William Swinton, Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac

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[126] McClellan, was instantly countermanded; and he was directed to put twenty thousand men in motion at once for the Shenandoah Valley, by the line of the Manassas Gap Railroad.¹ McDowell obeyed, but, to use his own language, ‘with a heavy heart,’ for he knew, what any man capable of surveying the situation with a soldier's eye must have known, that the movement ordered was not only most futile in itself, but certain to paralyze the operations of the main army and frustrate that campaign against Richmond on the issue of which hung the fortune of the war. In vain he pointed out that it was impossible for him either to succor Banks or co-operate with Fremont; that his line of advance from Fredericksburg to Front Royal was much longer than the enemy's line of retreat; that it would take him a week or ten days to reach the Valley, and that by this time the occasion for his services would have passed by. In vain General McClellan urged the real motive of the raid—to prevent re-enforcements from reaching him. Deaf to all sounds of reason, the war-council at Washington, like the Dutch States-General, of whom Prince Eugene said, that ‘always interfering, they were always dying with fear,’² heard only the reverberations of the guns of the redoubtable Jackson. To head off Jackson, if possible to catch Jackson, seemed now the one important thing; and the result of the cogitations of the Washington strategists was the preparation of what the President called a ‘trap’ for Jackson—a ‘trap’ for the wily fox who was master of every gap and gorge in the Valley! Now this pretty scheme involved the converging movements of Fremont from