McClellan and Burnside had been classmates at West Point, and had
been associated in railway employment after they had left the army,
in the years immediately before the war. The intimacy which began at
the Academy had not only continued, but they had kept up the
demonstrative boyish friendship which made their intercourse like
that of brothers. They were "Mac" and "Burn" to each other when I
knew them, and although Fitz-John Porter, Hancock, Parker, Reno, and
Pleasonton had all been members of the same class, the two seemed to
be bosom friends in a way totally different from their intimacy with
the others. Probably there was no one outside of his own family to
whom McClellan spoke his secret thoughts in his letters, as he did
to Burnside. The characteristic lack of system in business which was
very noticeable in Burnside, made him negligent, apparently, in
discriminating between official letters and private ones, and so it
happens that there are a number in the official records which were
never meant to reach the public. They show, however, as nothing else
could, the relations which the two men sustained to each other, and
reveal strong traits in the characters of both.
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