Mac didn’t actually favor the Confederacy, but he didn’t hate the Confederates and he wanted slavery to continue. He seems to have actively tried to bring the war to a gentle conclusion, imagining he could do just enough to force the Confederates to the bargaining table without doing serious damage to their lives or infrastructure. So some (certainly not all) of his war record reflects his (wrongheaded) attempts to act as a buffer between what he perceived as the bloodthirstiness of radical Republican congressmen and the actual conduct of the war. He (again, wrongly) assumed Lincoln was as bloodthirsty as the radicals. In fact, he almost completely misunderstood Lincoln in every way. He once gave Lincoln a paper indicating McClellan’s own thoughts on the purpose of the war and how to protect slavery, which Lincoln tucked into his pocket unopened (classic Lincoln, trying to stay on-message without inflaming McClellan, but also sending a subtle message that he would not be bullied.)
Well, I think “He who defends everything defends nothing” is more specifically a reference to the fact that if you spread your troops out evenly, the enemy can mass his at any point and outnumber you locally. But I guess it sort of applies in the way you meant.
McClellan had his virtues. He was great at building up an army and maneuvering it into a good position for battle. But then, as other have said, he’d lose his nerve. He was afraid to roll the dice.
So he’d dither and let the enemy slip away. Then he’d get mad at other people, probably in defensive recognition of his own faults.
I’ve often thought what could have worked was if the Army of the Potomac had had a split command. McClellan would have been in charge of the army most of the time. But once they got within ten miles of the Confederate Army, Joe Hooker would take command. “Fighting Joe” wasn’t a great general but he knew how to attack, which was the skill that McClellan lacked. Between them, they would have made a great general.
Sure, just look at how well Fighting Joe did when he finally got command of the Army of the Potomac. Chancellorsville, anyone? Look at how well he did when yoked with Grant and Thomas at Chattanooga. Basically Hooker ended the war out to grass because he wasn’t up to army command and he was not a willing and able subordinate.
Plus, shared command is an invitation to disaster, alwas was, always will be. Command by committee just doesn’t work.
I think Foote was going for a joke. There were plenty of other villains on both sides.
When Grant won at Shiloh he was called every kind of crazed and reckless butcher imaginable in the northern press. It continued when he was in Mississippi and then in Virginia, when his first few weeks of command more Federal troops from that theater were killed in all of the war to that date combined. This is exactly the kind of press that McLellan was trying to avoid.
And, ironically, when the war was over, Grant was probably the most beloved man in the Union (minus the former Confederacy obviously) and won the presidency by an electoral landslide and a comfortable margin of the popular vote. McCLellan had returned to the U.S. to run for president in '68 and was basically told (not an exact quote of anybody but a paraphrasing of sentiment) “No, Grant’s running, and if you couldn’t take Lincoln in '64 you sure as hell don’t stand a chance against the man who won the war”, which must have really galled him.
He gets quoted A LOT in histories of Europe and the Middle East for his travel writings. I remember at least one thing that was sent around a few years ago that was an amazingly prescient comment on the Arab world which, of course, when Snopesed turned out to be heavily edited (he did write a good bit about the Muslims of his time but in the forwarded one he stops just short of mentioning 9-11 and Obama).
Honestly, I’ve always considered McLellan to be a management error. More an error of the times. Mac would have THRIVED as ‘general in charge of getting an army together’. Putting him in overall command of troops in the field was a horrible mistake. But that sort of thing wasn’t doctrine then. A General at that time and place took the men under him into the field. But McLellan didn’t have that skillet and things didn’t work out. But lay a big chunk of the blame on the system he was under.
It’s a pretty general quote that is used frequently outside of military discussions.
In the specific instance Frederick was talking about, however, it wasn’t so much about not evenly distributing your lines so much as it was about the general concept that you must risk something offensively to achieve success. It’s really a quote more about offensive maneuver than defensive tactics. In Frederick’s era most successful offensive maneuvers by their nature exposed some weakness. Through proper tactics and execution you could often actively prevent that weakness from being exploited (or be reactive if the enemy notes the weakness and tries to exploit it), but there is no way at all to remove all risk from warfare and to try to do so will insure defeat.
To me one of the most impressive examples of Frederick’s strategy and the general concept of risk was seen at the Battle of Soor (not one of his more famous battles.) It was basically a situation in which Frederick had seriously erred. His men had made camp sloppily and they didn’t adequately prepare much of a defense, in marching to camp he had stripped several detachments off and thus had reduced manpower. The Austrians became aware of this and prepared a very well planned offensive to strike at the camp by surprise. In all reality the Austrians should have beaten the balls off the Prussians in this battle.
