The Rebel invasion
of Maryland, if not so large or formidable as last year and year before, looks
to me very annoying, the more so because I learn nothing satisfactory or
reliable from the War Office, and am persuaded there is both neglect and
ignorance there. It is evident there have not been sufficient preparations, but
they are beginning to move. Yet they hardly have any accurate information.
Stanton seems stupid, Halleck always does. I am not, I believe, an alarmist,
and, as I have more than once said, I do not deem this raid formidable if
rightly and promptly met, but it may, from inattention and neglect, become so.
It is a scheme of Lee’s strategy, but where is Grant’s?
The Blairs have
left, strangely, it appears to me, at this time, on a fishing excursion among
the mountain streams of interior Pennsylvania, and the ladies have hastily run
off from Silver Spring to Cape May, leaving their premises at a critical
moment.
Our Alabama news
comes in opportunely to encourage and sustain the nation’s heart. It does them
as well as me good to dwell upon the subject and the discomfiture of the British
and Rebels. The perfidy of the former is as infamous as the treason of the
latter. Both were whipped by the Kearsarge, a Yankee ship with a Yankee
commander and a Yankee crew.
SOURCE: Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon
Welles, Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and Johnson, Vol. 2: April 1, 1864
— December 31, 1866, p. 70-1
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