cock, an accomplished soldier
of the regular army, a grandson of Ethan Allen, who had grown old in
honorable service, was summoned to Washington, and was "amazed"
by having plumped at him the question, would he consent to succeed
McClellan? Though General Hitchcock was not without faults--and there
is an episode in his later relations with McClellan which his biographer
discreetly omits--he was a modest man. He refused to consider Stanton's
offer. But he consented to become the confidential adviser of the War
Office. This was done after an interview with Lincoln who impressed on
Hitchcock his sense of a great responsibility and of the fact that he
"had no military knowledge" and that he must have advice.(17) Out of
this congested sense of helplessness in Lincoln, joined with the new
labors of the Secretary of War as executive head of all the armies, grew
quickly another of those ill-omened, extra-constitutional war councils,
one more wheel within the wheels, that were all doing their part to
make the whole machine unworkable; distributing instead of concentrating
power. This new council which came to be known as the Army Board, was
made up of the heads of the Bureaus of the War Department with the
addition of Hitchcock as "Advising General." Of the temper of the Army
Board, composed as it was entirely of the satellites of Stanton, a
confession in Hitchcock's diary speaks volumes. On the evening of
the first day of their new relation, Stanton poured out to him such a
quantity of oral evidence of McClellan's "incompetency" as to make this
new recruit for anti-McClellanism "feel positively sick."(18)

By permitting this added source of confusion among his advisers, Lincoln
treated himself much as he had already treated McClellan. By going over
McClellan's head to take advice from his subordinates he had put the
General on a leash; now, by setting Hitchcock and the experts in the
seat of judgment, he virtually, for a short while, put himself on a
leash. Thus had come into tacit but real power three military councils
none of which was recognized as such by law--the Council of the
Subordinates behind McClellan; the Council of the Experts behind
Lincoln; the Council of the Jacobins, called The Committee, behind them
all.

The political pressure on Lincoln now changed its tack. Its unfailing
zeal to discredit McClellan assumed the form of insisting that he had a
secret purpose in waiting to get his army away from Washington, t