Regarding Meade’s poor reputation, I seem to recall reading that Dan Sickles was responsible for much of that. He launched a campaign among DC politicians slandering Meade as an attempt to do damage control for his actions during Gettysburg.
IIRC (and it is a vague “IIRC” so don’t kill me for it if I get this wrong) Lincoln wrote a scathing letter to Meade for not chasing down Lee after Gettysburg. Supposedly Lincoln’s letter was furious. Along the lines of (making this up which will be obvious), “You could have stopped the war! WTF is wrong with you? Lee was smashed and you let him get away! Fucking pussy!”
As mentioned that was totally made up but my sense is Lincoln was somewhere in that zone of pissed-offness…just a whole lot more eloquent about it.
However, Lincoln never sent the letter. He realized he was not there. He considered these guys just fought for three days and he was in no position to gainsay Meade.
I tend to buy into that. We may think Meade fucked-up after Gettysburg but Lincoln noted…somewhere…that is was not his place to suppose after all that guys should just haul off and continue battle.
I dunno. Meade had a chance to smash the Confederates but let them get away.
Even with hindsight I am not sure I can gainsay him on that choice.
I don’t feel he was hopeless as a field commander. As I said, he was great at maneuvering. He would swing around his opponent’s flanks and cut them off from their own supply lines. But then once he had his enemy in a hopeless position where they should have been doomed, he’d lose his nerve and would let them slip away rather than risk a battle.
The ideal situation would have been for McClellan to lead the Union army until it got within five miles of the Confederate Army. Then an aggressive commander like Grant or Hancock should have taken command and driven the troops into the gunfire.
The knowledge about many different subjects demonstrated by Straight Dope posters continues to impress me. 
This also happened even after a battle. McClellan always assumed that Lee had more men than what he actually had, and after barely beating Lee at Antietam it did not matter that McClellan still had more fresh troops than the tired retreating ones of Lee. McClellan thought once again that Lee still had massive reserves, so instead of being the decisive battle, it was just one of the important ones.
It has often been said that the winners write history but this has been somewhat turned upside down in USA. Right after the war southern historians began rewriting history to turn the south’s defeat into the lost glorious cause the is still very much alive to this day. The magnificence of the southern cause lead by the greatest military commanders of all time only lost because of the greater northern population and the brute force of industry. General Grant who won the war gets relegated to a drunk and many other examples of this such as Lee being turned into almost a God. Check out the southern patriot and neo-confederate web sites, they are full of it, also there are a couple of recent books trying to set the record straight.
True, McClellan was a first rate organizer and was the right man to train and discipline an Army. He was however, not, even in the remotest sense, a field general. Alawys imagining he was outnumbered, consistently grossly overestimating enemy strength and unwilling to exploitn obvious advantages, McClellan was in fact a dismal failure. Had he been aggressive at Antietam (Sharpsburg) he could have effectively ended the war in September 1862 by destroying Lee in detail. He had the advantage and squandered it, gaining instead a marginal victory that resembled a draw. He enjoyed many of the same advantages during the penninsular campaign and squandered those opportunities as well.
Had I needed someone to train troops, McClellan would have been my guy, but I would have never given him a command in the field.
You pretty much nailed it here. Southern historians have long tried to rationalize the defeat of the south and revise the root cause of the war. Your observation that the winners write history was a constant turned on it’s ear in this case is spot on. One only need read Alexander Stephens Cornerstone speech or the papers of the 16 secession commissioners to understand the reason for secession and the war was clear: the preservation of slavery. The rest of it is revisionist and apologist rationalization.
Re: McClellan, Pope, Hooker, & Burnsides.
Fletcher Pratt wrote an out-of-print history called Ordeal by Fire, in which he analyzed their failures as commander of the Army of the Potomac. He noted they had commanded only small numbers of troops – “50 dragoons chasing Indians” I think is the phrase he uses – prior to the war’s start and then they found themselves in command of entire armies. He contends this rapid promotion went to their heads and amplified their natural flaws, McClellan’s moral timidity (I love a phrase Pratt used: “He would have hesitated with the Golden Horde of Tamerlane at his back.”), Pope’s arrogance, and Hooker’s vanity. Grant, Meade, Sheridan, and Sherman came up more slowly and they learned to handle those armies.
