George B. McClellan and Civil War History

In the Shadow of Grant and Sherman

Thomas J. Rowland

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781612771809
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

A History Book Club Selection

Perhaps no other Union commander's reputation has been the subject of as much controversy as George B. McClellan's.

Thomas J. Rowland presents a framework in which early Civil War command can be viewed without direct comparison to that of the final two years. Such comparisons, in his opinion, are both unfair and contextually inaccurate. Only by understanding how very different was the context and nature of the war facing McClellan, as opposed to Grant and Sherman, can one discard the traditional "good general-bad general" approach to command performance. In such a light, McClellan's career, both his shortcomings and accomplishments, can be viewed with clearer perspective.

1

Of Statues and Shadows

IT STANDS IN METALLIC SILENCE, IMPASSIVE TO NINETY years of the commercial and residential growth that surrounds it. The statue, like the person it honors, remains difficult, almost hazardous to approach, its access constrained by two major District of Columbia arteries. Much like the man, the memorial rests on an island awash in a sea of confusion-aloof and distant from most other prominent Civil War statuary. Curiously, it adorns no rotary circle, graces no park or mall, commands no conspicuous city square as more and less heralded contemporaries do. Had not generations of urban sprawl engulfed it, the statue would go unnoticed. Tourists, providing they are alert, will stumble across it as they emerge from their hotel lairs for a day’s sightseeing in the nation’s capital. Its peculiar location reinforces the ambiguity besetting the one who created and first led the Army of the Potomac. And in a final touch of irony, the statue is flanked by such an irregular grid of street construction as to give rise to the amusing, if not judgmental, chestnut that the general was provided with three avenues of retreat but only one for advance. Fittingly, both the statue and the man, George Brinton McClellan, strike an enigmatic pose.¹

Looking resolutely southward. McClellan’s memorial has been the subject of many jibes aimed at the general’s timidity and extreme caution in fighting the enemy.

Photo courtesy of William E. Kotwas.

In sharp contrast to the McClellan memorial are those to his brother officers, Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. In the District of Columbia alone, streets, avenues, and rotary circles pay homage to their memories. Their statues dwarf all other Civil War memorials, both in size and prominence of location. Grant’s is an imposing statue, graced by splendidly animated horse-drawn artillery, and is located at the east end of the reflecting pool at the base of the capitol building itself. Located in East Executive Park, Sherman’s statue is parked immediately behind the United States Treasury Building, fronting the Ellipse, and flanked by the White House. The respect paid to their memories is not confined to the District of Columbia. Perched above a stretch along the Hudson River in New York City, Grant’s Tomb, a most impressive structure, houses the general’s remains. Sherman, no doubt, would have had a similar edifice to his memory, except that he specifically ruled it out. While his understated burial rituals were respected, neither he nor Grant, had he wished, could constrain generations of urban and rural officialdom from dedicating scores of expansive parkland, town squares, libraries, and other fitting testimonials in their honor. If for no other reason, Grant is remembered in countless fiduciary transactions conducted on a daily basis. Although initially a seldom-used issue of currency, his stamped facsimile, printed on the fifty-dollar bill of legal tender, is increasingly being lifted out of American wallets and pocketbooks. Grant and Sherman stand head and shoulders above all of their Union commanders, casting a near-impenetrable shadow over them.²

On the other hand, one finds little to dispel the riddle posed by McClellan’s memorial in the historiography of the Civil War era. Early McClellan biographies are generally so tainted with either panegyric or vitriol that they have become useless in arriving at any sober and objective assessment of the man. In them, McClellan is alternately vilified as traitor and coward by some or hailed as patriot and genius by others. The polemical nature of these works detracts from even the useful biographical information that might otherwise be gleaned from them. At any rate, by the Second World War, these arguments had exhausted themselves and a new generation of historians were prepared to debate his place within the broad parameters of the Civil War itself.³

Scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century, focusing on McClellan and his contemporaries, Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and even Abraham Lincoln, has tended to sweep McClellan into the background. In suppressing the controversy surrounding McClellan, Unionist historians of this period have forged a characteristic figure of the man. In finding McClellan’s military career to be essentially an unsuccessful one, they have tended to agree with T. Harry Williams’s verdict that McClellan was “not a good general, was even a bad one.” Bruce Catton found him to have “all of the virtues necessary in war except one-he did not like to fight.” Kenneth P. Williams blandly dismissed McClellan as the antithesis of a military leader by refusing to consider him a “real general.” And while his judgment of McClellan as a “vain and unstable man who sat a horse well” contains some basis in reality, Williams distorts McClellan’s active military ambitions in claiming he “wanted to be President.”⁴

