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."

General McClellan's expectations in coming to the Peninsula, first, that
he would find few or no rebel intrenchments, and, second, that he would
be able to make rapid movements, at once signally failed. On the
afternoon of the second day's march he came to the first line of the
enemy's defenses, heavy fortifications at Yorktown on the York River,
and a strong line of intrenchments and dams flooding the Warwick River,
extending to an impassable inlet from James River. But the situation was
not yet desperate. Magruder, the Confederate commander, had only eleven
thousand men to defend Yorktown and the thirteen-mile line of the
Warwick. McClellan, on the contrary, had fifty thousand at hand, and as
many more within call, with which to break the Confederate line and
continue his proposed "rapid movements." But now, without any adequate
reconnaissance or other vigorous effort, he at once gave up his thoughts
of rapid movement, one of the main advantages he had always claimed for
the water route, and adopted the slow expedient of a siege of Yorktown.
Not alone was his original plan of campaign demonstrated to be faulty,
but by this change in the method of its execution it became fatal.

It would be weary and exasperat