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THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR.

BY

WILLLIAM HENRY HURLBERT.

NEW YORK:

SHELDON AND COMPANY,

335 BROADWAY, COR. WORTH ST.

1864.

.

REPORT AND CAMPAIGNS.

THE ONLY COMPLETE AND ACCURATE EDITION.

By special arrangement with General MCCLELLAN,

Have published a

SHELDON & CO.,

Publishers, 335 Broadway, New York,

FULL AND COMPLETE EDITION OF HIS REPORT. While going through the press, this edition was corrected by General MCCLELLAN. It has none of the remarkable errors which have crept into the Government edition and all the other editions that have followed the Government edition.

It also has the

CAMPAIGN IN WESTERN VIRGINIA, prepared by General MCCLELLAN expressly for this edition. Illustrated with MAPS AND PLANS OF BATTLES, &c., prepared by General MCCLELLAN. One volume, 8vo. Price, $3.

12mo edition of the same, bound in cloth, with all the Maps, price, $1 75. Bound in boards, $1 25.

From the Journal of Commerce.

"We regret that the Congressional edition, and other cheap editions of the Report, are incomplete and inaccurate, omitting entirely some portions which present the most interesting and important views of the relations of General McClellan to the Cabinet, the army, and the country. The edition published by Sheldon & Company, under General McClel lan's authority, is accurate."

From the Post, Chicago.

"Sheldon & Company have issued their edition of General McClellan's Report on the Organization and Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac, to which is added an account of the Campaign in West Virginia, from the General's own pen. This edition is the only one which gives the main report in full; important parts of it, relating to very critical periods in the history of the Army of the Potomac, being omitted from the Congressional edition, and, by consequence, from all other editions, without exception, which are mere reprints of that. The edition published by Sheldon & Company is complete and authentic, and is the only complete and authentic edition."

From the Boston Post.

"No man can feel that he has a copy of McClellan's Report without a copy of this edi

tion."

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by
SHELDON & COMPANY,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York.

STEREOTYPED BY
SMITH & MCDOUGAL

82 & 84 Beekman St., N. Y.

PRINTED BY

O. 8. WESTCOTT & 00.,
79 John Street, N. Y.

PREFACE.

I HAVE not attempted in this volume to write either a full biography of General McClellan or a complete history of his campaigns.

So far as the biography of a man yet living, and conspicuous in the political action of his time, can properly be written at all, this work has been admirably done, in respect to General McClellan, by Mr. George S. Hillard, of Boston. And the history of General McClellan's campaigns can only be completely written when the archives not of our own war department alone, but of the war department of the Confederate States also, shall have become accessible to the historian.

My object has been to depict, as fully and fairly as the documentary evidence before me would enable me to do, the parts played by General McClellan and by the administration of Mr. Lincoln, respectively, in the conduct of the war from its outbreak, in the spring of 1861, down to the final removal of General McClellan from the command of the Army of the Potomac, in November, 1862.

About two years ago my attention was specially directed to this subject by a remarkable article on the campaign of the Army of the Potomac, which appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, at Paris, in October, 1862, over the signature of A. TROGNON, and which was commonly attributed at the time to the pen of the Prince de Joinville. It is unnecessary to dwell here upon the reasons which make it desirable for a prince of the House of Orleans to refrain from signing with his own name papers published at Paris, under the imperial regime: but it is not, perhaps, improper for me to say that, in a letter on the subject of this article, the Prince de Joinville has thus expressed himself: "I assure you that I entirely partake the

sentiments of respect and admiration entertained towards General McClellan by Mr. A. TROGNON.”

I published a translation of this article at New York immediately after its appearance in Paris, and in a brief preface to that translation I took occasion to say that the paper must be considered to be substantially an indictment of the administration of Mr. Lincoln as the really responsible authors of the failure of the Peninsular expedition against Richmond.

All that has since been made known of the history of that expedition, as well by the reports of the Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War as by the reports of General McClellan himself, and of his subordinate commanders; by the journals of the time; and by various official and non-official publications on the subject, tends, it seems to me, to sustain and to reinforce this indictment.

Moved to the work by a protracted examination of these publications, I had made some progress, more than a year ago, in a "Historical Sketch of the Peninsular Campaign," when I was led by considerations of no moment to the reader to defer the completion of my design. Having been applied to by the Messrs. Sheldon & Co., the publishers of General McClellan's Report, to furnish them with a narrative of General McClellan's career as a commander of the national armies, I judged it best to elucidate as clearly as I could the peculiar relations sustained by General McClellan to the policy of the war as well as to its conduct in the field: and I have therefore embodied in the present volume much of the material prepared for use in a more full, careful, and elaborate work than this at all pretends to be.

NEW YORK, September 27, 1864.

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