- 04 Nov 2020 09:11
#15132694
November 5, Wednesday
To President Lincoln, it looks like the enemy has gotten away again. McClellan has failed his test. Lincoln confides to his old friend and trusted adviser, Francis Preston Blair, that he “had tried long enough to bore with an auger too dull to take hold. He has got the slows, Mr. Blair.” There is more to it. Lincoln has indulged McClellan’s “slows” before, but times have changed. As a conservative Democrat, McClellan stands for limited war and compromise. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation has doomed all possibility of meeting the Confederacy halfway. For the North, the war is now being waged not only to preserve the Union but to abolish slavery. McClellan, with his overwhelming caution and his reluctance to sacrifice the lives of his soldiers, does not possess the ardor to fight such an all-out war.
So today Lincoln has orders drawn up relieving McClellan of command of the Army of the Potomac and replacing him with General Burnside. Secretary of War Stanton is so worried that McClellan might refuse to step down, or that the army might mutiny, that he arranges extraordinary procedures for delivering the orders. He entrusts them to his high-ranking assistant, Brigadier General Catharinus P. Buckingham, and instructs him to take a special train to the army’s field headquarters north of Warrenton.
There is a Federal reconnaissance from La Grange toward Somerset, Tennessee; action near Nashville; an affair near Piketon, Kentucky; a skirmish at Jumpertown, Mississippi; and action at Lamar, Missouri; as well as operations lasting several days from Helena to Moro, Arkansas; in Augusta, Bath, and Highland counties, Virginia; and Pendleton and Pocahontas counties, western Virginia.
To President Lincoln, it looks like the enemy has gotten away again. McClellan has failed his test. Lincoln confides to his old friend and trusted adviser, Francis Preston Blair, that he “had tried long enough to bore with an auger too dull to take hold. He has got the slows, Mr. Blair.” There is more to it. Lincoln has indulged McClellan’s “slows” before, but times have changed. As a conservative Democrat, McClellan stands for limited war and compromise. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation has doomed all possibility of meeting the Confederacy halfway. For the North, the war is now being waged not only to preserve the Union but to abolish slavery. McClellan, with his overwhelming caution and his reluctance to sacrifice the lives of his soldiers, does not possess the ardor to fight such an all-out war.
So today Lincoln has orders drawn up relieving McClellan of command of the Army of the Potomac and replacing him with General Burnside. Secretary of War Stanton is so worried that McClellan might refuse to step down, or that the army might mutiny, that he arranges extraordinary procedures for delivering the orders. He entrusts them to his high-ranking assistant, Brigadier General Catharinus P. Buckingham, and instructs him to take a special train to the army’s field headquarters north of Warrenton.
There is a Federal reconnaissance from La Grange toward Somerset, Tennessee; action near Nashville; an affair near Piketon, Kentucky; a skirmish at Jumpertown, Mississippi; and action at Lamar, Missouri; as well as operations lasting several days from Helena to Moro, Arkansas; in Augusta, Bath, and Highland counties, Virginia; and Pendleton and Pocahontas counties, western Virginia.
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
—Edmund Burke
—Edmund Burke