By this time, the advance along the Peninsula had so completely “relieved the front of Washington from pressure,” that Mr. Lincoln and his advisers, reassured as to the safety of that city, now saw their way clear to make McDowell’s corps, strengthened to a force of 41,000 men, contribute actively to McClellan’s assistance.  They could not, indeed, bring themselves to move it by water, as McClellan desired; but the President ordered McDowell to move down from Fredericksburg, where he now lay, towards McClellan’s right wing, which McClellan was ordered to extend to the north of Richmond in order to meet him.  But, in the words of the Comte de Paris, “an absurd restriction revealed the old mistrusts and fears.”  For McDowell was strictly ordered not to uncover the capital; also, with a decisive emphasis indicative of an uneasy suspicion, McClellan was forbidden to dispose of McDowell’s force in contravention of this still primary purpose.  Whether McDowell was under McClellan’s control, or retained an independent command, was left curiously vague, until McClellan forced a distinct understanding.

Although McClellan, writing to Lincoln, condemned rather sharply the method selected for giving to him the aid so long implored, yet he felt that, even as it came to him, he could make it serve his turn.  Though he grumbled at the President’s unmilitary ways, he afterward admitted that the “cheering news” made him “confident” of being “sufficiently strong to overpower the large army confronting” him.  There was no doubt of it.  He immediately extended his right wing; May 24, he drove the Confederates out of Mechanicsville; May 26, General Porter took position at Hanover Junction only fifteen miles from McDowell’s head of column, which had advanced eight miles out of Fredericksburg.  The situation was not unpromising; but unfortunately that little interval of fifteen miles was never to be closed up.

May 24, Mr. Lincoln wrote to McClellan, and after suggesting sundry advisable movements, he said:  “McDowell and Shields[14] both say they can, and positively will, move Monday morning.”  Monday was the 26th.  In point of fact, McDowell, feeling time to be of great value, urged the President to let him move on the morning of Sunday, the 25th; but Mr. Lincoln positively refused; the battle of Bull Run had been fought on a Sunday, and he dreaded the omen.[15] This feeling which he had about days was often illustrated, and probably the reader has observed that he seemed to like dates already marked by prestige or good luck; thus he had convened Congress for July 4, and had ordered the general advance of the armies for February 22; it was an indication of the curious thread of superstition which ran through his strange nature,—­a remnant of his youth and the mysterious influence of the wilderness.  But worse than a superstitious postponement arrived before nightfall on Saturday.  A dispatch from Lincoln to McClellan, dated at four o’clock that