One great and successful battle he fought, however, at Antietam, checking Lee’s attempt to invade the North and sending him in full retreat back to Virginia, but his failure to pursue the retreating army exasperated the President, and he was removed from command of the army on November 7, 1862.  This closed his career as a soldier.  In the light of succeeding events, it cannot be doubted that his removal was a serious mistake.  All in all, he was the ablest commander the Army of the Potomac ever had; he was a growing man; a little more experience in the field would probably have cured him of over-timidity, and made him a great soldier.  General Grant summed the matter up admirably when he said, “The test applied to him would be terrible to any man, being made a major-general at the beginning of the war.  If he did not succeed, it was because the conditions of success were so trying.  If he had fought his way along and up, I have no reason to suppose that he would not have won as high distinction as any of us.”  In 1864, McClellan was the nominee of the Democratic party for the presidency, but received only twenty-one electoral votes.

The command of the Army of the Potomac passed to Ambrose E. Burnside, who had won some successes early in the war, but who had protested his unfitness for a great command, and who was soon to prove it.  He led the army after Lee, found him entrenched on the heights back of Fredericksburg, and hurled division after division against an impregnable position, until twelve thousand men lay dead and wounded on the field.  Burnside, half-crazed with anguish at his fatal mistake, offered his resignation, which was at once accepted.

“Fighting Joe” Hooker succeeded him, and was soon to demonstrate that he, too, was unfitted for the great task.  Early in May, believing Lee’s army to be in retreat, he attacked it at Chancellorsville, only to be defeated with a loss of seventeen thousand men.  At the beginning of the battle, Hooker had enjoyed every advantage of position, and his army outnumbered Lee’s; but he sacrificed his position, with unaccountable stupidity, moving from a high position to a lower one, provoking the protest from Meade that, if the army could not hold the top of a hill, it certainly could not hold the bottom of it; and he seemed unable to use his men to advantage, holding one division in idleness while another was being cut to pieces.

It is, perhaps, sufficient comment upon the folly of dismissing McClellan to point out that within seven months of his retirement, the Army of the Potomac, which had been the finest fighting-machine in existence on the continent, had lost thirty thousand men on the field and thousands more by desertion, and had been converted from a confident and well-disciplined force into a discouraged and disorganized rabble.

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