o be carried out. McClellan shrank from the
decisive vigor of the plan, though he finally accepted it as the
means of getting the larger reinforcements. On the 21st of October
the discussion of cavalry horses was pretty well exhausted, and
McClellan telegraphed Halleck [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xix.
pt. i. p. 81.] that in other respects he was nearly ready to move,
and inquires whether the President desired him to march on the enemy
at once or to wait the arrival of the new horses. Halleck answered
that the order of the 6th October remained unchanged. "If you have
not been and are not now in condition to obey it, you will be able
to show such want of ability. The President does not expect
impossibilities, but he is very anxious that all this good weather
should not be wasted in inactivity. Telegraph when you will move and
on what lines you propose to march." This dispatch was plainly a
notice to McClellan that he would be held responsible for the
failure to obey the order of the 6th unless he could exonerate
himself by showing that he could not obey it. In his final report,
however, he says that he treated it as authority to decide for
himself whether or not it was possible to move with safety to the
army; [Footnote: _Ibid_.] "and this responsibility," he says, "I
exercised with the more confidence in view of the strong assurance
of his trust in me, as commander of that army, with which the
President had seen fit to honor me during his last visit." Argument
is superfluous, in view of the correspondence, to show that orders
and exhortations were alike wasted.

The movement began in the last days of October, the Sixth Corps,
which was in the rear, crossing the Potomac on the 2d of November.
McClellan had accepted Mr. Lincoln's plan, but lack of vigor in its
execution broke down the President's patience, and on the 5th of
November, upon Lee's recrossing the Blue Ridge without a battle, he
ordered the general to turn over the command to Burnside, as he had
declared he would do if Lee's was allowed to regain the interior
line. The order was presented and obeyed on the 7th, and McClellan
left the army. The fallen general brooded morbidly over it all for
twenty years, and then wrote his "Own Story," a most curious piece
of self-exposure, in which he unconsciously showed that the
illusions which had misguided him in his campaigns were still
realities to him, and that he had made no use of the authentic facts
which Con