The position of the Northern General was one of peculiar
weakness politically. He was an avowed Democrat. His head had been
turned by flattery and he had at one time dallied with the idea of
deposing Abraham Lincoln by the assumption of a military dictatorship.
Lincoln knew this. The demand for his removal would have swayed a
President of less balance.
Lincoln refused to deprive McClellan of his command but yielded
sufficiently to the clamor of the radicals of his own party to appoint
John Pope of the Western army to the command of a new division of troops
designed to advance on Richmond.
The generals under McClellan who did not agree with his slow methods
were detached with their men and assigned to service under Pope.
McClellan did not hesitate to denounce Pope as an upstart and a braggart
who had won his position by the lowest tricks of the demagogue. He
declared that the new commander was a military impostor, a tool of the
radical wing of the Republican party, a man who mistook brutality in
warfare for power and sought to increase the horrors of war by arming
slaves, legalizing plunder and making the people of the South
irreconcilable to a restored Union by atrocities whose memory could
never be effaced.
Pope's first acts on assuming command did much to justify McClellan's
savage criticism.
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