Controversies And Commanders: Dispatches from the Army of the Potomac

by Stephen W. Sears

Overview

CONTROVERSIES AND COMMANDERS is a fascinating look at some of the most intriguing generals in the Union's Army of the Potomac and at some of the most extraordinary events of the Civil War, chronicled by one of our leading historians, Stephen W. Sears. Sears investigates the accusations of disloyalty against General Charles Stone; the court-martial of Fitz John Porter; the crisis in army command on the eve of the Antietam battle; the Lost Order of Antietam; the revolt of the Potomac army's high command; the notorious General Dan Sickles, who had shot his wife's lover outside the White House; the murderous Kilpatrick-Dahlgren raid on Richmond; the firing of corps commander Gouverneur Warren on the eve of victory; and the much maligned Generals McClellan (justifiably) and Hooker (not so justifiably). The book follows the Army of the Potomac through the course of the war, from 1861 to 1865, painting a remarkable portrait of key incidents and personalities that influenced the outcome of our nation's greatest cataclysm.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780618057061
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	08/10/2000
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	948,087
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

STEPHEN W. SEARS is the author of many award-winning books on the Civil War, including Gettysburg and Landscape Turned Red. A former editor at American Heritage, he lives in Connecticut.,

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Little Mac and the Historians

IN THE WORST OF TIMES — especially in the worst of times — General George B. McClellan had never a doubt that vindication would be his in the eyes of the Muse Clio. As he wrote his wife, on an occasion when he was feeling particularly scorned by the administration in Washington, "Well — one of these days history will I trust do me justice in deciding that it was not my fault that the campaign of the Peninsula was not successful." After he was relieved of command of the Army of the Potomac, in November 1862, the Springfield Republican reported, "The McClellan excitement has wholly died out. He seems willing to await the decision of history as to his brief military career."

Since that time historians in some numbers have taken up McClellan's challenge. Being a latter-day biographer of the general, and the editor of his papers, I regard their findings as worthy of analysis. It seems that over the last century and a third, historians have come down on every side of the McClellan question concerning not only his Peninsula campaign but the rest of his remarkably varied wartime career as well.

To be sure, not all the McClellan biographers (including this one) and not all the more general commentators on his career have been professional historians. Yet at least some of the volunteers in the trade (including this one) have conscientiously applied accepted standards of historical analysis to their efforts and are entitied to seats alongside the regulars on what historian Joseph L. Harsh has labeled "the McClellanGo-Round."

One way to attract biographers is to run for president. History is seldom served by these campaign biographies, however, and that is certainly true in McClellan's case. Of the half-dozen potboilers that appeared during the 1864 campaign, one only may be regarded as "authorized" — a Life and Campaigns of ... effort by G. S. Hillard that was optimistically scheduled for publication one day before the Democratic convention would name its nominee. Hillard had been granted an interview by the prospective candidate, which provides the latter-day biographer with details of McClellan's early life not available elsewhere; otherwise Hillard slides back into the ruck of campaign-biography mediocrity.

During the 1864 campaign much of what was written about General McClellan (both for him and against him) in books, pamphlets, and newspapers drew inspiration from the general's Report on the Organization of the Army of the Potomac, and of Its Campaigns in Virginia and Maryland, the 242-page official account of his time as army commander. McClellan designed the Report with some care to be his final draft for history. It is better described as a very rough first draft. The New York Times waxed sarcastic, calling it "nothing less than the Military Memoirs of George B. McClellan, printed at the expense of the government."

Buttressed with numerous, carefully selected documents, the Report leaves no doubt that everything untoward that happened during these months could not be blamed on the general commanding. As James Russell Lowell observed in the North American Review, General McClellan "makes affidavit in one volume octavo that he is a great military genius, after all." The Peninsula campaign, for one prime example, was lost to an enemy wielding vastly greater numbers — vastly greater because the radical Republican administration in Washington adamantly scorned to support or to reinforce the Army of the Potomac and its commander. A New York publisher made the Report available to voters in a low-cost edition, and McClellan autographed a special oversized deluxe edition for friends and supporters. The still-lingering legend of George McClellan as savior of the Union has its origin in his Report.

During his time of command, the general had gone to some effort to preserve for his own use the raw materials of the history he was making. He sent copies of important documents to his wife, Ellen, which (as he told her) "I wish you to keep as my record." He explained why: "They will show, with the others you have, that I was true to my country, that I understood the state of affairs long ago, & that had my advice been followed we should not have been in our present difficulties. . . ." When relieved of command, he took away with him the entire headquarters archives of the Army of the Potomac for the period August 1861 to November 1862. The manuscript of his Report went to the War Department in August 1863 accompanied by the official reports of his subordinates — and that was all. He retained everything else of the Potomac army's archives, numbering in the thousands of pieces, as his personal property. As he saw it, only reports written officially for the government, by him or by his lieutenants, belonged to the government. With the exception of a few papers relating to the western Virginia campaign of 1861 that he made available, and a few dispatch books loaned to the Official Records project after his death, the McClellan papers remained unseen in family hands until presented to the Library of Congress in 1911 and 1916.

