I’m watching Ken Burn’s 1990 CW doc on Netflix. They really harp on McClellan’s apparent and stubborn inaction. His only redeeming quality they concede is his training of the army, but if you’re not going to fight, training’s about all that’s left to fill one’s day.
It was simply hsi personal nature; there’s not a lot more explanation needed. McLellan lacked the moral courage to commit his force to battle, and so he rationalized, over and over, why he couldn’t do so.
Possibly also he saw the Confederacy as something not worth fighting to retake - they wanna go, let 'em.
I would say he hated to see the beautiful army he had created destroyed, damaged or disgraced. Only when he had an completely overwhelming advantage would he have taken the field. Looking back, not a bad strategy IMO.
All of the above. Certainly, he abhorred damage to his army.
For another thing, he was a politically active Democrat who saw little wrong with slavery, and actually suggested that Lincoln promise the South it could keep slavery.
Also, he was cautious by nature, which conflicted with the North’s need to assume the offensive.
Also, his intelligence service was bad and he constantly believed the worst possible interpretations of Confederate troop strength, so he always felt outnumbered.
I’ve recently read one historian suggesting another reason: McClellan had been extremely successful in his youth. He’d been well-regarded in his previous military service, and he was the (young) president of a railroad company with his eye on politics when the war broke out. His first campaign (West Virginia) was successful (mostly because of the political sympathies of the region, and Confederate weakness and blundering) and that occurred early in the war, when the Union was both hungry for good news and not distracted by as many issues as would later arise, so he became hugely famous at the start.
The historian’s point being, McClellan had a LOT of expectations riding on him and a LOT of reputation to lose. Whereas Grant and Sherman had been all but complete failures before the war, and had really very little to lose and a lot to gain by taking risks. Little Mac was trying to avoid rashness, and given his other personality traits, took it way too far.
There were several northern generals who were more “conservative” when placed in command than turned out to be necessary. They believed that having the [Northern] Army of the Potomac destroyed could lose the war.
Like lots of generals the world over, McClellan decided to make very sure of victory with a carefull buildup of forces and meticulus planning. This meant that they found more and more reasons not to attack today, but wait until tomorrow. (Shelby Foote claims that McClellan got estimates of the size of the southern Army of Northern Virginia to be much greater than was actually the case. Like “twice as big” greater.)
It didn’t help any that the southern commanders were very adept at disengaging their forces from the Union Army, and getting a head start on out maneauvering them. Lee successfully disengaged after pushing Pope into D.C. (Sep 4 '62), disengaged after Antietam/Sharpsburg (Sep 18 '62), disengaged from Fredericksburg to redeploy for Chancellorsburg (Apr '63), and successfully disengaged after Gettysburg (July '63).
They did call him “The Young Napoleon.” A lot to live up to.
And even with all of this, there was at least one instance when the Union Army had to rush homeward toward Washington D.C. to prevent a heavy Confederate raid from getting in behind them and hitting the place.
(I wish I could cite this; my apologies for a half-ass post. I also don’t know how much damage the raid might have done if not headed off. Just burning a few houses in the suburbs? Seizing the White House and Capitol? I have to guess “somewhere in between.”)
Which reportedly infuriated Lincoln, who is said to have remarked that he simply did not understand why the Union armies could not go where the rebels went and fight where they fought.
Some of Early’s units got within spitting distance of the defensive lines around DC, but his main forces didn’t get the chance.
Battle of Monocacy - Wikipedia .
Battle of Fort Stevens - Wikipedia
That, of course, is an awful position for an army commander to take for the plain and simple reason that the mere fact that the enemy does not run screaming in rout means that the commander does not have the necessary overwhelming advantage.
Look at Little Mac at Williamsburg on the Peninsula in 1862 and again at Antietam/Sharpsburg that Fall. In both cases he had a substantial numerical and logistical advantage but because his enemy did not run from him at first sight he contented himself with half measures and tentative gestures when an all out commitment might well have won the war then and there by destroying the Confederacy’s principal army in the East.
McClellan was a bad commander because he lacked the moral courage to fight, to risk battle; perpetually waiting for an impossible set of circumstances to arise. His approach to waging war was much like a poker player who folds after every ante because he does not hold a straight flush.
