The telegram that reached George B. McClellan’s New Jersey home on the morning of April 15, 1865, carried word that President Abraham Lincoln had died at 7:22 a. m.
, hours after being shot at Ford’s Theatre — and it forced the former commander of the Army of the Potomac to confront, in a single moment, the full weight of his own bitter history with the fallen president.
McClellan, who had once been hailed as the savior of the Union and the “Young Napoleon,” went pale as he read the message, according to family accounts preserved in the McClellan papers at the Library of Congress. He sat down heavily, read it a second time, then a third, as though unable to process what it told him.
His wife, Ellen, later recalled in a letter to their daughter that she saw an expression on his face she had rarely witnessed — genuine shock mixed with something she could only describe as anguish. The man who had privately mocked Lincoln as a “well-meaning baboon” and the “original gorilla” now faced the reality of the president’s violent death.
McClellan’s first spoken words, as recorded by biographer William Starr Myers in his 1934 work drawing on family papers and Ellen’s recollections, described the assassination as a terrible calamity for the nation. That phrase became his public position, repeated to reporters and in official communications.
But the historical record shows far more. In a fragmentary letter held in his personal papers, apparently written in mid-April 1865, McClellan’s handwriting appears shakier than usual, with words crossed out and rewritten, the document never completed or sent. In it, he wrote that he was shocked beyond measure, that whatever political differences existed, he had never wished Lincoln harm, and that God knew he had never desired such a terrible end.
The repetition of those phrases suggests a man working through guilt, historians note — worried, perhaps irrationally, that his years of harsh private criticism and public opposition might somehow be connected to the climate of hatred that made assassination possible. John Wilkes Booth did not shoot Lincoln because McClellan called him a gorilla, but grief and guilt are not rational emotions.
On April 16, McClellan wrote to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, one of his harshest critics, offering his services in any capacity for pursuing and capturing the conspirators. The letter, preserved among War Department records for April 1865 in the National Archives, was brief and formal but sincere. For McClellan to reach out to Stanton at all demonstrated how deeply the assassination had affected him.
He also described the killing as a cowardly murder, language that carried particular weight from a man who had spent years criticizing Lincoln’s leadership, his origins, his lack of formal military education, and his tendency to tell stories even at serious moments.
The two men’s relationship had been one of the Civil War’s most consequential and troubled partnerships. McClellan graduated second in his class from West Point in 1846, resigned from the army, became a successful railroad executive, and was 34 when the war began. After the disaster at Bull Run in summer 1861, he took command of the Army of the Potomac and was hailed as the Union’s savior.
Lincoln placed enormous faith in him, often walking to McClellan’s headquarters late at night to discuss strategy, speaking of him with unusual warmth, and defending him repeatedly against critics in his cabinet and Congress. He gave the general everything he asked for — soldiers, resources, opportunities.
But McClellan saw Lincoln differently. His letters to Ellen, preserved at the Library of Congress, called the president a “well-meaning baboon” in August 1861 and the “original gorilla” that November. These were not isolated remarks but reflected deep contempt running through dozens of letters across many months.
On October 11, 1861, Lincoln came to McClellan’s house to speak with him and waited in the parlor. When the general returned and was told the president was waiting, he walked past the room, went upstairs, and sent a servant to tell Lincoln he had gone to bed. John Hay’s diary entry from that night, and John Nicolay’s later account, confirm Lincoln left quietly and never mentioned the slight.
The military relationship deteriorated through 1862. McClellan consistently overestimated Confederate forces, with Allan Pinkerton’s intelligence reports inflating enemy numbers by factors of two or three. He demanded more troops, more time, more supplies.
After Antietam in September 1862, when he failed to pursue Lee’s defeated army, Lincoln visited the battlefield personally, walking among the dead still being buried, and tried once more to persuade his general to act.
McClellan did not act. On November 5, 1862, Lincoln removed him from command in a brief telegram from General-in-Chief Henry Halleck preserved in the National Archives. When McClellan rode through the camps for the last time on November 10, multiple eyewitness accounts in regimental histories describe grown men weeping openly.
For two years McClellan lived in strange limbo — too prominent to ignore, too popular with certain Democratic factions to dismiss entirely, but with no command and no role. In 1864 the Democratic Party nominated him for president on a platform calling for immediate cessation of hostilities and negotiations with the Confederacy. McClellan tried to distance himself from that position, stating in his September 8 acceptance letter that “the Union must be preserved,” but the message was clear enough to most voters.
Lincoln won decisively on November 8, 1864, carrying 212 electoral votes to McClellan’s 21, with the general winning only New Jersey, Delaware, and Kentucky. Sherman’s capture of Atlanta had changed everything. According to journalist Noah Brooks’s diary, Lincoln was gracious in victory, saying he bore no personal ill will toward McClellan and that the general deserved respect for his military service.
McClellan was humiliated. The man he had called a baboon and a gorilla had defeated him overwhelmingly. The president whose interference he resented had been vindicated by events.
The war he thought should end through negotiation was being won through the aggressive warfare he had always resisted.
Six days after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, the telegram arrived. In the weeks that followed, McClellan’s private correspondence showed him beginning to recognize the true scale of what Lincoln had accomplished. The man he dismissed as an ignorant country lawyer had navigated the nation through its greatest crisis, outmaneuvered him politically, outlasted him militarily, and been proven right on the fundamental questions of the war.
In his letters from late April and May 1865, McClellan stopped making disparaging remarks about Lincoln entirely. The biting sarcasm and contempt that filled his wartime letters to Ellen simply disappeared. The most significant evolution came years later in memoirs he worked on during the 1880s, published posthumously in 1887 as “McClellan’s Own Story: The War for the Union.”
The book remains defensive in many places, with McClellan still justifying his military decisions and arguing he had been treated unfairly. But in his later writings and reflections, historians note indications that his assessment of Lincoln became more measured and respectful over time. While he did not always agree with Lincoln’s policies, he acknowledged that the president had navigated extraordinary challenges with skill and dedication.
A photograph of McClellan from the early 1880s, housed at the Library of Congress, shows him in his late 50s, hair and beard gray, face lined with age and experience. He looks tired — like a man who has carried regrets for a long time.
McClellan died on October 29, 1885, at his Orange, New Jersey home at age 58, from a heart condition that had troubled him for years. His funeral was a major public event attended by thousands, including many Army of the Potomac veterans who still revered him. Eulogies reported in the New York Times on October 31, 1885, praised his organizational abilities, his genuine care for his soldiers, and his intelligence, but were notably more circumspect about his generalship and political career.
In the end, McClellan’s reaction to Lincoln’s assassination was the reaction of a man forced to reckon with his own misjudgment of history’s central figure of his time. Not a dramatic conversion, not a sudden revelation, but the beginning of a slow, difficult, painful process of understanding — that the man he dismissed as unqualified had been greater than he realized, that the cause he had been ambivalent about defending had been profoundly just, and that his own certainties about military strategy and political wisdom had been wrong in crucial ways.
When that telegram arrived on the morning of April 15, 1865, George Brinton McClellan began the longest and most difficult campaign of his entire life. Not a military campaign, not a political campaign, but the campaign to understand Abraham Lincoln, to come to terms with his own relationship to the man who had been his president and commander-in-chief, and to acknowledge, however privately and painfully, that Lincoln had been his better in the ways that mattered most.