as a “snubbing.”  Naturally those who were known to be the chief promoters of this “snubbing,” and to have been highly gratified by it, now looked ruefully on the evident necessity of suddenly cutting it short, and requesting the snubbed individual to assume the role of their rescuer.  McClellan’s more prominent enemies could not and would not agree to this.  Three members of the cabinet even went so far as formally to put in writing their protest against restoring him to the command of any army at all; while Stanton actually tried to frighten the President by a petty threat of personal consequences.  But this was foolish.  The crisis was of the kind which induced Mr. Lincoln to exercise power, decisively.  On this occasion his impersonal, unimpassioned temperament left his judgment free to work with evenness and clearness amid the whirl of momentous events and the clash of angry tongues.  No one could say that he had been a partisan either for or against McClellan, and his wise reticence in the past gave him in the present the privilege of untrammeled action.  So he settled the matter at once by ordering that McClellan should have command within the defenses of Washington.

By this act the President gave extreme offense to the numerous and strenuous band with whom hatred of the Democratic general had become a sort of religion; and upon this occasion even Messrs. Nicolay and Hay seem more inclined to apologize for their idol than to defend him.  In point of fact, nothing can be more misplaced than either apology or defense, except criticism.  Mr. Lincoln could have done no wiser thing.  He was simply setting in charge of the immediate business the man who could do that especial business best.  It was not a question of a battle or a campaign, neither of which was for the moment imminent; but it was a question of reorganizing masses of disorganized troops and getting them into shape for battles and campaigns in the future.  Only the intensity of hatred could make any man blind to McClellan’s capacity for such work; and what he might be for other work was a matter of no consequence just now.  Lincoln simply applied to the instant need the most effective help, without looking far afield to study remote consequences.  Two remarks, said to have been made by him at this time, indicate his accurate appreciation of the occasion and the man:  “There is no one in the army who can man these fortifications and lick these troops of ours into shape half so well as he can.”  “We must use the tools we have; if he cannot fight himself, he excels in making others ready to fight.”

On September 1 Halleck verbally instructed McClellan to take command of the defenses of Washington, defining this to mean strictly “the works and their garrisons.”  McClellan says that later on the same day he had an interview with the President, in which the President said that he had “always been a friend” of the general, and asked as a favor that the general would request his personal friends among the principal