"My dear General, you have done nobly!"
Abraham Lincoln, however, realized the truth quickly. He removed Pope and in spite of the threat of his Cabinet to resign called McClellan to reorganize the dispirited army.
The North was in no mood to listen to the bombastic defense of General Pope. They were stunned by the sudden sweep of the Confederate army from the gates of Richmond on June first, to the defenses at Washington within sixty days with the loss of twenty thousand men under McClellan and twenty thousand more under Pope.
The armies of the Union had now been driven back to the point from which they had started on July 16, 1861. It had been necessary to withdraw Burnside's army from eastern North Carolina and the forces of the Union from western Virginia. The war had been transferred to the suburbs of Washington and the Northern people who had confidently expected McClellan to be in Richmond in June were now trembling for the safety of Pennsylvania and Maryland, to say nothing of the possibility of Confederate occupation of the Capital.
An aggressive movement of all the forces of the South under Lee in the East and Bragg and Johnston in the West was ordered.
In spite of the fact that Lee's army could not be properly shod—the supply of army shoes being inadequate and the lack of shoe factories a defect the Confederacy had yet been unable to remedy, the Southern Commander threw his army of barefooted veterans across the Potomac and boldly invaded Maryland on September the fifth.
The appearance of Stonewall Jackson on his entrance into Frederick City, Maryland, was described by a Northern war correspondent in graphic terms:
"Old Stonewall was the observed of all observers. He was dressed in the coarsest kind of homespun, seedy, and dirty at that. He wore an old hat which any Northern beggar would consider an insult to have offered him. In his general appearance he was in no respect to be distinguished from the mongrel barefoot crew who followed his fortunes. I had heard much of the decayed appearance of rebel soldiers,—but such a looking crowd! Ireland in her worst straits could present no parallel, and yet they glory in their shame!"
Lee's army was now fifty miles north of Washington, within striking distance of Baltimore. His strategy had completely puzzled the War Department of the Federal Government. McClellan was equally puzzled. Lincoln and his Cabinet believed Lee's movement into Maryland a feint to draw the army from the defense of the Capital, and, when this was accomplished, by a sudden swoop the Southern Commander would turn and capture the city.
While McClellan was thus halting in tragic indecision one of the unforeseen accidents of war occurred which put him in possession of Lee's plan of campaign and should have led to the annihilation of the Southern army. A copy of the order directing the movement of the Confederates from Frederick, Maryland, was thrown to the ground by a petulant officer to whom it was directed. It fell into the hands of a Federal soldier who hurried to McClellan's headquarters with the fateful document.