f the Potomac--as those who spoke for General
McClellan maintained--had been for six months engaged in a laborious
campaign in which they had fought many battles and experienced much
hardship. They needed rest, recruitment, clothes, shoes, and a
general supply of war material before setting out on what would
prove a winter march. The authorities at Washington asserted, and
apparently proved on the testimony of Quartermaster-General Meigs,
a most accomplished, able, and honorable officer, that the Army of
the Potomac, when it received its first orders to move in October,
was thoroughly and completely equipped. General McClellan thought
however that if intrusted with the command of the army he should
be allowed to direct its movements. He crossed the Potomac near
Harper's Ferry in the last week of October, and began an advance
through Virginia which effectually covered Washington. He had
reached Warrenton, and, before the plan of his campaign was developed,
received at midnight, on the 7th of November, a direct order from
President Lincoln to "surrender the command of the army to General
Burnside, and to report himself immediately at Trenton, the capital
of New Jersey."

GENERAL McCLELLAN'S MILITARY CAREER.

The reasons for this sudden and peremptory order were not given,
and if expressed would probably have been only an assertion of the
utter impossibility that the War Department and General McClellan
should harmoniously co-operate in the great military movements
which devolved upon the Army of the Potomac. But the time of
removal was not opportunely selected by the Administration. After
General McClellan's failure on the Peninsula, a large proportion
of the Northern people clamored for his deposition from command,
and it would have been quietly acquiesced in by all. At the end
of those disastrous days when he was falling back on the line of
the James River, General McClellan had telegraphed the Secretary
of War "If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no
thanks to you or to any persons in Washington. You have done your
best to sacrifice this army." Perhaps no such dispatch was ever
before sent by a military officer to the Commander-in-Chief of the
army--to the ruler of the nation. In any other country it would
have been followed with instant cashiering. Mr. Lincoln, with his
great magnanimity, had however condoned the offense, and after the
defeat of P