saw ten generals afraid to fight.”  The insult, delivered in the snug personal safety which was suspected to be very dear to Stanton, was ridiculous as aimed at men who soon handled some of the most desperate battles of the war; but it is interesting as an expression of the unreasoning bitterness of the controversy then waging over the situation in Virginia, a controversy causing animosities vastly more fierce than any between Union soldiers and Confederates, animosities which have unfortunately lasted longer, and which can never be brought to the like final and conclusive arbitrament.  The purely military question quickly became snarled up with politics and was reduced to very inferior proportions in the noxious competition.  “Politics entered and strategy retired,” says General Webb, too truly.  McClellan himself conceived that the politicians were leagued to destroy him, and would rather see him discredited than the rebels whipped.  In later days the strong partisan loves and hatreds of our historical writers have perpetuated and increased all this bad blood, confusion, and obscurity.

The action of the council of generals was conclusive.  The President accepted McClellan’s plan.  Therein he did right; for undeniably it was his duty to allow his own inexperience to be controlled by the deliberate opinion of the best military experts in the country; and this fact is wholly independent of any opinion concerning the intrinsic or the comparative merits of the plans themselves.  Indeed, Mr. Lincoln had never expressed positive disapproval of McClellan’s plan per se, but only had been alarmed at what seemed to him its indirect result in exposing the capital.  To cover this point, he now made an imperative preliminary condition that this safety should be placed beyond a question.  He was emphatic and distinct in reiterating this proviso as fundamental.  The preponderance of professional testimony, from that day to this, has been to the effect that McClellan’s strategy was sound and able, and that Mr. Lincoln’s anxiety for the capital was groundless.  But in spite of all argument, and though military men may shed ink as if it were mere blood, in spite even of the contempt and almost ridicule which the President incurred at the pen of McClellan,[164] the civilian will retain a lurking sympathy with the President’s preference.  It is impossible not to reflect that precisely in proportion as the safety of the capital, for many weighty reasons, immeasurably outweighed any other possible consideration in the minds of the Northerners, so the desire to capture it would be equally overmastering in the estimation of the Southerners.  Why might not the rebels permit McClellan to march into Richmond, provided that at the same time they were marching into Washington?  Why might they not, in the language afterward used by General Lee, “swap Queens?” They would have a thousand fold the better of the exchange.  The Northern Queen was an incalculably