Thanksgiving Day on the 28th was celebrated by enormous drunkenness in the army. The weather varied between days of delicious summer—soft, bright, balmy, and beautiful beyond expression—and days of wintry storm, with torrents of rain.
Some excitement was caused at the end of the month by the report I had received information from England that the law officers of the Crown had given it as their opinion that a United States man-of-war would be justified by Lord Stowell’s decisions in taking Mason and Slidell even in the British Channel, if the Nashville transferred them to a British mail steamer. This opinion was called for in consequence of the Tuscarora appearing in Southampton Water; and, having heard of it, I repeated it in strict confidence to some one else, till at last Baron de Stoeckl came to ask me if it was true. Receiving passengers from the Nashville, however, would have been an act of direct intercourse with an enemy’s ship. In the case of the Trent the persons seized had come on board as lawful passengers at a neutral port.
The tide of success runs strongly in favour of the North at present, although they generally get the worst of it in the small affairs in the front of Washington. The entrance to Savannah has been occupied, and by degrees the fleets are biting into the Confederate lines along the coast, and establishing positions which will afford bases of operations to the Federals hereafter. The President and Cabinet seem in better spirits, and the former indulges in quaint speculations, which he transfers even to State papers. He calculates, for instance, there are human beings now alive who may ere they die behold the United States peopled by 250 millions of souls. Talking of a high mound on the prairie, in Illinois, he remarked, “that if all the nations of the earth were assembled there, a man standing on its top would see them all, for that the whole human race would fit on a space twelve miles square, which was about the extent of the plain.”