If you look at McClellan before late 1861, you would have thought he would be a very promising general. He served bravely and well in the Mexican War, his superiors thought enough of him to send him as an observer to the Crimean War, he was an able railroad administrator, and his first campaign in West Virginia went well. However, he blew two chances to win the war in 1862. Forget Antietam; I’ve never been able to figure out why he retreated from the peninsula. He should have just telegraphed Congress for more men, guns, and ammo.
In The Battle Cry of Freedom, McPherson opined that McClellan’s successful record made him afraid of failure; that is why he never took the chances necessary to put the Army of Northern Virginia away.
Fletcher’s take on Bragg, who was a terrible general, Ralph, was that his character was like that of Jeff Davis, cold, intellectual, and argumentative and that is why Davis left him in command despite his obvious incompetence.
The Second Stone: You are absolutely correct in your appraisal of Forrest. I think that if he or George Thomas had led an army against Lee, Marse Robert would have been schooled in short order.
Sampiro: Also look at what happened to Pat Cleburne. Once he recommended using black troops, he didn’t get any further promotions even though he was the best brigade commander on either side.
Icerigger: You are absolutely right, buddy. Lee is the most overrated general in American history. Generations of Southerners have lied like Persian rugs which is why he has his reputation and Grant has been mercilessly slandered.
Rosecrans was another Union general who looked good on paper. He was talented and he won several battles early in the war. But it turned out his flaw was that he couldn’t handle adversity. He was defeated at Chickamaugua and he never recovered from that. He couldn’t shake off the defeat and lost his nerve.
You’re correct, Little Nemo, but I think a lot of people, George Thomas excepted, might have lost their nerve after that bloodbath.
I would never argue that McClellan wasn’t a good organizaer, but I would take issue with the statement that he was good at logistics. He was so-so at logistics. Grant was good at Logistics - the only other person in the war I’d give even money on matching him was his own friend Sherman. McClellan was terrible at manuever, too. He never once displayed any skill at moving his army or any in way surprised the enemy except at the Peninsular campaign’s opening. And even that he failed to mvoe up on. He was slow and that is always a failure for an offensive campaign.
As Lee found out at Antietam and Gettysburg, it’s a lot easier to defend territory than to conquer it.
I don’t have the background to join in the comments here, but I will second the recommendation of Ulysses S. Grant: A Victor, Not a Butcher. I just finished it, and learned a lot from it that set quite a bit of what I had heard and learned through the years on its head. I’m only recently getting a good start on what I should know about the war.
Tch.
Interesting observation I came across. Some people say that you can determine the competence of civil war generals by their beards: Grant, Lee, Sherman, Jackson, Forrest, Thomas, Meade, Stuart - all had beards. McClellan, Butler, Burnside, Sigel, Banks, Bragg, Kilpatrick - no beards. And Jefferson Davis had a little scraggly ass goatee which didn’t have a chance against Abraham Lincoln’s beard.
So that was the secret to his success, Lincoln grew a beard. 
(Warning, TV tropes link, you may not come back)
More to the point, I guess we really should be grateful to 11 year old Grace Bedell for telling Lincoln to get one.
I’m not sure that’s exactly it. He didn’t lose his “nerve”; he lost his wits. The man was always high-strung and after Chickamauga the stress finally got to him (well, that and Longstreet literally walked into the 2nd-biggest stroke of luck in the war). That said, I think he was more of a division-rank commander. Fantastic in a fight, good at prep work, but not great at handling an army in the field. It’s obviously true that he didn’t have the mental fortitude of most commanders, but even Sherman (who wasn’t crazy, of course), took some time off to rest during the war.
Intriguingly, he might have become Vice President and thence President upon Lincoln’s assasination. However, his reply never made it back, possibly destroyed by Stanton.
Can you all expand on George Thomas a bit? All I remember about him is that in Horace Porter’s Campaigning with Grant, Porter spoke of him very affectionately and said he was like a father to his men, who called him Old Pap Thomas. From the posts here, he sounds like an unsung badass.
He was a Virginian who didn’t secede with his state. He was active in the West, coming to prominence when he stopped a rout at the Battle of Chicamauga. About a third of the Union line had broken and was in retreat, with the rest of the army about to retreat, when Thomas rallied the troops and formed a new defensive line, which held for the rest of the day, giving him the nickname “The Rock of Chicamauga”. After the battle, he was promoted to the head of the Army of the Cumberland, and his troops won the Battle of Missionary Ridge as part of the battles for Chatanooga. He then handled planning for Sherman during his invasion of Georgia, and wiped out General Hood’s army at the battle of Nashville, getting him his second nickname, “The Sledge of Nashville”.
Thomas was a good general.