army on the James
river, then they will deserve the gratitude of the people. The malaria
there must be more destructive than would be many battles.

Events triumphantly justify Stanton's opposition to the Peninsula
strategy and campaign. So ends this horrible sacrifice; between fifty
and sixty thousand killed or dead by diseases. The victims of this
holocaust have fallen for their country's cause, but the
responsibility for the slaughter is to be equally divided between
McClellan, Lincoln, Seward and Blair. Even Sylla had not on his soul
so much blood as has the above quatuor. When, after the victory over
the allied Samnites and others, at the Colline gate of Rome, Sylla
ordered the massacre of more than four thousand prisoners who laid
down their arms; when his lists of proscription filled with blood Rome
and other cities of Italy, Sylla so firmly consolidated the supremacy
of the _Urbs_ over Italy and over the world, that after twenty
centuries of the most manifold vicissitudes, transformations and
tempests, this supremacy cannot yet be upturned. But the holocaust to
strategy resulted in humiliating the North and in heaping glory on the
Southern leaders.

If the newly called 600,000 men finish the rebellion before Congress
meets, then slavery is saved. To save slavery and to avoid
emancipation was perhaps the secret aim of Mr. Lincoln, Seward, and
Blair; who knows but that of Halleck, when the administration called
for the additional 300,000 men?

Persons who approach Halleck say that he is a thorough pro-slavery
partisan. His order No. 3, the opinion of some officers of his staff,
and his associations, make me believe in the truth of that report.

Mr. Seward says _sub rosa_ to various persons, that slavery is an
obsolete question, and he assures others that emancipation is a fixed
fact, and is no more to be held back; that he is no more a
conservative. How are we to understand this man? If Mr. Seward is
sincere, then his last transformation may prove that he has given up
the idea of finding a Union party in the South, or that he wishes to
reconquer--what he has lost--the confidence of the party. But this
return on his part may prove _troppo tardi_.

The army of the Potomac is saved; the heroes, martyrs, and sufferers
are extricated from the grasp of death. This epopee in the history of
the civil war will immortalize the army, but the strategian's
immortality will differ from that of the army.

England and Fr