Annihilated! Yes, gentlemen of Congress, sitting in Washington at that moment and passing resolutions and appropriations, and uttering fine sentiments about millions for defense and not one cent for tribute! There were ugly things there on the Connecticut River shore that answered you more loudly in their eternal silence than if they had spoken with a thousand angry tongues. That day’s battle that filled the fields of Connecticut with dead men’s bones to be plowed up in many a year afterward, went down in American history as the massacre of the Connecticut River. A massacre it was--an American massacre, carefully prepared by elaborate carelessness through many a year before. Less than a thousand men, it was said afterward, escaped from the massacre. They crawled away down gullies or swam down the river, and hid under weeds and panted, and tied up their wounds with rags from their ragged garments. They were never able to tell what had occurred. They knew only that they had thought there was victory--and then, in front of them, and on their flanks, and behind them, there had come flames as if a hot line of blast furnaces had opened to blow in their very faces, wherever they turned. “We have taught them their lesson!” said the hostile commander. “We shall have no more trouble.” It was true. Western Connecticut was broken under the invader’s rod as Eastern Massachusetts had been broken. That night the army occupied Hartford, Meriden, New Britain, and New Haven, though not before the arms factories had been blown up, to welcome the soldiers with flaming ruins. The next morning cavalry detachments began cautiously to scout into the Berkshire Hills, to feel for the American outposts. IX THE CAPTURE OF NEW YORK CITY When the news of the Battle of Connecticut went through the United States, there was a temporary end to all patience, to all calculations of prudence. There was an end to everything except blind passion. The United States was not a patient Nation, but no Nation, however patient, could have remained so at such a time. No man, however deeply admired, could have counseled wisdom then. No interests, however great, could have controlled. All the knowledge that had gone to the public about the utter unreadiness of the freshly enlisted volunteers to take the firing line; all the information that had been given to the people about the condition of their army; all the proofs that the foe had given with blood and fire of his immense superiority--all these were as nothing. That the army, if it had fought now, must be destroyed, was as nothing. The cry was that the army must fight! Trusted leaders pointed in vain to the history of the United States to prove that whenever its raw forces had hurried into battle in obedience to popular demand, the result had been only to hurry disaster. In vain they pointed to the Civil War and the hideous death-tolls paid by both sides without military advantage to either.