One biologist working with the group declared a new "golden age" of eagles, osprey and other waterfowl thriving within the tidal reach of the Chesapeake Bay, which includes the Potomac up to Washington.
By April 4, the regiment began to advance, along with many other elements of the Army of the Potomac, up the peninsula.
"I think that presidents actually do this more than it appears," said Guelzo, adding that Lincoln dispatched Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army Montgomery Meigs to circulate among the Army of the Potomac to pick up any negative "doggerel" or insults officers made about him.
"It's likely she'll come up the Potomac, disperse the Congress, and destroy the Capitol!
A deep draft vessel like the Merrimack, he finally replied, with her heavy armor, wouldn't make it up the Potomac past Kettle Bottom Shoals, and that's 50 miles away.
This was a major source of contention last year, with some religious leaders complaining that churches were buckling under fees assessed on all water customers to help pay for a federally mandated project to clean up the Potomac and Anacostia rivers.
His politics harked back to the politics of Lincoln, who read Shakespeare aloud as he was sailing up the Potomac days before his death and, through mysterious coincidence, chose "Macbeth" to recite, the very play in which Shakespeare is believed to have invented the word "assassination".
D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) joined several council members on Tuesday morning to unveil the city's new 20-year vision for creating an environmentally-friendly city, including 20-year goals to slash emissions and fossil fuel usage, plant new trees, clean up the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, and capture three-fourths of rainwater for reuse locally.
This can be seen most clearly with those British intellectuals - ranging across the political spectrum from the late Christopher Hitchens to the still extant Niall Ferguson - who, having paddled up the Potomac in their pith helmets, then went crazily native.
First the pundit world began calling it "Chesapeake Tuesday" but then someone evidently looked at a map and discovered that this left D.C. out, so they came up with "Potomac Tuesday" instead.
You could put a whole bunch of them in a plane and fly them across the Atlantic, drop them into Chesapeake Bay and they could sneak up the Potomac at night and we could wake up the next morning and find we had an Ayatollah in the White House.
