" Sumner said: "A total of 40,000 for the defense of the city
would suffice."[4] On the same day Stanton informed McClellan that the
President "made no objection" to this plan, but directed that a
sufficient force should be left to hold Manassas Junction and to make
Washington "entirely secure." The closing sentence was: "At all events,
move ... at once in pursuit of the enemy by some route." Thus at last
two important facts were established: that the route up the Peninsula
should be tried; and that the patience of the administration was
exhausted.
Though the enemy upon his retreat was burning bridges and destroying
railroads behind him, and making his possible return towards Washington
a slow, difficult process, which he obviously had no mind to undertake,
still this security of the capital rested as weightily as ever upon
Lincoln's mind. His reiteration and insistence concerning it made
perfectly plain that he was still nervous and disquieted about it,
though now certainly with much less reason than heretofore. But with or
against reason, it was easy to see that he was far from resting in the
tranquillity of conviction that Washington could never be so safe as
when the army of Virginia was far away upon the Peninsula. Nevertheless,
after the condition in its foregoing shape had been so strenuously
imposed by Mr. Lincoln and tacitly accepted by McClellan, the matter was
left as if definitely settled; and the President never demanded[5] from
the general any distinct statement concerning the numerical or specific
allotment of the available forces between the two purposes.
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