APPENDIX. 115 NOTE K —Page 86. THE SEVEN DAYS’ BATTLES. The phases of public feeling and of military opinion in Richmond during the progress of the operation by which General McClellan transferred his army from the Chickahominy to the James, were highly interesting to me at the time, and it may be worth while for me briefly to describe them now. Let me premise by stating however, that the Prinee is certainly in error, when he speaks of General Beauregard as “ lending the assistance of his capacity and his prestige” to the Southern army at this critical moment. General Beauregard was then at Eufaula, in Alabama, recruiting his health, shattered by two arduous-campaigns, one in the East and one in the West. Very few, if any of the troops from his army were in Virginia. Reinforcements had been coming into the city for several days previously to the 25th, in very considerable numbers, but they appeared to me to be mainly made up of new troops, and were generally understood to be so. Of the battle with Hooker on the 25th, in which the confederates were defeated, nothing was heard in Richmond save the sound of the cannonade, and to that we had all become so much accustomed as not to be much excited thereby. The negroes, who always, by some mysterious system of communication with the surrounding country, contrived to have news in advance of the published accounts, and whose reports I generally found to be quite as accurate as those of the “ Dispatch” and the “Examiner,” whispered indeed on the morning of the 26th in the servants’ halls, from which the story soon ran up stairs, that something not altogether agreeable had happened the day before. But the popular rumor was, that a slight skirmish had taken place, with the inevitable re suit of “skedaddled” and captured Yankees.
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