“If you will give satisfactory answers to the following questions, I shall gladly yield my plan to yours:—­

“1st.  Does not your plan involve a greatly larger expenditure of time and money than mine?

“2d.  Wherein is a victory more certain by your plan than mine?

“3d.  Wherein is a victory more valuable by your plan than mine?

“4th.  In fact, would it not be less valuable in this:  that it would break no great line of the enemy’s communications, while mine would?

“5th.  In case of disaster would not a retreat be more difficult by your plan than mine?”

To these queries McClellan replied by a long and elaborate exposition of his views.  He said that, if the President’s plan should be pursued successfully, the “results would be confined to the possession of the field of battle, the evacuation of the line of the upper Potomac by the enemy, and the moral effect of the victory.”  On the other hand, a movement in force by the route which he advocated “obliges the enemy to abandon his intrenched position at Manassas, in order to hasten to cover Richmond and Norfolk.”  That is to say, he expected to achieve by a manoeuvre what the President designed to effect by a battle, to be fought by inexperienced troops against an intrenched enemy.  He continued:  “This movement, if successful, gives us the capital, the communications, the supplies, of the rebels; Norfolk would fall; all the waters of the Chesapeake would be ours; all Virginia would be in our power, and the enemy forced to abandon Tennessee and North Carolina.  The alternative presented to the enemy would be, to beat us in a position selected by ourselves, disperse, or pass beneath the Caudine forks.”  In case of defeat the Union army would have a “perfectly secure retreat down the Peninsula upon Fort Monroe.”  “This letter,” he afterward wrote, “must have produced some effect upon the mind of the President!” The slur was unjust.  The President now and always considered the views of the general with a liberality of mind rarely to be met with in any man, and certainly never in McClellan himself.  In this instance the letter did in fact produce so much “effect upon the mind of the President” that he prepared to yield views which he held very strongly to views which he was charged with not being able to understand, and which he certainly could not bring himself actually to believe in.

Yet before quite taking this step he demanded that a council of the generals of division should be summoned to express their opinions.  This was done, with the result that McDowell, Sumner, Heintzelman, and Barnard voted against McClellan’s plan; Keyes voted for it, with the proviso “that no change should be made until the rebels were driven from their batteries on the Potomac.”  Fitz-John Porter, Franklin, W.F.  Smith, McCall, Blenker, Andrew Porter, and Naglee (of Hooker’s division) voted for it.  Stanton afterward said of this:  “We