Betrayal: General George McClellan, The Peninsula Campaign and The Death of General Philip Kearny

Abraham Lincoln recognized that the US Civil War would be a "hard war". Secession and slavery represented abiding beliefs central to Southern life. Overcoming them would require a war of attrition resulting in much death and destruction, but Lincoln knew that the populous industrial North would prevail in a war of "grim mathematics". He hoped that in George McClellan he had found the general to wage this war.

McClellan, though young and bright, was not up to the task. Early in his tenure, he...