The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln

by Larry Tagg

  George Brinton McClellan could look back on a life fit for a savior-intraining. He was the son of a prosperous Philadelphia physician, reared in the aristocratic circles of that conservative city, and educated at elite private schools that prepared him for entry into West Point, by special permission, at age fifteen—two years under the minimum age. There he excelled, graduating second out of the fifty-nine members of the Class of 1846. Two months after his graduation, McClellan sailed to the Rio Grande and into the Mexican War. There, at the age of twenty, he sparkled on the engineering staff of General Scott and won renown for his bravery in a battle during which two horses were shot out from under him and a grapeshot broke his sword hilt. In 1855, he was hand-picked by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to study European armies at first hand. He went to the Continent to study fortifications in the Crimean War, and afterward consulted with high officials, including the emperors of France and Austria. Returning to the United States, he introduced the “McClellan saddle” and saw it adopted by the U.S. Army. In January of 1857, impatient with the slow advancement of an army career, he resigned to become chief engineer of the Illinois Central Railroad. He was hired as president of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad two years later, and moved to Cincinnati, where he lived when the Civil War began. Within two weeks of the fall of Fort Sumter, he accepted the Ohio governor’s offer of the command of the Department of the Ohio, which included the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, as well as parts of western Virginia and Pennsylvania. In May 1861, he entered the service as a major general, second in rank only to General-in-Chief Scott. After his short campaign in western Virginia in June and July, he received Lincoln’s telegram, arrived in Washington on July 26 to a conqueror’s welcome, and immediately took command of the nation’s supreme field army. He was thirty-four years old.

  The Union needed a hero. The new general installed himself at the head of the Washington army amid “one continuous ovation,” as he himself described it. McClellan was a Democrat, but even the Radical Republicans were breathless in admiration of his ability and charisma. They adopted him as one of their own. Zack Chandler squired the new general around town as if he had discovered him. Washington, D.C., the nervous little outpost, bowed and curtsied. “I find myself in a new & strange position here,” he wrote to his wife the day after he arrived. “I seem to have become the power of the land. I almost think that were I to win some small success now I could become Dictator or anything else that might please me … .”

  McClellan did not disappoint. With his arrival, the ravening and drunken soldiers disappeared from the city streets and were back in their camps. Even that great grumbler, Count Gurowski, noted, “For the first time since the armaments, I enjoyed a genuine military view. McClellan, surrounded as a general ought to be, went to see the army. It looks martial. The city, likewise, has a more martial look… . It seems that a young, strong hand holds the ribbons.” On August 1 the New York Tribune ran the headline “Confidence Renewed” over an article that praised the young general and “the admirable system of discipline that he has put in force.”

  McClellan’s days were a blur of energetic attention to every detail. He held staff conferences after breakfast, then saw visitors and conducted business. In the afternoon he rode out to review troops, inspect camps, and survey the terrain for fortifications, rarely returning before nine or ten at night; then, after another staff conference, he did paperwork until the early morning hours. Often he was in the saddle twelve hours a day, his blouse so sweated through that it bled blue onto his linen shirt.

  Always he remained conspicuous. Rather than sleep in a tent among the troops, he rented a house in town across Lafayette Park from the White House. He was a magnificent horseman, and when he rode off to the camps, he galloped through the city streets at the head of a flying column of orderlies and a squadron of cavalry, whose horses’ hooves thundered as they kicked up clouds of dust, choking the open-mouthed spectators who poured onto the sidewalks to gape at the pageantry of the daily spectacle. Once arrived in the camps, he rode pell-mell down their length, from the Chain Bridge to Alexandria, holding his cap high in one hand to greet the ovations of the cheering soldiers, who shouted themselves hoarse in fanatical devotion to their “Little Mac.”

