From the day you left here until the present time there has
been no improvement in public affairs, save General McClellan's accession to
chief command, but his illness has in a great measure prevented the good
consequences which might have resulted from that event. His health is now
improving.
Your anticipation that he would be assailed by certain
parties, I think, is well founded. No direct assault upon him has yet been
made, but there have been several indirect lunges, the object whereof cannot be
mistaken. Fremont is now here and divers rumors abound as to the designs of his
partisans; whether any of them be true or not, time only will show.
The surrender of Mason and Slidell was a political
necessity, but I doubt whether it will avoid war. My private advices from
England represent a nearly unanimous and almost frantic hostility of the
English people to our Government, which the power of the ministry cannot
restrain, if it desired so to do. The French feeling is no better. The fact is
that there seems to be an outbreak of hostility against our republican form of
government, combined with a bitter contempt for the administration, which
induces foreign powers to seize the chance of the hour to destroy us. On our
part there appears no consciousness of the dangers, or ability to avoid them.
Seward says, “all’s well,” and that is enough for the Republicans.
SOURCE: Frank Abial Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton: the autocrat of rebellion, emancipation, and
Reconstruction, p. 123-4
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