Charles Francis Adams, Jr., On the Consequences of the Defeat

Boston, July 23, 1861

I don’t see any good in my saying anything of the disgraceful and disastrous battle of yesterday. The impression here is very general that Scott’s policy was interfered with by the President in obedience to what he calls popular will and at the instigation of Sumner, Greeley, and others, and the advance was ordered by Scott only after a written protest. The result was a tremendous and unaccountable panic, such as raw troops are necessarily liable to on a field of battle in a strange country, and it all closed in the loss of guns, colors, equipage, and even honor. Almost the first idea that occurred to me was the disastrous effect of this affair on you in your position. I do not see how foreign nations can refuse to acknowledge the Confederacy now, for they are a government de facto and this result looks very much as though they could maintain themselves as such. In any case I no longer see my way clear. Scott’s campaign is wholly destroyed and he must now go to work to reconstruct it. While our army is demoralized, theirs is in the same degree consolidated. Their ultimate independence is I think assured, but this defeat tends more and more to throw the war into the hands of the radicals, and if it lasts a year, it will be a war of abolition. Everything is set back for at least six months and just now, though not at all discouraged or disheartened, we feel here much as if we had been knocked over the head and had not yet recovered the use of our senses…

Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865, Vol. I, pp. 22-23

Charles Francis Adams, Jr., bio.