitiates it.

_February 27._--Gold rises, and no panic, a phenomenon upsetting the
old theories of political economy. This rise will not affect the
public credit, will not even ruin the poor. I am sure it will be so,
and political economy, as every thing else in this country, will
receive new and more true solutions for its old, absolute problems.
The genuine credit, the prosperity of this country, is wholly
independent of this or that financial or governmental would-be
capacity; is independent of European exchanges, and of the
appreciation by the Rothschilds, the Barings, and whatever be the
names of the European appraisers. The American credit is based on
the consciousness of the people, and on the faith in its own
vitality, in its inexhaustible intellectual and material resources.
The people credits to itself, it asks not the foreigners to open
for it any credit. The foreign capitalists will come and beg. The
nation is not composed here as it is composed all over Europe, of a
large body of oppressed, who are cheated, taxed by the upper-strata
and by a Government. Thus credit and discredit in America have other
causes and foundations, their fluctuations differ from all that
decides such eventualities in Europe.

I am sure that subsequent events will justify these my assertions.

_February 28._--Inveterate West Pointers got hold of the dizzy
brains of some Senators and of other Congressmen, and Congress
wasted its precious time in regulating the military position of
engineers. This action of Congress is a _pendant_ to the Academy of
Sciences. The leaders in this discussion proved to _nausea_; 1st.
Their utter ignorance of the whole military science, of its
subdivisions, branches and classifications; 2d. Their ignorance of
the nature of intellectual hierarchy in sciences; 3d. Those
Congressional wiseacres proved how easily the West Point Engineers
humbugged them. Congress consecrates the engineer as number one.
Congress had better send a trustful man to Europe, to the continent,
and find out what is considered as number one in the science of
warfare. But every luminous body throws a shadow; the Academy of
Sciences, and this number one, are the shadows thrown by that
political body.

_February 28._--Seldom, if ever, in history was the vital principle
of a society, of a nation, of a Government, so bitterly assailed,
and its destruction attempted by combined elements and forces of the
most hellish origin and nature, as the vital principle of American
institutions is now assailed. The enemies, the sappers, the miners,
are the Union-Slavery-Saviours of all kinds and hues. But darkness
cannot destroy light, nor cold overpower heat:--so the united
conspiracy will not prevail against light and right and justice.

_February 28._--The last batch of various generals sent for
confirmation to the Senate, reflects and illustrates the manner in
which promotion is managed, and military powers and capacity
estimated at the White House.

Hooker and Heintzelman are made major generals because they
brilliantly fought at Williamsburgh, and Sumner is likewise promoted
for Williamsburgh, where, in pursuance of McClellan's orders, Sumner
looked on when Heintzelman and Hooker were almost cut to pieces. The
dignitaries of Halleck's pacific staff are promoted, and colonels
who fight, and who, by their bravery and blood correct or neutralize
the awful deadly blunders of Halleck and of his staff, such colonels
are _not_ promoted!

_February 28._--Congress outlawed all foreign intervention,
mediation! Catch it, foreign meddlers. Catch it, _Decembriseur_ and
your lackeys.

_February 28._--Congress by its boldness, saved the immaculate
Republican idea, saved the principle of self-government, and
deserves the gratitude of all those from pole to pole, who have at
heart the triumph of freedom, the triumph of light! To its last
hours, this Congress had to overcome all the mean, petty appetites
and cravings, which so often palsy, defile, or at the best,
neutralize the noblest activity; Congress had to overcome
prejudices, narrow-mindedness and bad faith. Many of the so called
political friends--_vide_, the great Republican press--are as
troublesome, as much nuisances, as are the Sewardites and the
Copperheads. Others accuse the Congress for not having done enough.
Copperheads and Sewardites accuse Congress of having done too much.
And thus, the majority of Congress marches on across impediments and
abuses thrown in its way both by friends and by enemies.

The _Tribune_ bitterly and boldly attacks Dahlgren, and trembling
caves in before Seward. Of course! Dahlgren can only send 11 and 15
inch shells to crush the enemy; brother politician Seward can be
useful for some scheme.




MARCH, 1863.

     Press -- Ethics -- President's Powers -- Seward's Manifestoes --
     Cavalry -- Let

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