lan, who resided on Gramercy Park, and told him the story, with the purpose of ascertaining why he did not preside at the meeting after agreeing to do so.

"You amaze me!" he said. "No such events ever occurred. Mr. Weed is a good old man, and he has forgotten. Mr. Lincoln never offered me the Presidency in any contingency. I never declined to preside at a war-meeting. How could I, when I was a Union soldier, and the only criticism I ever made on the Administration was that it did not push the armies fast enough? There never was a time when I would have refused to preside at any meeting that could help the Union cause. I remember nothing about any such memoranda, and am sure I never wrote to Thurlow Weed in my life."

I asked the General if no such overture was ever made by Mr. Weed.

Not as I remember," he said. "I recollect his once speaking to me about the desirableness of taking the leadership of a War-Democratic party, but I do not remember the purport of this proposition."

At General McClellan's suggestion I called on Mr. Barlow, who also had forgotten all about it.

Returning to Mr. Weed's, I asked if he could find the letter received from General McClellan, in which he declined to preside at a war-meeting. He

1

doubted if he had kept it, but Miss Harriet Weed, his faithful daughter and invaluable secretary, going in search of it, returned in an hour, bringing it from an upper room. It ran as follows:

(Private)

MY DEAR SIR:

OAKLANDS, N. J., June 13, 1863.

Your kind note is received.

For what I cannot doubt that you would consider good reasons, I have determined to decline the compliment of presiding over the proposed meeting of Monday next.

I fully concur with you in the conviction that an honorable peace is not now possible, and that the war must be prosecuted to save the Union and the Government, at whatever cost of time and treasure and blood.

I am clear, also, in the conclusion that the policy governing the conduct of the war should be one looking not only to military success, but also to ultimate re-union, and that it should consequently be such as to preserve the rights of all Union-loving citizens, wherever they may be, as far as compatible with military security. My views as to the prosecution of the war remain, substantially, as they have been from the beginning of the contest; these views I have made known officially.

I will endeavor to write you more fully before

Monday.

In the meantime believe me to be, in great haste, truly your friend,

GEORGE B. MCCLELLAN.

Hon. THURLOW WEED, New York.

"The General has forgotten that formal letter, has he?" said Mr. Weed, smiling. "If he had presided at that meeting, and rallied his party to the support of the war, he would have been President. I never heard what his reasons were, either 'before Monday' or any other day. Just see what an embarrassing time it was to refuse to preside at a warmeeting. Grant seemed to be stalled in front of Vicksburg, and that very morning came a report that he was going to raise the siege. Banks was defeated, the day before, at Port Hudson, and, two days earlier, a rebel privateer had captured six of our vessels off the Chesapeake. The very day that McClellan wrote the letter, Lee was rapidly marching through Maryland into Pennsylvania, and the North was in a panic. There couldn't have been a worse time to decline to preside at a Union meeting, and I am sorry that the General has forgotten what prevented his doing so."

I took the letter and returned to General McClellan with it.

'Well!" he exclaimed, as he took it and in

spected it, "that is my writing. I wrote that, and had forgotten about it. I don't know why I declined to preside; but it was probably because I am shy in the presence of multitudes, am not in the habit of speech-making, and should be certain to preside awkwardly. But why should anybody suppose me indifferent to the prosecution of the war?"

"Because," I said, "a year later they found you standing as a candidate for President on a platform which declared the war up to that time a failure, and seemed to disparage the services of our soldiers in the field."

"I never stood on that platform a day!" he exclaimed. "Everybody knows I did not. I repudiated it in my letter, and made my repudiation of it the only condition of accepting the nomination. I told all my friends so!"

"Mr. Weed thinks," I added, "that if you had presided instead of refusing to preside, and had followed it up with corresponding action, it would have united the North, finished the war a year sooner, saved thousands of lives, and made you President."

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Oh, well," he said, laughing, “that's an interesting speculation. Nobody can tell. At any rate I didn't, and it's all over now.'

Shortly afterward, I mentioned these facts to Frederick W. Seward.

"Yes," he said, "I have often heard Mr. Weed

tell the story. The fact is that neither Lincoln nor my father expected that the Administration would be re-elected. Their only hope was to have the war carried on vigorously. The President used to say, 'I am sure there are men who could do more for the success of our armies in my place than I am doing; I would gladly stand aside and let such a one take my place, any day.' Looking back at the Mexican and other wars, we thought some general would succeed Lincoln in 1864, and McClellan evidently thought so too. We did not foresee the tremendous victories and the splendid wave of patriotic feeling that carried Lincoln in again."

Colonel John Hay tells me that he is acquainted with Lincoln's effort to stir up McClellan and Seymour, heard, I suppose, when he was in the White House. And Roscoe Conkling tells me that it is not news to him.

One morning, a year before he died, Mr. Weed said to me:

Governor Seymour was here yesterday. He stayed to dinner, and we had a good talk about old times. I spoke of the scheme to make him President, and he remembered the details as I did. But he said that his reason for his action was that he 'wanted to carry on the war legally.' He said he couldn't have carried his party with him to approve of the arbitrary arrest by Stanton of the Northern