thirty thousand men, besides all its artillery and munitions, and
Washington lay at the mercy of the Enemy, who were soon to advance
to the capture and sack of our great commercial cities. Never
before had so black a day as that black Monday lowered upon the
loyal hearts of the North; and the leaden, weeping skies reflected
and heightened, while they seemed to sympathize with, the general
gloom. It would have been easy, with ordinary effort and care, to
have gathered and remanded to their camps or forts around
Alexandria or Arlington, all the wretched stragglers to whom fear
had lent wings, and who, throwing away their arms and equipments,
and abandoning all semblance of Military order or discipline, had
rushed to the Capital to hide therein their shame, behind a cloud
of exaggerations and falsehoods. The still effective batteries,
the solid battalions, that were then wending their way slowly back
to their old encampments along the South bank of the Potomac,
depressed but unshaken, dauntless and utterly unassailed, were
unseen and unheard from; while the panic-stricken racers filled and
distended the general ear with their tales of impregnable
intrenchments and masked batteries, of regiments slaughtered,
brigades utterly cut to pieces, etc., making out their miserable
selves to be about all that was left of the Army. That these men
were allowed thus to straggle into Washington, instead of being
peremptorily stopped at the bridges and sent back to the
encampments of their several regiments, is only to be accounted for
on the hypothesis that the reason of our Military magnates had been
temporarily dethroned, so as to divest them of all moral
responsibility," Greeley's Am. Conflict, pp. 552-53., vol. I.]

"They rallied and repulsed us, but only to give us again the victory,
which seemed complete. But our men, exhausted with fatigue and thirst,