Key sentence from the Horace Greely letter being “I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.”
Another issue is that McClellan is only obviously a terrible general in retrospect.
He had his virtues. As you noted, he was popular with the troops and raised morale. He was an good organizer and got the army ready for campaigning. He was excellent at maneuvering his troops into good positions. And he always exuded absolute confidence in an American victory (due to his own great leadership). So there were good reasons to support McClellan.
But, of course, he also had some serious faults. He was a complete egotist who couldn’t separate the overall war effort from his own activities. As I noted above, he couldn’t handle being criticized or questioned. He was insubordinate to Lincoln, Stanton, and Scott (and history would show they were all more capable than McClellan and were generally right in their disagreements with McClellan). He tried to set political policies that went well beyond his military assignment.
All that could have been forgiven (and Lincoln was willing to overlook all of it). McClellan’s most serious flaw was his fear of battle. No battle is a sure thing and a good general has to be willing to take risks in order to fight and win battles. McClellan simply couldn’t do that. He was so afraid of losing a battle that he would always find an excuse to avoid fighting the battle.
McClellan himself was unaware of this flaw. The absolute confidence in victory that he displayed was not just a public pose. His private papers showed that he had no private self-doubts. He apparently had convinced himself that he had always made the right decisions in avoiding battle and the problems were somebody else’s fault. He was sure he would fight and win at some future point.
It didn’t help matters that McLellan was hailed as the new Napoleon - that is literally what some people called him - without having had to do much. He won a few little skirmishes in West Virginia, and so after the Bull Run fiasco was handed command of the army and, being the only guy in a blue uniform who’d won anything at all, was treated like Alexander the Great.
You couldn’t have drawn up a worse way to put someone in charge. McLellan was a man of almost limitless ego and bottomless contempt for basically everyone else.
Beyond that, the two armies basically kept up that scheme through the entire war. Confederate units were rebuilt/reinforced with new recruits, while the US Army tended to raise entirely new units out of recruits rather than reinforce/rebuild existing ones.
So your average Confederate regiment was both larger and more experienced than the average Union regiment as a result.
One of the greatest “what-ifs” in American history is how much shorter the war would have been if Lee had accepted Scott’s offer.
My take on that “what if”? The war would have lasted roughly as long, absent strong (nigh impossible to come up with) evidence to the contrary because (a) Lee wasn’t as great as the Lost Cause myth has made him out to be, and (b) it takes a while to subdue a rebellion spread out over an area the size of the Confederacy even with a good General (assuming Lee was at least that: good, but hardly worthy of the falling over praise we’ve been conditioned to give him).
Yes, Lincoln was anti-slavery but his platform, and his public views were more or less limited to stopping the spread- “No More Slave states”. Maybe if no succession had occurred, he might have moved to get rid of the Fugitive slave law next. Slow steps towards freedom.
Is this a new BMW I’m not familiar with???
Getting back to the question of “Why didn’t the North just let the South go.” I thought that one of the North’s fears was that Britain would gain too much influence over an independent South. What was left of the North would be trapped between the British Canada and the South as a British client.
(One author proposed one of the great “what if’s?” of alternate history: An independent South becomes so closely tied to Great Britain that it influences the course of WWI.)
A nation that allows its constituent parts to unilaterally secede is not a nation, because once that precedent is set, anyone that agrees with any major decision will break away. And for every major decision, there will be many who disagree with it.
Now, a bilateral secession, with both sides agreeing to it, might have been possible (certainly legally, and possibly politically). But we’ll never know, because that’s not what the South chose to do.
I think if Lee had stayed with the United States, he would have been assigned a command in the western theater as George Thomas was. There would have been too many issues raised by having him serve in Virginia.
An additional “What if” was what would have happened if Virginia has abolished slavery in 1831. There was a concerted effort after the Nat Turner rebellion (led by representatives of the western counties, of course) to set up emancipation. It failed (and was probably destined to fail), but it it had succeeded, it might* have kept Virginia in the Union and Lee as western commander.
*Virginia did not say they were supporting slavery when they seceded, but rather they were against the Union taking arms against the southern states. A fine and possibly specious distincting, but they, unlike other states, did not mention slavery itself as a cause.
Another interesting question - what if Georgia had not legalized slavery. Slavery was outlawed in Georgia in 1735, but legalized in 1751 due primarily to this chap (George Whitefield - Wikipedia).
But even the Virginia Ordinance of Secession did wind up acknowledging that slavery was in some sense the cause of The Late Unpleasantness:
NOT just “the Southern states” (or the “agrarian States” or the “low-tariff States”).
If you want to pick a single individual who caused slavery to become the fixture it was in America, I’d nominate Eli Whitney.
When you go back to the founding of the country, you’ll see the majority opinion was that slavery was in decline. Even most slaveowners figured it was heading towards extinction. The main issue over slavery at that time was how it would end. Would slave owners be compensated for freed slaves? Where would the money come from? What would happen to all of the former slaves after they were freed?
Then Whitney patented the cotton gin in 1794. And with that, cotton production became a source of big profits and slavery was revitalized. (Whitney didn’t make a lot of money from his patent. Most people simply defied his patent and built their own without paying him. And these off-patent cotton gins often incorporated improvements over the original.)
Agree. He also moved the South firmly to cash crops - which was a factor in the Confederacy’s defeat (cash crops are nice, if you can count on the customers sticking around - but crops you can eat are more useful when a blockade occurs).
Another factor with cash crops is they often involve the growers borrowing large sums of money. A little known connection between the American Revolution and the American Civil War is that in both of them Southern planters repudiated their debts to the “enemy” bankers - those in England in 1776 and those in the northeastern United States in 1861 - as a self-serving part of the war effort.
Yeah, the agricultural South was starving, whilst the North was fine.