A successful New York lawyer, Strong served as treasurer of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a civilian organization dedicated to caring for sick and wounded soldiers and improving conditions in army camps. In his diary he considered the prospects for the Union cause.
February 3. Life and Trust Company meeting this morning. To a poor man like me the talk of these wholesale money-ers, like old Joe Kernochan and Aspinwall and others, is sublime. With what irreverent familiarity do they talk of millions! At 823 afterwards.
Murray Hoffman dined here and I went at eight to Executive Committee meeting at Dr. Bellows’s, where were also Gibbs and Agnew. Among other little matters that came before us was a draft for some $1,100, the third article of the sort received from Honolulu. Agnew says he expects the next big aerolite that arrives will bring us a contribution from American citizens in the moon. The success of this Sanitary Commission has been a marvel. Our receipts in cash up to this time are nearly $700,000 at the central office alone, beside what has been received and spent by auxiliaries, and the three or four millions’ worth of stores of every sort contributed at our depots. It has become a “big thing,” has the Sanitary Commission, and a considerable fact in the history of this people and of this war. Our work at Washington and at Louisville, our two chief nervous centres, is on a big scale, employs some two hundred agents of every sort, and costs not much less than $40,000 a month.
National affairs seem stagnant, but I suppose we shall very soon hear news of the first importance from Vicksburg and possibly from Rosecrans. I think the national destiny will be decided in the Southwest, not in Virginia. Richmond is an ignis fatuus. We have mired ourselves badly in trying to reach it, twice at least, and can apply our strength more advantageously at other points. I am more and more satisfied, as I have been from the first, that our true policy is to occupy every Southern port, to open the Mississippi, to keep a couple of armies in strong and comfortable and healthy positions on the rebel frontier, and then to say to Jefferson Davis, “We are not going to advance into your jungle over your muddy roads. If you want a fight, you must come to us. If you don’t want it, stay where you are and let us see which party will first be starved and wearied into submission.” We do not need enterprise and dash near so much as resolution and steadiness, perseverance and pluck; the passive pluck that can suffer a little and wait quietly for the inevitable result. Therein this people seems wanting. Perhaps I do it injustice, but all the symptoms of the last four months indicate a fearful absence of vital power and constitutional stamina to resist disease and pain. The way the Dirt-Eaters and Copperheads and sympathizers and compromisers are coming out on the surface of society, like ugly petechiæ and vibices, shows that the nation is suffering from a most putrescent state of the national blood, and that we are a very typhoid community here at the North.
Thank God for the rancorous, vindictive, ferocious, hysterical utterances that reach us from the South—for the speeches and the Richmond Enquirer editorials declaring compromise and reconstruction impossible, that “Southrons” would not take back “Yankees” even as their slaves, that Northern Democrats who talk about restoring the Union are fools and blind. Were the South only a little less furious, savage, and spiteful, it could in three months so strengthen our “Peace Democracy” as to paralyze the nation and destroy all hope of ever restoring its territorial integrity. It is strange Jefferson Davis & Co. fail to see their best move. With a few unmeaning, insincere professions of desire for reconstruction, additional Constitutional guaranties, and so forth, they could bring us grovelling to their feet and secure an armistice most profitable to them, most dishonorable and disastrous to us.
February 5. These be dark blue days. Of course, every man’s duty is to keep a stiff upper lip—fortem in arduis rebus servare mentem—“to talk turkey” about the moral certainty of triumph at last. I do so very valiantly. It’s fearful and wonderful the way I blow and brag about our national invincibility, the extent of our conquests during the last twenty months, and our steady progress toward subjugation of the South. It is the right kind of talk for the times, and is more than half true, and has materially relieved the moral and political adynamia of at least one man, Bidwell, already. But (between me and my journal) things do in fact look darker and more dark every day. We are in a fearful scrape, and I see no way out of it. Recognition of the “Confederacy” is impossible. So is vigorous prosecution of the war twelve months longer. This proposition is self-evident “if this court understand herself, and she think she do.” How can these two contradictions be reconciled? Rabelais furnishes a case equally difficult. Jupiter created a fox that was destined never to be caught, and afterwards, by inadvertence, a dog destined to catch all foxes, so that the Olympian Ledger of Destiny could not be made to balance. If I rightly remember my learned and pious author, Jupiter got rid of the embarrassment by turning dog and fox into two stars, or two constellations, or two stones, which was a mere evasion, and no solution of the great problem he had to deal with. We are in a similar deadlock of contradiction, I fear; North cannot be defeated and South cannot be conquered. (Of course, this is taking the worst view of the case.)