After you left, I ascertained that less than twenty thousand unorganized men, without a single field battery, were all you designed to be left for the defence of Washington, and Manassas Junction; and part of this even, was to go to Gen. Hooker's old position. Gen. Banks' corps, once designed for Manassas Junction, was diverted, and tied up on the line of Winchester and Strausburg, and could not leave it without again exposing the upper Potomac, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. This presented, (or would present, when McDowell and Sumner should be gone) a great temptation to the enemy to turn back from the Rappahanock, and sack Washington. My explicit order that Washington should, by the judgment of all the commanders of Army corps, be left entirely secure, had been neglected. It was precisely this that drove me to detain McDowell.
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About George B. McClellan
George B. McClellan was a 19th-century American major general. George Brinton McClellan was an American military officer, politician, and engineer who served as the 24th governor of New Jersey from 1878 to 1881 and as Commanding General of the United States Army from November 1861 to March 1862. He was also chief engineer and vice president of the Illinois Central Railroad, and later president of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad in 1860. Read more on Wikipedia →