McClellan After Malvern Hill

[Saphroneth]

I only just noticed this because the quoting was done wrongly. I asked for an example of McClellan being cautious and got this reply:

The planning of the Peninsula Campaign was carried out in a slow, deliberate manner by McClellan to the frustration of Lincoln and the administration. Once the AOTP did arrive on the Peninsula, its movement towards Yorktown and preparation for a potential seige of that place was likewise carried out with extreme caution, thereby allowing confederate forces under John Magruder to withdraw towards Williamsburg.

So just to examine this...

Firstly, the idea that the planning of the Peninsula Campaign was done in a "slow, deliberate manner". It should be noted that McClellan ended up moving at the end of Q1 1862, which is earlier in the year than Grant moved in 1864 by about a month, and it's not like McClellan can make winter come to an end sooner.
Worse, however, McClellan's plan was for the Urbanna plan. Lincoln nixed it after most of the planning was done (three months of it, reasonable for such a complicated operation) and substituted the Peninsular Plan on the 13th March. So in fact all the planning was done in the space of about two weeks, most of it after the sailing had actually begun (it began on the 17th March).


I think most commanders would laugh at being told to organize an amphibious move of multiple corps in four days - look how long Burnside's much less complex expedition took to germinate.


Secondly, the idea that the AotP moved towards Yorktown with extreme caution. In fact McClellan started moving before more than half his divisions had arrived (he moved with five, of a planned eleven-to-twelve) and reached Yorktown after a normal march, only to hit the Warwick line and bounce off. (Warwick was not known about because, well, they'd had days not months to do the planning!) McClellan did only begin siege preperations slowly, but the reason for this was his effort to exhaust all other options first and the gap took two weeks.
The time taken from McClellan reaching the Warwick line to breaking through it was just over a month. This is pretty good as to the best of my knowledge no other flankless fortified line is beaten so efficiently in the entire Civil War.

McClellan is also accused by you of slowness for not capturing "forces under Magruder" retreating towards Williamsburg. There are three reasons he didn't:

1) Armies tend to march at about the same speed as one another.
2) The forces were not under Magruder, they were Johnston's entire field army - not something you can overcome on the march, it was a very sizeable force.
3) McClellan's attempted turning movement up the York to Eltham's Landing didn't have the manpower to succeed, because he only had the transports to move one division at a time. He'd wanted the transports to move all of 1st Corps, but they'd been dismissed from government service when 1st Corps was witheld from him.

So the slowness is largely either not slow at all, actually very fast, or the fault of the Washington administration. More importantly, McClellan's caution is not excessive - his orders when advancing to the Warwick line were very aggressive (ordering bayonet charges), his break-through at the Warwick line is quickly conducted (as I say, I don't think anyone got through a serious and flankless fortified line faster - some forts were surrounded entirely, but you can't do that at Yorktown, and even then most held out a lot longer.... compare Petersburg) and his advance up the Peninsula is fairly rapid considering he's doing so with an army almost as large as his own in front of him and doing their best to delay him. He certainly shouldn't be considered excessively cautious for not overtaking and catching several tens of thousands of men on the ten mile march from Yorktown to Williamsburg!

 

[WJC]

"We ought instead of retreating should follow up the enemy and take Richmond. And in full view of all responsible for such declaration, I say to you all, such an order can only be prompted by cowardice or treason." -- Phil Kearney

After Malvern Hill, McClellan ordered his army to continue their withdrawal to Harrison's Landing. Some of his officers believed the army should have followed up the battle with an attack of their own. Should McClellan have ordered an attack, or was continuing the retreat to Harrison's Landing the right decision?

Yes. But I have the advantage of hindsight....

 

[Saphroneth]

Yes. But I have the advantage of hindsight....

I have to disagree, with a simple set of questions:

1) What are your men going to eat?
2) What are they going to shoot?
3) How are they going to do this when they've been snatching sleep at odd hours for a week?

 

[jackt62]

I only just noticed this because the quoting was done wrongly. I asked for an example of McClellan being cautious and got this reply:




So just to examine this...

