render official steps unnecessary. Your identification with the campaign in Virginia justified me in believing that unless some had management or serious error marked my operations I would be sustained promptly and fully by you. I never would have consented to go into Virginia under any other belief. I felt sure, as I told you, that I would receive no support from McClellan and it is not necessary to say here that if I had imagined for a moment that he would be rewarded, with his partisans, for abandoning me and betraying his trust, and that you would at least have consented to his and their advancement after such an act and would have failed to sustain me or even to do me the barest justice or to make the slightest acknowledgement in public of my services, I would never have put foot in Virginia. Your not doing so, when the whole facts come to be known, cannot fail to be the subject of remark, especially so as the circumstances under which you came to Washington and I undertook the campaign in Virginia are well known to one-half of Congress.

You say that you do not allow personal feeling to regulate or even to influence your official action, yet you assign the personal feeling of officers of the Potomac Army as a reason for your action or your consent to the President's action in my case.

I will not pursue the matter, It seems plain to me that the Government has been very willing to allow me to be sacrificed for some reason yet to be explained. I shall, if possible, find out what that reason, is so that I may at least be acquainted with the great public interests which justified the unmerited sacrifice of the honor and reputation of an officer whose services are so highly lauded in private by the Government which permits his public condemnation.

I neither ask nor expect an answer to this letter. I have accomplished my object and have fully observed the obligations of the personal friendship which has existed between us, most sincerely felt on part, in laying before you in this manner and in advance of any official action, wherein I think myself wronged, and what in my view I had a right to expect at your hands, If you have not the power (as I am led to infer from your letter) to do justice, even in words, to officers who served under your immediate orders and whose operations commanded your entire approval, but are forced to see them sacrificed without being permitted to put forth a word to prevent it, I have only to say that your position is certainly not to be envied. no man in all this country regrets more than I do that you occupy such a position or would more gladly see you out of it.

Excuse the length of this letter. Thus much seemed due to our private relations. I have not designed in any way to wound your feelings, and if I have said what is disagreeable to you, it has arisen from the necessity of my position.

Very respectfully, yours,

JNO. POPE.

SAINT PAUL, October 30, 1862.

Major General H. W. HALLECK, General-in-Chief:

MY DEAR GENERAL: So long as the vindictive and unfriendly critiques of my late campaign in Virginia were confined to the statements of irresponsible persons or the stories of very badly informed newspaper correspondents, I have not thought it worth while to take any public notice of them, but I observe that of late certain officers of