McClellan revisited

I've always thought McClellan was a lazy and cowardly general.  I was probably wrong.

from  Allen C. Guelzo  Winter 2009 issue of the Claremont Review of Books. Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College.

 "..what, actually, did Lincoln learn from his auto-didactic pursuit of military science? The standard textbooks of the day were written under the spell of Napoleon Bonaparte, and they hewed to the belief that victory in war was the product of single, decisive battles in which one side, in one massive stroke, disabled the opposing army and compelled its political leadership to come to the peace table. This might have served Napoleon's purposes at Jena and Austerlitz. But by the 1850s, field armies had swollen to dimensions which ensured that single-stroke, "decisive" victories would be impossible. What would certainly cripple an enemy army, however, would be to shift the blow to the enemy's logistics—lines of supplies, depots, and manufacturing centers—since these newly-gargantuan armies had stomachs which no mere foraging on the countryside could any longer satisfy. McClellan, curiously, understood this, and so his initial plans for war-making were aimed at the Confederacy's logistical centers, rather than at its field armies. Hence McClellan's grand plan to side-step the rebel army in Virginia, shift his own Army of the Potomac by water to the James River peninsula, and hit the Confederate capital at Richmond through its back door.

"But Lincoln, who already had ample reason to resent McClellan's unconcealed contempt for the president he called "the original gorilla," interpreted McClellan's strategy as politics, not warfare—as a desire to avoid a straight-up, knock-down confrontation with the rebels. When Robert E. Lee and the Confederate army turned the tables on McClellan and ripped out McClellan's own logistical wiring during the Seven Days' Battles, McClellan hastily retreated. This looked to Lincoln like cowardice, not prudence, and when Lincoln finally relieved him of command in November 1862, he was adamant that McClellan's successors stop fooling around with plans to take Richmond, and drive up the middle, overland, to slug it out with Robert E. Lee and the Confederate army. "Lee's Army," he told Joseph Hooker, "and not Richmond, is your true objective point."

 "But was it? Obediently, a succession of generals—Burnside, Hooker, Meade—struggled to follow Lincoln's directive, and ended up with nothing to show for it but indecisive collisions with the rebels. When Lincoln brought Ulysses S. Grant to take control in Virginia in 1864, Grant was handed the same mandate. But Grant enjoyed Lincoln's political confidence like no other of the generals, and after another resultless string of stalemates, from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor, Grant prevailed on Lincoln to let him try the McClellan strategy below the James River. The result was a siege of Richmond and Petersburg which drained the life out of Lee's army, and when Lee finally broke away and tried to make a run for it in April 1865, the rebel army, lacking a logistical base, stumbled and collapsed into Grant's arms. The same pattern held true elsewhere in the war—it was not the defeat of rebel armies at Perryville or Murfreesboro, but the capture of Chattanooga and Atlanta, which wrecked the Confederacy's war-making capacity. In retrospect, Lincoln's directive to make "Lee's army...your true objective" was almost the worst advice a commander-in-chief could have given in the 19th century."

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