McClellan and Limited War

strategic thrust away from the political core of the Confederacy towards the Mississippi basin. McClellan’s plan brought Virginia (which was Scott’s native state) firmly into focus as the primary theater. McClellan argued that all other operations were subsidiary to the Virginia campaign. He intended to make this truly decisive. It would demonstrate the futility of secession and the utter impossibility of resistance his great army would advance on the Confederate capital and, in siege operations comparable to those at Sevastopol (1854–55) during the Crimean War, seize Richmond, and then the Confederacy would collapse, as Russia had shortly after the fall of Sevastopol. It was within the context of this outlook that McClellan’s concern with increasing the professionalism of his army should be understood. While Lee would latch onto Scott’s offensive outlook, McClellan developed Scott’s interest in detailed planning and took it a stage further.
Preparations would be so intricate, staff procedures so perfect, and the men so well trained, that his advance would be irresistible. McClellan would be able to control the battlefield and the object for which he was fighting:
there would be no foolish temptation to consider any revolutionary steps such as the abolition of slavery, and the status quo would be restored with a minimum of destruction, discomfort, and death.
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The only problem with this elegant scheme and stately view of the war’s progress was that McClellan did not have the time necessary to put it into practice. McClellan was under considerable political pressure to defeat the
Confederacy at the earliest possible moment. In addition, McClellan reflected and shared some of the widespread illusions about the nature of the Civil
War. For instance, he could never shake off the misconception that the war could be brought to an end by one strategic thrust. Here was an example of how his operational and tactical preferences were shaped by his political views or aspirations. The policy of conciliation could succeed only if
McClellan and those like him (such as Don Carlos Buell, the commander of the Army of the Ohio) were able to win rapid and complete victories.
However, they were both temporarily incapable of seizing the opportunities that were offered to them on the battlefield.
In short, McClellan’s tenure of command experienced a continuing tension between his role as general-in-chief and his role as field commander which was exploited by his enemies. The most important critical forum established by his critics was the formation in December, 1861, of the
Congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. This served as a focal point for all the discontent with McClellan’s performance that had bubbled up during the previous months. Harnessed by congressional (and administration) critics, it blew towards McClellan like a hurricane by January and February, 1862. It was clear that politicians of both parties had little sympathy with McClellan’s efforts to impose professional standards on his army. Yet his problems were accentuated by the command structure that
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he had inherited from Scott. When Abraham Lincoln, the President,
had queried whether McClellan could undertake the simultaneous duties of both field command and general-in-chief, the latter had replied confidently,
“I can do it all.”
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Time would show that he could not.
The organization of an army is an immensely intricate task, and McClellan became absorbed in its detail. He neglected his duties as the government’s principal strategic advisor. He produced no plans, and the President,
dissatisfied with the general-in-chief, claimed that the war effort was stalled on dead center McClellan’s health suffered because of overwork and he succumbed to typhoid. Lincoln convened councils of war and issued general orders in January and February, 1862, in an attempt to get the Army of the
Potomac to move, but to no avail. Nonetheless, McClellan’s refusal to discuss his plans on the grounds of operational secrecy was highhanded and his credibility was damaged in the resulting controversy.
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In truth, McClellan was not acting as a general-in-chief should, but it is difficult to see how he could concentrate on these important duties when he was distracted by his tasks as afield commander. Everybody (including the
President) persisted in judging him by his performance as commander of the Army of the Potomac—and it was this latter consideration that brought him the most criticism. Nevertheless, McClellan had the intellect and vision to propound a grand strategic view and workout an operational method for fulfilling it. When eventually in February, 1862, he drew up plans for the administration’s perusal, they were impressive. He sought to launch
“combined and decisive operations and not waste life in useless battles.”
