elated Southerners, beginning to believe that their armies were
invincible, now clamored for "invasion" and the capture of Washington.
Apparently General Lee, too, had drunk the poison of triumph, and
dreamed of occupying the national capital, Baltimore, and Philadelphia,
and dictating the terms of peace to a disheartened North. The
fascinating scheme--the irretrievable and fatal blunder--was determined
upon.

To carry out this plan Swell's corps was covertly moved early in June
into the Shenandoah Valley. Hooker, anticipating some such scheme, had
suggested to Mr. Lincoln that, if it were entered upon, he should like
to cross the river and attack the Southern rear corps in Fredericksburg.
The President suggested that the intrenched Southerners would be likely
to worst the assailants, while the main Southern army "would in some way
be getting an advantage northward." "In one word," he wrote, "I would
not take any risk of being entangled upon the river, like an ox jumped
half over a fence and liable to be torn by dogs front and rear, without
a fair chance to gore one way or kick the other." Yet, very soon, when
the attenuation of Lee's line became certain, Lincoln sent to Hooker one
of his famous dispatches: "If the head of Lee's army is at Martinsburg,
and the tail of it on the plank road between Fredericksburg and
Chancellorsville, the animal must be very slim somewhere. Could you not
break him?" But the "animal" was moving rapidly, and the breaking
process did not take place.

Hooker now conceived a plan seductive by its audacity and its possible
results. He proposed by a sudden movement to capture Richmond,
presumably garrisoned very scantily, and to get back before Lee could
make any serious impression at the North. It _might_ have been done,
and, if done, it would more than offset all the dreary past; yet the