McClellan remains the “problem child” of the Civil War because his military performance still invites debate, although less now than at the beginning of this historiographical period. If not a winner, he was not exactly a loser. Nearly all historians admit he was the competent organizer and administrator of an army that had been shattered at First Manassas. Some point out that, unlike Grant, McClellan had taken on the Confederacy when it was young and strong. Others have seized upon Robert E. Lee’s purported verdict that of all Federal commanders he faced, McClellan was his most difficult adversary. Warren W. Hassler and James G. Randall speculated that had McClellan’s efforts in the Peninsula campaign not been undercut by an antagonistic administration, he might have taken Richmond and convinced the Confederacy of the futility of a protracted war. All of this might have been accomplished nearly three years before Grant finally cornered Lee in about the same location.⁵

There are formidable obstacles to surmount in approaching McClellan objectively. Joseph L. Harsh has astutely observed that the more negative appraisals of McClellan became increasingly solidified in the face of a growing acceptance of the Unionist interpretation of the Civil War. Evaluations of Federal military leaders, and the ever-popular ranking of them, became conditioned by the rigid conclusion that the rebellion was not crushed, slavery was not abolished, and the magisterial Lincoln was not vindicated until the final years of the war. To that effect, all before 1864 has been reduced to a herculean struggle marked by adversity and disappointment. Kenneth P. Williams’s multivolume work underscores this frustration by implying that Lincoln despaired of finding a real general in the East until Grant was summoned in 1864. In this framework McClellan can only fail ignominiously. To McClellan’s claims that he was victimized by political machinations, historians have responded by charging that he suffered acute psychological delusions. Students of American strategic thought have squarely placed McClellan as a shortsighted commander. The Civil War had outgrown the limited, professional war of the strategist Henri Jomini. It had taken on Clausewitzian dimensions; it was the total, unlimited, annihilative struggle between peoples that Grant and Sherman, however unwittingly, pursued. In strategic perception, McClellan tops the list of commanders who failed to comprehend that difference.⁶

An objective study of McClellan becomes particularly difficult when he is compared to Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman. Lincoln is perhaps one of the most revered presidents in America. His heroic perseverance and force of personality preserved the Union from dissolution. He was martyred for that cause at the very moment his struggles became vindicated. McClellan’s own memoirs and his defenders’ apologies appear insipid by contrast. Nor do McClellan’s chances for an honest appraisal increase when he stands up to scrutiny with the likes of Grant and Sherman. Along with Phil Sheridan, Grant and Sherman are the heroic Union figures in the war. They emerge as both the architects and executors of victory. McClellan cannot and does not fare well by comparison.⁷

In the face of such commanding and summary verdicts, ongoing interest in the McClellan controversy largely languished in the immediate post-Civil War centennial period. All the same, a firm foundation had been constructed for future scholars to build upon. Acknowledging a debt to those early Unionist historians, James B. McPherson recently wrote: “A generation ago, fine studies by two historians named Williams–T. Harry and Kenneth P.–told us everything we might want to know about Lincoln’s search for the right military strategy and for the right generals to carry it out.” McPherson is dead-on in his appraisal. While elements of Unionist interpretation have been targeted for revision, the body of their work, particularly as it relates to the quality of Civil War commanders has remained largely intact and greatly respected. “Grant deserves the lion’s share of credit for the Union triumph,” Gabor S. Boritt plainly stated, and along with Sherman, “He provided the strategy and the victories that, in time, won the war.” For Boritt, “These conclusions appear to be no longer controversial.” This sentiment is shared by Gary W. Gallagher, who acknowledges that only a handful of “critics continue to fight a rearguard action against Grant.” For him, the “historical consensus clearly recognizes his [Grant’s] indispensable role as the architect of northern military victory.” Perry D. Jamieson, in reviewing Stephen W. Sears’s biography of McClellan in the Journal of Southern History, has correctly analyzed that kinder works on the general by Warren W. Hassler, Jr., and Edward Hagerman simply have not been as influential as those by T. Harry Williams and others of his generation.⁸

Renewed interest in McClellan emerged with the arrival of Stephen W. Sears’s version of the controversy. Appropriately hailed as the literary successor of Bruce Catton, Sears has, through meticulous research, including previously untapped sources, established himself as the authority on McClellan. Resurrecting McClellan as a figure worthy of controversy, he has reinterred him as a grievously flawed and ineffective commander, much in keeping with the views of Kenneth P. Williams, Bruce Catton, and T. Harry Williams. Noting that McClellan shared with Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman the honor of shaping the course of the Union during the Civil War, Sears concludes that of all commanders of the Army of the Potomac “he was inarguably the worst.” This message, particularly its psychological profiling of the general, has found fertile soil. Joseph T. Glatthaar concluded that only “an exploration into what psychiatrists and psychologists term ‘paranoid personality disorder’” would explain why a seemingly intelligent and charismatic person like McClellan could fail so miserably.⁹