  McClellan oozed ability. His first impression charmed the Washington set in a way that Lincoln never could. Men noticed his grace of movement, his leopard suppleness. “His manner,” wrote one who saw him then, “is self-possessed, unaffected, though remarkably self-complacent, with natural dignity and frankness. His talk, to the point, earnest, honest, and intelligent… . [T]here is an indefinable air of success about him and something of the ‘man of destiny.’ He looked like one who always had succeeded and always will succeed.” What a contrast to the man in the White House! William Russell remarked on the serenity of his dark blue eye, the firmness of his mouth, the animation of his features. “His voice is sweet, his address affectionate, his manner winning,” wrote another who saw him then. McClellan looked every inch the man born to command. His full head of dark hair topped handsome, regular features. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that his perfectly modeled head balanced on “a neck such as not one man in ten thousand possesses,” and this on a body “muscular as a prize-fighter’s.” Even Lincoln’s secretaries wrote later, “[I]n everyone, from the President of the United States to the humblest orderly who waited at his door, he inspired a remarkable affection and regard.” He was the “idol of Washington drawing-rooms,” they said. Already there was frank talk that he would be the next President.

  * * *

  The worship went instantly to McClellan’s head, with terrible consequences for the nation. For what was not apparent was that a life of too-easy success and abundant natural gifts had spoiled something at the core of George McClellan. His rearing in an aristocratic family in the conservative upper crust of Philadelphia society had made him caste conscious, always with a sense of his own superiority. At West Point, he had noticed that “In almost every class, those who are gentlemen associate together, and have nothing whatever to do with those forward impudent fellows who never can be gentlemen.” “Some how or other,” young cadet McClellan admitted, “I take to the Southerners. I am sorry to say the manners, feeling, and opinions of the Southerners are far, far preferable to those of the majority of the Northerners at this place.” He shared with the plantation aristocrats their arrogance, their sense of entitlement to command, their contempt for common folk, their tantrums with superiors—attitudes that would be tragically out of place at the head of a great democratic army.

  His inbred aristocracy and his sudden idolization by the important men in Washington were pernicious: he refused to consider himself subordinate to either his civilian chief, President Lincoln, or his military one, General-in-Chief Scott. During the fall months of 1861, while he organized and trained his Army of the Potomac, and while he enjoyed a period entirely free from prodding politicians, his combative spirit was turned entirely against his two superiors.

  General Scott felt McClellan’s jealousy of his authority at once. In his first week, the young general got in the habit of dealing directly with President Lincoln, ignoring Scott in the chain of command. McClellan neglected to consult Scott in making his plans. His letters to his wife Ellen are a chronicle of galloping resentments. Week after week his letters were full of his “war” with his senior. For three months the proud old warrior suffered McClellan’s petulant refusal to hear his opinions. Then, finally, on November 1, Winfield Scott, the greatest soldier in the history of the nation between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, graciously passed the baton to his tormenter and announced his retirement “for reasons of health.” Lincoln gave McClellan Scott’s title of General-in-Chief of all the nation’s armies, and put him in charge of overall Union strategy. “I can do it all,” was McClellan’s reply.

  Lincoln would quickly learn the painful lesson that it was folly to appease McClellan, who grew more conceited with every accumulation
of power. Now that Scott was disposed of, the new General-in-Chief proceeded to cultivate an intense dislike of the President himself. Lincoln was unaware of just how vulgar he seemed to a snob such as McClellan, and how much malignity there was in that snobbery. McClellan was still very much the gentleman from Philadelphia, and his abhorrence of Lincoln’s informal manners and country habits was visceral. Among his notes for his memoirs, McClellan wrote that the President “was not a man of very strong character, & as he was destitute of refinement—certainly in no sense a gentleman—he is easily wrought upon by the coarse associates whose style of conversation agreed so well with his own.”

