As a mere matter of military comprehension and judgment of the strategic situation, the letter puts Mr. Lincoln head and shoulders above both his military subordinates. Halleck saw its force, but would not order it to be carried out. McClellan shrank from the decisive vigor of the plan, though he finally accepted it as the means of getting the larger reinforcements. On the 21st of October the discussion of cavalry horses was pretty well exhausted, and McClellan telegraphed Halleck [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xix. pt. i. p. 81.] that in other respects he was nearly ready to move, and inquires whether the President desired him to march on the enemy at once or to wait the arrival of the new horses. Halleck answered that the order of the 6th October remained unchanged. "If you have not been and are not now in condition to obey it, you will be able to show such want of ability. The President does not expect impossibilities, but he is very anxious that all this good weather should not be wasted in inactivity. Telegraph when you will move and on what lines you propose to march." This dispatch was plainly a notice to McClellan that he would be held responsible for the failure to obey the order of the 6th unless he could exonerate himself by showing that he could not obey it. In his final report, however, he says that he treated it as authority to decide for himself whether or not it was possible to move with safety to the army; [Footnote: Ibid.] "and this responsibility," he says, "I exercised with the more confidence in view of the strong assurance of his trust in me, as commander of that army, with which the President had seen fit to honor me during his last visit." Argument is superfluous, in view of the correspondence, to show that orders and exhortations were alike wasted.
The movement began in the last days of October, the Sixth Corps, which was in the rear, crossing the Potomac on the 2d of November. McClellan had accepted Mr. Lincoln's plan, but lack of vigor in its execution broke down the President's patience, and on the 5th of November, upon Lee's recrossing the Blue Ridge without a battle, he ordered the general to turn over the command to Burnside, as he had declared he would do if Lee's was allowed to regain the interior line. The order was presented and obeyed on the 7th, and McClellan left the army. The fallen general brooded morbidly over it all for twenty years, and then wrote his "Own Story," a most curious piece of self-exposure, in which he unconsciously showed that the illusions which had misguided him in his campaigns were still realities to him, and that he had made no use of the authentic facts which Confederate as well as National records had brought within his reach. He had forgotten much, but he had learned nothing.
PERSONAL RELATIONS OF McCLELLAN, BURNSIDE, AND PORTER
Intimacy of McClellan and Burnside--Private letters in the official files--Burnside's mediation--His self-forgetful devotion--The movement to join Pope--Burnside forwards Porter's dispatches--His double refusal of the command--McClellan suspends the organization of wings--His relations to Porter--Lincoln's letter on the subject--Fault-finding with Burnside--Whose work?--Burnside's appearance and bearing in the field.
McClellan and Burnside had been classmates at West Point, and had been associated in railway employment after they had left the army, in the years immediately before the war. The intimacy which began at the Academy had not only continued, but they had kept up the demonstrative boyish friendship which made their intercourse like that of brothers. They were "Mac" and "Burn" to each other when I knew them, and although Fitz-John Porter, Hancock, Parker, Reno, and Pleasonton had all been members of the same class, the two seemed to be bosom friends in a way totally different from their intimacy with the others. Probably there was no one outside of his own family to whom McClellan spoke his secret thoughts in his letters, as he did to Burnside. The characteristic lack of system in business which was very noticeable in Burnside, made him negligent, apparently, in discriminating between official letters and private ones, and so it happens that there are a number in the official records which were never meant to reach the public. They show, however, as nothing else could, the relations which the two men sustained to each other, and reveal strong traits in the characters of both.
After Burnside had secured his first success in the Roanoke expedition, he had written to McClellan, then in the midst of his campaign of the peninsula, and this was McClellan's reply on the 21st of May, 1862:-- [Footnote: Official Records, vol ix. p. 392.]
"MY DEAR BURN,--Your dispatch and kind letter received. I have instructed Seth [Williams] to reply to the official letter, and now acknowledge the kind private note. It always does me good, in the midst of my cares and perplexities, to see your wretched old scrawling. I have terrible troubles to contend with, but have met them with a good heart, like your good old self, and have thus far struggled through successfully.... I feel very proud of Yorktown: it and Manassas will be my brightest chaplets in history, for I know that I accomplished everything in both places by pure military skill. I am very proud, and very grateful to God that he allowed me to purchase such great success at so trifling a loss of life.... The crisis cannot long be deferred. I pray for God's blessing on our arms, and rely far more on his goodness than I do on my own poor intellect. I sometimes think, now, that I can almost realize that Mahomet was sincere. When I see the hand of God guarding one so weak as myself, I can almost think myself a chosen instrument to carry out his schemes. Would that a better man had been selected.... Good-bye and God bless you, Burn. With the sincere hope that we may soon shake hands, I am, as ever,
Your sincere friend, MCCLELLAN."