Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/460

 corrupted, by the influence of the conservatives. On one side he was assailed by a clamor for peace, on the other by vehement and injurious demands for a more vigorous prosecution of the war. To one friend who assailed him with peculiar candor, he made a reply which may answer as a sufficient defense to all the radical attacks which were so rife at the time.” That “friend” was I.

I had, while in the field, carried on a more or less active correspondence with my political friends to keep myself informed of what was going on in the country. I had also while stationed near Washington, visited that city and conversed with public men, among whom were Secretary Chase and Senator Sumner. The impressions I received from my letters as well as from my conversations were very gloomy. There was a discouragement in the popular mind which urgently demanded successes in the field for its relief. Such successes were indeed achieved in the West, but not in the East, where the principal theater of the war, upon which the final, decisive blows were to be struck, was supposed to be. It was observed with disquietude that reckless operations of the enemy, such, for instance, as those of Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley and the raid on Manassas Junction, which would have resulted in his destruction, if our ample means had been promptly and vigorously used, had been accomplished with astonishing success.

The apparent lack of hearty co-operation between different commands, to which Pope's disastrous discomfiture seemed in great part to have been owing, formed the subject of much anxious talk. There was a suspicion current that the enemy had spies in the Adjutant General's office in Washington who despatched intimate information about our condition and plans southward. Rumors of occasional utterances dropped