The records now show that at the time of the slow advance of McClellan’s army by the Williamsburg Peninsula, General Magruder had been able, with a few thousand men and with dummy guns made of logs, to give the impression that a substantial army was blocking the way to Richmond.  McClellan’s advance was, therefore, made with the utmost “conservatism,” enabling General Johnston to collect back of Magruder the army that was finally to drive McClellan back to his base.  It is further in evidence from the later records that when some weeks later General Johnston concentrated his army at Gaines’s Mill upon Porter, who was separated from McClellan by the Chickahominy, there was but an inconsiderable force between McClellan and Richmond.

At the close of the seven days’ retreat, McClellan, who had with a magnificent army thrown away a series of positions, writes to Lincoln that he (Lincoln) “had sacrificed the army.”  In another letter, McClellan lays down the laws of a national policy with a completeness and a dictatorial utterance such as would hardly have been justified if he had succeeded through his own military genius in bringing the War to a close, but which, coming from a defeated general, was ridiculous enough.  Lincoln’s correspondence with McClellan brings out the infinite patience of the President, and his desire to make sure that before putting the General to one side as a vainglorious incompetent, he had been allowed the fullest possible test.  Lincoln passes over without reference and apparently without thought the long series of impertinent impersonalities of McClellan.  In this correspondence, as in all his correspondence, the great captain showed himself absolutely devoted to the cause he had in mind.  Early in the year, months before the Peninsular campaign, when McClellan had had the army in camp for a series of months without expressing the least intention of action, Lincoln had in talking with the Secretary of War used the expression:  “If General McClellan does not want to use the army just now, I would like to borrow it for a while.”  That was as far as the Commander-in-chief ever went in criticism of the General in the field.  While operations in Virginia, conducted by a vacillating and vainglorious engineer officer, gave little encouragement, something was being done to advance the cause of the Union in the West.  In 1862, a young man named Grant, who had returned to the army and who had been trusted with the command of a few brigades, captured Fort Donelson and thus opened the Tennessee River to the advance of the army southward.  The capture of Fort Donelson was rendered possible by the use of mortars and was the first occasion in the war in which mortars had been brought to bear.  I chanced to come into touch with the record of the preparation of the mortars that were supplied to Grant’s army at Cairo.  Sometime in the nineties I was sojourning with the late Abram S. Hewitt at his home in Ringwood, New Jersey.  I noticed, in looking