Selected Correspondance of Abraham Lincoln 1863 Letter To General J. A. Mcclernand
by Abraham Lincoln
EXECUTIVE MANSION, WASHINGTON,
August 12, 1863.
MAJOR-GENERAL McCLERNAND.
MY DEAR SIR:--Our friend William G. Greene has just presented a kind
letter in regard to yourself, addressed to me by our other friends
Yates, Hatch, and Dubois.
I doubt whether your present position is more painful to you than to
myself. Grateful for the patriotic stand so early taken by you in
this life-and-death struggle of the nation, I have done whatever has
appeared practicable to advance you and the public interest together.
No charges, with a view to a trial, have been preferred against you
by any one; nor do I suppose any will be. All there is, so far as I
have heard, is General Grant's statement of his reasons for relieving
you. And even this I have not seen or sought to see; because it is a
case, as appears to me, in which I could do nothing without doing
harm. General Grant and yourself have been conspicuous in our most
important successes; and for me to interfere and thus magnify a
breach between you could not but be of evil effect. Better leave it
where the law of the case has placed it. For me to force you back
upon General Grant would be forcing him to resign. I cannot give you
a new command, because we have no forces except such as already have
commanders.
I am constantly pressed by those who scold before they think, or
without thinking at all, to give commands respectively to Fremont,
McClellan, Butler, Sigel, Curtis, Hunter, Hooker, and perhaps others,
when, all else out of the way, I have no commands to give them. This
is now your case; which, as I have said, pains me not less than it
does you. My belief is that the permanent estimate of what a general
does in the field is fixed by the "cloud of witnesses" who have been
with him in the field, and that, relying on these, he who has the
right needs not to fear.