  Lincoln made the problem worse by deferring to the young general. According to McClellan, Lincoln “liked me personally, and certainly he was always much influenced by me when we were together.” He said Lincoln even implied that he, McClellan, was more important to the Union war effort, telling him “they would probably give more for my scalp at Richmond than for his.” Lincoln erred in affecting an easy familiarity with the haughty, extremely proper general, calling him “George”—“Is George in?” he would ask, when he came across Lafayette Park to McClellan’s headquarters.

  Lincoln’s habit of coming over unannounced to talk strategy at all hours was an exasperating annoyance to McClellan, who showed his disdain for the President by keeping him waiting. Lincoln arrived one evening when the London Times’ William Russell was there, and Russell noted his entrance: “a tall man with a navvy’s cap, and an ill-made shooting suit, from the pockets of which protruded paper and bundles.” Lincoln was told the general was resting, but that he would be informed the President was there to see him. “‘Oh, no; I can wait. I think I’ll take supper with him,’” Lincoln said, and sat down to wait with the others in the room. “This poor President!” was Russell’s reaction. “Trying with all his might to understand strategy … . He runs from one house to another, armed with plans, papers, reports, recommendations, sometimes good-humoured, never angry, occasionally dejected, and always a little fussy.” Lincoln was sweet-tempered enough to bear the wait with equanimity, but the aides with him steamed at the insult. “A minute passes,” remembered one, “then another, and then another, and with every tick of the clock upon the mantel your blood warms nearer and nearer its boiling-point. Your face feels hot and your fingers tingle, as you look at the man [Lincoln], sitting so patiently over there … and you try to master your rebellious consciousness.”

  Perhaps Lincoln would have been less patient if he had been aware of McClellan’s sense of superiority, or the fact that the Young Napoleon, in his arrogance, took Lincoln’s humility for weakness. McClellan’s commentary on the events of these weeks survives in letters to his wife. The letters have the sound of a man who already expected to succeed Lincoln in the presidency, a man who was writing for posterity, saying, in effect, “See what I had to put up with?” McClellan’s letters to Ellen, written between his arrival in Washington in late July and hers in December, brimmed with malice and petty conceit:

  “The Presdt is an idiot.” (August 16)

  “I am becoming daily more disgusted with this administration—perfectly sick of it. If I could with honor resign I would quit the whole concern tomorrow.” (October 2)

  “I can’t tell you how disgusted I am becoming with these wretched politicians … . The Presdt is nothing more than a well meaning baboon.” (October 11)

  “I have not been home for some 3 hrs, but am ‘concealed’ at Stanton’s to dodge all enemies in shape of ‘browsing’ Presdt etc… . I have a set of scamps to deal with—-unscrupulous & false … . It is perfectly sickening to have to work with such people & see the fate of the nation in such hands… . [I]t is terrible to stand by & see the cowardice of the Presdt, the vileness of Seward, & the rascality of Cameron—Welles is an old woman—Bates an old fool… . I am thwarted & deceived by these incapables at every turn.” (October 31)

  “It is sickening in the extreme & makes me feel heavy at heart when I see the weakness & unfitness of the poor beings who control the destinies of this great country… . I went to the White House shortly after tea where I found ‘the original gorrilla,’ about as intelligent as ever. What a specimen to be at the head of our affairs now! … I went to Seward’s, where I found the ‘Gorilla’ again, & was of course much edified by his anecdotes—ever apropos & ever unworthy of one holding his high position… . I suppose our country has richly merited some great punishment, else we should not now have such wretched triflers at the head of affairs.” (November 17)

  The tragic flaw of callow America—its worship of the individual, its distrust of authority—was made flesh and played out on an epic scale in the antagonism between the Union’s main actors, Abraham Lincoln and the fiercely insubordinate George McClellan. For a while, McClellan patronized his Commander-in-Chief. His sneering attitude at first expressed itself in amusement at the unmilitary Lincoln’s quaint presumption. General Samuel Heintzelman described a strategy meeting in McClellan’s map room during which Lincoln pointed to a map and made “remarks, not remarkably profound, but McClellan listened as if much edified.” Heintzelman said that afterward McClellan saw the President out, “& as he pushed the door to, looking back said, ‘Isn’t he a rare bird?’”

