August 21st.—The echoes of Bull Run are coming back with a vengeance. This day month the miserable fragments of a beaten, washed out, demoralised army, were flooding in disorder and dismay the streets of the capital from which they had issued forth to repel the tide of invasion. This day month and all the editors and journalists in the States, weeping, wailing, and gnashing their teeth, infused extra gall into their ink, and poured out invective, abuse, and obloquy on their defeated general and their broken hosts. The President and his ministers, stunned by the tremendous calamity, sat listening in fear and trembling for the sound of the enemy’s cannon. The veteran soldier, on whom the boasted hopes of the nation rested, heartsick and beaten down, had neither counsel to give nor action to offer. At any moment the Confederate columns might be expected in Pennsylvania Avenue to receive the welcome of their friends and the submission of their helpless and disheartened enemies.
All this is forgotten—and much more, which need not now be repeated. Saved from a great peril, even the bitterness of death, they forget the danger that has passed, deny that they uttered cries of distress and appeals for help, and swagger in all the insolence of recovered strength. Not only that, but they turn and rend those whose writing has been dug up after thirty days, and comes back as a rebuke to their pride.
Conscious that they have insulted and irritated their own army, that they have earned the bitter hostility of men in power, and have for once inflicted a wound on the vanity to which they have given such offensive dimensions, if not life itself, they now seek to run a drag scent between the public nose and their own unpopularity, and to create such an amount of indignation and to cast so much odium upon one who has had greater facilities to know, and is more willing to tell the truth, than any of their organs, that he will be unable henceforth to perform his duties in a country where unpopularity means simply a political and moral atrophy or death. In the telegraphic summary some days ago a few phrases were picked out of my letters, which were but very faint paraphrases of some of the sentences which might be culled from Northern newspapers, but the storm has been gathering ever since, and I am no doubt to experience the truth of De Tocqueville’s remark, “that a stranger who injures American vanity, no matter how justly, may make up his mind to be a martyr.”
