Precisely at this point came into operation the fatal effect of the lack of understanding between the President and the general as to the division of the forces.  In the plan of campaign, it had been designed to throw the corps of McDowell into the rear of Yorktown by such route as should seem expedient at the time of its arrival, probably landing it at Gloucester and moving it round by West Point.  This would have made Magruder’s position untenable at once, long before the natural end of the siege.  But at the very moment when McClellan’s left, in its advance, first came into actual collision with the enemy, he received news that the President had ordered McDowell to retain his division before Washington—­“the most infamous thing that history has recorded,” he afterward wrote.[10] Yet the explanation of this surprising news was so simple that surprise was unjustifiable.  On April 2, immediately after McClellan’s departure, the President inquired as to what had been done for the security of Washington.  General Wadsworth, commanding the defenses of the city, gave an alarming response:  19,000 or 20,000 entirely green troops, and a woeful insufficiency of artillery.  He said that while it was “very improbable” that the enemy would attack Washington, nevertheless the “numerical strength and the character” of his forces rendered them “entirely inadequate to and unfit for their important duty.”  Generals Hitchcock and Thomas corroborated this by reporting that the order to leave the city “entirely secure” had “not been fully complied with.”  Mr. Lincoln was horror-struck.  He had a right to be indignant, for those who ought to know assured him that his reiterated and most emphatic command had been disobeyed, and that what he chiefly cared to make safe had not been made safe.  He promptly determined to retain McDowell, and the order was issued on April 4.  Thereby he seriously attenuated, if he did not quite annihilate, the prospect of success for McClellan’s campaign.  It seems incredible and unexplainable that amid this condition of things, on April 3, an order was issued from the office of the secretary of war, to stop recruiting throughout the country!

This series of diminutions, says McClellan, had “removed nearly 60,000 men from my command, and reduced my force by more than one third....  The blow was most discouraging.  It frustrated all my plans for impending operations.  It fell when I was too deeply committed to withdraw....  It was a fatal error.”

Error or not, it was precisely what McClellan ought to have foreseen as likely to occur.  He had not foreseen it, however, and nothing mitigated the disappointment.  Unquestionably the act was of supreme gravity.  Was Mr. Lincoln right or wrong in doing it?  The question has been answered many times both Yea and Nay, and each side has been maintained with intense acrimony and perfect good faith.  It is not likely that it will ever be possible to say either that the Yeas have it, or that the Nays have it.[11] For while it is certain that what actually did happen coincided very accurately with McClellan’s expectations; on the other hand, it can never be known what might have happened if Lincoln had not held McDowell, and if, therefore, facts had not been what they were.