^7 THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC. G7 Who were the men, who by driving him into an untimely campaign, had revealed to the enemy operations not yet ripe for execution t Was McClellan responsible for that want cf unity in the ends and in the action of the government which had trammelled the movements of the army since he bad been deprived of the chief command and supreme directions of the forces? Was McClellan responsible for the systematic diminution of his forces, which, in the face of the agglomeration of the forces of the enemy, had successively deprived him, since the campaign had opened, of the division of Blen- ker and of two-thirds of McDowell’s corps, without sending him one solitary man to fill up the gaps made by sickness and by the cannon ? In spite of all these obstacles he had reached the walls of Richmond, but he had no longer the means of striking the great blow which probably would have ended the ■war. In a hostile country covered with forests, where one sees nothing and knows little, what appears a simple recon- noissance may often prove a serious and general attack. There a large force is needed to guard against surprises, and a still larger force to secure lines of communication, which cannot be broken without danger. Evidently we needed reinforcements. Could we obtain them ? Could the federals meet, with a powerful concentration of troops, that concentration which the enemy had effected, and to the reality of which the observations of our aeronauts, as well as the statements of deserters, daily bore witness? This was the first question we had to ask ourselves. General Wool from Norfolk, Burnside from North Carol na, might send some men, but very few, while around Washington more than eighty thousand were collected. Of these about one-half were making head against the partisan Jackson in the valley of the Shenandoah. The rest were collected under McDowell at Fredericksburg, sixty miles to the north of Richmond. They had rebuilt the railway bridge over the
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