But while the Nationalists were arming in an undoubted majority, and exhibiting a spirit that made it madness to openly oppose them, there was still a wide secession affiliation and sympathy at the North, especially in New York City and Philadelphia - indeed, everywhere at the North, much more than was shown or spoken outright, and continued through the whole war, waiting always for a good chance to make a sortie in any way that would tell best; but it was at first utterly cowed by the general and sudden rising, and though afterward a source of great anxiety to the Government it never got the coveted change of [missing text] The Saturday and Sunday of the battle, (20th, 21st) had been parched and hot to an extreme - the dust, the grime and smoke, in layers, sweating in, followed by other layers, again sweated in, absorbed by those excited souls, - their clothes, all saturated with the clay-powder filling the air, those two days - stirred up everywhere on the dry-roads and trodden fields, by the regiments, swarming wagons, artillery, &c, - all the men, with all this coating of murk and sweat and Virginia rain - now a solid stream recoiling back - pouring over the Long Bridge, a horrible march of 20 miles, returning to Washington battled, humiliated, panic-struck! Where are the vaunts, and the proud boasts with which you went forth? Where are your banners, and where your bands of music, and your ropes to bring back your prisoners? Well, there isn't a band playing - and there isn't a flag but clings ashamed and lank to its staff.
    The sun rises, but shines not.  The men appear, at first sparsely and shame-faced enough - then thicker in the streets of Washington - appear in Pennsylvania avenue and on the steps and basement entrances.  They come along in disorderly mobs, some in squads, stragglers, companies.  Occasionally, a rare regiment, in perfect order, with its officers (some gaps, dead, the true braves), marching in silence, with lowering faces, stern, weary to sinking, all black and dirty, but every man with this musket, and stepping alive; - but these are the exceptions.
    Sidewalks of Pennsylvania avenue, Fourteenth street, &c, crowded, jammed with citizens, darkies, clerks, everybody, lookers-on; women in the windows, curious expressions from faces as those swarms of dirt-covered returned soldiers there (will they never end?) move by: but nothing said, no comments; (halt our lookers-on seesh of the most venomous kind - they say nothing; but the devil snickers in  their faces.)
    During the forenoon Washington gets motley with these dirt-covered soldiers.  Queer-looking objects, strange eyes and faces, drenched (the stead rain drizzles on all day) and fearfully, forlorn, hungry, haggard, blistered in the feet.  [missing text]d people (but not over-many of them either) [missing text]y up something for their grub.  They put [missing text]-kettles on the fire, for soup, for coffee.  [missing text]y set tables on the side-walk -- wagon loads [missing text] bread [missing text] purchased, swiftly cut in stout chunks. Here [missing text] beautiful, the first in the city [missing text] they stand with store of ea [missing text] an improvised table of rough pla[missing text] food, and have the store replenished from their house every half-hour all that day; and there in the rain they stand, active, silent, white-haired, and give food, though the tears stream down their cheeks, almost without intermission, the whole time.
    Amid the deep excitement (too deep for demonstration) -- amid the crowds and motion, and desperate eagerness, it seems strange to see many, very many, of the soldiers sleeping -- in the midst of all, sleeping sound.  They drop down anywhere, on the steps of houses, up close by the basements or fences, on the sidewalk, aside on some vacant lot, and deeply sleep.  A poor seventeen or eighteen year old boy lies there, on the stoop of a grand house; he sleeps so calmly, so profoundly!  Some clutch their muskets firmly even in sleep.  Some, in squads; comrades, brothers, close together, and on them as they lay, sulkily drips the rain.
    As afternoon passed on, and evening came, the streets, the bar-rooms, knots everywhere, listeners, questioners, terrible stories, bugaboo, masked-batteries, our regiment all cut up, &c., -- stories and story-tellers, windy, bragging, vain centres of street-crowds.  Resolution, manliness, seem to have abandoned Washington.  The principal hotel, Willard's, is full of shoulder-straps -- thick, crushed, creeping with shoulder-straps.  I see them, and must have a word with them.  There you are, shoulder-straps!-- but where are your companies? where are you men?  Incompetents! never tell me of chances of battle, of getting strayed, and the like.  I think this is your work, this retreat, after all.  Sneak, blow, put on airs there in Willard's sumptuous parlors and bar-rooms, and anywhere -- no explanation shall save you.  Bull Run is your work; had you been half worthy your men, this would never have happened.

    Meantime, in Washington, among the great persons and their entourage, a mixture of awful consternation, uncertainty, rage, shame, helplessness, and stupefying disappointment.  The worst [missing text] only imminent, but already here.  In a few hours--perhaps before the next meal--the Secesh generals, with their victorious hordes, will be upon us.  Their dream of Humanity, the vaunted Liberty-Union we thought so strong, so impregnable--lo! it is smashed like a china plate.  One bitter, bitter hour--perhaps proud and dainty personified America will never again know such a bitter hour.  She must pack and fly no time to spare.  These white palaces of [missing text] beauty--the dome-crowned Cap-[missing text] stately over the trees-[missing text] went under.

    At this time, too, through all the Northern, Middle and Western States, the gravity of the revolt, and the power and will of the Slave States for a strong and continued military resistance to National authority, was not at all realized except by a few.  Nine-tenths of the people of the Free States looked upon the rebellion, as started in South Carolina, from a feeling one-half of contempt and the other half composed of anger and incredulity.  It was not thought it would be joined in by Virginia, North Carolina or Georgia.  A great and cautious blow over "in sixty days," and folks generally believed the prediction.  I remember talking about it on a Fulton ferry-boat with the Brooklyn Mayor, who said he only "hoped the Southern fire-eaters would commit some overt act of resistance, as they would then be at once so effectually squelched we would never hear of secession again -- but he was afraid they never would have the pluck to really do anything."
    I remember too that a couple of companies of the Thirteenth Brooklyn, who rendezvoused at the City armory, and started thence as Thirty Days' Men, were all provided with pieces of rope conspicuously tied to their musket barrels, with which to bring back each man a prisoner from the audacious South, to be led in a noose, on our men's early and triumphal return!

