- 09 Oct 2020 15:19
#15126203
October 10, Friday
Since receiving President Lincoln’s telegram ordering him to advance, McClellan hasn’t budged. He remains behind the Potomac, insisting in an increasingly bitter telegraphic duel with Washington that his army cannot move without reinforcements and supplies. This long-range debate becomes so acrimonious that when McClellan asks for more horses because those in his cavalry are broken down and plagued by a variety of diseases, Lincoln explodes. “I have just read your dispatch about sore-tongued and fatigued horses,” the president wires caustically in reply. “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?”
McClellan’s demands stem in part from his chronic perfectionism. Nevertheless, some of his claims are valid. More than half of the horses of the V Corps artillery are unshod and a large number in all the batteries are lame with hoof rot. Many soldiers have been issued no now clothing since embarking on the Peninsular Campaign seven months ago, and there are “men with no coats, no underclothes, in rags, no shoes.” What McClellan fails to grasp, however, is that the Confederate army is in even worse shape. And every day he delays in pushing south enables Lee’s men to gain strength and numbers at their bivouacs near Winchester. By now, so many stragglers and recruits have joined the Army of Northern Virginia that Lee reports 64,273 present for duty. This is less than two thirds of McClellan’s total but nearly double the number that retreated from Sharpsburg three weeks ago.
There is fighting at Harrodsburg and Danville Cross Roads, Kentucky, as Bragg’s Confederates begin their retreat east and southward.
In Virginia Jeb Stuart crosses the Potomac on his raid, and by evening enters Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.
In Tennessee there is a skirmish at Medon Station; on the upper Missouri River below Fort Berthold, Dakota Territory, a party of Sioux fight with a boatload of miners. Indiana home guards drive a group of rebel guerrillas from Hawesville, Indiana.
President Davis asks Virginia for a draft of 4,500 Blacks to work on completion of the fortifications of Richmond.
Major General John B. Magruder, Confederate hero of the siege of Yorktown, is assigned to command the District of Texas.
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