I am sure some day or other it will come out that this immense fortification of Manassas is a similar humbug to the masked batteries; and Scott was the first to aggrandize these terrible national nightmares. Already many soldiers say that they did not see any fortifications. Very likely only small earthworks; if so, Scott ought to have known what was the position and the works of an enemy encamped about thirty miles from him. If he, Scott, was ignorant, then it shows his utter imbecility; if he knew that the fortifications were insignificant, and did not tell it to the troops, then he is worse than an incapable chief. Up to the present day, all the military leaders of ancient and modern times told their troops before a battle that the enemy is not much after all, and that the difficulties to overcome are rather insignificant. After the battle was won, everything became aggrandized. Here everybody, beginning with Scott, ardently rivalled how to scare and frighten the volunteers, by stories of the masked batteries of Manassas, with its several tiers of fortifications, the terrible superiority of the Southerners, etc., etc. In Europe such behavior would be called treason.
The administration and the influential men cannot realize that they must give up their old, stupid, musty routine. McClellan ought to be altogether independent of Scott; be untrammelled in his activity; have large powers; have direct action; and not refer to Scott. What is this wheel within a wheel? Instead of it, Scott, as by concession, cuts for McClellan a military department of six square miles. Oh, human stupidity, how difficult thou art to lift!
Scott will paralyze McClellan as he did Lyon and Butler. Scott always pushed on his spit-lickers, or favorites, rotten by old age. But Scott has pushed aside such men as Wool and Col. Smith; refused the services of many brave as Hooker and others, because they never belonged to his flunkeys.
Send to McClellan a plan for the reorganization of the army.
1st. True mastership consists in creating an army with extant elements, and not in clamoring for what is altogether impossible to obtain.
2d. The idea is preposterous to try to have a large thus-called regular army. A small number, fifteen to twenty thousand men, divided among several hundreds of thousands of volunteers, would be as a drop of water in a lake. Besides, this war is to be decided by the great masses of the volunteers, and it is uncivic and unpatriotic to in any way nourish the wickedly-assumed discrimination between regulars and volunteers.