No, not a Law Firm
Bennett says McClellan throttling the CSA?
In a war of words with James Gordon Bennett, Sr. and his New York Herald even the Richmond Dispatch is giving Union General-in Chief McClellan some guff about the apparent inactivity of the U.S. Army of the Potomac.
From the Richmond Daily Dispatch January 11, 1862:
His hand upon our throat.
–The voracious and modest Bennett avers that General McClellan has his hand upon the throat of the South, and can choke us all to death whenever it suits his good pleasure. His figure of speech describes accurately the temper and purpose of the Lincoln Administration, which may be compared to a highwayman, seizing an innocent traveler by the throat with one hand, and with a loaded pistol in the other, bidding him deliver or die. This is precisely what the North means by this war — nothing more, nothing less — deliver us your cotton, rice, tobacco, naval stores, and trade and commerce generally, or die. But the traveler in this case happens to be armed, and is in no humor to deliver up a dime upon compulsion. If the highwayman can choke him to death when he pleases, he has been a long time in doing it. We were to have been crushed in April, according to the vicious Herald. That paper declared that we should not be permitted to vote upon the Ordinance of Secession. Then it was merciful enough to postpone our fate till the pleasant month of June, and gave us a still farther respite till the 20th of July, when our Congress was to meet, and which Bennett declared old Scott would disperse at the point of the bayonet. Certain events on the 21st induced the Herald to change its opinion, and it instantly became as vociferous in magnifying the military prowess of the Southern Confederacy as it had previously been in deriding and running it down. It has now returned to its old game of brag and bluster, and audacity. McClellan is throttling and choking us, but he is doing it so gently that the subject of it is not aware of the experiment. Shut up in Washington, blockaded in his own capital, and unable or unwilling to make a sortie in its defence, he has his hand upon our throat and is choking us to death ! If Bennett’s readers are capable of believing such nonsense, he would despise himself if he could give it credit.
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Key West, ca. 1856
It is said that 150 years ago today the U.S. Department of Key West was constituted with John Milton Brannan as its commander. Brannan was a graduate of West Point and a career army officer who would serve throughout the Civil War. His first wife died mysteriously; she was the daughter of Ichabod Crane. And I admit it, I never knew there was a real Ichabod Crane.
John M. Brannan
Ichabod B. Crane
