George B. McClellan

• 1. Introduction

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  George Brinton McClellan arrived in Washington in the summer of 1861 as the man the Union had been waiting for. He had won the only land battles of the war so far, newspapers were calling him "the Napoleon of the Present War", and crowds cheered his train all the way from Wheeling to the capital. Within weeks he would write to his wife that he had "become the power of the land" and confess that he might have made himself Dictator if he had wanted to. He did not want to. What he wanted was to build the most powerful army the United States had ever seen, and then fight the war on his own terms. The questions that shadow McClellan across fifteen years of Civil War, politics, and afterlife are deceptively simple. Why did one of the most gifted military organizers in American history so rarely fight? Why did a man celebrated by his troops lose their vote nearly three to one? And how does a general who never won a decisive battle convince himself, until the end of his life, that history would eventually do him justice?

• 2. Philadelphia to West Point

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  Philadelphia on the 3rd of December 1826 was where McClellan was born, into a family of considerable standing. His father, also named George McClellan, was a surgeon who founded Jefferson Medical College. His mother, Elizabeth Sophia Steinmetz Brinton McClellan, was described by those who knew her as possessing "considerable grace and refinement." One of McClellan's great-grandfathers was Samuel McClellan, a brigadier general who served in the Revolutionary War, so military heritage ran in the blood.

  The boy first aimed at medicine, then at law, before settling on the army. His father wrote to President John Tyler on his behalf, and in 1842, at fifteen years old, McClellan was accepted at West Point with the academy waiving its usual minimum age of sixteen. He threw himself into the military theory of Dennis Hart Mahan and the strategic writings of Antoine-Henri Jomini. His closest friends at the academy were aristocratic southerners: George Pickett, Dabney Maury, Cadmus Wilcox, and A. P. Hill. These friendships gave McClellan what he later described as a special appreciation for the southern character and the sectional tensions that would eventually produce the Civil War.

  He graduated second in his class of 59 cadets in 1846, at age nineteen. The top position went to Charles Seaforth Stewart because McClellan's drawing skills were judged inferior. He was commissioned a brevet second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and within weeks he was sailing for Mexico.

• 3. Lessons from Mexico

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  McClellan arrived near the mouth of the Rio Grande in October 1846 carrying a double-barreled shotgun, two pistols, a saber, a dress sword, and a Bowie knife. He was disappointed to have missed the American victory at Monterrey a month earlier. Dysentery and malaria then kept him hospitalized for nearly a month; he would call malaria his "Mexican disease" for the rest of his life.

  Once recovered, he served as an engineering officer under Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott, a close friend of his father's. He was repeatedly exposed to enemy fire and earned brevet promotions for his service at Contreras, Churubusco, and Chapultepec. He also served under Captain Robert E. Lee, the same man he would face years later at Antietam. The war taught McClellan that flanking movements, as Scott used at Cerro Gordo, often beat frontal assaults, and that siege operations, as at Veracruz, could deliver decisive results without reckless bloodshed. He also watched Scott maintain strict discipline over his troops to protect the civilian population, and he came away with a lasting disdain for volunteer soldiers and officers who lacked professional training.

  The peacetime years that followed were restless. He surveyed the Cascade Range for a potential transcontinental railroad route in 1853, under orders from Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, and demonstrated an early pattern of insubordination: he selected Yakima Pass without thorough reconnaissance, refused the Washington Territory governor's order to lead a party through it in winter, and missed three superior passes nearby that were later used for both railroads and interstate highways. Davis nonetheless treated McClellan almost as a protege and sent him in 1855 as an official observer to the Crimean War, where he watched the siege of Sevastopol. From that assignment came two lasting legacies: a cavalry tactics manual adopted by the U.S. Army, and the McClellan Saddle, which he claimed to have observed used by Hussars in Prussia and Hungary and which remained standard issue for the horse cavalry as long as the cavalry existed.

• 4. Building an Army

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  On the 26th of July 1861, the day McClellan reached Washington by special train after his victories in western Virginia, he was appointed commander of the Military Division of the Potomac. By August 20, he had consolidated several scattered units into the Army of the Potomac and named himself its first commander. The army grew from 50,000 men in July to 168,000 in November, making it the largest military force the United States had raised to that point. He surrounded Washington with 48 forts and strong points, mounting 480 guns manned by 7,200 artillerists.

