ses always were both so numerous and so
satisfactory, that many reasonably minded persons knew not whether they
had a right to feel so angry towards him as they certainly could not
help doing. The present instance was directly in point. General Keyes
reported to him that no part of the enemy's line could "be taken by
assault without an enormous waste of life;" and General Barnard, chief
engineer of the army, thought it uncertain whether they could be carried
at all. Loss of life and uncertainty of result were two things so
abhorred by McClellan in warfare, that he now failed to give due weight
to the consideration that the design of the Confederates in interposing
an obstacle at this point was solely to delay him as much as possible,
whereas much of the merit of his own plan of campaign lay in rapid
execution at the outset. The result was, of course, that he did not
break any line, nor try to, but instead thereof "presented plausible
reasons" out of his inexhaustible reservoir of such commodities. It was
unfortunate that the naval cooeperation, which McClellan had expected,[9]
could not be had at this juncture; for by it the Yorktown problem would
have been easily solved without either line-breaking or reason-giving.

Precisely at this point came into operation the fatal effect of the lack
of understanding between the President and the general as to the
division of the forces. In the plan of campaign, it had been designed to
throw the corps of McDowell into the rear of Yorktown by such route as
should seem expedient at the time of its arrival, probably landing it at
Gloucester and moving it round by West Point. This would have made
Magruder's position untenable at once, long before the natural end of
the siege. But at the very moment when McClellan's left, in its advance,
first came into actual collision with the enemy, he received news that
the President had ordered McDowell to retain his division before
Washington--"the most infamous thing that history has recorded," he
afterward wrote.[10] Yet the explanation of this surprising news was so
simple that surprise was unjustifiable. On April 2, immediately after
McClellan's departure, the President inquired as to what had been done
for the security of Washington. General Wadsworth, commanding the
defenses of the city, gave an alarming response: 19,000 or 20,000
entirely green troops, and a woeful insufficiency of artillery. He said
that while it was "very improbable" that