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1862.

CHAP. XX. called by himself, had decided that Washington could not be safely left without a covering force of 55,000, including the garrisons of the forts. When he had gone, General Wadsworth reported that he had left only nineteen thousand, and had ordered away nearly half of these. Two eminent generals in the War Department investigated this statement and found it true, whereupon the President ordered that McDowell's corps should for the present remain within reach of Washington. McClellan took with him to the Peninsula an aggregate force of over 100,000 men, afterwards largely increased. His own morning report of the 13th of April, signed by himself and his adjutant-general, shows that he had with him actually present for duty 100,970. With this overwhelming superiority of numbers he could have detached thirty thousand men at any moment to do the work that he had intended McDowell to do. But all the energy he might have employed in this work he diverted in attacking the Administration at Washington, which was doing all that it could do to support and provide for his army.

W. R. Vol. XI., Part III., p. 97.

The attitude of the President towards him at this time may be seen from the following letter of the 9th of April, in which Mr. Lincoln answers McClellan's complaints with as much consideration and kindness as a father would use towards a querulous and petulant child:

Your dispatches complaining that you are not properly sustained, while they do not offend me, do pain me very much.

Blenker's division was withdrawn from you before you left here, and you know the pressure under which I did it,

and, as I thought, acquiesced in it- certainly not without CHAP. XX. reluctance.

After you left, I ascertained that less than twenty thousand unorganized men, without a single field battery, were all you designed to be left for the defense of Washington and Manassas Junction, and part of this even was to go to General Hooker's old position. General Banks's corps, once designed for Manassas Junction, was diverted and tied up on the line of Winchester and Strasburg, and could not leave it without again exposing the upper Potomac and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. This presented, or would present when McDowell and Sumner should be gone, a great temptation to the enemy to turn back from the Rappahannock and sack Washington. My explicit order that Washington should, by the judgment of all the commanders of army corps, be left entirely secure, had been neglected. It was precisely this that drove me to detain McDowell.

I do not forget that I was satisfied with your arrangement to leave Banks at Manassas Junction; but when that arrangement was broken up, and nothing was substituted for it, of course I was constrained to substitute something for it myself. And allow me to ask, do you really think I should permit the line from Richmond via Manassas Junction to this city to be entirely open, except what resistance could be presented by less than twenty thousand unorganized troops? This is a question which the country will not allow me to evade.

There is a curious mystery about the number of troops now with you. When I telegraphed you on the 6th saying you had over 100,000 with you, I had just obtained from the Secretary of War a statement taken, as he said, from your own returns, making 108,000 then with you and en route to you. You now say you will have but 85,000 when all en route to you shall have reached you. How can the discrepancy of 23,000 be accounted for? 1

1 The discrepancy cannot be accounted for. General McClellan's official morning report of the 13th of April, four days after the date of the President's letter, gives the following: "Number of

troops composing the Army of the
Potomac after its disembarkation
on the Peninsula: Aggregate
present for duty, 100,970; on
special duty, sick, and in arrest,
4265; aggregate absent, 12,486

CHAP. XX.

W. R. Vol. XI., Part I., p. 15.

1862.

As to General Wool's command, I understand it is doing for you precisely what a like number of your own would have to do if that command was away.

I suppose the whole force which has gone forward for you is with you by this time, and if so, I think it is the precise time for you to strike a blow. By delay the enemy will relatively gain upon you—that is, he will gain faster by fortifications and reënforcements than you can by reënforcements alone. And once more let me tell you it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I am powerless to help this. You will do me the justice to remember I always insisted that going down the bay in search of a field, instead of fighting at or near Manassas, was only shifting and not surmounting a difficulty; that we would find the same enemy and the same or equal intrenchments at either place. The country will not fail to note, is now noting, that the present hesitation to move upon an intrenched enemy is but the story of Manassas repeated.

I beg to assure you that I have never written you or spoken to you in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as, in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can. But you must act.

These considerations produced no impression upon General McClellan. From the beginning to the end of the siege of Yorktown, his dispatches were one incessant cry for men and guns. These the Government furnished to the utmost extent possible, but nothing contented him. His hallucination of overwhelming forces opposed to him began again, as violent as it was during the winter. On the 8th of April he wrote to Admiral Goldsborough,

-total aggregate, 117,721."
Yet with statements like these on
file in the War Department, over
his own signature, he did not
hesitate to inform the President
that his force amounted to only
85,000; and even this sum

dwindled so considerably, as years rolled by, that in his article, in "Battles and Leaders" (Vol. II., p. 171), on the Peninsular Campaign, he gives his available fighting force as "" only some 67,000 for battle."

1862.

"I am probably weaker than they now are, or soon CHAP. XX. will be." His distress is sometimes comic in its expression. He writes on the 7th of April, "The Warwick River grows worse the more you look at it." While demanding McDowell's corps en bloc he asked on the 5th for Franklin's division, and on the 10th repeated this request, saying that although he wanted more, he would be responsible for the results if Franklin's division were sent him. The Government, overborne by his importunity, gave orders the same day that Franklin's division should go to him, and the arrangements for transporting it were made with the greatest diligence. He was delighted with this news; and although the weather was good and the roads improving, he did nothing but throw up earthworks until they came. They arrived on the 20th, and no use whatever was made of them! He kept them in the transports in which they had come down the bay more than two weeks in fact, until the day before the siege ended. It is hard to speak with proper moderation of such a disposition of this most valuable force, so clamorously demanded by General McClellan, and so generously sent him by the President. General Webb, the intimate friend and staff-officer of McClellan, thus speaks of it:

The latter officer [Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander of the Corps of Engineers] was then instructed to devise the proper arrangements and superintend the landing of the troops; but, extraordinary as it may seem, more than two weeks were consumed in the preliminaries, and when everything was nearly ready for the disembarkation the enemy had vanished from the scene. . . How long it would have taken the whole of McDowell's corps to disembark at this rate. . . the reader may judge; and yet for days it

CHAP. XX. had been General McClellan's pet project, in connection with his plan of campaign, to utilize McDowell in just this manner as a flanking column.

Webb, "The Peninsula," pp. 61, 62.

1862.

W. R.

Vol. XI., Part I., p. 406.

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The simple truth is, there was never an hour during General McClellan's command of the army that he had not more troops than he knew what to do with; yet he was always instinctively calling for more. Mr. Stanton one day said of him, with natural hyperbole: "If he had a million men, he would swear the enemy had two millions, and then he would sit down in the mud and yell for three." He repeatedly telegraphed to Washington that he expected to fight an equal or greater force - in fact, "all the available force of the rebels" in the neighborhood of Yorktown. We have the concurrent testimony of all the Confederate authorities that no such plan was ever thought of. Magruder's intentions, as well as his orders from Richmond, were merely to delay McClellan's advance as long as practicable. His success in this purpose surpassed his most sanguine expectations. In the early days of April he was hourly expecting an attack at some point on his thinly defended line of thirteen miles, guarded, as he says, by only 5000 men, exclusive of the 6000 who garrisoned Yorktown. "But to my utter surprise," he continues, "he permitted day after day to elapse without an assault." At last, no less to his astonishment than to his delight, Magruder discovered that McClellan was beginning a regular siege, which meant a gain of several weeks for the rebel defense of Richmond, and absolute safety for the concentration of rebel troops in the mean time.

It is now perfectly clear that McClellan could

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