  McClellan was extraordinarily gifted at organization and at inspiring loyalty. His troops adored him. He reviewed them constantly, and they repaid the attention with passionate devotion. Historian Stephen W. Sears later noted that McClellan's defensive caution would have been reasonable for a commander genuinely outnumbered, but McClellan in fact rarely had less than a two-to-one advantage over Confederate forces in 1861 and 1862. That fall, Confederate numbers ranged from 35,000 to 60,000, while the Army of the Potomac numbered 122,000 in September, rising to 192,000 by year's end.

  The inflated estimates came partly from McClellan himself and partly from his intelligence chief, detective Allan Pinkerton, whose overblown reports reinforced McClellan's existing convictions. By August 19, McClellan had estimated 150,000 rebel soldiers on his front, against an actual Confederate deployment that had numbered only 35,000 at Bull Run weeks before. The result was a paralysis that dismayed Lincoln, who on the 10th of January 1862, told top generals, "If General McClellan does not want to use the army, I would like to borrow it for a time."

  On the 1st of November 1861, McClellan became general-in-chief of all Union armies after Winfield Scott retired. When Lincoln expressed concern about the burden of the dual role, McClellan replied, "I can do it all." He privately referred to Lincoln, whom he had known as a railroad lawyer for the Illinois Central, as "nothing more than a well-meaning baboon" and "a gorilla". On the 13th of November he made the president wait thirty minutes at his door, then had a servant say he had gone to bed.

• 5. The Peninsula and Seven Days

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  On the 17th of March 1862, McClellan's army began sailing from Alexandria in what an English observer called the "stride of a giant": 121,500 men, 44 artillery batteries, 1,150 wagons, over 15,000 horses, and tons of supplies. The target was Richmond, approached from the southeast via the Virginia Peninsula, between the James River and the York River.

  Confederate General John B. Magruder, defending the Peninsula with a vastly smaller force, marched small groups of men repeatedly past observation points to create an impression of overwhelming numbers, accompanied by great noise and fanfare. McClellan, already predisposed to believe he was outnumbered, fell completely for the deception and chose a siege of Yorktown rather than assault. When Johnston finally pulled back up the Peninsula, McClellan was left chasing him without the heavy artillery he had spent a month positioning. His forces came to within four miles of Richmond before a malarial fever prevented him from commanding personally on the 31st of May, when Johnston struck at Seven Pines.

  Johnston was wounded in that battle and Robert E. Lee took command of the Army of Northern Virginia. At the end of June, Lee launched the Seven Days Battles. The first major fight, at Mechanicsville, was poorly coordinated and costly to the Confederates, but the surprise appearance of Stonewall Jackson's troops convinced McClellan he faced 200,000 enemy soldiers. He reported that number to Washington, although the source places Lee's actual strength at roughly 112,220 men compared with McClellan's 105,857.

  McClellan decided to withdraw his army south to the James River. During the battles of Glendale and Malvern Hill, he was absent: at Glendale he was five miles behind the lines near Malvern Hill, without telegraph communications; at Malvern Hill he was aboard a gunboat, at one point ten miles down the James River. Effective command fell both times to Brigadier General Fitz John Porter. Historian Stephen W. Sears wrote that McClellan "was guilty of dereliction of duty" on those battlefields, and that had the Army of the Potomac been destroyed at Glendale, charges under the Articles of War would likely have followed. A telegram McClellan sent to Secretary of War Stanton during the withdrawal blamed the Lincoln administration directly: "If I save this army now, I tell you plainly I owe no thanks to you or to any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army." The War Department telegrapher censored the message before Lincoln could read it.

• 6. Antietam and Removal

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  On the 4th of September 1862, Robert E. Lee launched his first invasion of the North, crossing into Maryland. Lincoln reluctantly restored McClellan to field command. Then, on the 13th of September, Union soldiers found a copy of Lee's operational orders wrapped around a package of cigars in an abandoned Confederate camp. Special Order 191 revealed that Lee had split his army into multiple widely separated columns. McClellan's reaction was exultant: he waved the order at his friend Brigadier General John Gibbon and said, "Here is a paper with which if I cannot whip Bobbie Lee, I will be willing to go home."

