mansion of many apartments

Still wondering, however, if McClellan was as aware of the weight that had been added as he was of the weight that had been taken away, he returned to the point: ‘In addition to your present command, the supreme command of the Army will entail a vast labor upon you.’
‘I can do it all,’ McClellan told him.

Shelby Foote, the Civil War

A sketch made at the Battle of Gaines Mill by artist Alfred R. Waud. The text reads,

“Battle of Friday on the Chickahominy. 1862 June 27. Inscribed above image: Porter, McCall, Slocum, Sykes, and Sumner attacked by a superior force of the rebels under Jackson and Lee.”

The third engagement to occur during the Seven Days, Gaines Mill saw the deaths of 2377 Americans. Often regarded as a Union defeat, the battles enabled the Union army to fight a withdraw to the banks of the James River. There, the Army of the Potomac was in fact closer to the Confederate capital than the position it had just fled. Robert E. Lee later wrote, “Our success has not been as great or complete as we should have desired. Under ordinary circumstances the Federal Army should have been destroyed.”

“The further I go in my studies, the more amazed I am,” he told Walker Percy in 1956. “What a war! Everything we are or will be goes right back to that period. It decided once and for all which way we were going, and we’ve gone.”

During this interview I inquired of the President if he was all ready for the end of the war. What was to be done with the rebel armies when defeated? And what should be done with the political leaders, such as Jeff. Davis, etc.? Should we allow them to escape, etc.? He said he was all ready; all he wanted of us was to defeat the opposing armies, and to get the men composing the Confederate armies back to their homes, at work on their farms and in their shops. As to Jeff. Davis, he was hardly at liberty to speak his mind fully, but intimated that he ought to clear out, “escape the country,” only it would not do for him to say so openly. As usual, he illustrated his meaning by a story:

A man once had taken the total-abstinence pledge. When visiting a friend, he was invited to take a drink, but declined, on the score of his pledge; when his friend suggested lemonade, which was accepted. In preparing the lemonade, the friend pointed to the brandy-bottle, and said the lemonade would be more palatable if he were to pour in a little brandy; when his guest said, if he could do so “unbeknown” to him, he would “not object.” From which illustration I inferred that Mr. Lincoln wanted Davis to escape, “unbeknown” to him.