Their distrust was not allayed by the manner in which he conducted himself.  His views of life and of the office of commanding general were not those of frontier America.  He believed in pomp, in display, in an ordered routine.  The fine weather of the autumn of 1861 was utilized at Washington for frequent reviews.  The flutter of flags, the glint of marching bayonets, the perfectly ordered rhythm of marching feet, the blare of trumpets, the silvery notes of the bugles, the stormily rolling drums, all these filled with martial splendor the golden autumn air when the woods were falling brown.  And everywhere, it seemed, look where one might, a sumptuously uniformed Commanding General, and a numerous and sumptuous staff, were galloping past, mounted on beautiful horses.  Plain, blunt men like the Jacobins, caring nothing for this ritual of command, sneered.  They exchanged stories of the elaborate dinners he was said to give daily, the several courses, the abundance of wine, the numerous guests; and after these dinners, he and his gorgeous staff, “clattering up and down the public streets” merely to show themselves off.  All this sneering was wildly exaggerated.  The mania of exaggeration, the mania of suspicion, saturated the mental air breathed by every politician at Washington, that desperate winter, except the great and lonely President and the cynical Secretary of State.

McClellan made no concessions to the temper of the hour.  With Lincoln, his relations at first were cordial.  Always he was punctiliously respectful to “His Excellency.”  It is plain that at first Lincoln liked him and that his liking was worn away slowly.  It is equally plain that Lincoln did not know how to deal with him.  The tendency to pose was so far from anything in Lincoln’s make-up that it remained for him, whether in McClellan or another, unintelligible.  That humility which was so conspicuous in this first period of his rule, led him to assume with his General a modest, even an appealing tone.  The younger man began to ring false by failing to appreciate it.  He even complained of it in a letter to his wife.  The military ritualist would have liked a more Olympian superior.  And there is no denying that his head was getting turned.  Perhaps he had excuse.  The newspapers printed nonsensical editorials praising “the young Napoleon.”  His mail was filled with letters urging him to carry things with a high hand; disregard, if necessary, the pusillanimous civil government, and boldly “save the country.”  He had so little humor that he could take this stuff seriously.  Among all the foolish letters which the executors of famous men have permitted to see the light of publicity, few outdo a letter of McClellan’s in which he confided to his wife that he was willing to become dictator, should that be the only way out, and then, after saving his country, to perish.(3)

In this lordly mood of the melodramatic, he gradually—­probably without knowing it—­became inattentive to the President.  Lincoln used to go to his house to consult him, generally on foot, clad in very ordinary clothes.  He was known to sit in McClellan’s library “rather unnoticed” awaiting the General’s pleasure.(4)