His personal intercourse with those about him
was so kindly, and his bearing so modest, that his dispatches,
proclamations, and correspondence are a psychological study, more
puzzling to those who knew him well than to strangers. Their turgid
rhetoric and exaggerated pretence did not seem natural to him. In
them he seemed to be composing for stage effect something to be
spoken in character by a quite different person from the sensible
and genial man we knew in daily life and conversation. The career of
the great Napoleon had been the study and the absorbing admiration
of young American soldiers, and it was perhaps not strange that when
real war came they should copy his bulletins and even his personal
bearing. It was, for the moment, the bent of the people to be
pleased with McClellan's rendering of the role; they dubbed him the
young Napoleon, and the photographers got him to stand with folded
arms, in the historic pose. For two or three weeks his dispatches
and letters were all on fire with enthusiastic energy. He appeared
to be in a morbid condition of mental exaltation. When he came out
of it, he was as genial as ever. The assumed dash and energy of his
first campaign made the disappointment and the reaction more painful
when the excessive caution of his conduct in command of the Army of
the Potomac was seen.
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