ays believe _blunders_) had prevented their
reaping the fruits of those repeated victories, and the great object of
the expedition--Richmond--had been daily receding and was now apparently
out of reach. The brilliant flank movement which McClellan was
executing, seemed to them to be a simple retreat which was to take the
remains of the Army of the Potomac to the James River for the purpose of
an immediate embarkation and abandonment of the campaign. Men less
heroic would have grown disheartened and struck feebly in the midst of
so many causes of discouragement; and the able review of the Campaign on
the Peninsula, by a true man and a soldier, the Prince de Joinville,
shows that even with his past knowledge of their bravery and endurance
_he_ would not have been surprised to see the spirit of the whole army
sinking under sufferings, wrongs and disasters. Perhaps such would have
been the case, had they had less confidence in their leaders; but while
that existed there could be nothing like demoralization; and if there
has ever been a day since that time, when the same noble body of men
and the others who have been joined with or replaced them, have
displayed that hopeless deterioration of efficiency as an army, the
fault has lain in their being led by men in whom they lacked confidence
and men who lacked confidence in themselves! Up to this time no such
misfortune had fallen upon them. They had learned to suffer and endure,
but they had not yet learned to be permanently defeated. Sumner,
Franklin, Kearney, Heintzelman, Keyes and Fitz-John Porter, but above
all McClellan, possessed their undivided confidence; and whenever, at
any point of the retreat towards the James, either of those great chiefs
had appeared in their midst or ridden along their battle-thinned
ranks--renewed hope and energy had been always evinced by the heartiest
acclamations.

Particularly, it has been said, was this the case with McClellan. His
extraordinary popularity has been more than once incidentally adverted
to, in the course of this narration; and if it has been so, the cause is
not to be found in either partisan spirit or man-worship on the part of
the writer, but in the unavoidable necessity of echoing what "everybody
says." "Little Mac" was then, he is to-day,[12] the most popular soldier
of the age, whether the country has or has not anything to show for the
confidence long reposed in him by the government and the immense bodies
of troops at