George Meade, The Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade, Major-General United States Army
George Gordon Meade, Ed.

[175] witnesses, and before humiliating and disgracing in the eyes of the world that general who scarce nine months before had assumed, unseeking it, the command of the Army of the Potomac, and within a week thereafter had gained the victory of Gettysburg?

This combined attack in the committee and the Senate upon General Meade, failing of its object, which was his removal, the committee proceeded to the further examination of the subject, hoping to produce so great a mass of damaging testimony as would render the committee's efforts on some future occasion more successful. That it did not eventually succeed was owing primarily to the integrity of Mr. Lincoln and his confidence in General Meade, and secondarily, as General Meade himself often subsequently remarked, to the inability of all the clashing interests opposed to him to combine on one common choice for a successor.

The animus displayed by the committee, as illustrated in the carefully discussed case, is a fair example of its course toward General Meade throughout its whole existence. And it is not to be supposed that the members confined their operations to the inside of the committee room. Coming from different parts of the country, prominent and influential, with a numerous following, they doubtless availed themselves of all the means at their command of disseminating the peculiar kind of information that best suited their object in view. Starting from Washington, the grand centre of all the low intrigues and wild rumors of which those days were so prolific, the information found its way to the outside world, to reappear, commented upon and exaggerated, in the various newspaper organs of each particular clique, manifesting itself in the constant sneers and innuendoes, constant misstatements and falsification of everything connected with the Army of the Potomac and himself, which so annoyed and harassed General Meade, and to which he makes so frequent allusion in his letters. The appointment of Lieutenant-General Grant to the command of all the armies of the United States, and his continuous presence with the Army of the Potomac, caused the command of that army to cease to be a position so much to be sought after, and for a time the labors of the committee to be diverted to other fields; and it was not until the unfortunate affair of the Petersburg mine that it again directed its attention to General Meade, with what success will subsequently appear. In the meantime, however, so far as the press was concerned, the system of misrepresentation and