actually get in motion?  After leaving all that would be necessary, how many troops could join the movement from southwest of the river?  How many from northeast of it?” Then he proceeded briefly to hint rather than distinctly to suggest that plan of a direct advance by way of Centreville and Manassas, which later on he persistently advocated.  Ten days elapsed before McClellan returned answers, which then came in a shape too curt to be respectful.  Almost immediately afterward the general fell ill, an occurrence which seemed to his detractors a most aggravating and unjustifiable intervention of Nature herself in behalf of his policy of delay.

On January 10 a dispatch from General Halleck represented in his department also a condition of check and helplessness.  Lincoln noted upon it:  “Exceedingly discouraging.  As everywhere else, nothing can be done.”  Yet something must be done, for the game was not to be abandoned.  Under this pressure, on this same day, he visited McClellan, but could not see him; nor could he get any definite idea how long might be the duration of the typhoid fever, the lingering and uncertain disease which had laid the general low.  Accordingly he summoned General McDowell and General Franklin to discuss with him that evening the military situation.  The secretaries of state and of the treasury, and the assistant secretary of war, also came.  The President, says McDowell, “was greatly disturbed at the state of affairs,” “was in great distress,” and said that, “if something was not soon done, the bottom would be out of the whole affair; and if General McClellan did not want to use the army, he would like to ‘borrow it,’ provided he could see how it could be made to do something.”  The two generals were directed to inform themselves concerning the “actual condition of the army,” and to come again the next day.  Conferences followed on January 11 and 12, Postmaster-General Blair and General Meigs being added to the council.  The postmaster-general condemned a direct advance as “strategically defective,” while Chase descanted on the “moral power” of a victory.  The picture of the two civilians injecting their military suggestions is not reassuring.  Meigs is somewhat vaguely reported to have favored a “battle in front.”

McDowell and Franklin had not felt justified in communicating these occurrences to McClellan, because the President had marked his order to them “private and confidential.”  But the commander heard rumors of what was going forward,[156] and on January 12 he came from his sick-room to see the President; he was “looking quite well,” and apparently was “able to assume the charge of the army.”  The apparition put a different complexion upon the pending discussions.  On the 13th the same gentlemen met, but now with the addition of General McClellan.  The situation was embarrassing.  McClellan took scant pains to conceal his resentment.  McDowell, at the request of the President, explained