A friend, a Republican general, wrote to him a week or so after McClellan had been removed to urge that all the generals ought to be men in thorough sympathy with the Administration.  He received a crushing reply (to be followed in a day or two by a friendly invitation) indignantly proving that Democrats served as well in the field as Republicans.  But in regard to McClellan himself we now know that a grave suspicion had entered Lincoln’s mind.  He might, perhaps, in the fear of finding no one better, have tolerated his “over-cautiousness”; he did not care what line an officer who did his duty might in civil life take politically; but he would not take the risk of entrusting the war further to a general who let his politics govern his strategy, and who, as he put it simply, “did not want to hurt the enemy.”  This, he had begun to believe, was the cause of McClellan’s lack of energy.  He resolved to treat McClellan’s conduct now, in fighting Lee or in letting him escape South, as the test of whether his own suspicion about him was justified or not.  Lee did get clear away, and Lincoln dismissed McClellan in the full belief, right or wrong, that he was not sorry for Lee’s escape.

It is not known exactly what further evidence Lincoln then had for his belief, but information which seems to have come later made him think afterwards that he had been right.  The following story was told him by the Governor of Vermont, whose brother, a certain General Smith, served under McClellan and was long his intimate friend.  Lincoln believed the story; so may we.  The Mayor of New York, a shifty demagogue named Fernando Wood, had visited McClellan in the Peninsula with a proposal that he should become the Democratic candidate for the Presidency, and with a view to this should pledge himself to certain Democratic politicians to conduct the war in a way that should conciliate the South, which to Lincoln’s mind meant an “inefficient” way.  McClellan, after some days of unusual reserve, told Smith of this and showed him a letter which he had drafted giving the desired pledge.  On Smith’s earnest remonstrance that this “looked like treason,” he did not send the letter then.  But Wood came again after the battle of Antietam, and this time McClellan sent a letter in the same sense.  This he afterwards confessed to Smith, showing him a copy of the letter.  Smith and other generals asked, after this, to be relieved from service under him.  If, as can hardly be doubted, McClellan did this, there can be no serious excuse for him, and no serious question that Lincoln was right when he concluded it was unsafe to employ him.  McClellan, according to all evidence except his own letters, was a nice man, and was not likely to harbour a thought of what to him seemed treason; it is honourable to him that he wished later to serve under Grant but was refused by him.  But, to one of his views, the political situation before and after Antietam was alarming, and it is certain that to his inconclusive mind and character an attitude of half loyalty would be easy.  He may not have wished that Lee should escape, but he had no ardent desire that he should not.  Right or wrong, such was the ground of Lincoln’s independent and conscientiously deliberate decision.