    All this sort of feeling was destined to be arrested and cut short and reversed by a sudden and terrible shock,--the battle of First Bull Run--certainly, as we now know it, one of the most singular fights on record.  All battles, and their results, are far more matters of accident than is generally though; but this was throughout a casualty, a chance.   Each side supposed it had won, till the last moment.  One had in point of fact just the same right to be routed as the other.  By a fiction, or series of fictions, the National forces, at the last moment, exploded in a panic, and fled from the field.
    Then the popular feeling North, from its' extreme of superciliousness, recoiled to the depth of gloom and apprehension.

    Of all the days of the War, with its fitful long-drawn four years of ups and downs, there are two especially I can never forget.  Those were the days following the news, in New York and Brooklyn, of the first Bull Run defeat, and the day of Abraham Lincoln's death.  I was home in Brooklyn on both occasions.  The day of the murder we heard the news very early in the morning.  Mother prepared breakfast--and the other meals afterward - as usual; but not a mouthful was eaten by either of us.  We each drank half a cup of coffee; that was all.  Little was said, We got every newspaper morning and evening, and passed them to each other.)

    The troops commenced pouring into Washington, over the Long Bridge, at day-light on Monday 22d--day drizzling all through the rain. [missing text] the National side, and soon restored the Union energies with determination five times magnified, and finally plucked the flower safety out of the nettle danger.

    For the remaining part of my sketches I shall adopt the diary form, in chronological order.  The events of the remainder of '61, and most of those of '62, were not of momentous interest North and East, through exciting the West--the bloody battle of Shiloh, the surrender of Island No. 10, the lower Mississippi occupied, and New Orleans taken by Farragut.
    Through this time--indeed throughout the whole of the vast and many-threaded drama of conflict that followed; with its sudden and strange surprises, its confounding of prophecies, its moments of despair, the dread of foreign interference, the interminable campaigns, the bloody battles, the mighty and cumbrous and fresh armies, the volunteering and drafts and bounties--with, over the whole land, North and South, an upending, universal mourning-wail of women, parents, orphans--while of the military movements of all those, and the ups and downs from 1861 to 1865, the ostensible statistics, numbers, dates &c., have been put on record, (though much is yet behind to be gradually unearthed, disentangled, clarified, and to furnish points in History, Literature, Art, and even Philosophy, for ages and ages to come,) there was ever going on, in by-scenes or behind the, scenes, South and North, a mass of complicated weft and warp of subordinate occurrences, not at the time registered, and perhaps never will be--though in some respects it identifies the most important part of the whole.  This formed, and will every from, the vast Untold and Unwritten History of our Civil War-- infinitely greater (like Life's) than the few scraps and ends and distortions that are ever told or written.  Think how much, and of importance, will be--how much, civic and military, has already been--buried in the grave, in eternal darkness!
    For it is not generally known that the talk among the talkers and magnates and officers and clerks and officials everywhere, for twenty-four hours in and around Washington, was loud and undisguised for yielding out and out to the secession demands, and substituting the Southern rule, and Lincoln promptly abdicating and departing.  If the Secesh officers and forces had immediately followed, and by a bold Napoleonic movement, had entered Washington the first day (or even the second) it is certain they could have had things their own way, and a powerful faction North to back them.  One of our returning Bull Run officers and gentlemen in a crowded room, the opinion that it was useless to fight, that the Southerners had made their title clear to their own terms, and that the best course for the National Government to pursue was to desist from any further attempt at stopping them, and admit them again to the lead on the best terms they were willing to grant.  Not a voice was raised against this judgment amid that large crowd of officers and gentlemen.
    (This was Washington "society," remember, and it makes the strongest point against Washington I know of.  The fact is, the hour was one of the three or four of those crises we had during the fluctuations of four years, when human eyes appeared at least just as likely to see he last breath of the Union as to see it continue.)
    But the hour, the day, the night passed, and whatever returns, an hour, a day, a night like that an never again return.  The President recovering himself, begins that very night--sternly and rapidly sets about the work of reorganizing his forces, and placing himself in positions for future and greater work.  It there were nothing else of Abraham Lincoln for history to stamp him with, it is to be said, (and I say it here,) that it is enough to send him with his wreath to the memory of all future time, that he endured that hour, that day, bitterer than gall--indeed a crucifixion day--that he endured it, was superior to it, that it did not conquer him--that he unflinchingly stemmed it, and resolved to lift himself and the union out of it.  I say that his deed, in this alone, is a first class historic grandeur, fit to stand with all greatest antique and modern samples and personalities, and not afraid of comparison with the best of them.

    Then the great New York papers at once appeared, (commencing that very evening and following it up the next morning, and incessantly through many days afterwards), with leaders that rang out over the land, with all the loudest, most reverberating ring of bands of clearest, wildest, most stirring bugles, full of encouragement, hope, inspiration, unfaltering defiance.  Those magnificent editorials! they never flagged for a fortnight. The Herald commenced them--I remember the articles well.  The Tribune was equally cogent and inspiriting--and the Times, Evening Post, and other principal papers were not a whit behind.  They came in good time, for they were needed.  And there is no denying that these loud cheerful clarion [missing text] of the Herald and the rest, coming on the instant gave the key-note to what followed, on