effect; his influence had passed forever. The movement of the army was
successfully completed, the rear guard arriving at Yorktown on August
20. Thus the first great Peninsula campaign came to its end in
disappointment and almost in disaster, amid heart-burnings and
criminations. It was, says General Webb, "a lamentable failure,--nothing
less." There was little hope for the future unless some master hand
could control the discordant officials who filled the land with the din
of their quarreling. The burden lay upon the President. Fortunately his
good sense, his even judgment, his unexcitable temperament had saved him
from the appearance or the reality of partisanship and from any
entangling or compromising personal commitments.

In many ways and for many reasons, this story of the Peninsula has been
both difficult and painful to write. To reach the truth and sound
conclusions in the many quarrels which it has provoked is never easy,
and upon some points seems impossible; and neither the truth nor the
conclusions are often agreeable. Opinion and sympathy have gradually but
surely tended in condemnation of McClellan and in favor of Lincoln. The
evidence is conclusive that McClellan was vain, disrespectful, and
hopelessly blind to those non-military but very serious considerations
which should have been allowed to modify the purely scientific strategy
of the campaign. Also, though his military training was excellent, it
was his misfortune to be placed amid exigencies for which neither his
moral nor his mental qualities were adapted. Lincoln, on the other hand,
displayed traits of character not only in themselves rare and admirable,
but so fitted to the requirements of the times that many persons have
been tempted to conceive him to have been divinely led. But against this
view, though without derogating from the merits which induce it, is to
be set the fact that he made mistakes hardly consistent with the theory
of inspiration by Omniscience. He interfered in military matters; and,