Interesting. What resources was McClellan "repeated denied"?
Via
Mike Griffith's site:
Criticism: The significance of the battle was not Lee's withdrawal, but McClellan's inexplicable failure to pursue. On September 18, the armies remained in their positions without fighting. Lee was highly vulnerable. About one-fourth of his army had been lost in the previous day's fighting, and he had no reserves. After weeks of marching, his men were tired and low on supplies. McClellan, on the other hand, welcomed an additional 12,000 troops on September 18, and he had 24,000 troops who had seen little or no action the day before. He outnumbered Lee by more than two to one. Yet, McClellan refused to pursue Lee.
Response: Some of these criticisms are downright ridiculous, and the troop numbers are based on the dubious assumption that Lee arrived at Antietam with only 43,000 men. The significance of the battle most certainly was Lee's retreat, not McClellan's "failure" to immediately pursue Lee. McClellan's victory over Lee ended Lee's Maryland campaign, decimated Lee's officer corps, restored Northern public confidence, enabled Lincoln to issue his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and prevented England from recognizing the Confederacy.
Not only did McClellan win at Antietam, but he won the two key battles that led up to Antietam—the Battle of South Mountain and the Battle of Campton's Gap. McClellan's critics either ignore or minimize these victories because they resulted from smart decisions and rapid action by McClellan.
The victories at South Mountain and Crampton's Gap would have ended Lee's Maryland campaign if Lincoln and Halleck had listened to McClellan when he repeatedly advised them to withdraw the 10,000 troops from Harper's Ferry and add them to his army. Even before McClellan left Washington, he urged Halleck to withdraw the Harper's Ferry garrison and add that force to his army while there was still time to do so (Ethan Rafuse,
McClellan's War, pp. 285-286; Harsh,
Taken at the Flood, pp. 269-272, 315-316). Lincoln and Halleck rejected McClellan's request. Their failure to evacuate Harper's Ferry led to the largest surrender of U.S. troops in the war and convinced Lee not to abandon his Maryland campaign.
After the battles at South Mountain and Crampton's Gap, Lee concluded that his Maryland campaign was ruined and he began to prepare to return to Virginia. But, he changed his mind when Stonewall Jackson informed him that he had captured Harper's Ferry, had taken the 10,000 Federal troops there prisoner, and had seized the garrison's valuable supplies. When Lee heard this, he decided to stay and give battle at Antietam.
Regarding McClellan's decision not to attack on September 18, he had several good reasons for not attacking. For one thing, he was somewhat low on small-arms ammunition and extremely low on artillery ammunition. A large shipment of artillery shells was supposed to reach McClellan early in the morning on the 18th, but for reasons that remain unknown, there was a six-hour delay between Washington and Baltimore, and the shipment did not reach Hagerstown, over 6 miles from McClellan's camp, until 1:00 that afternoon (the small-arms ammunition arrived even later). (The train carrying the artillery shells should have made it to the Baltimore station in about 90-100 minutes, which would have enabled it to reach Hagerstown by about 5:30 or 6:00 that morning, but on this occasion the trip took over six hours. To this day, no one knows why this strange delay occurred. The train left Washington before midnight; the train had absolute right of way; and the rail line was clear. Heysinger discusses this strange incident in detail in
Antietam and the Maryland and Virginia Campaigns of 1862, pp. 145-149.)
As for the issue pursuit, this is a favorite complaint among amateur critics, and among historians who should know better. In point of act, in several cases Civil War generals did not pursue the defeated army. For example, Grant did not pursue Beauregard's defeated army as it fled to Corinth after the Battle of Shiloh, even though Grant's army, recently swelled with reinforcements, heavily outnumbered the Confederate force. Similarly, General George G. Meade wisely decided against attacking Lee's defeated army immediately after the Battle of Gettysburg. General James Longstreet, one of the South's best generals, said Lee would have liked nothing better than for Meade to have attacked him soon after Gettysburg because Lee likely would have inflicted the same kind of defeat on Meade that Meade inflicted on Lee in Pickett's Charge. There were cases in the war when the winning army attacked the defeated army soon after the battle and suffered a nasty repulse.
