478 The Seven Days' Battles. [1862 enemy was making a desperate resistance. His second telegram, sent at three o'clock, said it was not a battle ; his third, sent at five, that he had fully gained his point with but little loss. But at a quarter past six he sent a fourth and, this time, a lengthy dispatch, in which President Lincoln, familiar with the general's quick changes of mood, at once read the presage of defeat. It announced that Beauregard had arrived in Richmond with strong reinforcements; that Jackson would attack his rear; that the total rebel force was reported at 200,000. " I will do all that a general can do," continued he, " with the splendid army I have the honour to command, and, if it is destroyed by over- whelming numbers, can at least die with it and share its fate. But if the result of the action, which will probably occur to-morrow or within a short time, is a disaster, the responsibility cannot be thrown on my shoulders ; it must rest where it belongs." The distorted rumours that threw McClellan into this gloomy state of mind had for their basis only the fact that General Lee, taking advantage of McClellan's inaction during nearly the whole of June, gathered an army of 80,762 well-trained and well-appointed Confederate soldiers and carefully prepared to attack and, as he confidently hoped, destroy the Union army. To carry out this plan he recalled Jackson from the Shenandoah Valley, and so early as June 13 sent General Stuart, with 1200 Confederate cavalry and a few guns, on a raid entirely around McClellan's army, which that enterprising leader successfully accomplished, burning two schooners laden with forage and fourteen government waggons, besides doing other miscellaneous damage on the way. So confident of success was Lee that he took the risk of dividing his force, sending two-thirds of it north of the Chickahominy to drive McClellan's right wing down the peninsula. It was the movement thus begun on June 26 which inaugurated the series of conflicts known as the Seven Days' Battles. Strong as he had managed to make the Confederate army, its mere numbers did not yet render it capable of performing the extraordinary task he set it. McClellan's effective force for the coming encounters has been carefully estimated to have been 92,500 while his own official report, five days earlier, reckoned it at 105,445. It was that general's chronic habit of over-estimating the enemy that prompted his fear of being overwhelmed by 200,000, as expressed in his dispatch to the President of June 25. Doubtless Mr Lincoln congratulated himself on having organised a new army under Pope, which, in case of the defeat which McClellan's dispatch foreshadowed, he could interpose between Lee and Washington ; for the postscript of his reply to McClellan says significantly, " General Pope thinks, if you fall back, it would be much better toward York river than toward the James." McClellan's dispatch at noon of June 26 was more hopeful, for he promised to do his best "to out-manoeuvre, outwit, and out-fight the