He argued in favor of an indirect approach on Richmond by shifting the
Army of the Potomac to the peninsula between the James and York Rivers,
and advancing on the Confederate capital from the east. By avoiding the bulk of the Confederate main body in northern Virginia, he hoped to demoralize the enemy and force him to come out of his defenses and attack the Army of the Potomac. While standing on the defensive, McClellan hoped to inflict an American Waterloo on the rebels. Yet it is noteworthy that McClellan hoped that such a decisive outcome could be produced with a minimum of fratricidal bloodshed. He seems to have unconsciously reflected anxieties among some Northern generals about the casualties resulting from any move into Southern territory because his plans are couched in and justified by sound military reasoning. But McClellan’s cool military analysis was underwritten by looming fears that denote both a nervous lack of confidence in Northern troops compared with a romanticized notion of Southern martial ability and alack of self-esteem which transformed an avoidance of defeat into a triumph. McClellan’s limited expectations of his army reinforced the limited aims he set himself both strategically and politically.
Certainly, the compound of technical military reasoning and personal predilection lent a distinctly defensive tenor to his plan.
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McClellan did not gain any credit for the successes achieved on other fronts during his tenure as general-in-chief. These seemed to augur that the
Confederacy would collapse by the summer. McClellan himself shared this ambivalence. His reaction to criticism was to further centralize the system,
and thus to add to the burdens weighing on himself it took longer to get decisions on urgent matters. He declined to appoint corps commanders,
hoping to be able to direct twelve divisions himself, unaided, and these appointments were eventually forced on him by the President. He neglected to appoint a commander of the Washington garrison, and Lincoln moved to install James S. Wadsworth, one of McClellan’s critics. This dithering reduced
McClellan’s influence as general-in-chief, and Lincoln removed him on
March 11 in Presidential War Order Noon the grounds that he should concentrate on directing the Army of the Potomac.
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The Confederacy had experienced problems comparable to those of the
Union. Jefferson Davis had resolutely refused to appoint a general-in-chief.
His experience with Scott, when Secretary of War during the Pierce administration) had not been a happy one, and he believed that the powers of the general-in-chief were an unconstitutional encroachment on the presidential war powers. The Confederacy’s senior general was the
Adjutant General, Samuel Cooper, whom Steven E. Woodworth accurately judged as the President’s chief military clerk Davis thus dealt with
Confederate generals himself without an intermediary. The commander of the Confederate forces in Virginia, Joseph E. Johnston, resembled
McClellan in his uncommunicativeness and unhelpfulness to politicians.
If he had any plans, he did not divulge them. That Union generals were not alone in failing to comprehend the intricacies of offensive operations was shown in June, 1862, in Johnston’s overelaborate, poorly coordinated and thoroughly muddled counteroffensive at Seven Pines (Fair Oaks).
Johnston was wounded and was replaced by the President’s military advisor,
Robert E. Lee. Lee had only ever held staff positions before and had never commanded troops in battle.
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The essential difference between Lee and McClellan was that the former established cordial relations with his political masters, and that Lee’s military outlook was offensive, not defensive. Although his methods have often been compared by historians to those of Napoleon, Lee was essentially
Scott’s pupil. He took the latter’s methods and developed them further in scale and intensity. Given the Confederacy’s overall strategic, industrial,
and logistical weakness when compared with the Union, Lee appreciated that time was not on its side. He was therefore prepared to accept great risks, was keen to disperse his force (sometimes for logistic reasons) and then concentrate at the decisive point, making the most of mobility.
He would maneuver near the enemy to demoralize and confuse him rather than withdraw, as Johnston invariably did. Consequently, Lee was prepared
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to fight for the initiative, not wait for the inevitable accumulation of massive
Union numerical and material superiority that, McClellan calculated,
would overwhelm weaker Southern armies. Lee sought a decision in the
Confederacy’s favor he did not believe the Confederacy could enjoy the luxury of attempting just to avoid defeat.
