WASHINGTON, April 9,
1862.
Major General McClellan.
My dear Sir.
Your despatches complaining that you are not properly
sustained, while they do not offend me, do pain me very much.
Blenker's division was withdrawn from you before you left
here, and you know the pressure under which I did it, and, as I thought,
acquiesced in it – certainly not without reluctance.
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' 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 explicit 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 100,000 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, I understand it is doing for you precisely what's like number of your
own would have to do if that command was away.
I suppose the whole force which has gone forward for you is
with you by this time, and, if so, I think it is the precise time for you to
strike a blow. By delay the enemy will relatively gain upon you – that is, he
will gain faster by fortifications and re-enforcements than you can by
re-enforcements 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 now
noting, that the present hesitation to move upon an intrenched enemy is but the
story of Manassas repeated.
I beg to assure you that I have never written you or spoken
to you in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to
sustain you, so far as, in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can. But you must act.
Yours, very truly,
A. LINCOLN.
Major-General McCLELLAN.
SOURCES: The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of
the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Volume
11, Part 1 (Serial No. 12), p. 15; A copy of this letter can be found in
the Abraham
Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress; Roy P. Basler,
Editor, The Collected Works
of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 5, p. 184-5;
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