not one give for his estimate of McClellan! It would be worth
the whole great collection of characters sketched by innumerable friends
and enemies for that much-discussed general. While others think that
they know accurately the measure of McClellan's real value and
usefulness, Lincoln really knew these things; but he never told his
knowledge. We only see that he sustained McClellan for a long while in
the face of vehement aspersions; yet that he never fully subjected his
own convictions to the educational lectures of the general, and that he
seemed at last willing to see him laid aside; then immediately in a
crisis restored him to authority in spite of all opposition; and shortly
afterward, as if utterly weary of him, definitively displaced him.
Still, all these facts do not show what Lincoln thought of McClellan.
Many motives besides his opinion of the man may have influenced him. The
pressure of political opinion and of public feeling was very great, and
might have turned him far aside from the course he would have pursued if
it could have been neglected. Also other considerations have been
suggested as likely to have weighed with him,--that McClellan could do
with the army what no other man could do, because of the intense
devotion of both officers and men to him; and that an indignity offered
to McClellan might swell the dissatisfaction of the Northern Democracy
to a point at which it would seriously embarrass the administration.
These things may have counteracted, or may have corroborated, Mr.
Lincoln's views concerning the man himself. He was an extraordinary
judge of men in their relationship to affairs; moreover, of all the men
of note of that time he alone was wholly dispassionate and non-partisan.
Opinions tinctured with prejudices are countless; it is disappointing
that the one opinion that was free from prejudice is unknown.[32]

FOOTNOTES:

[28] The consolidation, and the assignment of Pope to the command, bore
date June 26, 1862.

[29] This campaign of General Pope has been the topic of very bitter
controversy and crimination. In my brief account I have eschewed the
view of Messrs. Nicolay and Hay, who seem to me if I may say it, to have
written with the single-minded purpose of throwing everybody's blunders
into the scale against McClellan, and I have adopted the view of Mr.
John C. Ropes in his volume on _The Army under Pope_, in the Campaigns
of the Civil War Series. In his writing it is impossible t