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334 chapter fifteen “It Is My Duty to Submit to the Presdt’s Proclamation & Quietly Continue Doing My Duty” Although he took great satisfaction in the fact that he had thwarted Lee’s grand bid to win the war north of the Potomac, McClellan went to bed on the evening of September 20 in a sour mood. That afternoon a note had arrived from Halleck complaining that Washington was “entirely in the dark in regard to your own movements and those of the enemy. This should not be so. You should keep me advised of both.” Having just led the Army of the Potomac through some of the most anxious moments of the war, and still feeling the effects of dysentery, McClellan was in no mood to be lectured to by a man who had done little to vindicate the administration’s decision to elevate him to the exalted post of general-in-chief. “I regret that you ¤nd it necessary to couch every dispatch,” McClellan lashed back, “in a spirit of fault-¤nding. . . . I telegraphed you yesterday all that I knew, and had nothing more to inform you of until this evening.” He then reported that the Twelfth Corps had just occupied Maryland Heightsand Couch’s division was pushing the rebels out of Williamsport . The rest of the army, he informed Halleck, remained concentrated at Sharpsburg watching the rebels, who were reportedly falling back in the direction of Winchester. McClellan closed by complaining that Halleck had “not yet found leisure to say one word in commendation of the recent achievements of this army.”1 “it is my duty to . . . quietly continue doing my duty” 335 Thus, in the afterglow of the victories at South Mountain and Antietam, the tone was set for what would be the last chapters in McClellan’s military career. McClellan clearly hoped that his victories in Maryland would provide a major boost to his effort to restore reason, moderation, and enlightened statesmanship to ascendancy in the Union war effort. The ¤rst step in this effort had been the discrediting of Pope, and with him, the change in Union policy toward Southern civilians and the abandonment of the Peninsula; the second had been thwarting Lee’s raid into Maryland, and, in the process, vindicating McClellan ’sleadershipandoperationalmethods.Thenextstep,McClellanbelieved,was a quiet period that would allow him to rest and re¤t an army that was, in his mind, far short of being the ef¤ciently organized, properly led, and well-disciplined force he needed to achieve his strategic and operational objectives. Certainly, this was a reasonable and necessary step, given the terrible casualties the Army of the Potomac had suffered in Maryland, the logistical and administrative problems that had emerged as a consequence of the rapid evacuation of the Peninsula, the defeat at Second Manassas and the rush to the ¤eld in its aftermath , and the large number of new regiments in the army. Once this was done, the Army of the Potomac would undertake a new, decisive campaign against the rebels that would hopefully once again see it on its true line of operations on the James River. It quickly became clear, however, that McClellan’s goals after Antietam were unacceptable to the Lincoln administration. Moreover, any hope that McClellan had that Pope’s defeat and his own victories might stem the Lincoln administration ’s drift away from the policy of conciliation would prove to be as wrong as could be. McClellan would handle this particular disappointment quite well and, despite a number of problems, rehabilitate his army to the point that he would be able to conduct a very impressive campaign in early November. Nonetheless, it was, in retrospect, almost inevitable that the ultimate outcome of the events of this period would be McClellan’s removal from command. As McClellan contemplated the pile of captured Confederate battle ¶ags in his tent, he could not imagine on September 20 that his own position as commander of the Army of the Potomac might not be secure. Instead, that evening his mind was on taking others down from their posts. The previous day he had received a letter from Postmaster General Blair congratulating him on his victories in Maryland. Lincoln, Blair wrote, had “called me to his side & said ‘I rejoice in this success for many public reasons but I am also happy on account of McClellan.’ You know general that I have always told you that the President was your friend.” No doubt encouraged by Blair’s...

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