Mr. Seward to Mr. Adams..
Sir: It seems a mockery to give you accounts of military operations, insomuch as, though my advices are delayed until the last hour before the departure of the mail, they are outstripped by the telegraphic despatches going during two whole days from all parts of the country to the very hour of the sailing of the steamer.
Cloudless skies, with drying winter winds, have at last succeeded the storms which so long held our fleets in embargo and our land forces in their camps.
The Burnside expedition has escaped its perils, and is now in activity on the coast of North Carolina. The great victory at Mill Spring, in Kentucky, has been quickly followed by the capture of Fort Henry, on the Tennessee river, and the interruption of the railroad by which the insurgents have kept up their communications between Bowling Green and Columbus; and the divisions in the west are all in activity with prospects of decisive achievements.
It is now nearly one year since the insurgents began their desperate undertaking to establish a confederacy of the fifteen slave States. At some time within the previous six months they had virtually displaced the flag of the Union in thirteen of those States by stratagem or by force, and it stood in apparent jeopardy in the fourteenth State.
But the process of preparation has steadily gone on in the loyal States, while that of exhaustion has been going on in the disloyal. Only eleven of the slave States are practically subject to the insurgents, and already the flag of the Union stands, as we think, irremovably fixed upon some points in every one of the thirty-four States, except Texas, Alabama, and Arkansas. Congress has come fully up to the discharge of its great responsibility of establishing the finances of the country on a safe and satisfactory foundation. Notwithstanding the protestations of the insurgents that the people of the insurgent States are unanimous in their determination to overthrow the government, we have the most satisfactory evidence that the Union will be hailed in every quarter, just as fast as the army shall emancipate the people from the oppression of the insurgent leaders.
Under these circumstances, you will judge how strangely the assumptions of European papers and politicians that a preservation of the Union is impossible sound to us when they reach this side of the Atlantic.
I am, sir, your obedient servant,
Charles Francis Adams, Esq., &c., &c., &c.