McClellan had determined to move his army by sea to some point further down the coast of the Chesapeake Bay.  The questions which Lincoln wrote to him requesting a written answer have never been adequately answered.  Did McClellan’s plan, he asked, require less time or money than Lincoln’s?  Did it make victory more certain?  Did it make it more valuable?  In case of disaster, did it make retreat more easy?  The one point for consideration in McClellan’s reply to him is that the enemy did not expect such a movement.  This was quite true; but the enemy was able to meet it, and McClellan was far too deliberate to reap any advantage from a surprise.  His original plan was to land near a place called Urbana on the estuary of the Rappahannock, not fifty miles east of Richmond.  When he heard that Johnston had retreated further south, he assumed, and ever after declared, that this was to anticipate his design upon Urbana, which, he said, must have reached the enemy’s ears through the loose chattering of the Administration.  As has been seen, this was quite untrue.  His project of going to Urbana was now changed, by himself or the Government, upon the unanimous advice of his chief subordinate generals, into a movement to Fort Monroe, which he had even before regarded as preferable to a direct advance southwards.  A few days after Johnston’s retreat, the War Department began the embarkation of his troops for this point.  Fort Monroe is at the end of the peninsula which lies between the estuaries of the York River on the north and the James on the south.  Near the base of this projection of land, seventy-five miles from Fort Monroe, stands Richmond.  On April 2, 1862, McClellan himself landed to begin the celebrated Peninsula Campaign which was to close in disappointment at the end of July.

Before the troops were sent to the Peninsula several things were to be done.  An expedition to restore communication westward by the Baltimore and Ohio Rail way involved bridging the Potomac with boats which were to be brought by canal.  It collapsed because McClellan’s boats were six inches too wide for the canal locks.  Then Lincoln had insisted that the navigation of the lower Potomac should be made free from the menace of Confederate batteries which, if McClellan would have co-operated with the Navy Department, would have been cleared away long before.  This was now done, and though a new peril to the transportation of McClellan’s army suddenly and dramatically disclosed itself, it was as suddenly and dramatically removed.  In the hasty abandonment of Norfolk harbour on the south of the James estuary by the North, a screw steamer called the Merrimac had been partly burnt and scuttled by the North.  On March 1 she steamed out of the harbour in sight of the North.  The Confederates had raised her and converted her into an ironclad.  Three wooden ships of the North gave gallant but useless fight to her and were destroyed that day; and the news spread