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McClellan's Victories.
The greatest victories of this war were won by Gen. McClellan, at Manassas and at Yorktown — victories which injured the rebels and encouraged the union men more than any others of the war; and they were won without the loss of a man. These are the victories we want. We know abolitionists do not like them — they want hundreds, thousands of our countrymen killed every day. We wish the union could be saved without the loss of another man.
Abolitionists not only want men killed, but they want McClellan to fail. They continually find fault with him, and seek, every way, to interfere with his plans. But his genius overcomes all difficulties. Abolitionists now say McClellan might have taken Yorktown long ago. Mr. Raymond, editor of the New York Times — than whom there is not a newspaper man in the country better qualified to judge — wrote from the field as follows:
"There are some men who think that Gen. McClellan, on first arriving here, might have carried Yorktown by a sudden dash, and saved the labor, cost and delay of a regular siege. If he had been allowed to carry out his original plan he would have turned Yorktown, and been in Richmond now. But, when he was suddenly deprived of the very men he had relied on to accomplish this, he had no choice but to change his plan. He then was compelled to take Yorktown by a direct advance, and that advance was a work of the utmost difficulty."
It is the highest compliment to Gen. McClellan's military skill that the rebel General Lee, an officer who stood next to General Scott before the rebellion, foresaw that Yorktown must fall; that works planned and erected by the most skillful rebel engineers, and pronounced impossible to capture, could not withstand the approaches of McClellan.