The Secretary of the Navy was familiar with the omens, and on December 14 they were very bad. It was generally known in Washington that a great battle had been fought at Fredericksburg, and while the War Department had nothing whatever to say about it, Mr. Welles felt that it was giving the show away by the very manner in which it kept silent. He had found, Mr. Welles noted in his diary, that whenever the War Department had unwelcome news which it would greatly prefer not to publish, it managed to perform the purely negative act of not publishing "with a great deal of fuss and mystery, a shuffling over of papers and maps, and a far-reaching vacant gaze at something undefined and indescribable."
- from page 63, Glory Road