his place. “This whole campaign,” says Arnold, “illustrates Lincoln’s patience, forbearance, fidelity to, and kindness for, M‘Clellan. His misfortunes, disastrous as they were to the country, did not induce the President to abandon him. Indeed, it was a very difficult and painful thing for him ever to give up a person in misfortune, even when those misfortunes resulted from a man’s own misconduct.” But though he spoke kindly of General M‘Clellan, Mr. Lincoln could not refrain from gently satirising the dilatory commander. Once he remarked that he would “very much like to borrow the army any day when General M‘Clellan did not happen to be _using it_, to see if he could not do something with it.” On the 9th March, an incident occurred which forms the beginning of a new era in naval warfare. The rebels had taken possession of the steam frigate _Merrimac_ at Norfolk, and covered her with iron armour. Sailing down the James river, she destroyed the frigates _Cumberland_ and _Congress_, and was about to attack the _Minnesota_, when, by strange chance, “there came up the bay a low, turtle-like nondescript object, bearing two heavy guns, with which she attacked the _Merrimac_ and saved the fleet.” This was the _Monitor_, built by the celebrated engineer Ericsson. There were many in the South, during the war, who schemed, or at least talked over, the assassination of President Lincoln. On one occasion, when he learned from a newspaper that a conspiracy of several hundred men was forming in Richmond for the purpose of taking his life, he smiled and said, “Even if true, I do not see what the rebels would gain by killing me.... Everything would go on just the same. Soon after I was nominated, I began to receive letters threatening my life. The first one or two made me a little uncomfortable, but I came at length to look for a regular instalment of this kind of correspondence in every week’s mail. Oh! there is nothing like getting _used_ to things.” General Burnside, who accepted with reluctance the command of the army (November 8th, 1862), was a manly and honourable soldier, but not more fortunate than his predecessor. Owing to a want of proper understanding and action between himself and Generals Halleck, Meigs, and Franklin, the battle of Fredericksburg, begun on the 11th December, 1862, was finally fought on the 15th January, the Union army being defeated with a loss of 12,000 men. The spirit of insubordination, of delay, and of ill-fortune which attended M‘Clellan, seemed to have descended as a heritage on the army of the Potomac.