These dynamic methods imposed great physical and psychological strain on Lee. His chief of staff, Colonel RH. Chilton, who had served under Lee on the Great Plains, was an amiable nonentity who simply issued orders. This placed more work on Lee’s shoulders, and it is perhaps not surprising that he relied heavily on oral orders. He never shied away from taking decisions, placed himself at the most convenient point where he could take them, and disdained councils of war. He had inherited Scott’s view that, once the commanding general had issued orders, subordinates should carry them out in their own way. Over the next year he would modify this approach. For instance, in September, 1862, he personally directed Confederate tactics at the battle of Antietam. Soldiers largely responded to his cool leadership and record of success aware of the effect of his presence at the front, he tended to ration his appearances to increase their tonic effect during dire emergencies. But, unlike McClellan, Lee actually enjoyed the intellectual and moral challenges posed by field command.
The contrasting fortunes of Lee and McClellan indicate how important field command was for contemporaries in estimating the abilities of a commander. McClellan, for all his talents, was temperamentally unsuited for the moral challenges posed by the command of an army. He could plan but not carry through his ideas into practice. He was timorous and hesitant and was gripped by an obsession that he was greatly outnumbered by the Confederates such a misconception led to the greatest possible mis- appreciation of the potential of his army by comparison with the
Confederate, and fatal misjudgments about the current of battle. Certainly,
the view that he was outnumbered was an important self-justifying link in the circular argument that underwrote his defensive schemes. Ina very real sense, McClellan did not command. His interpretation of Scott’s methods was simply to abandon his subordinates to fight their own battles.
During the Seven Days battles (June July 1, 1862) Fitz-John Porter’s Fifth
Corps was left unsupported to bear the main burden of the fighting.
Moreover, McClellan absented himself from the battlefield. While the battle of Malvern Hill was raging, it was rumored that he was on board a river steamer on the James River. His admirers dismissed rumors circulating in Washington, DC, to this effect as a vicious calumny. Yet although he was not relaxing (as critics claimed, he had virtually abandoned the battlefield, abdicated any semblance of responsibility for its movements, and was preoccupied with administrative trivia. During the Seven Days battles
Union forces won a number of tactical successes, notably at Mechanicsville
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and Malvern Hill, but, lacking a directing intelligence which could relate them to an overarching operational design, the result was a major strategic defeat for the Union cause, and the dashing of the high hopes for McClellan’s
“grand campaign.”
Nor did McClellan learn from experience. In the Antietam campaign in September, 1862, he enjoyed the inestimable advantage of discovering Lees entire plan and the distribution of his forces from the famous lost order Yet, due to laggard movements, overcaution and wasted time—not least the unaccountable waste of an entire day before McClellan launched his attack at Antietam on September Lee was allowed to concentrate his army and prepare for the Union attack. McClellan’s disjointed efforts were repulsed and the opportunity to destroy Lee’s army was frittered away through inertia. McClellan simply lacked the moral qualities of decisiveness and faith in his own judgment that contribute to dynamic action. He failed to harness the fighting power at his disposal and employ it to secure his military objectives. As a battlefield commander McClellan still remained an ambitious captain bewildered by his weighty responsibilities field command was not as easy as Scott had made it look in 1846–47. McClellan’s two campaigns neither restored his fortunes nor resulted in his reappointment as general-in-chief. On July 11, 1862, that position had been offered by Lincoln to Henry W. Halleck after the fall of Memphis, Tennessee.
Halleck accepted, but admitted that he did not know what his duties involved.
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Lee’s experience was exactly the opposite. Success at field command resulted in the Army of Northern Virginia enshrining the hopes of the
Confederacy, and Lee became influential as a result. The reason for his success was simple he commanded confidently, although not as effortlessly as he sometimes made it look. He is sometimes criticized by historians fora certain meekness, yet Lee was a skillful manager of men. His loose leadership style suited the strong personalities of his subordinates. Although tensions existed within his army, for instance between his two corps commanders, Stonewall
Jackson and Longstreet, and between Jackson and his subordinates (especially with AP. Hill, Lee managed to persuade his rather vain subordinates to work together. The Army of Northern Virginia was not crippled, as the
Army of Tennessee had been throughout 1862, by petty and factious disputes between the commanding general, Braxton Bragg, and his subordinates,
Leonidas Polk and William J. Hardee. In October, 1863, most of the army’s generals signed a petition asking for Bragg’s dismissal. This curious affair prevented the Army of Tennessee from benefiting from the success of the
Chickamauga campaign, and demanded the personal attention of Jefferson
Davis to sort out, which he did by siding with Bragg, who began an ill advised purge of his critics. Southern generals—and here the experience of Scott’s many quarrels was salutary—needed to be directed with tact. Lee had tact
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in abundance, but Bragg (and Stonewall Jackson, for that matter) sorely lacked it.
