During this period of Lincoln’s brief vengefulness, Stanton thought that his time for clearing scores with McClellan had come.  He even picked out the man who was to be rushed over other men’s heads to the command of the army of the Potomac.  General Hitchcock, an accomplished soldier of the regular army, a grandson of Ethan Allen, who had grown old in honorable service, was summoned to Washington, and was “amazed” by having plumped at him the question, would he consent to succeed McClellan?  Though General Hitchcock was not without faults—­and there is an episode in his later relations with McClellan which his biographer discreetly omits—­he was a modest man.  He refused to consider Stanton’s offer.  But he consented to become the confidential adviser of the War Office.  This was done after an interview with Lincoln who impressed on Hitchcock his sense of a great responsibility and of the fact that he “had no military knowledge” and that he must have advice.(17) Out of this congested sense of helplessness in Lincoln, joined with the new labors of the Secretary of War as executive head of all the armies, grew quickly another of those ill-omened, extra-constitutional war councils, one more wheel within the wheels, that were all doing their part to make the whole machine unworkable; distributing instead of concentrating power.  This new council which came to be known as the Army Board, was made up of the heads of the Bureaus of the War Department with the addition of Hitchcock as “Advising General.”  Of the temper of the Army Board, composed as it was entirely of the satellites of Stanton, a confession in Hitchcock’s diary speaks volumes.  On the evening of the first day of their new relation, Stanton poured out to him such a quantity of oral evidence of McClellan’s “incompetency” as to make this new recruit for anti-McClellanism “feel positively sick."(18)

By permitting this added source of confusion among his advisers, Lincoln treated himself much as he had already treated McClellan.  By going over McClellan’s head to take advice from his subordinates he had put the General on a leash; now, by setting Hitchcock and the experts in the seat of judgment, he virtually, for a short while, put himself on a leash.  Thus had come into tacit but real power three military councils none of which was recognized as such by law—­the Council of the Subordinates behind McClellan; the Council of the Experts behind Lincoln; the Council of the Jacobins, called The Committee, behind them all.

The political pressure on Lincoln now changed its tack.  Its unfailing zeal to discredit McClellan assumed the form of insisting that he had a secret purpose in waiting to get his army away from Washington, that he was scheming to leave the city open to the Confederates, to “uncover” it, as the soldiers said.  By way of focussing the matter on a definite issue, his enemies demanded that he detach from his army and assign to the defense of Washington, a division which was supposed to be peculiarly