Lincoln and McClellan: The Troubled Partnership Between A President and His General
There are few admirers of George McClellan today, even among the most rarefied circles of Civil War history. He is the general who loved to command, but not to fight. He is melodramatic, insubordinate, and the author of some of the most revoltingly egotistical letters in the annals of American military egotism. All of which is hard to reconcile with the fabulous value set on him by Winfield Scott, Jefferson Davi, and Robert E. Lee, and the adulation he enjoyed from the Army of the Potomac from its first organization to its last parade. John Waugh has dealt on-and-off with McClellan, first in his 1994 book on McClellan’s West Point class, The Class of 1846, and then again in 1997 in Re-electing Lincoln, on the presidential campaign of 1864, which pitted McClellan against Lincoln as the Democratic party’s presidential nominee. The result is what Waugh’s long list of popular Civil War-era histories has prepared us for — a lively narrative, good command of the basic facts and sources, and no particular surprises. George McClellan is quickly established as a military thinker with “a genius for organization” but too methodical and too anxious not to fail to “act rashly or aggressively.” In three quick chapters, Waugh brings McClellan through his West Point years and the Mexican War to his first crossing-of-paths with Lincoln in Illinois (during the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858), and then his appointment to organize the Army of the Potomac. Waugh moves rapidly through Lincoln’s growing disenchantment with McClellan in the winter of 1861-62, the Peninsula campaign, and Antietam, followed by McClellan’s dismissal and his failed attempt to unseat Lincoln in the 1864 election. The fundamental flaw with this otherwise engaging book is that none of it reveals anything terribly original about either McClellan or Lincoln. There is little here which has not already been said in biographies by Warren W. Hassler (1957), Stephen W. Sears (1988) and Ethan Rafuse (2005). Waugh relies almost entirely on already-published sources — apart from a handful of citations to the McClellan Papers in the Library of Congress and a dozen of the better-known newspapers — and is too unwilling to ask why McClellan was picked for top command in the first place, and why Lincoln was so slow to cashier him. Waugh bypasses an opportunity to dig deeply into one of the more enigmatic characters of the Civil War and two of the war’s most nagging questions: first, what is the practical relationship between a civilian commander-in-chief and his principal military executive, and how close did McClellan come to overthrowing it in a military coup d’etat? And, second, why did a general whose achievements on the battlefield were so meager retain such a fervent and divisive following among the soldiers he once commanded? McClellan’s shadow was long enough to set corps commanders of the Army of the Potomac at each other’s throats, even as late as Gettysburg. “No man who is an anti-slavery man or an anti-McClellan man can expect decent treatment in that army as at present constituted,” complained Abner Doubleday in 1864, and he was not the only complainer. Yet, for all his shortcomings as a field commander, McClellan was one of the most perceptive strategic thinkers of the times, and his real genius might have been revealed as the chief of a general staff if the U.S. Army had had such a thing in the 19th century. George McClellan belongs to the realm of might-have-beens. Although Waugh’s book is a useful introduction to the questions McClellan poses, the answers are still awaiting. Reviewer: Allen Guelzo Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College.
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Illustrations, photographs, maps, notes, sources, index, 252 pp., 2010, Palgrave Macmillan,