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Lee’s force of character, and determination to secure the objectives he set himself, demonstrated that Scott’s system could be made to work even with untrained staffs and much larger armies (that were more difficult to command) than the small force that Scott himself had directed in Mexico.
Nevertheless, Lee would modify it. In June, 1862, Lee briefed his subordinates on his plans to relieve Richmond by striking at McClellan’s lines of communications by a turning movement that would involve a junction with
Jackson’s troops from the Shenandoah Valley on the battlefield, among a number of other complex movements. Having outlined this concept,
Lee then left the room so that his subordinates could discuss his plan and workout the movement details among themselves without reference to him.
The errors that frustrated Lee’s scheme to destroy McClellan’s army proved to him such a degree of latitude was excessive, and Lee never repeated the exercise.
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Moreover, the campaign indicated (despite an uncharacteristic lassitude)
that Lee had found in Jackson an executive officer of incomparable talent.
If McClellan had found a subordinate of similar energy his generalship might have prospered, but McClellan’s protégés tended to mirror his own weaknesses. Jackson thrived when given responsibility and along rein. Although very different in character from Lee, Jackson shared his military outlook,
and the conviction that daring, deception, and demoralizing maneuvers that resulted from surprise could splinter Union numerical strength, and allow much more skillful Confederate forces to achieve local operational superiority and defeat Union forces in detail. In 1862 Confederate forces commanded by Lee and Jackson had the nerve to undertake operations based on calculated risks. Throughout the Seven Days Lee never once convened his subordinates in council. Such councils tend to take a cautious view and expend precious time, as Jackson discovered when he convened his only council of war in the Shenandoah Valley. That is the last council of war I will ever hold he exclaimed. Jackson could have spoken for Lee when he once snapped at an anxious staff officer,“Never take counsel of your fears.”
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In 1862–63 Lee was able to frame audacious plans, guessing (correctly as it turned out) that Union commanders invariably took such ill advised counsel.
The results for the Confederacy were a string of operational successes in the East but these could not be translated into a strategic dividend. The command system was part of the reason for this failure. Lee’s victories increased his influence (which reached its height in May/June, 1863) but not his power within the circles of the Davis administration. (His suggestion,
for example, that Beauregard command anew force on his right was ignored) By 1863 and 1864 Davis came to rely on his advice and needless
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to say, it was heavily influenced by his perspectives and responsibilities as an army commander. The appointment of Braxton Bragg as Davis’s advisor
“Commanding the Armies of the Confederate States in February, 1864, only accentuated the muddle and ambiguity of the Confederate command system.
Bragg’s power did not extend to Lee (who was his senior) or the Army of
Northern Virginia.
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Lee was not general-in-chief, and Davis’s informal methods of working while retaining all powers of decision in his own hands meant that Lee did not have the time to devote to matters outside his department. Davis’s requests could also be importunate. For instance, at the height of his anxieties as to whether Grant had crossed the James River on June 15, 1864, Davis asked Lee to recommend a successor to Leonidas Polk, who had been killed at Pine Mountain, Georgia, the day before. Lee declined, pleading lack of knowledge. Such opinions, expressed in his correspondence, used to be adduced by some historians as evidence of Lee’s parochialism.
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But it was the system that was at fault. It overemphasized field command and expected too much of its practitioners, and neglected to provide for the coordinating duties of higher levels of command. Significantly, neither Joseph E. Johnston nor PG. T. Beauregard did more than Lee (in many ways did much less)
when given command of the Department of the West in 1863 and respectively. They assumed that their duties were purely advisory. Given such constraints, Lee could not fulfill a role that the system was not designed to carry out.
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