He also had political ambitions, so much so that he kept a printing press with him to issue his own press releases. He knew that one “McLellan’s blunder costs 3,000 soldiers their lives” would destroy those ambitions. While he was slaughtered in the Electoral vote of 1864 (212:21) he got a not-too-shabby 45% of the popular, so apparently it worked somewhat.
He seems like he would have been a real douche. His references to Lincoln as a ‘baboon’ (and other forms of ape) and unworthy of his office and ignorant and above his station, etc., remind that the 21st century didn’t invent nasty politics.
At the time there was a military theory that the main strategy of warfare was to avoid pitched battle that could leave you with no army, but to instead concentrate on “manuverings and demonstrations” to force your opponent to respond to your feints in order to not risk being flanked, having an enemy in their rear, etc. Accordingly, McClellan counted every engagement which ended with the rebel forces withdrawing from the field as a “victory”. :rolleyes:
It was worse even than that. He started doing this to everybody who wasn’t one hundred per-cent pro McClellan. And that started to become a very short list. Naturally, he undercut and destroyed much of his own support this way. Later on, his lack of support for Pope turned what could have been a crushing Union victory (Lee would have been trapped between two strong armies) into an agonizing defeat at Second Bull run. The evidence demonstrates that McClellan did this intentionally, sacrificing thousands of lives and prolonging the war for nothing rmoe than to stroke his ego.
And the alternative is almost as bad, because the only other explanation is that he was so grossly incompetent that he hid it with near-treasonous disobediance and sniping.
And this wasn’t the first of it, either. There’s evidence of him being a hellish boss even at the railroad, so it wasn’t a new trait.
Shelby Foote’s line that “The Civil War had no villains except slavery…and George McClellan” may not be literally true, but it does get across the sense of history’s judgement.
Frederick the Great (Prussian monarch who also happened to probably be one of the best generals of the second half of the 18th century), said “He who defends everything defends nothing.” In terms of military operations, basically you must always be willing to take some losses in order to win a victory. If your goal is to basically be absolutely protected from any damage (to defend everything), then you basically have made it impossible to win.
McClellan simply never grasped this fact, something that gets hammered into the heads of people who learn about military strategy is that a commander that isn’t willing to take actions that will certainly cost some of your men their lives is a commander unfit to lead any men and who might cost far more of his men their lives than a commander willing and able to give the necessary orders.
Wars cannot be fought and won without losing some skin, McClellan did not want to believe that but it did not change the fact.
Although that certainly is one ideal, it is interesting to contrast this with what U.S. Grant says in his autobiography (again, I fail miserably, by being unable to provide a cite: I read it, and remember this bit…)
He said that if he had enough troops to fight a battle with a 90% chance of winning it, then, instead, he would prefer to fight two battles with a 75% chance of winning each. This retains the 90% chance of winning at least one of the battles, but offers a pretty decent chance of winning both. He believed in tailoring the strength of his forces in a battle so as not to have an overwhelming advantage.
It’s a remarkably cold-blooded approach, but it has strategic merits.
I think Spavined Gelding was simply commenting that McClellan would not, or could not, succeed unless he immediately achieved complete victory. Since the Confederates declined to roll over and beg, he enver achieved anything.
Something I find interesting is that his greatest victories in the early war were not much his own doing. He led the campaign in West Virginia, but didn’t do any of the fighting, and in fact nearly got Rosecran’s whole force killed. He came up with a great plan, but when the time came to risk anything whatsoever, even to save his own subordinate’s force, he got nervous and stood around. Had the Confederates not been in severe distress, Rosecran’s surprise attack would have been quickly surrounded and destroyed. As it was, Old Rosy carried the entire field himself.
I have not heard that quote myself, but it’s remarkably similar to a saying by Sun Tzu. The fun part is that Grant most likely never even heard the man’s name, and never particularly read strategy.
I think its more accurate to say that he didn’t think slavery was worth fighting over.
Generals have thrived commanding armies and navies in wars they didn’t necessarily think were worth fighting. You could write a whole book about Japanese generals and admirals in WWII who commanded magnificently despite being convinced the war was utter folly. Hell, the guy who ended up replacing McLellan (more or less), Ulysses S. Grant, commanded well in the Mexican-American War despite thinking the war a terrible sin.
McLellan was a coward. He was a near-perfect psychological case of a person who was perfectly designed to achieve high command and then fuck it up.