his way. On
April 7 he thought that Johnston and the whole Confederate army were at
Yorktown; whereas Johnston's advance division arrived there on the 10th;
the other divisions came several days later, and Johnston himself
arrived only on the 14th.

On April 9 Mr. Lincoln presented his own view of the situation in this
letter to the general:--

"Your dispatches complaining that you are not properly sustained, while
they do not offend me, do pain me very much.

... "After you left I ascertained that less than 20,000 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 diverted 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 implicit order that Washington should, by the judgment of
all the commanders of army 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 constrained to
substitute something for it myself. And 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 20,000 unorganized troops? This is a question
which the country will not allow me to evade.

"There is a curious mystery about the number of troops now with you.
When I telegraphed you on the 6th, saying you had over a hundred
thousand with you, I had just obtained from the secretary of war a
statement taken, as he said, from your own returns, making 108,000 then
with you and en route to you. You now say you will have but 85,000 when
all en route to you shall have reached you. How can the discrepancy of
23,000 be accounted for?

"As to General Wool's command,[12] I understand it is doing for you
precisely what a like number of your own would have to do if that
command was away.

"I suppose the whole f