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The sagacious Lincoln, whose action in army matters was paralyzed by cliques, in the end saw through sham with an inspired clarity of vision, and proposed the measure, but the backwoods Mazarin, Seward, prepared such voluminous "considerations" in opposition that the good-natured President withdrew his suggestion, and, as a consequence, the dismal Ilium on the Potomac became the bone of a four years' contention, whose vicissitudes exceed the incidents of the Iliad.
Yet the friendship was never restored, and when the two after the war were associated in the Potomac company, Washington's sense of the old treachery was still so keen that he alluded to the appointment of "my bosom friend Genl G-tes, who being at Richmond, contrived to edge himself in to the commission." Thomas Conway was Washington's traducer to Gates.
On the night of September 23, the President, General Halleck, several members of the cabinet, and leading army and railroad officials met in an improvised council at the War Department, and issued emergency orders under which two army corps from the Army of the Potomac, numbering twenty thousand men in all, with their arms and equipments ready for the field, the whole under command of General Hooker, were transported from their camps on the Rapidan by railway to Nashville and the Tennessee River in the next eight days.
On the morning of the 19th some hours before day the rumbling of the wagon trains told of our march backward. We crossed the Potomac, Longstreet leading, and Jackson bringing up the rear.
At 3 P.M. doubled the Cape of Good Hope and steamed into the anchorage at Simon's Town, which we reached at about 4.30 P.M. The Vanderbilt had left on Friday last, and was reported to have hovered near the Cape for a day or two. Greatly disarranged by the news from home Vicksburg and Port Hudson fallen; Rosecrans' army marching southwards; and Lee having recrossed the Potomac.
The country immediately about it is naturally beautiful and romantic, especially up the Potomac, in the region of the Great Falls; and, though the soil be poor as compared with that of my present home, it is susceptible of easy improvement and embellishment.
On the next morning Early's division attacked the forces of Milroy at Winchester, stormed and captured their "Star Fort," on a hill near the place, and so complete was the rout of the enemy that their commander, General Milroy, had scarcely time to escape, with a handful of his men, in the direction of the Potomac.
McClellan prepared and fully expected to move on Richmond again from this new base, but early in August received orders to withdraw from the Peninsula. By the middle of the month the dejected Army of the Potomac was on its way north.
Wright, I wish you could go across the Potomac and look over my district. I think you will find that African slavery is not half as bad as it is represented." Elizur Wright went and returned with the emphatic reply: "I find it much worse than I expected."
Later in the course of trials of a machine for the United States Government at Fort Myer, just across the Potomac from Washington, the Wrights seriously offended a certain sort of public sentiment in a way which undoubtedly set back the encouragement of aviation by the United States Government very seriously. The Comparative Strength of Belligerents in Dirigibles at the Opening of the War.
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