forces upon McClellan’s right flank, which began on the 26th, placed him in what appears to have been, as he himself thought it, a situation of great danger.  Lee is said to have “read McClellan like an open book,” playing upon his caution, which made him, while his subordinates fought, more anxious to secure their retreat than to seize upon any advantage they gained.  But Lee’s reading deceived him in one respect.  He had counted upon McClellan’s retreating, but thought he would retreat under difficulties right down the Peninsula to his original base and be thoroughly cut up on the way.  But on July 2 McClellan with great skill withdrew his whole army to Harrison’s Landing far up the James estuary, having effected with the Navy a complete transference of his base.  Here his army lay in a position of security; they might yet threaten Richmond, and McClellan’s soldiers still believed in him.  But the South was led by a great commander and had now learned to give him unbounded confidence; there was some excuse for a panic in Wall Street, and every reason for dejection in the North.

On the third of the Seven Days, McClellan, much moved by the sight of dead and wounded comrades, sent a gloomy telegram to the Secretary of War, appealing with excessive eloquence for more men.  “I only wish to say to the President,” he remarked in it, “that I think he is wrong in regarding me as ungenerous when I said that my force was too weak.”  He concluded:  “If I save the army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you nor to any other persons in Washington.  You have done your best to sacrifice this army.”  Stanton still expressed the extraordinary hope that Richmond would fall in a day or two.  He had lately committed the folly of suspending enlistment, an act which, though of course there is an explanation of it, must rank as the one first-rate blunder of Lincoln’s Administration.  He was now negotiating through the astute Seward for offers from the State Governors of a levy of 300,000 men to follow up McClellan’s success.  Lincoln, as was his way, feared the worst.  He seems at one moment to have had fears for McClellan’s sanity.  But he telegraphed, himself, an answer to him, which affords as fair an example as can be given of his characteristic manner.  “Save your army at all events.  Will send reinforcements as fast as we can.  Of course they cannot reach you to-day or to-morrow, or next day.  I have not said you were ungenerous for saying you needed reinforcements.  I thought you were ungenerous in assuming that I did not send them as fast as I could.  I feel any misfortune to you and your army quite as keenly as you feel it yourself.  If you have had a drawn battle or repulse, it is the price we pay for the enemy not being in Washington.  We protected Washington and the enemy concentrated on you.  Had we stripped Washington, he would have been upon us before the troops could have gotten to you.  Less than a week ago you notified us reinforcements were leaving Richmond to come in front of us.  It is the nature of the case, and neither you nor the Government are to blame.  Please tell me at once the present condition and aspect of things.”