se whole duty was limited to the army under his
command, and brought him at last to a temper of mind most unfortunate
for the public interests, in which he could believe the administration
personally hostile to himself because opposed to the political
principles of those who wished to profit by his "availability." It was
only natural, too, that he should gradually come to think himself what
his partisans constantly affirmed that he was,--the sole depositary of
the country's destiny. We form our judgment of General McClellan solely
from his own Report; we believe him to be honest in his opinions, and
patriotic so far as those opinions will allow him to be; we know him to
be capable of attaching those about him in a warm personal friendship,
and we reject with the contempt they deserve the imputations on his
courage and his military honor; but at the same time we consider him a
man like other men, with a head liable to be turned by a fame too
easily won. His great misfortune was that he began his first important
campaign with a reputation to save instead of to earn, so that he was
hampered by the crowning disadvantage of age in a general without the
experience which might neutralize it. Nay, what was still worse, he had
two reputations to keep from damage, the one as soldier, the other as
politician.

He seems very early to have misapprehended the true relation in which
he stood to the government. By the operation of natural causes, as
politicians would call them, he had become heir presumptive to the
chair of state, and felt called on to exert an influence on the policy
of the war, or at least to express an opinion that might go upon record
for future convenience. He plunged into that Dismal Swamp of
constitutional hermeneutics, in which the wheels of government were
stalled at the outbreak of our rebellion, and from which every
untrained explorer rises with a mouth too full of mud to be
intelligible to Christian men. He appears to have thought it within the
sphere of his duty to take charge of the statesmanship of the President
no less than of the movements of the army, nor was it long before there
were unmistakable symptoms that he began to consider himself quite as
much the chief of an opposition who could dictate terms as the military
subordinate who was to obey orders. Whatever might have been his
capacity as a soldier, this divided allegiance could not fail of
disastrous consequences to the public service, for no m