erything was hopeless, blank despair--dull, dead desolation. Not
even the fatal Monday following the defeat of Bull Run, when we believed
that all our New York troops had been cut to pieces or fled
ingloriously, produced the same total discouragement in the great city.
Bull Run was our first signal reverse--the first blow from the rod of
national chastisement, that was afterwards to cut so deeply. Though that
stroke pained, it also fired and awakened; and repeated blows had not
yet produced that weakness and exhaustion so difficult to arouse to any
further effort. And we had not, at the same time, passed through the
repeated disasters of the few months following, which stunned and
hardened while they pained. We were quite unprepared for the disaster,
coming as it did after several months of continued comparative victory
(the Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland period of the Lincoln Empire, if it
has had one); and the country felt it most keenly.

The heart of the nation had been bound up in McClellan. The confidence
and love reposed in him may have been man-worship, without ground or
reason, but it was no less real and positive. While in the
Command-in-Chief, everything had gone well, and the Butler and Burnside
expeditions, the two great successes of the war, had been planned and
executed. On the Army of the Potomac the people had looked as the
bulwark of the country--the central force that should in good time take
Richmond and give the last blow to the rebellion. The miserable
bickering and paltry fears which had detached McDowell's division from
the grand army, to defend Washington when never threatened, had been
comparatively unknown or little understood. Many and disastrous months
were yet to elapse, before the letters of the Orleans Princes could tear
away the curtain of mystery and show the official action in its naked
deformity of malice and misjudgment. McClellan had left Manassas with a
gallant army of immense force, whose numbers had no doubt been all the
while exaggerated to the popular ear. They had proved themselves
soldiers and heroes, and had won whenever and wherever brought to the
test. The young commander had had the Command-in-Chief taken from him,
at the moment when he first moved forward; but it was believed that the
change had been made with his consent if not at his own request, so that
he might be the more unhampered in the field. We did not know the chain
which had been cruelly locked around his stro