The City of Washington.
Published: November 1, 1861
We learn from Washington that severe inconvenience is already felt in that city by reason of the loss of the navigation of the Potomac. The sole railroad line that remains is wholly inadequate to the comfortable supply of the population of the city and the vast army in its front. The pinch of this deprivation will grow more severe as Winter approaches, and may become a distressing social evil. But this is a trifle to what would happen in certain, perhaps very improbable, contingencies of the present insurrection.
The events of the war have tended to reduce very much the admiration of the people for their national seat of Government. Washington City has cost the Government dearly, so very dearly indeed that the Capitol, the White House and all the public buildings there, might have been blown up or abandoned at the beginning of the war, with a positive saving to the Government -- a saving not only of money, but of painful popular anxiety.
Washington has no strategical importance whatever, apart from its political character. As a military camp it is an outpost merely. The real base of the National Army of the Potomac, is this side of the soil of Maryland. We communicate with it, or have been communicating with it, by the Potomac River and by one railroad possessing a single track. The navigation of the Potomac is now annihilated, and the single track railroad is the sole plank that bridges a gulf between the people and their capital. We have only to recur to the events of the 19th of April last to comprehend the worthlessness of that line of communication in case of a serious disaster to the National cause near Washington. The entire length of the road lies in hostile territory, and so do at least four score miles each of its two connections north of Baltimore. We may safely say that the loyal North is separated from the capital of the nation by a gap of 110 miles of hostile territory, the railroad lines through which are tolerated only. Let the smothered fires of rebellion break out in Maryland -- and we know how hot the smouldering embers are -- and the railroad lines to Washington would snap like flax in a flame.
The nation has had two great frights for Washington. The first, when the Baltimore rebel mob forbade our Government to march Union troops through that city, and slew the men of Massachusetts, the second, when the scattered regiments from Bull Run sought shelter and food, from house to house, on their return unarmed to the Capital they had gone to defend. It is needless to allude to the enormous cost of the extraordinary measures that were resorted to by the Government, to protect Washington after these two calamitous panics. Fortunately the disasters were repaired. The Potomac remained open, and the exhaustless facilities of water transportation were available to the Government.
How would it be now? Let us not be misunderstood. We are not alarmists. We are not afraid for the safety of Washington. We are simply considering the situation. If Washington had fallen into the hands of the rebels in April we should have lost prestige only. The de facto Government of JEFF. DAVIS, installed at Washington, would have stood very much better abroad. If Washington had been captured by BEAUREGARD after the battle of Bull Run, we should have lost prestige as before, but we should have lost also an entire army of 40,000 men, and an incalculable amount of artillery, small arms, ammunitions and stores that had been gathered there for that army's use. But let us lose Washington now, and our loss would be well high remediless. We have an army of near 200,000 men depending on Washington as its base. The guns, the ammunition, the horses, the wagons, the clothing, the stores, for one of the largest armies the world has ever seen, are collected at Washington. And Washington is in the heart of the enemy's country; and the main communication with the loyal North is cut off. The other line of communication is a single track railroad, running, as we have shown with its connections, 110 miles through a disloyal territy. These are the facts of the case.
There may be no danger. With so great an army as we have at Washington, we are quite sure there ought to be none. But many surprising and mortifying results have been witnessed in this war; and regarding merely the possibilities of a national misfortune near Washington, all persons must admit that in that one hazard -- one chance in a hundred perhaps -- the people of the loyal States are paying far too dearly for a capital on the banks of the Potomac. In the presence of battle, and in the heat of conflict, it has been found stimulating to push the ensigns of an army forward into the very ranks of the enemy. Desperate struggles will frequently be made, in such cases, to recover the periled banners and save the national honor. But we have no historic justification for a nation's maintaining its seat of Government, its constitutional functionaries, its Great Seal and its archives, on an exposed border of its territory and right under the guns of hostile armies. The safety of the personnel of a Government and the insignia and evidences of its sovereignty, should never be unduly hazarded -- their possible loss should not be a source of uneasiness even -- save as the final result of an unsuccessful war.