Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 1.djvu/244

216 to despair.” “My despatch to you was sent with the knowledge of Senator Johnson and Representative Maynard, and they will be after me to know your answer, which I cannot safely show them.” This characteristic wail of the President, with the extraordinary ending, “I do not intend this to be an order in any sense, but merely to show you the grounds of my anxiety,” was followed by far more emphatic expressions from General McClellan. “I was extremely sorry,” he wrote to Buell, “to learn from your telegram to the President that you had from the beginning attached little or no importance to a movement into East Tennessee. I had not so understood your views, and it develops a radical difference between yours and mine, which I deeply regret.” He then gave his reasons for preferring a movement towards East Tennessee to one against Nashville, emphasizing the fact that “the latter would work a prejudicial change in my own plans.” On January 13, McClellan wrote again in a way that obliged Buell to promise to comply with the wishes of his superiors. Yet he failed to keep his promise promptly, further excusing himself by reason of want of transportation and the impracticability of the roads.

Meantime, the lack of stirring events and the absolute silence imposed by General Buell's orders upon correspondents in regard to the large army under his command, on penalty of expulsion from the department, made time hang rather heavily on my hands. My social relations were too limited, for the reasons already explained, to relieve the monotony of my daily life. Moreover, no public entertainments of any kind were going on in Louisville, owing to the state of war. But I had a pleasant interruption of my dull existence by spending Christmas week among my friends in Cincinnati. The continual inclemency of the weather added no little to the dreariness of those winter months, during which not a single personal incident worth recording occurred.

My usefulness to my employers would thus not have