William Swinton, Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac

“ [97] to direct an army which it is difficult enough to handle when actually in the field.

”

Jomini: Precis de l'art de la Guerre, vol. II., p. 47.

On the other hand, it is to be admitted that General McClellan, too, committed grave faults. He had already put the patience of the public and the Administration to a severe strain by his six months inactivity; and in proposing to remove his army from the front of Washington, he made another and peculiarly heavy draft upon their confidence. In this he again exposed himself to the criticism already made respecting his deficiency in those statesmanlike qualities that enter into the composition of a great general. Granting that the lower Chesapeake was the true line of approach to Richmond, yet finding the project of a removal of the army from the front of Washington so peculiarly repugnant to the wishes and convictions of the President and his councillors as to have suggested grave doubts as to the possibility of his obtaining a cordial support in its execution, he should have considered with himself whether he could follow the wishes of his superiors by operating against the enemy at Manassas; and if not, he should have resigned. ‘A general,’ says Napoleon, in one of his fine rulings regarding what may be called the ethics of war, ‘is culpable who undertakes the execution of a plan which he considers faulty. It is his duty to represent his reasons, to insist upon a change of plan; in short, to give in his resignation rather than allow himself to be made the instrument of his army's ruin.’ But the case before General McClellan was in nowise of the nature contemplated in this dictum. For the scheme of an advance against Manassas cannot be called ‘faulty,’ or of a kind to hazard the ruin of the army. It was a question of a choice of plans. Different plans of campaign may be each correct, and yet differ in boldness and brilliancy; and the bolder and more brilliant plan may often have to give way to one more feasible or more opportune. The determination of this in any given case is a problem in the higher generalship. Had