Following his defeat in the presidential election, McClellan resigned his commission and sailed for Europe. The Young Napoleon, said observers, was accepting exile as his fate. By the time he returned to America in 1868, wartime passions had cooled. He made a comfortable living as an engineering consultant and served as elder statesman of the Democratic party. But his determination to seek the vindication of history remained as strong as ever. During his European exile he had begun a memoir — "the secret history," he called it, "of my connection with Lincoln, Stanton, Chase etc.; it may be valuable for history one of these days." By 1881 he had finished his memoir, but during a six-month stay in Europe the single copy, left in New York for safekeeping, was destroyed by fire. Undaunted, he began work anew on what would be published posthumously, in 1887, as McClellan's Own Story.

This book, which contrary to McClellan's intentions put a blight on his military reputation, would remain something of a puzzle to historians and biographers for more than a century. Here was a memoir presented as McClellan's considered and final testament on the Civil War and his role in it, yet it appeared that the general had simply ignored everything factual learned from the records of the war in the two decades between 1865 and his death in 1885. "Never was there a controversial work in which the other side was more calmly ignored," wrote John C. Ropes in a review of McClellan's Own Story. "... It is impossible to get up much sympathy for General McClellan. And we do not think that this book of his will raise him in the opinion of his countrymen." It was an accurate prophecy. Seventy years later, historian Allan Nevins would remark, "Students of history must always be grateful that McClellan so frankly exposed his own weaknesses in this posthumous book."

It is known now that in fact poor McClellan was betrayed by his literary executor, William C. Prime. Wartime editor of the rabidly pro-McClellan New York Journal of Commerce, Prime let his partisanship and his devotion to the general run away with him in seeing into print McClellan's side of the story. The general had left not even half a manuscript, with much of that only in early draft form and undergoing revision at the time of his sudden death. Prime took this as it was, undid some of the revisions, and patched together the balance of the book from McClellan writings that went back twenty years and more, much of it from the 1864 Report. Not content with this hodgepodge, he then added excerpts from some 250 of McClellan's wartime letters to his wife. In these letters to Ellen it had been the general's habit to pour out his innermost feelings and opinions in unbridled fashion; at their publication McClellan surely turned over in his grave. Although Prime deleted or censored the most inflammatory of McClellan's views, enough remained, writes Joseph Harsh, that historians, "finding the letters offensive, ... read them as candid glimpses of the character flaws which foredoomed the General's military career."

The general's death, and the subsequent publication of McClellan's Own Story, inspired several of McClellan's contemporaries to prepare articles of reminiscence and analysis. For The Century General James B. Fry wrote "McClellan and His 'Mission,'" a commentary on the general's messianic vision of saving the Union, a vision mentioned frequently in the letters to Ellen printed in Story. Former staff officer William F. Biddle furnished more admiring "Recollections of McClellan" for the professional military journal United Service Magazine. George Ticknor Curtis, a staunch friend and political adviser of McClellan's, wrote uncritically of his generalship in McClellan's Last Service to the Republic (1886), appropriately subtitled "A Tribute to His Memory."

The first true biography of the general was not published until 1901 — Peter S. Michie's General McClellan, in Appleton's "Great Commanders" series. Michie had been a respected engineering officer during the war, and his is the only in-depth appraisal of McClellan the soldier written by a fellow soldier. It is especially valuable on that score. Michie coolly evaluated the claims in the Report and McClellan's Own Story against the realities in the Official Records. While finding enough of value in McClellan's overall war record to fit him in among the Great Commanders, Michie could be unsparing as well. He delivered a stinging soldier's verdict, for example, on General McClellan's conduct at Glendale and Malvern Hill during the Seven Days. On June 30 and July 1, 1862, the general commanding literally fled these two Peninsula battlefields, boarding the gunboat Galena for useless excursions on the James and each day leaving his army to get out of its scrape (to use a favorite expression of his) as best it could. The term Michie used for the general's actions in these battles was "astounding." Michie concluded his account of Glendale and Malvern Hill with words of caution for future McClellan biographers: "every explanation ... put forward by his defenders must ever be in the nature of an unsatisfactory apology."

An oddity among McClellan biographies is James Havelock Campbell's bravely titled McClellan: A Vindication of the Military Career of General George B. McClellan (1916). Campbell, a law school dean, described his work as a lawyer's brief, and it is all of that — a defense lawyer's brief. If General McClellan turned over in his grave after what William Prime inflicted on his memoir, then probably he again rested peacefully when Campbell's book appeared. Turning to Campbell's account of Glendale and Malvern Hill, we find that General McClellan on these battlefields was "wise, prudent, brave, skilful, with a mind which grasped everything down to the minutest detail and with an energy which governed all."

