The public was beginning to regard the Army of the Potomac, whose delays and blunders contrasted sharply with the success of Grant’s army in the West, “as a gigantic joke.” When some credited McClellan with devising the grand strategy that led to Grant’s victory at Fort Donelson, a skeptic mocked the Young Napoleon, sarcastically observing that the “high and dry” canal boats formed “a stupendous and sublime exhibition of his never-can-be-sufficiently-bragged-about strategy! Such is the splendid result of all this fanfaronade that stupid dunderheads have been attempting to cram into the ears of the people about a General who fights all his battles a thousand miles away from fire! Lord, Lord, how this world is given to folly! How old Jack [Falstaff] would laugh at that ‘strategy,’ which won Donelson by telegraph, when there wasn’t a wire within a hundred miles of Donelson, and yet couldn’t get a canal boat right under its own nose (old ‘strategy’s’ nose I mean) into the river, after six months’ preparation!” Another wag quipped that “McClellan is waiting for the Chinese population of California to increase to such a vast number that they will be able to cross the Rocky Mountains and bring up his right wing, by which time the Russian Possessions and Greenland will have a redundant population, which can be drafted down to the support of the grand left wing of the Union army.” Then and only then “the war will commence in earnest!” Chase was warned that the army’s delay caused such dissatisfaction that the government would soon find it impossible to borrow money at anything lower than extortionate interest rates.
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