Firstly, the idea that the planning of the Peninsula Campaign was done in a "slow, deliberate manner". It should be noted that McClellan ended up moving at the end of Q1 1862, which is earlier in the year than Grant moved in 1864 by about a month, and it's not like McClellan can make winter come to an end sooner.
Worse, however, McClellan's plan was for the Urbanna plan. Lincoln nixed it after most of the planning was done (three months of it, reasonable for such a complicated operation) and substituted the Peninsular Plan on the 13th March. So in fact all the planning was done in the space of about two weeks, most of it after the sailing had actually begun (it began on the 17th March).


I think most commanders would laugh at being told to organize an amphibious move of multiple corps in four days - look how long Burnside's much less complex expedition took to germinate.


Secondly, the idea that the AotP moved towards Yorktown with extreme caution. In fact McClellan started moving before more than half his divisions had arrived (he moved with five, of a planned eleven-to-twelve) and reached Yorktown after a normal march, only to hit the Warwick line and bounce off. (Warwick was not known about because, well, they'd had days not months to do the planning!) McClellan did only begin siege preperations slowly, but the reason for this was his effort to exhaust all other options first and the gap took two weeks.
The time taken from McClellan reaching the Warwick line to breaking through it was just over a month. This is pretty good as to the best of my knowledge no other flankless fortified line is beaten so efficiently in the entire Civil War.

McClellan is also accused by you of slowness for not capturing "forces under Magruder" retreating towards Williamsburg. There are three reasons he didn't:

1) Armies tend to march at about the same speed as one another.
2) The forces were not under Magruder, they were Johnston's entire field army - not something you can overcome on the march, it was a very sizeable force.
3) McClellan's attempted turning movement up the York to Eltham's Landing didn't have the manpower to succeed, because he only had the transports to move one division at a time. He'd wanted the transports to move all of 1st Corps, but they'd been dismissed from government service when 1st Corps was witheld from him.

So the slowness is largely either not slow at all, actually very fast, or the fault of the Washington administration. More importantly, McClellan's caution is not excessive - his orders when advancing to the Warwick line were very aggressive (ordering bayonet charges), his break-through at the Warwick line is quickly conducted (as I say, I don't think anyone got through a serious and flankless fortified line faster - some forts were surrounded entirely, but you can't do that at Yorktown, and even then most held out a lot longer.... compare Petersburg) and his advance up the Peninsula is fairly rapid considering he's doing so with an army almost as large as his own in front of him and doing their best to delay him. He certainly shouldn't be considered excessively cautious for not overtaking and catching several tens of thousands of men on the ten mile march from Yorktown to Williamsburg!

I'm not attempting to criticize McClellan by considering his movements cautious. In fact, as you note, McClellan was hampered by the Lincoln administration's insistence on quick action, and withholding needed manpower. Nevertheless, my point being that McClellan, for better or worse, was a more deliberative, cautious commander in contrast to more aggressive commanders such as Grant or Sheridan. The Peninsula campaign was a well conceived strategy that brought the AOTP within miles of Richmond, as opposed to Grant's Overland campagin, which ended up pretty much in the same place but with tens of thousands more casualties.

 

[Saphroneth]

I'm not attempting to criticize McClellan by considering his movements cautious.

You specifically described him as excessively cautious - that is, cautious to the point of criticism.

 

[Jimklag]

I only just noticed this because the quoting was done wrongly. I asked for an example of McClellan being cautious and got this reply:




So just to examine this...

Firstly, the idea that the planning of the Peninsula Campaign was done in a "slow, deliberate manner". It should be noted that McClellan ended up moving at the end of Q1 1862, which is earlier in the year than Grant moved in 1864 by about a month, and it's not like McClellan can make winter come to an end sooner.
Worse, however, McClellan's plan was for the Urbanna plan. Lincoln nixed it after most of the planning was done (three months of it, reasonable for such a complicated operation) and substituted the Peninsular Plan on the 13th March. So in fact all the planning was done in the space of about two weeks, most of it after the sailing had actually begun (it began on the 17th March).


I think most commanders would laugh at being told to organize an amphibious move of multiple corps in four days - look how long Burnside's much less complex expedition took to germinate.