Furthermore, McClellan
did pursue Lee on September 19 as soon as he found out that Lee had retreated from Antietam, but he called off the pursuit after he realized that Lee's positions across the river were too strong to be carried by the pursuit force and because his army was in no condition to move en masse against Lee's new positions in Virginia, due to a severe lack of critical supplies. McClellan's reasons for not attacking Lee with his entire army immediately after Antietam are just as valid and sound as Meade's reasons for not attacking Lee immediately after Gettysburg. (For a good analysis of the soundness of Meade's decision not to attack Lee right after Gettysburg, see Tom Huntington,
Searching for George Gordon Meade: The Forgotten Victor of Gettysburg, Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2013, pp. 185-202.)
McClellan might very well have destroyed Lee's army on September 17 if Lincoln and Halleck had not needlessly kept tens of thousands of troops near Washington instead of letting McClellan have most of them, as he requested. On September 10 and 11, McClellan requested that every available soldier from the Washington area be sent to his army. But Lincoln and Halleck sent him only one corps (Porter's corps of 13,000 men, which McClellan designated as his reserve force). McClellan's critics rarely mention this egregious blunder by Lincoln and Halleck, while they are quick to condemn McClellan for not sending in his reserve force during the battle (a move that even the aggressive Porter argued against at the time). General Upton:
mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri">While General McClellan has been censured for not engaging the
font-family:Arial;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri">13,000 men under the command of General Porter, justice requires that we should cast a glance at
12.0pt;font-family:Arial;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri"> the situation around Washington. . . .
12.0pt;font-family:Arial;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri">On September 11, he . . . recommended . . . "that every available man" be added to his army. The same day he again telegraphed:
mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri"> "Please send forward all the troops you can spare from Washington, particularly Porter, Heintzelman, Sigel, and all the other old troops. General Banks reports 72,500 troops in and about Washington". . . .
The commander, as on the Peninsula, sought to place the result of the battle beyond doubt, by asking that every available man be sent forward; yet, at the critical moment when he was censured for not employing his last reserve of 13,000 men, an army stood idle at Washington aggregating present for duty 71,210; present and absent, 107,839. Had 60,000 of these men been sent forward, the raw troops placed in reserve north of the Antietam, the old troops to have joined their veteran comrades in battle, it is fair to infer that little would have been heard of the Confederacy after the Maryland invasion. (
The Military Policy of the United States, pp. 383-384)
Criticism: The president was amazed to discover that from September 17 to October 26, despite his and Halleck's repeated requests, McClellan declined to pursue Lee across the Potomac, claiming he was short of equipment and that his army needed rest. In fact, despite repeated urging Lincoln and Halleck, McClellan did not move toward Virginia until five weeks after the battle. McClellan was not short of supplies and his army was no more exhausted than was Lee's army.
Response: This is a mix of myth and distortion. For starters, the fact that McClellan's army was badly lacking in critical supplies is abundantly documented in the relevant primary sources and has been discussed in numerous analyses of the aftermath of Antietam (see, for example, Rafuse,
McClellan's War, pp. 350-359; George Ticknor Curtis,
McClellan's Last Service to the Republic, New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1886, pp. 61-71; see also below).
General Meade, one of McClellan's subordinate commanders, went so far as to accuse the War Department of deliberately withholding supplies from the army. Quite of a few of McClellan's subordinate officers believed that Stanton delayed the arrival of supplies so he could then blame McClellan for "excessive delay." Stanton never did provide a credible innocent explanation for the long delay in getting supplies to McClellan's army.
Stanton claimed that the tons of supplies intended for McClellan's army at Harper's Ferry had been mistakenly, accidentally sent to the troops garrisoned around the capital. But Stanton, along with everybody else in the War Department, knew that McClellan's army was at Harper's Ferry, over 60 miles away. For nearly three weeks, McClellan complained in his dispatches to the War Department that he was not receiving the supplies he had requested, yet Stanton and Halleck, along with Republican newspapers, kept insisting that the supplies had been sent and that McClellan had all the supplies he needed to pursue Lee in Virginia.
