Lincoln's Yarns and Stories

MIXED UP WORSE THAN BEFORE.

The President told a story which most beautifully illustrated the muddled situation of affairs at the time McClellan’s fate was hanging in the balance. McClellan’s work was not satisfactory, but the President hesitated to remove him; the general was so slow that the Confederates marched all around him; and, to add to the dilemma, the President could not find a suitable man to take McClellan’s place.

The latter was a political, as well as a military, factor; his friends threatened that, if he was removed, many war Democrats would cast their influence with the South, etc. It was, altogether, a sad mix-up, and the President, for a time, was at his wits’ end. He was assailed on all sides with advice, but none of it was worth acting upon.

“This situation reminds me,” said the President at a Cabinet meeting one day not long before the appointment of General Halleck as McClellan’s successor in command of the Union forces, “of a Union man in Kentucky whose two sons enlisted in the Federal Army. His wife was of Confederate sympathies. His nearest neighbor was a Confederate in feeling, and his two sons were fighting under Lee. This neighbor’s wife was a Union woman and it nearly broke her heart to know that her sons were arrayed against the Union.

“Finally, the two men, after each had talked the matter over with his wife, agreed to obtain divorces; this they, did, and the Union man and Union woman were wedded, as were the Confederate man and the Confederate woman—the men swapped wives, in short. But this didn’t seem to help matters any, for the sons of the Union woman were still fighting for the South, and the sons of the Confederate woman continued in the Federal Army; the Union husband couldn’t get along with his Union wife, and the Confederate husband and his Confederate wife couldn’t agree upon anything, being forever fussing and quarreling.

“It’s the same thing with the Army. It doesn’t seem worth while to secure divorces and then marry the Army and McClellan to others, for they won’t get along any better than they do now, and there’ll only be a new set of heartaches started. I think we’d better wait; perhaps a real fighting general will come along some of these days, and then we’ll all be happy. If you go to mixing in a mix-up, you only make the muddle worse.”