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

‘ [173] They stated that Congress had appointed the committee to watch the conduct of the war, and unless this state of things should soon be changed, it would be their duty to make the testimony public which had been taken, with such comments as the circumstances of the case seemed to require.’

So, by the printed record of the committee, it appears that after the exhaustive examination of the three distinguished military authorities, Generals Sickles, Doubleday, and Howe, and without General Meade having been called upon to testify in his own behalf, Mr. Wade, the chairman, and Mr. Chandler, the two most prominent and active members of the committee, had deemed it their duty to wait upon the President and secretary of war, and ‘in behalf of the army and the country,’ demand the removal of General Meade.

To realize the enormity of these proceedings it is necessary for the reader to bear in mind the relation of certain dates to each other. The action of Mr. Wade and his colleague is shown by the journal, as just quoted above, to have been taken on the 3d of March, one day before General Howe's testimony was finished, and it was on the following day, the 4th of March, when the entry in the journal, detailing the visit to the President and secretary, had been made by direction of the chairman, he announced that General Meade happened to be in Washington, and the committee thereupon summoned General Meade to appear before it.

On the 4th of March, therefore, General Meade was summoned to appear before the committee, and on the next day, the 5th of March, he appeared before it, as mentioned in his letter of the 6th of March. He there says, in that letter of the 6th of March, that upon presenting himself, in obedience to the summons of the committee, he found present only Senator Wade, who denied that there were any charges against him, saying that the committee was merely making up a history of the war, and was now taking evidence to enable it to give an account of the battle of Gettysburg. Yet this gentleman who spoke was he who, with his colleague, had only three days before been to see the President and secretary, to request the removal for incompetency of General Meade from the command of the Army of the Potomac, and who, only two days before, had ordered the entry, as quoted, made in the journal immediately before he, as chairman, notified the committee that General Meade was in Washington.

General Meade did, in truth, most inopportunely for the committee,