Unfortunately, right at the outset of this new campaign, General McClellan’s incapacity and want of candor once more became sharply evident.  In the plan formulated by the four corps commanders, and approved by himself, as well as emphatically repeated by the President’s instructions, was the essential requirement that Washington should be left entirely secure.  Learning that the general had neglected this positive injunction, the President ordered McDowell’s corps to remain for the protection of the capital; and when the general complained of this, Mr. Lincoln wrote him on April 9: 

“After you left I ascertained that less than twenty thousand unorganized men, without a single field-battery, were all you designed to be left for the defense of Washington and Manassas Junction; and part of this, even, was to go to General Hooker’s old position.  General Banks’s corps, once designed for Manassas Junction, was divided and tied up on the line of Winchester and Strasburg, and could not leave it without again exposing the upper Potomac and the Baltimore and Ohio railroad.  This presented (or would present when McDowell and Sumner should be gone) a great temptation to the enemy to turn back from the Rappahannock and sack Washington.  My explicit order that Washington should, by the judgment of all the commanders of corps, be left entirely secure, had been neglected.  It was precisely this that drove me to detain McDowell.

“I do not forget that I was satisfied with your arrangement to leave Banks at Manassas Junction; but when that arrangement was broken up and nothing was substituted for it, of course I was not satisfied.  I was constrained to substitute something for it myself.”

“And now allow me to ask, do you really think I should permit the line from Richmond via Manassas Junction to this city to be entirely open, except what resistance could be presented by less than twenty thousand unorganized troops?  This is a question which the country will not allow me to evade....”

“By delay, the enemy will relatively gain upon you—­that is, he will gain faster by fortifications and reinforcements than you can by reinforcements alone.  And once more let me tell you it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow.  I am powerless to help this.  You will do me the justice to remember I always insisted that going down the bay in search of a field, instead of fighting at or near Manassas, was only shifting and not surmounting a difficulty; that we would find the same enemy and the same or equal intrenchments at either place.  The country will not fail to note—­is noting now—­that the present hesitation to move upon an intrenched enemy is but the story of Manassas repeated.”