empty) White House could
have given to the soldiers comfortable night quarters. It can give an
idea how they treat the soldiers in the field, if here in Washington
they care so little for them. But McClellan has forty wagons for his
staff, and forty ambulances--no danger for the latter to be used. In
European armies aristocratic officers would not dare to treat soldiers
in this way--to throw them on the pavement without any necessity.

More than once in my life, after heavy fighting, I laid down the
knapsack for a cushion, snow for a mattrass and for a blanket; but by
the side of the soldiers, the generals, the staffs, and the officers
shared similar bedsteads.

I hear strange stories about Stanton, and about his having ruefully
fallen in McClellan's lap. If so, then one more _man_, one more
illusion, and one more creed in manhood gone overboard, drowned in
meanness, in moral cowardice, and subserviency.

The worshippers of strategy and of Gen. McClellan try to make the
public swallow, that the investment of Richmond by him was a
magnificent display of science, and would have been a success but for
50,000 more men under his command.

To invest any place whatever is to cut that place from the principal,
if not from all communications with the country around, and thus
prevent, or make dangerous or difficult, the arrival of provisions, of
support, etc.

Our gunboats, etc., in the York and the James rivers have virtually
invested Richmond on the eastern side; but that part of the Peninsula
did not constitute the great source of life for the rebel army. The
principal life-arteries for Richmond ran through four-fifths of a
circle, beginning from the southern banks of the James river and
running to the southern banks of the Rapidan and of the Rappahannock.
Through that region men, material, provisions poured into Richmond
from the whole South, and that whole region around Richmond was left
perfectly open; but strategy concentrated its wisdom on the
comparatively indifferent eastern side of the Chickahominy marshes,
and cut off the rebels from--nothing at all.

_September 13._--General McClellan, in search of the enemy, during the
first six days makes thirty miles! Finds the enemy near Hagerstown. No
more time for strategy.

_September 14._--General McClellan telegraphs to General Halleck
(_meliores ambo_) that he, McClellan, has "_the most reliable
information that the enemy is 190,000 strong in Maryland and in
Penn