When confronted with an eyewitness report from Colonel Thomas Scott that McClellan had
not received the supplies, Stanton and/or Halleck "suggested" that the supplies had been sent to the garrison units around the capital, since those units were technically part of the Army of the Potomac. No one ever explained how the tons of supplies requested by McClellan for his army at Harper's Ferry could have been "mistakenly" sent to the capital's garrison units when everyone in Washington knew that McClellan's army was over 60 miles away. In fact, upon further investigation, train loads of the supplies that McClellan had requested "
were found on the tracks at Washington, where some of the cars had been for weeks" (William H. Powell,
The Fifth Army Corps--Army of the Potomac: A Record of Operations During the Civil War in the United States of America, 1861-1865, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1893, p. 311, emphasis added).
Also, Lincoln had no reason to be amazed that McClellan had to resupply his army before moving against Lee in Virginia, because Lincoln soon became aware of the fact that the supplies that Stanton had claimed had been sent to McClellan had
not been delivered to him, and that McClellan's army was in fact suffering from a severe shortage of basic supplies. As soon as those supplies were finally delivered, McClellan was only too happy to begin his move against Lee in Virginia.
Part of the problem was that Lincoln was virtually illiterate when it came to military matters. For all his good qualities, Lincoln did not understand even the basics of military operations. On many occasions, he imposed faulty strategies and unsound deployments on his commanders, especially on McClellan. Lincoln also frequently pestered commanders for updates and offered baseless and annoying comments on ongoing military operations. Lincoln should have understood that McClellan's army would be in great need of resupply after fighting several intense battles during the preceding two weeks—including the single bloodiest day of combat in the entire war—and given the fact that McClellan's "army" had been hastily thrown together after Pope's debacle at Second Bull Run just two weeks before Antietam.
Regarding the claim that McClellan should not have taken five weeks to rest and resupply his army after Antietam before going after Lee in Virginia, we might want to consider what Colonel Robert Gould Shaw had to say on the matter. Shaw was in McClellan's army at the time, and students of the Civil War know that Shaw was no shrinking violet when it came to combat. In a letter to his mother, dated September 25, 1862, barely a week after the battle, he made it known that he strongly agreed with McClellan's decision to rest and resupply the army after Antietam and not to move immediately to pursue Lee--he also provided some insight into the supply shortage, the one that the Radicals claimed did not exist:
We are regularly encamped up here now, and hope to stay some time, for the army certainly needs rest; and Heaven preserve us from a winter campaign! If any newspaper talks of "On to Richmond" after the middle of November, let the editors come down and try it themselves; from what we experienced the first six weeks of this campaign, I am certain only about half the army would live through it; the wet and cold together are too much for men who can seldom change shoes or clothing, and most of whom are without Indian rubber blankets. A wet overcoat, and woolen blanket in the same condition, are very small protection. We have four to six wagons per regiment now, so that no extra clothing can be carried. (Russell Duncan, editor,
Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, University of Georgia Press, 1992, p. 244)
Isn't that the the issue at the heart of every discussion of McClellan's performance? MaClellan seemed always to believe he was vastly outnumbered....
Same site:
Criticism: McClellan conspired with Allan Pinkerton to inflate the numbers and, when Pinkerton's estimates were too low, McClellan raised them.
Response: I would suggest reading Pinkerton's memoir
The Spy of the Rebellion. Pinkerton, far from complaining that McClellan doctored his numbers, ardently defended McClellan and blamed President Abraham Lincoln and his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, for repeatedly withholding troops from McClellan and for interfering with McClellan's operations (see, for example, pp. 458-461, 463-464, and 542-543).
McClellan sometimes chose the median point between the intelligence estimates he received, and sometimes McClellan arrived at accurate estimates. He did not just make up numbers; he based his estimates on the estimates he was given by his intelligence sources. It is fair to point out that McClellan's enemies frequently
understated the size of the Confederate armies that McClellan battled and the losses that they suffered, although most books on the war say nothing about this.
As is well documented, McClellan certainly was not the only Civil War general to fall victim to inaccurate intelligence. As just one example of many that could be cited, Grant vastly overestimated the size of the Confederate force at the Battle of Shiloh, and continued to insist on his errant figure after the battle. General William Halleck was convinced that the Confederate force opposite him at Corinth was at least as large as his own, when in fact the enemy force was half the size of his army. On the eve of the Battle of Chancellorsville, General Joseph Hooker advised Washington that Lee's army had received reinforcements and now outnumbered the Army of the Potomac, when in fact Lee had received no reinforcements and his army was considerably smaller than Hooker's. For that matter, Lincoln himself estimated that Stonewall Jackson had 30,000 troops in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862, when in fact he only had 16,000 at the time. Stanton estimated that Jubal Early had 35,000 troops in 1864, when in fact he only had about 12,000.