William Starr Myers, a Princeton historian, was the first to mount a scholarly biographical effort to capture the general's life between covers and the first to utilize the McClellan papers deposited in the Library of Congress. Myers titled his 1934 work General George Brinton McClellan: A Study in Personality. In his preface he confessed to slighting the military side of McClellan's story (Myers identified himself as a professor of politics), "for I am fully aware of my own limitations in technical knowledge in this field." This indeed proved a handicap in writing the biography of a general. Nevertheless, Myers found the McClellan papers a rich source for exploring the personality of his subject. The figure that emerges from this effort is morally upright, stainlessly honorable, and politically naive. Surprisingly for a professor of politics, Myers exhibited a naiveté of his own in his depiction of George McClellan, presidential candidate, as a feckless innocent.

Two biographies published on the eve of World War II contributed nothing in particular to a clearer understanding of the general. Clarence E. Macartney's Little Mac (1940), thinly researched, is wholly unexceptional. H. J. Eckenrode and Bryan Conrad, authors of the forthrightly titled George B. McClellan: The Man Who Saved the Union (1941), set out to prove, they write in their foreword, that their subject "was a great general and that he has been underestimated by historians." Their technique was in all cases to take McClellan's word for it: Nothing that happened was his fault; it was all a plot against him directed by his enemies in Washington.

Starting around 1950, as Civil War scholarship was stimulated by the approaching centennial, most authors of general histories of the war or of the campaigns diverged sharply from the McClellan biographers in their handling of the generals role in the conflict. This was hardly a new trend — James Ford Rhodes, in his History of the Civil War (1917), was one of those historians targeted as underappreciating the general by biographers Eckenrode and Conrad — but it now accelerated. In his Lincoln Finds a General, for example, Kenneth P. Williams apparently decided not to take McClellan's word on anything. "McClellan was not a real general," came his final accounting. "... McClellan was merely an attractive but vain and unstable man, with considerable military knowledge, who sat a horse well and wanted to be President." T. Hany Williams reached a similar if less colorful conclusion: "McClellan was not a fighting man," he wrote in Lincoln and His Generals. "In Lincoln's mind, McClellan stood for strategy, preparation, delay, and at the best, barren victories." In Bruce Catton's Mr. Lincoln's Army, the first volume of a trilogy on the Army of the Potomac, the story told of McClellan is a self-induced tragedy of one missed opportunity after another until, finally, "his part was finished." Catton, in his subsequent Centennial History of the Civil War, and Allan Nevins, in The War for the Union, both of them major multivolume works employing extensive original-source research, made affirmation of these negative findings concerning General McClellan.

In 1957, in the midst of this trend and apparently in reaction to it, Penn State historian Warren W. Hassler, Jr., published a new military biography, General George B. McClellan: Shield of the Union. Attended by full scholarly apparatus, with the imprint of a university press, it purported to be a balanced and objective accounting — by inference, the first such. In reality, the work falls squarely within the friendly and forgiving tradition of McClellan biography. The generals word is taken on all controverted issues and occasions; fault lies wholly with his subordinates, with his intelligence service, with his radical Republican opponents in Washington who delude Mr. Lincoln and undermine the president's faith in the general. George McClellan is revealed, in summary, as "a soldier of superior strategic and tactical ability. ... Political enmity toward him was largely his undoing."

Hassler achieved this effect by careful and very selective use of sources and documents, especially the McClellan papers, in apparent emulation of the writings by the general himself. Nothing untoward is disclosed from the contents of McClellan's letters to his wife, for example; William Prime's sanitized versions are quoted instead. Nothing is found amiss in the general's flight from the Glendale and Malvern Hill battlefields, as if this were conduct expected of an army commander. The depths of all the major controversies — at which level in truth General McClellan is invariably to be found as one of the perpetrators — are never plumbed. Instead, the causes and the blame remain just where McClellan long ago assigned them. James Russell Lowell could as easily have said of this work, as he said of McClellan's 1864 Report, that its author "makes affidavit in one volume octavo" that General McClellan "is a great military genius, after all."

This widening gap in interpretation between McClellan's biographers and the historians writing general accounts and studies of the war was investigated in Joseph Harsh's 1973 article "On the McClellan-Go-Round." Harsh argued that there must be a middle ground between the two camps, a pathway that would lead to a better and truer understanding of the general, if only historians would pay "serious attention to McClellan's ideas, beliefs and expressed intentions" and then recognize "the fact that these do help explain his behavior." Taking up this challenge, and following where the original sources and their investigations led, the present writer published George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon in 1988 and soon thereafter a companion volume of documents, The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan. This new depiction of the general differs substantially from that offered at least by previous biographers, and the contents of the Papers in particular seem to have inspired historians to fresh efforts to decipher Little Mac's military character.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Controversies & Commanders"
by .
Copyright © 1999 Stephen W. Sears.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Title Page,
Table of Contents,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Preface,
Little Mac and the Historians,
The Ordeal of General Stone,
The Court-Martial of Fitz John Porter,
September Crisis,
Last Words on the Lost Order,
The Revolt of the Generals,
In Defense of Fighting Joe,
Dan Sickles, Political General,
Raid on Richmond,
Gouverneur Kemble Warren and Little Phil,
Index,
About the Author,
Footnotes,

Editorial Reviews

"A personal look at the facinating events of the Civil War, by "the finest and most provacative Civil War historian wriring today" The Chicago Tribune —

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