lses--his trust in Pope,
his reluctance to disgrace McClellan. Orders were issued transferring
the bulk of the army of the Potomac to the new army of Virginia lying
south of Washington under the command of Pope. McClellan was instructed
to withdraw his remaining forces from the Peninsula and retrace his
course up the Potomac.(6)

Lincoln had committed one of his worst blunders. Herndon has a curious,
rather subtle theory that while Lincoln's judgments of men in the
aggregate were uncannily sure, his judgments of men individually were
unreliable. It suggests the famous remark of Goethe that his views of
women did not derive from experience; that they antedated experience;
and that he corrected experience by them. Of the confessed artist this
may be true. The literary concept which the artist works with is often,
apparently, a more constant, more fundamental, more significant thing,
than is the broken, mixed, inconsequential impression out of which it
has been wrought. Which seems to explain why some of the writers who
understand human nature so well in their books, do not always understand
people similarly well in life. And always it is to be remembered that
Lincoln was made an artist by nature, and made over into a man of action
by circumstance. If Herndon's theory has any value it is in asserting
his occasional danger--by no means a constant danger--of forming in his
mind images of men that were more significant than it was possible for
the men themselves to be. John Pope was perhaps his worst instance. An
incompetent general, he was capable of things still less excusable. Just
after McClellan had so tragically failed in the Seven Days, when Lincoln
was at the front, Pope was busy with the Committee, assuring them
virtually that the war had been won in the West, and that only
McClellan's bungling had saved the Confederacy from speedy death.(7) But
somehow Lincoln trusted him, and continued to trust him even after he
had proved his incompetency in the catastrophe at Manassas.

During August, Pope marched gaily southward issuing orders that
were shot through with bad rhetoric, mixing up army routine and such
irrelevant matters as "the first blush of dawn."

Lincoln was confident of victory. And after victory would come the new
policy, the dissipation of the European storm-cloud, the break-up of the
vindictive coalition of Jacobins and Abolitionists, the new enthusiasm
for the war. But of all this, the incensed Abolitio