Secondly, the idea that the AotP moved towards Yorktown with extreme caution. In fact McClellan started moving before more than half his divisions had arrived (he moved with five, of a planned eleven-to-twelve) and reached Yorktown after a normal march, only to hit the Warwick line and bounce off. (Warwick was not known about because, well, they'd had days not months to do the planning!) McClellan did only begin siege preperations slowly, but the reason for this was his effort to exhaust all other options first and the gap took two weeks.
The time taken from McClellan reaching the Warwick line to breaking through it was just over a month. This is pretty good as to the best of my knowledge no other flankless fortified line is beaten so efficiently in the entire Civil War.

McClellan is also accused by you of slowness for not capturing "forces under Magruder" retreating towards Williamsburg. There are three reasons he didn't:

1) Armies tend to march at about the same speed as one another.
2) The forces were not under Magruder, they were Johnston's entire field army - not something you can overcome on the march, it was a very sizeable force.
3) McClellan's attempted turning movement up the York to Eltham's Landing didn't have the manpower to succeed, because he only had the transports to move one division at a time. He'd wanted the transports to move all of 1st Corps, but they'd been dismissed from government service when 1st Corps was witheld from him.

So the slowness is largely either not slow at all, actually very fast, or the fault of the Washington administration. More importantly, McClellan's caution is not excessive - his orders when advancing to the Warwick line were very aggressive (ordering bayonet charges), his break-through at the Warwick line is quickly conducted (as I say, I don't think anyone got through a serious and flankless fortified line faster - some forts were surrounded entirely, but you can't do that at Yorktown, and even then most held out a lot longer.... compare Petersburg) and his advance up the Peninsula is fairly rapid considering he's doing so with an army almost as large as his own in front of him and doing their best to delay him. He certainly shouldn't be considered excessively cautious for not overtaking and catching several tens of thousands of men on the ten mile march from Yorktown to Williamsburg!

I happen to agree with most of what you're saying. Why do you think the historical record is so full of accounts of McClellan's extreme caution and constant exaggeration of the rebel forces . . . etc?

 

[Saphroneth]

I happen to agree with most of what you're saying. Why do you think the historical record is so full of accounts of McClellan's extreme caution and constant exaggeration of the rebel forces . . . etc?

There's several reasons all bundled up together - the Lost Cause, and so on - but I think the main reasons why it's focused on for him and not for everyone else are threefold.


Firstly, there's that as time went on the Union lowered the scale of their headline numbers (the number an army leader quotes as their strength), but McClellan was right at the start of the process. So he was giving higher numbers for both his own army size and that of the enemy than just about anyone else did, and it's easy to point to his high numbers and compare them to the lowball reported Confederate numbers. (As Grant noted in his own memoirs when talking about how close he came to defeat at Shiloh, the Confederate headline numbers are "men with muskets in the firing line" and the Union headline numbers early in the war are "men getting paid".)

Secondly, there's that he was ultimately defeated during the June-July 1862 period by being outnumbered and hit in the flank, despite warning for weeks solid that this was a risk. To excuse Lincoln from making what basically is a series of mistakes in the management of the Peninsular campaign on the levels above McClellan, he gets the blame for everything - people even assert McClellan was the one who withdrew from the Peninsula.

And thirdly, he was a political opponent of Lincoln in 1864, and the level of nasty tricks thrown around in that election were quite astonishing. It's where the "McClellan wasn't on the field at Malvern" rumour comes from - literally it's from a mendacious campaign poster - and the consequence of this is that people inclined to look further into the nuances of other Union generals don't bother with him.


The people who like the Union conduct of the war in general blame McClellan because otherwise it would mean coming to terms with how Lincoln and other higher-ups made major blunders and robbed McClellan of the support he needed, the people who think the Confederacy was the best of course like the idea that "one Reb could whip three Yanks" and that Magruder (say) tricked McClellan with clever manoeuvres instead of just having enough men to hold a very strong position...

 

[Jimklag]

Those are good reasons for shortly after the war, but experienced modern historians should have been able to separate the pepper from the fly poop. Why has all this anti-McClellan mythology been perpetuated?

