This text is part of:
[357]
and just so the Bourbons and their followers constantly denied the military greatness of Bonaparte.
But General McClellan has been so unjustly treated and so unscrupulously slandered that something more is required, simply as a matter of truth and fair dealing, in vindication and defence of him. After what has passed, silence might seem like acquiescence in charges which are as false as they are injurious.
It is no fault of General McClellan that events have taken such a turn that it is impossible to write a life of him without taking a somewhat controversial attitude.
A few remarks are, consequently, submitted, which are in the nature of a comment upon some points of the evidence presented in the preceding pages.
First of all: there are some persons who deny to General McClellan all merit whatever as a commander, maintaining that he has neither the capacity to plan a campaign nor to fight a battle, nd that every thing successfully done by him was either the work of others or the result of pure accident.
With such persons it is useless to reason, as to do so would be simply a waste of time.
No arguments or considerations would have any power to shake an impression like this.
Men who hold this opinion of the conqueror of Malvern Hill and Antietam are, in the intellectual line, legitimate
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.