With the Merrimack neutralized, the Army of the Potomac set sail for the Peninsula on March 17, one day before Lincoln’s deadline. In a good mood, McClellan wrote that the president “is all right—he is my strongest friend.” But Lincoln harbored grave doubts about the general. On April 2, he told Orville Browning that General Scott “and all the leading military men around him, had always assured him” that McClellan “possessed a very high order of military talent, and that he did not think they could all be mistaken—yet he was not fully satisfied with his conduct of the war—that he was not sufficiently energetic and aggressive in his measures.” Lincoln added that he had studied McClellan “and taken his measure as well as he could—that he thought he had the capacity to make arrangements properly for a great conflict, but as the hour for action approached he became nervous and oppressed with the responsibility and hesitated to meet the crisis, but that he had given him peremptory orders to move now, and he must do it.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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