To Lincoln the news of the promenade seemed both a vindication of his own plan and crushing evidence that if he had insisted on his plan, the Confederate army would have been annihilated, the war in one cataclysm brought to an end.  He was ridden, as most men were, by the delusion of one terrific battle that was to end all.  In a bitterness of disappointment, his slowly tortured spirit burst into rage.  The Committee was delighted.  For once, they approved of him.  The next act of this man, ordinarily so gentle, seems hardly credible.  By a stroke of his pen, he stripped McClellan of the office of Commanding General, reduced him to the rank of mere head of a local army, the army of the Potomac; furthermore, he permitted him to hear of his degradation through the heartless medium of the daily papers.(15) The functions of Commanding General were added to the duties of the Secretary of War.  Stanton, now utterly merciless toward McClellan, instantly took possession of his office and seized his papers, for all the world as if he were pouncing upon the effects of a malefactor.  That McClellan was not yet wholly spoiled was shown by the way he received this blow.  It was the McClellan of the old days, the gallant gentleman of the year 1860, not the poseur of 1861, who wrote at once to Lincoln making no complaint, saying that his services belonged to his country in whatever capacity they might be required.

Again a council of subordinates was invoked to determine the next move.  McClellan called together the newly made corps commanders and obtained their approval of a variation of his former plan.  He now proposed to use Fortress Monroe as a base, and thence conduct an attack upon Richmond.  Again, though with a touch of sullenness very rare in Lincoln, the President acquiesced.  But he added a condition to McClellan’s plan by issuing positive orders, March thirteenth, that it should not be carried out unless sufficient force was left at Washington to render the city impregnable.

During the next few days the Committee must have been quite satisfied with the President.  For him, he was savage.  The normal Lincoln, the man of immeasurable mercy, had temporarily vanished.  McClellan’s blunder had touched the one spring that roused the tiger in Lincoln.  By letting slip a chance to terminate the war—­as it seemed to that deluded Washington of March, 1862—­McClellan had converted Lincoln from a brooding gentleness to an incarnation of the last judgment.  He told Hay he thought that in permitting McClellan to retain any command, he had shown him “very great kindness."(16) Apparently, he had no consciousness that he had been harsh in the mode of McClellan’s abatement, no thought of the fine manliness of McClellan’s reply.