  Historians including James M. McPherson, Stephen Sears, John Keegan, and James V. Murfin have argued that despite that excitement, McClellan delayed some eighteen hours before acting on the intelligence, giving Lee time to concentrate his forces at Sharpsburg. A 2012 article by Gene Thorp in The Washington Post, however, cited evidence that the army's vanguard was already in motion on the 13th based on orders issued the previous day.

  The Battle of Antietam on the 17th of September 1862 was the single bloodiest day in American military history. Lee's army was smaller than half the size of McClellan's, yet McClellan launched his three assaults separately and sequentially against the Confederate left, center, and right, allowing Lee to shift defenders each time. Historian James M. McPherson noted that the two corps McClellan kept in reserve were larger than Lee's entire force. At a critical breakthrough in the Confederate center, Fitz John Porter reportedly told McClellan, "Remember, General, I command the last reserve of the last Army of the Republic."

  Antietam was a tactical draw but a strategic Union victory: Lee withdrew to Virginia, ending his Maryland campaign. That outcome allowed Lincoln to issue the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on the 22nd of September 1862. Secretary of State William H. Seward had advised Lincoln to wait for a Union victory before issuing it, to prevent the impression it came from desperation. The proclamation, and the battle that enabled it, helped dissuade France and Britain from recognizing the Confederacy.

  Because McClellan failed to pursue Lee's retreating army, Lincoln ordered his removal from command on the 5th of November 1862. Ambrose Burnside assumed command of the Army of the Potomac on the 9th of November. McClellan wrote to his wife: "Well, one of these days history will I trust do me justice."

• 7. The 1864 Campaign

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  Secretary Stanton ordered McClellan to Trenton, New Jersey, for further orders that never came. He spent months writing a lengthy report justifying his conduct of both major campaigns and accusing the Lincoln administration of denying him necessary reinforcements. The War Department was reluctant to publish the report; in October 1863, McClellan openly declared himself a Democrat and a candidate for office.

  The Democrats nominated him to run against Lincoln in the 1864 presidential election. Following the example of Winfield Scott, McClellan remained on active duty as a U.S. Army general throughout the campaign and did not resign his commission until election day, the 8th of November 1864. His position was muddied from the start: he supported continuing the war and restoring the Union, but the party platform, written by Copperhead leader Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, called for an immediate cease-fire and a negotiated peace with the Confederacy. McClellan was forced to repudiate the platform, making his campaign internally inconsistent. His running mate, George H. Pendleton of Ohio, was a peace candidate whose name was later attached to the Pendleton Act civil service reforms.

  Lincoln won by a wide margin: 212 Electoral College votes to 21, and a popular vote of 2,218,388 to 1,812,807. For all the devotion the Army of the Potomac had shown him in the field, the military vote went to Lincoln nearly three to one. Lincoln's share of the vote within the Army of the Potomac itself was seventy percent.

• 8. After the War

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  At the end of the war in 1865, McClellan took his family to Europe and did not return until 1868, staying out of American politics entirely during that period. Back in New York, he worked on engineering projects and was offered the presidency of the newly formed University of California, which he declined. In 1870 he was appointed chief engineer of the New York City Department of Docks. From 1872 he also served as president of the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad, and the family returned to Europe again for three years from 1873 to 1875.

  In March 1877, the Governor of New York, Lucius Robinson, nominated McClellan to be the first state Superintendent of Public Works, but the New York State Senate rejected him as "incompetent to fill the position for which he was named."

  His political rehabilitation came from New Jersey rather than New York. In 1877, the New Jersey Democratic Party nominated him for governor at a state convention where his name had not even been placed forward by his own supporters; there was a sudden stampede and he was nominated by acclamation. His opponent in the general election, William A. Newell, attacked him for living in New York. McClellan refuted the charge, and won. Democrats gained a majority in both houses of the New Jersey legislature for the first time since 1870. In his inaugural address, McClellan named relief from the Panic of 1873 as the state's most urgent problem and advocated a fifty percent cut in state taxes. By the end of his term, the state tax on residents had been abolished entirely. He served as the 24th governor of New Jersey from 1878 to 1881, and in his later writings continued to vigorously defend every decision he had made during the Civil War. He died on the 29th of October 1885.