Washington.  In June last the road was open from Baltimore to the Point of Rocks, between which last place and the Ferry were some rebel obstructions easy to be removed.  Had Gen. Patterson occupied Harper’s Ferry in June, and opened the railroad to that point, and from thence carried on the campaign like a brave general, worthy to command the brave men who filled the ranks of his army, the government might by this time have made the whole line of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad of use, as a means of transporting troops and munitions between Cincinnati and Baltimore,—­a desideratum then, as now, very strongly urged, as the shortest route between those points is the circuitous one via Harrisburg and Pittsburgh.  It could have been of great use, too, to Patterson’s division of the army, in transporting supplies from Baltimore, by the most natural and expeditious route.  But it was his plan to enter Virginia at Williamsport, so that all supplies for his division must go from Baltimore and Philadelphia to Harrisburg, and thence by rail to Hagerstown, where they were loaded upon army wagons, and transported thus to and across the Potomac, and for fifteen or twenty miles into Virginia, to the Federal camps, at very great outlay and expense.  So earnest did Gen. Patterson seem to be, either in doing nothing, or else in causing all the expenditure possible.

These are the arguments which address themselves to our reason, as bearing on the question of Patterson’s success or failure, and as explanatory of the latter.  As before stated, they are urged, not to show that Patterson should have possessed prophetic knowledge or any extraordinary powers, but to illustrate his failure to understand what was transpiring before his face and eyes.  He is culpable, not because he did not achieve impossibilities, but because he did not do what plain common-sense seemed to require.  The writer heard, among the Federal camps, but one reason suggested for Patterson’s neglect to occupy Harper’s Ferry in June, which was, that probably the rebels had concealed sundry infernal machines in its vicinity, which would destroy thousands of the Union soldiers at the proper time.  This was building a great military policy on a very small basis.  If there was running through Gen. Patterson’s policy any such plan of military strategy, or, in fact, any plan whatever, we have the curious spectacle presented of a general of an army ignoring common-sense, and building up a plan of a great campaign solely upon improbabilities.  And it strikes us that this may be the key to the general’s system of warfare, and a very plain and lucid explanation of his failure.