It was a dreadful Monday in the North when the first hideous bulletins were sent broadcast through the cities and carried by couriers into every hamlet.  For hours—­sickening hours—­it was not believed.  We have awakened many a morning since 1861 to hear of thrones overturned, armies vanquished, dynasties obliterated; to hear of great men gone by sudden and cruel death:  but the anger and despair when Booth’s cruel work was known; the shuddering horror over Garfield’s taking off; the amazement when the hand of Nihilism laid an emperor dead; the overthrow of Austria in a single day; the extinction of the Bonapartes—­these things were heard and digested with something like repose compared to the bewildering outbreak that met the destruction of our army at Manassas.

It was not the dazed, panic-stricken, panic anguish that followed Fredericksburg or the second Bull Run.  It was not the indignant, fretful wrath that rebuked official culpability for the destruction of the grand campaign on the Peninsula.  It was a startled, incredulous, angry amazement, in which blame afterward visited upon generals or Cabinet, was humbly taken on the people’s shoulders and echoed in a moaning mea culpa.  For days all the people were close kin.  In the streets strangers talked to strangers; the pulpit echoed the inextinguishable wrath of the streets; the journals, for a moment restrained into solemnity, echoed for once the real voice of an elevated humanity and not the drivel of partisanship nor the ulterior purposes of wealth and sham.  Even schoolboys, arrested in the merry-making of youth, looked in wonder at the sudden reversal of conditions.  Boys well remember in the school that Monday, when the northern heavens were hung in black and grief wrung its crystal tresses in the air, the master began the work of the day with a brief, pathetic review of the public agony, and dismissed the classes that he was too agitated to instruct.  There were no games on the greensward, no swimming in the river, no excursion to the Malvern cherry groves.  The streets were filled with blank faces and whispering crowds unable to endure the restraint of routine or the ordinary callings of life.  Parties were obliterated, or rather from the flux of this white heat, came out in solidified unity that compact of parties which for four years breathed the breath of the nation’s life, spoke the purposes of the republic, and amid stupendous reverses and triumphs held the public conscience clear in its sublime duty.  The woes of bereavement were not wide-spread; the killed at Manassas were hardly more than we read of now in a disaster at sea or a catastrophe in the mines.  The whole army engaged hardly outnumbered the slaughtered at Antietam, Gettysburg, or Burnside’s butchery at St. Mary’s Hill.