ke was behind him. Before him was the issue whether he should rest
satisfied with the deliberate judgment given by McClellan, or whether,
at considerable cost to the cause, he should make the assurance greater
out of deference to other advice. He chose the latter course. In so
doing, if he was not vacillating, he was at least incurring the evils of
vacillation. It would have been well if he could have found some quarter
in which permanently to repose his implicit faith, so that one
consistent plan could have been carried out without interference. Either
he had placed too much confidence in McClellan in the past, or he was
placing too little in him now. If he could not accept McClellan's
opinion as to the safety of Washington, in preference to that of
Wadsworth, Thomas, and Hitchcock, then he should have removed McClellan,
and replaced him with some one in whom he had sufficient confidence to
make smooth cooeperation a possibility. The present condition of things
was illogical and dangerous. Matters had been allowed to reach a very
advanced stage upon the theory that McClellan's judgment was
trustworthy; then suddenly the stress became more severe, and it seemed
that in the bottom of his mind the President did not thus implicitly
respect the general's wisdom. Yet he did not displace him, but only
opened his ears to other counsels; whereupon the buzz of contradictory,
excited, and alarming suggestions which came to him were more than
enough to unsettle any human judgment. General Webb speaks well and with
authority to this matter: "The dilemma lay here,--whose plans and advice
should he follow, where it was necessary for him to approve and
decide?... Should he lean implicitly on the general actually in command
of the armies, placed there by virtue of his presumed fitness for the
position, or upon other selected advisers? We are bold to say that it
was doubt and hesitation upon this point that occasioned many of the
blunders of the campaign. Instead of one mind, there were many minds
influencing the management of military affairs." A familiar culinary
proverb was receiving costly illustration.

But, setting the dispute aside, an important fact remains: shorn as he
was, McClellan was still strong enough to meet and to defeat his
opponents. If he had been one of the great generals of the world he
would have been in Richmond before May Day; but he was at his old trick
of exaggerating the hostile forces and the difficulties in