Due to a combo of age, experience, weight and vanity, wasn’t Scott more interested in White House dinner parties than engaging in the war?
Which could make a fascinating story…
Scott was involved in one of the weirder scandals in his earlier years - the “hasty plate of soup” business. Elektratig: Winfield Scott Sits Down to a Hasty Plate of Soup
The question asked was whether McClellan subordinated to a superior. I answered the question asked. He had Scott over him (until November 1, 1861) and then was both general-in-chief and army commander.
Note the dual titles. Far from *not *being expected to lead an army in battle, McClellan was the army commander. Everybody assumed he *would *then lead the Army south against Lee. As it turns out he stalled and stalled until finally Lincoln removed the general-in-chief title in March 1862 just before the Peninsula Campaign. There was no general-in-chief until Henry Halleck was named in July. Until then Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton were McClellan’s superiors.
Grant had a reputation as a drunk, and had failed at several personal ventures. Sherman had a nervous breakdown not too long after the war started. These problems are at least part of the reason these two weren’t promoted sooner.
Thank you, well put.
One contributing reason: General Henry Halleck, Grant’s superior, was suspicious that someone else’s success might detract from his own legacy, and repeatedly tried to downplay Grant’s successes and start rumors about his drinking. Halleck was finally forcibly directed by the War department to file charges and make them stick or drop the matter (which he ultimately did).
When your manager is undercutting and lying about you, it can substantially hinder promotion.
Another contributing factor to poor Northern generalship was that Lincoln appointed a number of “political” generals – rival politicians who craved glory in war to enhance their careers.
By appointing them, Lincoln solved several problems. They would be busy learning their new trade and have less time for political mischief (an important consideration in an already-divided republic); they would be separated from their constituencies; they would owe him a favor; if they won, it would reflect well on Lincoln’s judgment; if they lost, it might end their careers and get them out of Lincoln’s hair.
Appointing political hacks to high command seems like a dangerous game to play with the lives of soldiers – but remember that at the outset, nobody (except Scott and Sherman) seemed to think there would be much fighting at all, whereas divisive politics had proven to be disastrous for the country.
One by one the political generals failed or were moved to unimportant commands as the war dragged on.
It is perhaps important to note that the very concept of how armies should be organized and led was very different in 1861 than it is today.
Prior to the Civil War, the United States Army was very small, and disproportionately made up of engineers. The need for two entire, massive armies meant they were being more or less created from scratch; neither side had either the infrastructure or officer corps for such massive armies. So you had to create all kinds of generals, colonels, majors and such where none existed before.
On top of that, it was a different time. Modern conceptions of military professionalism were in their infancy, and the United States was a different society then, one that still largely adhered to the concept of Jacksonian democracy. It seems very odd to us today that so many officers were
- Appointed basically as a patronage appointment, a political gift, or even
- Were literally elected by the soldiers of the regiment,
… but in 1861 that seemed absolutely, wholly logical. Handing out generalships to keep political promises and allowing the men to elect their captains and colonels was very much what the American of 1861 expected. The modern concept of the military been a cloistered tower of professionals who maintain their own standards did not exist back then (it did to some extent in the Navy, I guess) but rather the people thought of the armies as just another institution It might seem bizarre to us today, but not only was that the political climate of the time, but
- It’s not like they had a great many capable officers anyway, and
- It seemed to them to be better than what most European nations did, which was handing out officerships based on who your parents were.
Of course sometimes this worked out well; Grant himself, the greatest general of the war, was a political appointment. Sometimes it didn’t. The thing is, in a country where the armies were suddenly fifty times bigger, there was no reliable way of ascertaining who would make a good officer or not. You would have been guessing anyway; SOMEONE had to command that brigade so you might as well hand it to Bill, 'cause he served in the Mexican War and seems like a guy who can put his pants on straight.
Umm… Compared to what? Ideally, all military leaders would be highly qualified and would be chosen on the basis of merit rather than wealth or patronage. But this is projecting modern values onto an older culture.
For 99% of human history, there was no difference between a “political hack” and a military general. Leaders were chosen based on their wealth and influence first, and their ability second. There are a few reasons for this.
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Societies were small enough that most of the educated, upper class people could know (or at least know of) each other. If you were not party of the upper-class elite, you probably didn’t have the education (much less the training) necessary to be a military leader.
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Political leaders picked generals they thought they could trust. Nobody wanted to give an Army to someone who might use it against you. Therefore, they elevated close friends and family to the most senior positions as a way of exercising control.
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Leaders of that time were often responsible for the financial burdens their units incurred. Under feudalism, a subordinate leader was responsible for raising his army. Even into the 19th century, officers were expected to subsidize their units. The American Civil War saw some officers who acquired their position by virtue of the fact that they paid for their unit.
I could go on, but the points just get more pedantic from here. The bottom line is that for most of human history, the line between political and military leadership has been - at best - indistinct. This has less to do corruption and incompetence than one might think. In places where communication, oversight, and military education were weak (ie Almost everywhere before 1900 or so) there were sound and logical reasons to place regime loyalty and political patronage above military skill.
I agree.
Contrast this with FDRs use of General Marshall in WWII.
Marshall was brilliant at organization & logistics, so FDR kept him at home in DC attending to those vital tasks, and sent people like Eisenhower & Patton overseas to run the armies in the field.
So more of a Marshall or Ike than a Patton?
Finally, a question that truly belongs in the General Questions forum.
Reported.