Lincoln's and General-in-Chief Henry Halleck's blunders in analyzing enemy intentions, especially towards the capital, were far more egregious than McClellan's mistakes in estimating enemy troop strength, as were Stanton's claims about enemy intentions and the capital's defenses.
Criticism: McClellan relied on Pinkerton, who obtained his information from a limited number of poorly trained spies, deserters from Johnston's army, and Confederate newspapers.
Response: Well of course McClellan relied on Pinkerton, because Pinkerton was the chief of the Union Intelligence Service at the time. Lincoln and Stanton also relied heavily on Pinkerton and in fact asked Pinkerton to stay on after they relieved McClellan for the final time. Also, for a more complete description of Pinkerton's sources and methods, I recommend reading Pinkerton's memoir. Here is some of what Pinkerton had to say about the impact of the blunders of Washington authorities on McClellan's operations:
Notwithstanding all that has been said and written upon this subject, I have no hesitation in expressing the opinion, that had not the President and his advisors stood in such ungrounded fear for the safety of Washington, and had not withheld McDowell's forces at a time when their absence was a most serious blow to the plans of General McClellan, the close of the year would have seen the Rebellion crushed, and the war ended. . . .
The Union army was before Yorktown. McClellan had already sustained two serious disappointments, and both of them at the hands of the government at Washington. In the first place, on his arrival at Fort Monroe, he had ascertained that the promised assistance of the navy could not be relied upon in the least, and that their efficient cooperation with him would be an utter impossibility. This interference with his plans might have been overcome, although the loss of the naval support was a serious misfortune to him; but a more surprising and disheartening act of the authorities was yet in store for him. A few days later, he was thunderstruck at the unexpected information that General McDowell's entire corps, upon whose assistance he had confidently relied, was detached from his command, and had been ordered to remain in front of Washington, for the protection of the capital, which was erroneously believed to be in imminent danger of capture by the rebels. . . . (
The Spy of the Rebellion, University of Nebraska Press, 1989, reprint of 1883 edition, pp. 542-543)
Criticism: McClellan's tendency to be overly cautious became paralyzing in the hopes of attaining his manpower goal of 273,000 for the Army of the Potomac. Colonel Oliver Spaulding observed that McClellan was never satisfied with what he had and was unwilling to do the best he could with an imperfect tool.
Response: There is no factual basis for this claim. McClellan repeatedly proved he was willing to take action even when he did not have all the forces and supplies that his superiors had promised he would have. This fact is documented in McClellan's correspondence with Lincoln, Stanton, and Halleck; in his letters to his wife; and in the accounts of some of his corps and division commanders. Indeed, the record shows that after the Seven Days Battles, McClellan repeatedly requested permission to advance on Richmond.
It is worth mentioning that when Ulysses S. Grant was preparing for his own Peninsula campaign two years later, he asked Lincoln for 300,000 troops, even though he was facing a Confederate army that was weaker than the one McClellan had faced. General Sherman once requested 200,000 troops for his operations in the Union state of Kentucky, even though he was facing a rather small enemy force. Nevertheless, McClellan's critics assail him for asking for more reinforcements after the Seven Days Battles. If McClellan had been given all the reinforcements he requested after those battles, his total number of troops would have been far less than the number of troops that Grant requested, and also less than the number of troops that Sherman requested.
Not only do McClellan's critics fault him for wanting to be as prepared as possible before attacking the enemy, but most of them heap praise on generals who lost thousands of troops in ill-advised, unsuccessful frontal attacks. McClellan's critics tend to follow the lead of McClellan's original critics—the Radical Republicans. The Radicals were constantly clamoring for "action," i.e., aggressive attacks, regardless of the cost. Most of them knew little if anything about military strategy and tactics, and they never took any responsibility when the "aggressive" attacks that they were always demanding ended in defeat with thousands of lives wasted.
Forum Host
Thread Medic
Bringing the