afterward wrote.[10] Yet the explanation of this surprising news was so
simple that surprise was unjustifiable. On April 2, immediately after
McClellan's departure, the President inquired as to what had been done
for the security of Washington. General Wadsworth, commanding the
defenses of the city, gave an alarming response: 19,000 or 20,000
entirely green troops, and a woeful insufficiency of artillery. He said
that while it was "very improbable" that the enemy would attack
Washington, nevertheless the "numerical strength and the character" of
his forces rendered them "entirely inadequate to and unfit for their
important duty." Generals Hitchcock and Thomas corroborated this by
reporting that the order to leave the city "entirely secure" had "not
been fully complied with." Mr. Lincoln was horror-struck. He had a right
to be indignant, for those who ought to know assured him that his
reiterated and most emphatic command had been disobeyed, and that what
he chiefly cared to make safe had not been made safe. He promptly
determined to retain McDowell, and the order was issued on April 4.
Thereby he seriously attenuated, if he did not quite annihilate, the
prospect of success for McClellan's campaign. It seems incredible and
unexplainable that amid this condition of things, on April 3, an order
was issued from the office of the secretary of war, to stop recruiting
throughout the country!

This series of diminutions, says McClellan, had "removed nearly 60,000
men from my command, and reduced my force by more than one third.... The
blow was most discouraging. It frustrated all my plans for impending
operations. It fell when I was too deeply committed to withdraw.... It
was a fatal error."

Error or not, it was precisely what McClellan ought to have foreseen as
likely to occur. He had not foreseen it, however, and nothing mitigated