1862.]

AN HISTORICAL PARALLEL.

217

issued in September, 1862 - seventeen months. In the one case, as in the other, the interval was filled with doubt, hesitation, and divided counsels; and Lincoln's reluctance finds its match in Washington's confession that when he took command of the army (after Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill had been fought) he still abhorred the idea of independence. And again, as the great Proclamation was preceded by the attempts of Frémont and Hunter, so the great Declaration had been preceded by those of Mendon, Mass., Chester, Penn., and Mecklenburg, N. C., which anticipated its essential propositions by two or three years. A period of fifteen or seventeen months, however slow for an individual, is perhaps for an entire people as rapid development of a radical purpose as we could have any reason to expect.

CHAPTER XIV.

BURNSIDE'S CAMPAIGN.

AFTER the battle of the Antietam, Lee withdrew to the neighborhood of Winchester, where he was reënforced till at the end of a month he had about sixty-eight thousand men. McClellan followed as far as the Potomac, and there seemed to plant his army, as if he expected it to sprout and increase itself like a field of corn. Ten days after he defeated Lee on the Antietam, he wrote to the President that he intended to stay where he was, and attack the enemy if they attempted to re-cross into Maryland! At the same time, he constantly called for unlimited reënforcements, and declared that, even if the city of Washington should be captured, it would not be a disaster so serious as the defeat of his army. Apparently it did not occur to General McClellan that these two contingencies were logically the same. For if Lee could have defeated that army, he could then have marched into Washington; or if he could have captured Washington without fighting the army whose business it was to defend it, the army would thereby be substantially defeated.

On the 1st of October the President visited General McClellan at his headquarters, and made himself acquainted with the condition of the army.

1862.]

M'CLELLAN'S INACTION.

219

Five days later he ordered McClellan to "cross the Potomac, and give battle to the enemy, or drive him south." The despatch added, "Your army must move now, while the roads are good. If you cross the river between the enemy and Washington, and cover the latter by your operation, you can be reënforced with thirty thousand men." Nevertheless, McClellan did not stir. Instead of obeying the order, he inquired what sort of troops they were that would be sent to him, and how many tents he could have, and said his army could not move without fresh supplies of shoes and clothing. While he was thus paltering, the Confederate General Stuart, who had ridden around his army on the Peninsula, with a small body of cavalry rode entirely around it again, eluding all efforts for his capture. On the 13th the President wrote a long, friendly letter to General McClellan, in which he gave him much excellent advice that he, as a trained soldier, ought not to have needed. A sentence or two will suggest the drift of it: "Are you not overcautious when you assume that you cannot do what the enemy is constantly doing? In coming to us, he [the enemy] tenders us an advantage which we should not waive. We should not so operate as to merely drive him away. . . . It is all easy if our troops march as well as the enemy, and it is unmanly to say they cannot do it." The letter had outlined a plan of campaign, but it closed with the words, characteristic of Lincoln's modesty in military matters, "This letter is in no sense an order." Twelve days more of fine

220

LINCOLN TO M'CLELLAN.

[1862.

weather were frittered away in renewed complaints, and such inquiries as whether the President wished him to move at once or wait for fresh horses, for the General said his horses were fatigued and had sore tongue. Here the President began to show some impatience, and wrote: "Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?" The General replied that they had been scouting, picketing, and making reconnoissances, and that the President had done injustice to the cavalry. Whereupon Mr. Lincoln wrote again : "Most certainly I intend no injustice to any, and if I have done any I deeply regret it. To be told, after more than five weeks' total inaction of the army, and during which period we had sent to that army every fresh horse we possibly could, amounting in the whole to 7,918, that the cavalry horses were too much fatigued to move, presented a very cheerless, almost hopeless, prospect for the future, and it may have forced something of impatience into my despatches." That day, October 26, McClellan began to cross the Potomac; but it was ten days (partly owing to heavy rains) before his army was all on the south side of the river, and meanwhile he had brought up new questions for discussion and invented new excuses for delay. He wanted to know to what extent the line of the Potomac was to be guarded; he wanted to leave strong garrisons at certain points, to prevent the army he was driving southward before him from rushing northward into Maryland again; he dis

1862.1

BURNSIDE IN COMMAND.

221

cussed the position of General Bragg's (Confeder ate) army, which was four hundred miles away beyond the mountains; he said the old regiments of his command must be filled up with recruits before they could go into action.

McClellan was a sore puzzle to the people of the loyal States. But large numbers of his men still believed in him, and-as is usual in such casesintensified their personal devotion in proportion as the distrust of the people at large was increased. After crossing the Potomac, he left a corps at Harper's Ferry, and was moving southward on the eastern side of the Blue Ridge, while Lee moved in the same direction on the western side, when, on November 7, the President solved the riddle that had vexed the country, by relieving him of the command.

The successor of General McClellan was Ambrose E. Burnside, then in his thirty-ninth year, who was graduated at West Point fifteen years before, had commanded cavalry during the Mexican war, had invented a breech-loading rifle, which was commercially unsuccessful, and at the breaking out of the rebellion was treasurer of the Illinois Central Railroad. When the 1st Rhode Island regiment went to Washington, four days after the President's first call for troops, Burnside was its colonel. He commanded a brigade at the first battle of Bull Run; led an expedition that captured Roanoke Island, New Berne, and Beaufort, N.C., in January, 1862; and commanded one wing of McClellan's army at South Mountain and