Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

would rise in support of the Union and overthrow the secessionist state government in Nashville. Then McClellan proposed to lead the Army of the Potomac in a major invasion of Virginia, aimed at the capture of Richmond. The result would be “to advance our centre into South Carolina and Georgia; to push Buell either towards Montgomery, or to unite with the main army in Georgia.”39

This was not a bad plan, and in fact it conformed rather handsomely to the indirect methods of campaigning Dennis Hart Mahan had championed at West Point (McClellan had been one of Mahan’s prize pupils at the academy). It aimed at the acquisition of territory, not the expensive confrontation of armies, and even though the Union forces would be forced to operate on exterior lines in coordinating these movements, the Union’s superiority in terms of ships and railroad support would help to overcome that deficit. Politically speaking, McClellan’s plan also had the advantage of carrying the war to those areas that had shown the least fervor for secession and probably would show the least resistance.

There were two factors working against McClellan that no one in a West Point classroom could easily have anticipated, much less corrected, and both of them would help to undercut McClellan and his plan. One of these was McClellan’s simple personal vanity. McClellan had at first been flattered by the attention paid to him by official Washington, but the more he listened and believed the complimentary nonsense heaped upon him by the press, the bureaucrats, and the politicians, the more he began to believe himself superior to all three. “I am becoming daily more disgusted with this administration—perfectly sick of it,” he wrote to his wife, “There are some of the greatest geese in the Cabinet I have ever seen.” Even “the President is an idiot.”40

Two weeks after McClellan succeeded Winfield Scott as general in chief, Lincoln called at McClellan’s temporary headquarters in Washington, only to be told that McClellan was out, though he “would soon return.” Lincoln waited for an hour. But when McClellan at last arrived, the general paid no “particular attention to the porter who told him the President was waiting to see him, went up stairs,” and went to bed. Lincoln’s secretary, John Hay, took this as a “portent of evil to come … the first indication I have yet seen, of the threatened supremacy of the military authorities.” It would not be the last, either. “I have no ambition in the present affairs,” McClellan claimed, “only wish to save my country—& find the incapables around me will not permit it!” His conclusion that the administration was incapable was precisely what fired his ambition, and he began to entertain fantasies about “the Presidency, Dictatorship &c.”41

He grew increasingly uncooperative with the cabinet, especially Lincoln’s new secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, and increasingly contemptuous of and uncommunicative with Lincoln. “The Genl: it seems, is very reticent,” complained Attorney General Edward Bates. “Nobody knows his plans. The Sec of war and the President himself are kept in ignorance of the actual condition of the army and the intended movements of the General—if indeed they intend to move at all.” McClellan rationalized this as a necessary security precaution. “If I tell [Lincoln] my plans,” McClellan assured Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs, “they will be in the New York Herald tomorrow morning. He can’t keep a secret.” At this point Republicans in Congress began to wonder if McClellan was keeping secrets about more plans than just military ones. On December 31, the newly formed Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War complained to Lincoln about McClellan’s inertia, and in a meeting with the entire cabinet on January 6, the committee urged Lincoln to remove McClellan and reinstate Irvin McDowell.42

There was also a problem with McClellan’s fussiness. One railroad executive remembered that in civilian life McClellan had been “constantly soliciting advice, but he knows not more about a situation and has no more confidence in his own judgment after he has received it, than before.” This characteristic was not going to disappear from McClellan “as a soldier.”43 The debacle at Bull Run had demonstrated the foolishness of rushing untrained soldiers into combat, and so Congress had been willing to give McClellan what it had not given McDowell, the time to train and equip an army. As the summer of 1861 faded into autumn, and autumn into winter, McClellan showed no desire to do more than train and equip, plus organize elaborate reviews.

Part of the politicians’ impatience with McClellan was generated by a persistent unwillingness on the part of the politicians to recognize the immense difficulties in arming, feeding, clothing, and then moving an army that was larger than the entire Mexican War enlistments. A good deal of it was also the result of a West Point engineer’s love for perfecting technical details. McClellan’s first plan for Virginia, which he formulated in late 1861, dismissed the notion of assaulting the Confederates at Manassas Junction directly and called for an ambitious joint army-navy landing operation that would unload Federal forces at Urbanna, on the Rappahannock River in Virginia, and march from there overland to Richmond, only fifty miles away. By January 1862 McClellan had changed his mind: he would need to wait on Buell’s advance into Kentucky before doing anything in Virginia, and he even considered moving his army to Kentucky and abandoning all notion of a Virginia invasion.

Neither of these plans produced any movement on McClellan’s part, and by the end of January Lincoln was so exasperated with his general in chief that on January 27 he issued a presidential order mandating a “general movement of the land and naval forces of the United States against the insurgent forces” on February 22, followed by a second order on January 31 that assigned McClellan particular responsibility for “an expedition for the immediate object of seizing and occupying a point upon the railroad southwestward of what is known as Manassas Junction.”44

McClellan, incensed at what