The Prussians only became aware of the Austrian presence relatively shortly before actually being attacked. Frederick immediately ordered his cavalry to charge at the Austrian center, uphill, in the face of a strong Austrian advance who had the advantage of terrain and had 16 heavy guns already in position. It seemed a stupid, stupid response to a bad situation. What actually happened is it turned the Austrians, and in a bloody battle for both sides, the Prussians won the strategic victory. Frederick later said that his actions were risky, but he saw it as the least risky of all options. If he had been overwhelmed by the situation and tried to actively avoid risk (by trying to brace for the assault or even beat some sort of retreat) it’s very likely the Austrians would have caused serious chaos in his formation and inflicted heavy casualties. The biggest advantage the Austrians had was surprise and the confusion and disorientation that can sow in an opposing force, by ordering an assault and quickly, Frederick basically reversed that advantage.
A lot of military thinkers of Frederick’s day would have probably said that in such a situation the correct response would be to find a way to retreat without having your entire force destroyed, but Frederick decided to instead risk his force in the one way he saw that might actually give him a victorious outcome (and it worked.)
Soor was indeed one of Frederick’s most impressive victories, but let’s remember he was facing sad-sack Charles Alexander of Lorraine and poor Prince Charles simply sucked. He attacked sluggishly, trying to slowly constrict Fred’s army*. He made no defensive reaction to Frederick’s sudden concentration of forces and when his center was hotly engaged, let his right wing stand idle. Against a good general Fred likely loses regardless - he really did put his own ass in a crack, not for the last time.
But I agree that nonetheless you have to give him credit for his aggression, fast-thinking and decisiveness. He put himself in a position to win against a superior force where many would not. It’s kind of like Agincourt - Henry V should never have let himself get caught in the position he was, but he managed to pull a rabbit out of his hat.
*Unlike Daun at Hochkirch, who catching Frederick in a very similar careless error took full advantage.
Hooker’s problem was he would attack when he wasn’t ready. McClellan’s problem was he would be ready and then not attack. Put them together and each would have covered the other’s flaws.
And it wouldn’t have been a committee. Only one general would have been in charge at any given time.
That said, I was more making a point about their command styles than offering a actual suggestion.
I can’t help but think of another pair of generals, one impetuous and the other overly cautious who shared command of an army by alternating command of it day to day. Romans by the names of Paullus and Varro at a place called Cannae.
Do you think things would have worked better if Varro had been put in sole command? The problem wasn’t a split command; it was Varro was placed in command of a situation that he was temperamentally unsuited for (much like McClellan and Hooker were placed in commands they were temperamentally unsuited for).
The pre-Grant commanders of the Army of the Potomac, McClellan most certainly included, shared a bizarre lack of urgency about getting their soldiers to where they needed to be to be effective. Meanwhile, the opposite number for the Army of Northern Virginia would push his troops to get to whatever key point they needed to occupy. They’d be exhausted when the battle began, but they’d almost inevitably be dug in and waiting when the Union troops arrived. Jackson was the ultimate exemplar of this: he’d push his “foot cavalry” to march 40 miles in two days, if need be, to get to where they needed to be. But the ANV generals all shared this instinct, to varying degrees, while it seems to have been absent from the Army of the Potomac generals during the first three years of the war.
McClellan stumbling on the Confederate plans before Antietam is the classic for-instance: if he’d gotten his troops back on the march that same afternoon when he’d concluded the plans were genuine, he might’ve been able to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia two days later.
But it wasn’t just him. Hooker at Chancellorsville, IIRC, didn’t push his troops to get all the way through the Wilderness before they camped for the night, with unfortunate results. Meade failing to follow up the destruction of the units in Pickett’s charge on the last day of the Gettysburg battle. Etcetera.
Reading the first two volumes of Bruce Catton’s Army of the Potomac trilogy makes you want to reach through time, grab a few Union generals by the lapels, and shout, “Get a fucking move on, asshole! Could you actually take advantage of that opportunity while it’s there, for once, instead of thinking you’ve got all week?”
It couldn’t have gone much worse, if Varro had sole command the doubt and uncertainty amongst the troops caused by the split temperaments of their alternating commanders would at least have been removed. There’s a reason unity of command has been a principle of war written about since Sun Tzu. Hannibal was aware of the Roman split command arrangements and went about baiting the Romans on a day he knew Varro would be in charge.
Worse than that. McClellan’s army (if not the man himself) could have obliterated Lee after Malvern Hill. The army would have ground Lee to powder had Hooker actually fought at Chancellorsville. And while Meade could be excused to failign to attack Lee right on the last day of Gettysburg, he should never have let Lee get across the Potomac. And well, Burnside spoke for himself. Literally.
Naturally, the Union Army having failed to give battle when it had the advantage, Lee never gave it another similar chance throughout Grant’s entire campaign. By that time, the army was so afraid that it the footsloggers (really their JO’s) refused to take the offensive or initiative even when faced with fantastic opportunities, so that they ended up suffering even more casualties.
Basically, the Eastern officer corp topped out at “Competent but nothing special.” WHy this as the case is a matter fo speculation.
But that’s not luck - Fred *knew *he was facing a weak general, and tailored his attack accordingly. If the Austrians had been commanded by someone more competent, he might not have taken the risk.
In the same manner, I’m sure Lee, Jackson et al allowed themselves to take the risks they took because they knew how McClellen would react - or fail to react.
