Sept. 8th.–Rode over to Arlington House. Went round by Aqueduct Bridge, Georgetown, and out across Chain Bridge to Brigadier Smith’s head-quarters, which are established in a comfortable house belonging to a Secessionist farmer. The General belongs to the regular army, and, if one can judge from externals, is a good officer. A libation of Bourbon and water was poured out to friendship, and we rode out with Captain Poe, of the Topographical Engineers, a hard-working, eager fellow, to examine the trench which the men were engaged in throwing up to defend the position they have just occupied on some high knolls, now cleared of wood, and overlooking ravines which stretch towards Falls Church and Vienna. Everything about the camp looked like fighting: Napoleon guns planted on the road; Griffin’s battery in a field near at hand; mountain howitzers unlimbered; strong pickets and main-guards; the five thousand men all kept close to their camps, and two regiments, in spite of McClellan’s order, engaged on the trenches, which were already mounted with field-guns. General Smith, like most officers, is a Democrat and strong anti-Abolitionist, and it is not too much to suppose he would fight any rather than Virginians. As we were riding about, it got out among the men that I was present, and I was regarded with no small curiosity, staring, and some angry looks. The men do not know what to make of it when they see their officers in the company of one whom they are reading about in the papers as the most &c, &c, the world ever saw. And, indeed, I know well enough, so great is their passion and so easily are they misled, that without such safeguard the men would in all probability carry out the suggestions of one of their particular guides, who has undergone so many cuffings that he rather likes them. Am I not the cause of the disaster at Bull’s Run?
Going home, I met Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln in their new open carriage. The President was not so good-humored, nor Mrs. Lincoln so affable, in their return to my salutation as usual. My unpopularity is certainly spreading upwards and downwards at the same time, and all because I could not turn the battle of Bull’s Run into a Federal victory, because I would not pander to the vanity of the people, and, least of all, because I will not bow my knee to the degraded creatures who have made the very name of a free press odious to honourable men. Many of the most foul-mouthed and rabid of the men who revile me because I have said the Union as it was never can be restored, are as fully satisfied of the truth of that statement as I am. They have written far severer things of their army than I have ever done. They have slandered their soldiers and their officers as I have never done. They have fed the worst passions of a morbid democracy, till it can neither see nor hear; but they shall never have the satisfaction of either driving me from my post or inducing me to deviate a hair’s-breadth from the course I have resolved to pursue, as I have done before in other cases –greater and graver, as far as I was concerned, than this.