Marshall, kind of; and Ike did fully commit his army on D-Day after due preparation. Patton would’ve kicked McClellan in the nuts in disgust, if he ever had the chance. Patton was a fighting general - Mac, anything but.
Your statements are entirely true, but it seems that the biggest issue was that people kept incredibly petty grudges the two for some trivial reason or professional envy, and acted at various times to stir up gossip, try to knock down his repuation from behind, and etc. Those reputations were spread more by malice than mere gossip.
One critical thing about those campaigns, though: WHile McClellan did plan and lead them, when it came time to face the enemy he became remarkably slow and fearful. Rosecrans did all the fighting with his detachment, quite unsupported.
McClellan also consistently misread the (accurate) reports frm Pinkerton. The Union organization was able to get pretty complete tallies of how many Confederate soldiers were in given areas, even though they might not know exactly how many were in which army. Somehow McClellan kept imagining that, say, every enemy soldier in Northern Virginia was facing in front of him, when there was not the slightest possibility of that - the Confederacy couldn’t have supplied anything like that for long.
Anyway, back to the OP: One issue on the Confederate side was that Jefferson Davis played favorites. While he was intelligent, had military experience and had previously been Secretary of War, he was a horrible judge of generalship. Sure, he stood by Lee, but he also stood by Polk, Bragg and Hood. Many scholars also point to his support of Albert Sidney Johnston, though I disagree on that point. Also, Davis’s private advice to Pemberton caused the loss of an entire Confederate Army.
I am not any sort of military expert and am not in a position to dispute anything being said here. I would just offer a general observation, which may or may not have relevance.
After every sports championship, the post-series analysis is full of things the winning coach did right and the losing coach did wrong. After every political campaign, the post-election analysis is full of things the winning campaign did right and the losing campaign did wrong. In the corporate world, every company doing well is led by management doing all sorts of things right and every company doing poorly is led by people doing all sorts of things wrong. And after every war, the analysis is full of things that the winning generals did right and the losing generals did wrong. (The “every” is just a small bit of hyperbole - there are rare exceptions.)
Bottom line is that nothing makes a leader look more capable and competent than actually winning. If you win - for whatever reason - you and your strategies will look much smart. The reverse is true of anyone who loses.
The nature of the Civil War was that the Union advantages were of a sort which was cumulative over time, with their advantages in manpower and industrial strength gradually overwhelming the Confederacy. If it seems by coincidence that the relative capabilities of Union and Confederate generals also changed over time, then it’s worth considering the possibility that it just seems that way, in line with the above.
But again, I’m not making any definitive claims - this is just food for thought.
Agreed. The Union had more chance of winning as the war dragged on, for various reasons the CSA had some serious weaknesses, such as a lack of industrial capacity, that ultimately doomed it to failure. The South got the generals, the North got the factories.
One thing I wonder about is that, while the CSA had generally better generalship and its soldiers were supposed to better man for man, the casualty count overall, and for most of the battles, was not greatly in the South’s favor. And this is without taking into account the disparity in manpower. available to each side.
The points raised here have been very interesting; the fact that the leaders on both sides had to fight political battles as well as the military ones, and also the way both sides had to gear up overnight for large-scale total war, starting out with a small peacetime military that had not seen much action. And the action was either against the Indians or the Mexicans, so the experience gained was misleading.
The Confederacy didn’t have to conquer the U.S.; they just had to win enough to make the U.S. decide to let them go. They came close several times - victories at Antietam or Gettysburg, or Lincoln’s defeat by a war-weary electorate in 1864, just might have done it.
It is an interesting point that we won’t ever know just exactly what the rebels needed to do to “win” the war. Whatever it was, it wasn’t what they actually managed. Part of why the war was hard for the rebels to win is that their strategy wasn’t really going to win it. They simply wanted the Union to leave them alone, and that sort of defensive strategy doesn’t easily lend itself to ultimate military victory, even assuming that your opposition is ever going to be willing to just leave you alone.
While it is true that we cannot know the effect of something that didn’t happen, Lee and Jefferson Davis hoped that a victory in the Gettysburg Campaign would result in anti-war forces in the Union prevailing upon Lincoln to make a peace on terms favorable to the Confederacy.
Unfortunately, the planned battle actually occurred due an accidental meeting of elements of both armies, which led to the Union victory at Gettysburg. This had the opposite effect to that intended.
As people involved in the events and presumably in touch with the political and social climate, their opinions are probably relevant.
True - but the extreme documentation we have for the Civil War allows us to get a pretty good peek into the what various leaders were thinking at different times, as well as a very high level of information about the actual opertaions, and fortuitously, many of the Confederacy’s leaders were widely recognized as brilliant in their own day which helps form a clearer picture of events. We can, for instance, see exactly where any why different commanders made certain mistakes or cleverly siezed certain advantages, and evaluate the risks as they saw them.
That re-evaluation is an ongoing project. It’s one reason why I don’t merely question McClellan’s judgement, but can outright accuse him of being an utter traitorous wretch for his actions, can suggest that Albert Sidney Johnson was trying his best in an extreme situation, and that Bragg had talents but had such a quarrelsome personality he managed to turn his whole army hostile.
It’s true we don’t know exactly what the Confederacy needed to “win”, partly because we don’t exactly know what conditions they could or would have accepted in the end. But the relative balance of power was not entirely unfavorable to them even into the winter of 1864. Their defeat finally came in part from - yes - material superiority in the North, but the North held material superiority throughout the war. The keys which allowed a Union victory were deeply personal, and consisted of the character of the leaders on opposite sides.