From this moment the debate between the President and the General with regard to plans of campaign approached the nature of a dispute.  McClellan repeated his demand for more time in which to prepare.  He objected to the course of advance which the President wished him to pursue.  Lincoln, seeing the situation first of all as a political problem, grounded his thought upon two ideas neither of which was shared by McClellan:  the idea that the supreme consideration was the safety of Washington; the resultant idea that McClellan should move directly south, keeping his whole army constantly between Washington and the enemy.  McClellan wished to treat Washington as but one important detail in his strategy; he had a grandiose scheme for a wide flanking movement, for taking the bulk of his army by sea to the coast of Virginia, and thus to draw the Confederate army homeward for a duel to the death under the walls of Richmond.  Lincoln, neither then nor afterward more than an amateur in strategy, was deeply alarmed by this bold mode of procedure.  His political instinct told him that if there was any slip and Washington was taken, even briefly, by the Confederates, the game was up.  He was still further alarmed when he found that some of the eider generals held views resembling his own.(9) To his modest, still groping mind, this was a trying situation.  In the President lay the ultimate responsibility for every move the army should make.  And whose advice should he accept as authoritative?  The first time he asked himself that question, such peace of mind as had survived the harassing year 1861 left him, not to return for many a day.

At this moment of crises, occurred one of his keenest personal afflictions.  His little son Willie sickened and died.  Lincoln’s relation to his children was very close, very tender.  Many anecdotes show this boy frolicking about the White House, a licensed intruder everywhere.  Another flood of anecdotes preserve the stupefying grief of his father after the child’s death.  Of these latter, the most extreme which portray Lincoln toward the close of February so unnerved as to be incapable of public duty, may be dismissed as apocryphal.  But there can be no doubt that his unhappiness was too great for the vain measurement of descriptive words; that it intensified the nervous mood which had already possessed him; that anxiety, deepening at times into terrible alarm, became his constant companion.

In his dread and sorrow, his dilemma grew daily more intolerable.  McClellan had opposed so stoutly the Washington birthday order that Lincoln had permitted him to ignore it.  He was still wavering which advice to take, McClellan’s or the elder generals’.  To remove McClellan, to try at this critical moment some other general, did not occur to him as a rational possibility.  But somehow he felt he must justify himself to himself for yielding to McClellan’ s views.  In his zeal to secure some judgment more authoritative than his own, he took a further