  Two days later, however, McClellan’s amusement had turned to disdain. On the evening of November 13, Lincoln, Seward, and Hay went to McClellan’s, and, finding him absent, decided to wait in the parlor. About an hour later, McClellan returned home from a wedding, and was told the President was waiting to see him, whereupon, according to Hay, McClellan “went up stairs, passing the door of the room where the president and Secretary of State were seated. They waited about half-an-hour, and sent once more a servant to tell the General they were there, and the answer coolly came that the General had gone to bed.” Hay resented this blatant snub as “the unparalleled insolence of epaulettes,” and warned, “It is the first indication I have yet seen of the threatened supremacy of the military authorities.”

  No issue was bigger, in this era of violent suspicions, than supremacy of the military authorities. It hinted at a military coup. The politicians distrusted the generals, and the generals distrusted the politicians. The hopes and fears of both groups hinged on control of Lincoln—vested by the Constitution with authority over each, in his twin capacities as Commander-in-Chief and Chief Executive—and, because the Railsplitter was perceived by both sides as weak and indecisive, each side badgered him mercilessly with pleas and threats. Lincoln was particularly easy to criticize. He was a man of moderation, impenetrable in his thinking and at the same time open to suggestion. No matter which side his policy favored, the other would accuse him of a shameful surrender. The Radical Republicans, as the group most eager to see the rebels scattered and punished, were the most vehement politicians, and so the battle for supremacy—and the tug-of-war over Lincoln—was most desperate when the commanding general was a Democrat, as McClellan was.

  McClellan hated the Radical Republicans. “The Radicals had only the negro in view, & not the Union,” he wrote later. “They cared not for the results, knew little or nothing of the subject to be dealt with,& merely wished to accomplish a political move for party profit, or from sentimental motives.” McClellan was adamant that the war’s purpose should remain the Democrats’ purpose: the restoration of the Union as it was, with slavery intact. He had been educated at West Point, an institution that emphasized the science of military engineering and fortifications. He was well read in the strategic theories of Baron Henri Jomini, the Swiss interpreter of the Napoleonic military art. To such men, war was an elaborate game of vectors and concentrations, best left to professionals; interference by politicians led to holocausts like the French Revolution. McClellan’s profound contempt for politicians only deepened during the months he made his headquarters in Washington, which he came to refer to as “that sink of iniquity.” Certainly he liked the Radicals, those craven lurkers in the halls of power, less than his aristocratic fri
ends at the gentleman’s club at West Point, many of whom were now leading Confederate troops.

  Other West Point-educated officers felt the same. Because the military academy required that each new student be appointed by a congressman, in an era when Democrats dominated, West Pointers were overwhelmingly conservative Democrats like McClellan. They were distrustful of any Republican administration, especially one whose departments were shot through with disloyal personnel. They were disgusted by the orgy of greed, corruption, and waste in the War Department, and contemptuous of Lincoln’s free way of handing out general’s stars to politicians—amateurs, such as John C. Frémont—whom the militarily naïve President had lifted directly from civilian life into high rank, and who were now barking orders to the West Pointers, men with a lifetime of training and service.

  The West Point men had another cause to resent Lincoln. He had insulted their patriotism in his July 5th Message to Congress, wherein he had pointed out, “Not one common soldier or common sailor is known to have deserted his flag,” but, in contrast, “in this, the government’s hour of trial, large numbers” of army and navy officers “have resigned and proved false to the hand which had pampered them … .” Yes, thought the West Pointers, one third of the U.S. Army’s 1,108 officers had deserted to the South—they had gone with their states, as any gentleman would do. And why no praise for those that remained? The officers felt that Lincoln’s insult was the cheap appeal of a demagogue for popular approval, and that by impugning their patriotism he had undercut their authority and damaged the army’s discipline.