"2d. Wherein is a victory more certain by your plan than mine?
"3d. Wherein is a victory more valuable by your plan than mine?
"4th. In fact, would it not be less valuable in this: that it would break no great line of the enemy's communications, while mine would?
"5th. In case of disaster would not a retreat be more difficult by your plan than mine?"
To these queries McClellan replied by a long and elaborate exposition of his views. He said that, if the President's plan should be pursued successfully, the "results would be confined to the possession of the field of battle, the evacuation of the line of the upper Potomac by the enemy, and the moral effect of the victory." On the other hand, a movement in force by the route which he advocated "obliges the enemy to abandon his intrenched position at Manassas, in order to hasten
to cover Richmond and Norfolk." That is to say, he expected to achieve by a manoeuvre what the President designed to effect by a battle, to be fought by inexperienced troops against an intrenched enemy. He continued: "This movement, if successful, gives us the capital, the communications, the supplies, of the rebels; Norfolk would fall; all the waters of the Chesapeake would be ours; all Virginia would be in our power, and the enemy forced to abandon Tennessee and North Carolina. The alternative presented to the enemy would be, to beat us in a position selected by ourselves, disperse, or pass beneath the Caudine forks." In case of defeat the Union army would have a "perfectly secure retreat down the Peninsula upon Fort Monroe." "This letter," he afterward wrote, "must have produced some effect upon the mind of the President!" The slur was unjust. The President now and always considered the views of the general with a liberality of mind rarely to be met with in any man, and certainly never in McClellan himself. In this instance the letter did in fact produce so much "effect upon the mind of the President" that he prepared to yield views which he held very strongly to views which he was charged with not being able to understand, and which he certainly could not bring himself actually to believe in.
Yet before quite taking this step he demanded that a council of the generals of division should be summoned to express their opinions. This was
done, with the result that McDowell, Sumner, Heintzelman, and Barnard voted against McClellan's plan; Keyes voted for it, with the proviso "that no change should be made until the rebels were driven from their batteries on the Potomac." Fitz-John Porter, Franklin, W.F. Smith, McCall, Blenker, Andrew Porter, and Naglee (of Hooker's division) voted for it. Stanton afterward said of this: "We saw ten generals afraid to fight." The insult, delivered in the snug personal safety which was suspected to be very dear to Stanton, was ridiculous as aimed at men who soon handled some of the most desperate battles of the war; but it is interesting as an expression of the unreasoning bitterness of the controversy then waging over the situation in Virginia, a controversy causing animosities vastly more fierce than any between Union soldiers and Confederates, animosities which have unfortunately lasted longer, and which can never be brought to the like final and conclusive arbitrament. The purely military question quickly became snarled up with politics and was reduced to very inferior proportions in the noxious competition. "Politics entered and strategy retired," says General Webb, too truly. McClellan himself conceived that the politicians were leagued to destroy him, and would rather see him discredited than the rebels whipped. In later days the strong partisan loves and hatreds of our historical writers have perpetuated and increased all this bad blood, confusion, and obscurity.
The action of the council of generals was conclusive. The President accepted McClellan's plan. Therein he did right; for undeniably it was his duty to allow his own inexperience to be controlled by the deliberate opinion of the best military experts in the country; and this fact is wholly independent of any opinion concerning the intrinsic or the comparative merits of the plans themselves. Indeed, Mr. Lincoln had never expressed positive disapproval of McClellan's plan per se, but only had been alarmed at what seemed to him its indirect result in exposing the capital. To cover this point, he now made an imperative preliminary condition that this safety should be placed beyond a question. He was emphatic and distinct in reiterating this proviso as fundamental. The preponderance of professional testimony, from that day to this, has been to the effect that McClellan's strategy was sound and able, and that Mr. Lincoln's anxiety for the capital was groundless. But in spite of all argument, and though military men may shed ink as if it were mere blood, in spite even of the contempt and almost ridicule which the President incurred at the pen of McClellan,[[164]] the civilian will retain a lurking sympathy with the President's preference. It is
impossible not to reflect that precisely in proportion as the safety of the capital, for many weighty reasons, immeasurably outweighed any other possible consideration in the minds of the Northerners, so the desire to capture it would be equally overmastering in the estimation of the Southerners. Why might not the rebels permit McClellan to march into Richmond, provided that at the same time they were marching into Washington? Why might they not, in the language afterward used by General Lee, "swap Queens?" They would have a thousand fold the better of the exchange. The Northern Queen was an incalculably more valuable piece on the board than was her Southern rival. With the Northern government in flight, Maryland would go to the Confederacy, and European recognition would be sure and immediate; and these two facts might, almost surely would, be conclusive against the Northern cause. Moreover, memory will obstinately bring up the fact that long afterward, when General Grant was pursuing a route to Richmond strategically not dissimilar to that proposed by McClellan, and when all the circumstances made the danger of a successful attack upon Washington much less than it was in the spring of 1862, the rebels actually all but captured the city; and it was saved not alone by a rapidity of movement which would have been impossible in the early stages of the war, but also by what must be called the aid of good luck. It is difficult to see why General Jackson in 1862