er, and who could evoke powers that he could not control,
he was swamped in his own supplies. With every reinforcement sent him
on the Peninsula, his estimate of the numbers opposed to him increased.
His own imagination faced him in superior numbers at every turn. Since
Don Quixote's enumeration of the armies of the Emperor Alifanfaron and
King Pentapolin of the Naked Arm, there has been nothing like our
General's vision of the Rebel forces, with their ever-lengthening list
of leaders, gathered for the defence of Richmond. His anxiety swells
their muster-roll at last to two hundred thousand. We say his anxiety,
for no man of ordinary judgment can believe that with that number of
men the Rebel leaders would not have divided their forces, with one
army occupying General McClellan, while they attempted the capital he
had left uncovered with the other.

The first plan proposed by General McClellan covered operations
extending from Virginia to Texas. With a main army of two hundred and
seventy-three thousand he proposes "not only to drive the enemy out of
Virginia and occupy Richmond, but to occupy Charleston, Savannah,
Montgomery, Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans; in other words, to move
into the heart of the enemy's country and crush the rebellion in its
very heart." We do not say that General McClellan's ambition to be the
one man who should crush the rebellion was an unworthy one, but that
his theory that this was possible, and in the way he proposed, shows
him better fitted to state the abstract problems than to apprehend the
complex details of their solution when they lie before him as practical
difficulties. For when we consider the necessary detachments from this
force to guard his communications through an enemy's country, as he
wishes the President to do, in order to justify the largeness of the
force required, we cannot help asking how soon the army for active
operations would be reduced to a hundred and fifty thousand. And how
long would a general be in reaching New Orleans, if he is six months in
making up his mind to advance with an army of that strength on the
insignificant fortifications of Manassas, manned, according to the best
information, with forty thousand troops? At the same time General
McClellan assigns twenty thousand as a force adequate for opening the
Mississippi. This plan, to be sure, was soon abandoned, but it is an
illustration of the want of precision and forethought which
characterizes the