Because the Unionist interpretation has made its imprint on how the entire course of the war is viewed, those who have embarked on general military histories of the Civil War, or on topics that only vaguely deal with McClellan, have been similarly influenced. For many, he has become a benchmark or bellwether for their assessments of other Civil War commanders. Consequently, William Marvel is able to elevate Ambrose Burnside’s reputation because, in the final analysis, Burnside was not so poor when compared to McClellan. Jeffry Wert, a historian who has produced excellent studies of Southern military commanders, and whose concern with McClellan is merely peripheral, relied exclusively on Sears’s view of the McClellan that James Longstreet faced at the beginning of the war. Yet, no verdict can quite match the invidious comparison that was summoned by a reviewer of the most recent biography of Union general Franz Sigel. William Shea leavens his critique of the truly hopeless Sigel by proporting that “Sigel resembled George B. McClellan, though he operated on a smaller stage and consequently did less damage to the Union war effort.” These examples do not even begin to scratch the surface of the immense catalog of indictments levied at McClellan.¹⁰

Bruce Catton and T. Harry Williams, as well as Kenneth P. Williams, a mathematician by profession, will be forever remembered by succeeding generations in the professional historian community; after all, they have provided a basis upon which careers and livelihoods have been built. Their greatest contribution, however, is in the degree to which they have molded enduring popular perceptions of Civil War military leadership. One of the consequences of their undisputed influence is the unquestioned and matter-of-fact presentation of Civil War platitudes, analogies, and invidious comparisons employed by those who write for popular or public consumption. The Unionist interpretation of the Civil War is accepted lock, stock, and barrel.

It was hardly surprising, then, when political pundit and conservative columnist for the Washington Post, George F. Will, took humorous aim at McClellan’s statue on Connecticut Avenue as a way of questioning why the major international airport in the Washington metropolitan area should be named after such an unpopular figure like John Foster Dulles. McClellan is hastily dismissed as Lincoln’s “tormentor,” and a “paranoiac with real enemies, whom he called ‘traitors.’” The statue, in his opinion, was a monument to a man “whose vainglory, political ambition and military incompetence put the Republic at risk.” Tongue in cheek, he suggested that the statue had “cluttered the city long enough,” and in view of Lincoln’s upcoming birthday, it should be removed from its location. Similarly, Harry Truman, a student of the Civil War, found in his nemesis, Douglas MacArthur, a suitable precedent in Lincoln’s-George B. McClellan. Appearing in a best-selling biography by David McCullough is Truman’s recollection of having sent a staff member to the Library of Congress for information on the Lincoln-McClellan crisis. He learned that Lincoln had to deal with a subordinate who refused to attack when commanded and who ventured into political matters outside the military arena. For Truman, the lesson gained was quite simple. Lincoln had exercised tremendous patience with his obstreperous general, “But at long last he was compelled to relieve the Union Army’s principal commander.” Now he was prepared to sack MacArthur. All could be reduced to simple truths.¹¹

Periodically, McClellan’s name is dredged up to provide insightful analysis in contemporary discussions of military and civil policy. At the height of the war with Iraq, when it was being suggested that allied armies should move on Baghdad to unseat Saddam Hussein, William Safire, in a New York Times op-editorial titled “McClellan’s Way,” hauled the general’s reputation into his argument. Critical of attempts by the Soviet Union and France to fight a limited war, seeking settlement, Safire characterized them as a “McClellanesque mission.” Safire claimed that, “McClellan lives; we hear his counsel of delay in Moscow, in Paris, in the seventh floor of our State Department.” Calling upon President George Bush to seize the mission of protecting future freedom in the world, Safire cried, “Send for Grant.” Bush was not the only president who should take heed of spurious military counsel. Upon the sudden retirement of Les Aspin as secretary of defense in 1993, President William Clinton was forced to cast about for a replacement. One of his first choices was the retired admiral, Bobby Ray Inman, who quickly became somewhat of an embarrassment for Clinton, since he hedged accepting the assignment until certain uncomfortable military-political policies were clarified to his liking. Seizing upon this unusual posturing was syndicated political cartoonist Herblock. Lapooning Inman’s demands, Herblock featured a nineteenth-century reporter standing in front of a strutting George McClellan, asking: “And you feel, Gen. McClellan, that the President is not providing you the proper comfort level?”¹²

Similarly, during the international crisis spurred by ethnic tensions in Bosnia, McClellan’s name was trotted out once again. Again, a New York Times editorial writer was the instigator. Critical of the military’s apparent reluctance to offer military options to intercede in the Bosnian slaughte...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Of Statues and Shadows
• 2. A Foray into the Twilight Zone
• 3. Little Mac’s Peccadilloes
• 4. The Struggle Becomes Remorseless
• 5. Dodging the Albatross: McClellan and Grant and the Safety of Washington
• 6. On to Richmond: Illusion of Easy Victory, 1861-1862
• 7. The First Will Be Last and the Last Will Be First
• 8. Bagging Bobby Lee
• 9. Emerging from the Shadows
• Note on Sources
• Index