In April, 1861, a deputation of sympathizers with secession had the
boldness to call on President Lincoln and demand a cessation of
hostilities until convening of Congress, threatening that seventy-five
thousand Marylanders would contest the passage of troops over their
soil.
"I presume," quietly replied Mr. Lincoln, "that there is room enough in
her soil for seventy-five thousand graves?"--(Peterson's "Life of
Lincoln.")
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MR. LINCOLN'S OPINION OF GENERAL McCLELLAN.
In the first stage of the war, when the President was
commander-in-chief of the forces by virtue of his office, he played the
part of the elevated boy in "The King of the Castle." Every one of his
colleagues, who ought to have been his loyal supporters, until some
firm stand was attained under the batteries of Richmond, civil and
military, warred against him, underhandedly and haply openly. All
aimed, in Cabinet and on the staff, to be ruler. The understrappers of
aged General Scott upheld all that concurred with warfare, set and
obsolete, of the European strategists, overthrown by the great
Napoleon. The principal practiser of these tactics, the _summum bonum_,
or "good thing," of the "West Pointers" was General McClellan, "the
Little Mac" of his worshipers and "the Little Napoleon" of the dazzled
crowd. He was, like Cassio, "a great arithmetician, who had never set a
squadron in the field or the division of a battle knew," etc. Seeming
utterly to ignore that the enemy was composed of men trained by their
life and "genteel" occupations to shoot true, to ride like Comanches or
Revolutionary Harry Lee's Light-horse, used to lying outdoors under
skies genial to them, and subsisting on game and corn-cake as Marion on
sweet potatoes, he expected to foil such guerrillas as "Jeb" Stuart,
Mosby, and Quantrell by earthworks, which they probably would have
leaped their horse over if they wanted to reach their spoil in that
way. It was in allusion to this adherence to Vauban that the President,
who eyed the aspiring Hotspur as Henry V. his heir, the sixth Henry,
trying on his crown, observed shrewdly, when the general kept silence:
"He is entrenching."
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