On the same day Lincoln issued another general order accepting McClellan's plan for a flanking movement to the Virginia coast.[14]The Confederate lines at this time ran through Manassas--the point Lincoln wished McClellan to strike.It was to be known later that the Confederate General gave to Lincoln's views the high endorsement of assuming that they were the inevitable views that the Northern Commander,if he knew his business,would act upon.Therefore,he had been quietly preparing to withdraw his army to more defensible positions farther South.By a curious coincidence,his "strategic retreat"occurred immediately after McClellan had been given authority to do what he liked.On the ninth of March it was known at Washington that Manassas had been evacuated.
Whereupon,McClellan's fatal lack of humor permitted him to make a great blunder.The man who had refused to go to Manassas while the Confederates were there,marched an army to Manassas the moment he heard that they were gone--and then marched back again.This performance was instantly fixed upon for ridicule as McClellan's "promenade to Manassas."To Lincoln the news of the promenade seemed both a vindication of his own plan and crushing evidence that if he had insisted on his plan,the Confederate army would have been annihilated,the war in one cataclysm brought to an end.He was ridden,as most men were,by the delusion of one terrific battle that was to end all.In a bitterness of disappointment,his slowly tortured spirit burst into rage.The Committee was delighted.
For once,they approved of him.The next act of this man,ordinarily so gentle,seems hardly credible.By a stroke of his pen,he stripped McClellan of the office of Commanding General,reduced him to the rank of mere head of a local army,the army of the Potomac;furthermore,he permitted him to hear of his degradation through the heartless medium of the daily papers.[15]The functions of Commanding General were added to the duties of the Secretary of War.Stanton,now utterly merciless toward McClellan,instantly took possession of his office and seized his papers,for all the world as if he were pouncing upon the effects of a malefactor.That McClellan was not yet wholly spoiled was shown by the way he received this blow.It was the McClellan of the old days,the gallant gentleman of the year 1860,not the poseur of 1861,who wrote at once to Lincoln making no complaint,saying that his services belonged to his country in whatever capacity they might be required.
Again a council of subordinates was invoked to determine the next move.McClellan called together the newly made corps commanders and obtained their approval of a variation of his former plan.He now proposed to use Fortress Monroe as a base,and thence conduct an attack upon Richmond.Again,though with a touch of sullenness very rare in Lincoln,the President acquiesced.But he added a condition to McClellan's plan by issuing positive orders,March thirteenth,that it should not be carried out unless sufficient force was left at Washington to render the city impregnable.
During the next few days the Committee must have been quite satisfied with the President.For him,he was savage.The normal Lincoln,the man of immeasurable mercy,had temporarily vanished.McClellan's blunder had touched the one spring that roused the tiger in Lincoln.By letting slip a chance to terminate the war--as it seemed to that deluded Washington of March,1862--McClellan had converted Lincoln from a brooding gentleness to an incarnation of the last judgment.He told Hay he thought that in permitting McClellan to retain any command,he had shown him "very great kindness."[16]Apparently,he had no consciousness that he had been harsh in the mode of McClellan's abatement,no thought of the fine manliness of McClellan's reply.
During this period of Lincoln's brief vengefulness,Stanton thought that his time for clearing scores with McClellan had come.He even picked out the man who was to be rushed over other men's heads to the command of the army of the Potomac.
General Hitchcock,an accomplished soldier of the regular army,a grandson of Ethan Allen,who had grown old in honorable service,was summoned to Washington,and was "amazed"by having plumped at him the question,would he consent to succeed McClellan?Though General Hitchcock was not without faults--and there is an episode in his later relations with McClellan which his biographer discreetly omits--he was a modest man.He refused to consider Stanton's offer.But he consented to become the confidential adviser of the War Office.This was done after an interview with Lincoln who impressed on Hitchcock his sense of a great responsibility and of the fact that he "had no military knowledge"and that he must have advice.[17]Out of this congested sense of helplessness in Lincoln,joined with the new labors of the Secretary of War as executive head of all the armies,grew quickly another of those ill-omened,extra-constitutional war councils,one more wheel within the wheels,that were all doing their part to make the whole machine unworkable;distributing instead of concentrating power.This new council which came to be known as the Army Board,was made up of the heads of the Bureaus of the War Department with the addition of Hitchcock as "Advising General."Of the temper of the Army Board,composed as it was entirely of the satellites of Stanton,a confession in Hitchcock's diary speaks volumes.On the evening of the first day of their new relation,Stanton poured out to him such a quantity of oral evidence of McClellan's "incompetency"as to make this new recruit for anti-McClellanism "feel positively sick."[18]
