Another Manassas lethargy.
It has been six weeks since the last gun was fired in the fights around Richmond that sent McClellan ‘"skedaddling"’ to the shelter of his gunboats at Westover. Since then a lethargy as deep as that which pervaded the army and the country after Manassas seems gradually settling down upon us. We are, apparently, waiting for the enemy to recruit his exhausted strength, and to come forth in the cool weather that will be upon us in the next sixty days. By that time his regiments will all be filled up, and we shall be assailed by three hundred thousand additional troops. We shall at least escape the chance of attacking him before he is ready. We are giving him all the time be can desire. He can never reproach us with pressing on him when he is not prepared. What the consequences will be it is not worth while to anticipate. We saw what they were last year. It is fated, it seems, that we are never to reap the fruits of any victory, no matter how decisive. Manassas was followed by the abandonment of nearly half of Virginia. Shiloh was followed by the entire loss of the Mississippi and the fall of New Orleans.--What is to follow the victories around Richmond we cannot imagine. We have not much more to give up, unless we mean to abandon Virginia altogether.The people of this country ought to be made aware of the truth before it be too late. We are rapidly giving way to the same delusion which lulled our people into security last year, while the enemy was enlisting and training 700,000 men, and building and preparing to arm three hundred vessels-of-war. We are fulled by precisely the same species of delusion. We are still told that England is not only about to recognize our existence, but to take up arms in our behalf, as if it were not plain that she not only has no intention of doing so, but that France would long since have done it had she not interfered to prevent it. We are told that the North is discouraged, precisely as we were told after Manassas that she could not raise men for the further prosecution of this war. We listen to the song of the siren. We suffer the warm months, when the Yankees, by the mere force of climate, are unable to prosecute their designs, to pass unheeded over our heads. We shall not be awakened until the first white frost, when we shall be aroused by the thundering tread of 300,000 soldiers, come to reinforce those whom we have already beaten and whom we leave to receive the expected succor before they again take the field. For us the lessons of the past have no instruction; to us reverses and suffering are as though they had never occurred. We apparently love to be deceived. We are sleeping the sleep of Manassas, and it seems as though nothing can break its chain.
