He had urged a system of compensated emancipation for the border
States. He had said that he held the slavery question to be only a
part, and an absolutely subordinate part, of the greater question of
saving the Union. He had disapproved of a portion of Pope's order
regarding the treatment of non-combatants. However ill-advised
McClellan's letter was, it may be read between the lines as an
attempt to strengthen himself with the President as against Stanton
and others, and to make his military seat firmer in the saddle by
showing that he was not in political antagonism to Mr. Lincoln, but
held, in substance, the conservative views that were supposed to be
his. Its purpose seems to me to have been of this personal sort. He
did not publish it at the time, and it was not till he was removed
from his command that it became a kind of political manifesto. This
view is supported by what occurred after the publication of the
Emancipation Proclamation, which I shall tell presently; but, to
preserve the proper sequence, I must first give another incident.
A few days after the battle of Antietam a prominent clergyman of
Hagerstown spent the Sunday in camp, and McClellan invited a number
of officers to attend religious services in the parlors of the house
where headquarters were.
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