 

[Saphroneth]

Those are good reasons for shortly after the war, but experienced modern historians should have been able to separate the pepper from the fly poop. Why has all this anti-McClellan mythology been perpetuated?

67th has a theory about the American Heritage magazine having kicked it all off. Essentially what it looks like is that by now many of the secondary sources are contaminated, so people get the anti-McClellan feeling from reading them, and making matters worse one of the most recent historians (Sears) is actively mendacious in his pursuit of an anti-McClellan thesis.

 

[67th Tigers]

67th has a theory about the American Heritage magazine having kicked it all off. Essentially what it looks like is that by now many of the secondary sources are contaminated, so people get the anti-McClellan feeling from reading them, and making matters worse one of the most recent historians (Sears) is actively mendacious in his pursuit of an anti-McClellan thesis.

Well, the decisive shift against McClellan happened immediately after WW2. Before that there's some genuine debate.

American Heritage was the brain-child of the late Allan Nevins, and basically this one man shaped the entire course of the historiography of the ACW until well past his death. Bruce Catton was his protege, and Sears and McPherson came up under him. He founded a club, The Society of American Historians, limited to 250 authors of whose opinions he approved. He was explicit that he wasn't interested in the study of history, but rather telling historical stories. He had his own magazine to promote them (AH) and his own publishing house. These days their star has waned, but their ideas live on

 

[wausaubob]

Yes and Nevins and Catton tried to do the same thing with respect to Ulysses Grant as president.
Note that Grant never engaged in this type of criticism of McClellan. He stated to Young that McClellan got too political, and made mistake like Hunter and Fremont and others. To Grant is supposed to follow policy and not make it. A general only influences policy when asked.
While McClellan was alive, this McClellan bashing did not occur at the fever pitch that occurred in history, because Grant and Sherman viewed McClellan as one of their own. They cared neither for bashing Confederates or McClellan.
The one part of the historical picture that is hard to evaluate is what was the death rate due to disease in the Army of the Potomac during McClellan's generalship?

 

[wausaubob]

Grant was willing to bring McClellan back in 1864, if General McClellan was willing to take a command. If he could not get McClellan, he got as many McClellan officers as he could.
Grant wanted people like Barnard around because Barnard knew where the army had failed McClellan and where McClellan had made fixable mistakes.

 

[Saphroneth]

Grant was willing to bring McClellan back in 1864, if General McClellan was willing to take a command.

Sadly, though, I think he was denied the opportunity to ask. Oh for McClellan to be put in charge of the siege ops at Petersburg!

Grant wanted people like Barnard around because Barnard knew where the army had failed McClellan and where McClellan had made fixable mistakes.

And, unfortunately for this particular example, Barnard had a bit of a tendency to blame McClellan for things that McClellan either could not have avoided or which Barnard endorsed at the time.

 

[Jimklag]

Well, the decisive shift against McClellan happened immediately after WW2. Before that there's some genuine debate.

American Heritage was the brain-child of the late Allan Nevins, and basically this one man shaped the entire course of the historiography of the ACW until well past his death. Bruce Catton was his protege, and Sears and McPherson came up under him. He founded a club, The Society of American Historians, limited to 250 authors of whose opinions he approved. He was explicit that he wasn't interested in the study of history, but rather telling historical stories. He had his own magazine to promote them (AH) and his own publishing house. These days their star has waned, but their ideas live on

I am a huge fan of Bruce Catton who, if I recall, was not particularly hard on McClellan except for his relationship (or lack thereof) with Lincoln. Sears dumped all over McClellan early but his latest book, Lincoln's Lieutenants, has toned that down a lot. D. Scott Hartwig, the National Park Service historian who wrote To Antietam Creek is quite fair. I have purchased McClellan's War by Ethan Rafuse but I haven't read it yet. It's been a long time since I read McPherson's Battle Cry Of Freedom and Crossroads Of Freedom and I honestly don't remember what he wrote concerning McClellan's abilities and Allan Nevins' works were even longer ago. Douglas Southall Freeman in Lee's Lieutenants is somewhat critical of McClellan, but he defers to Lee's judgment that was favorable of McClellan. Jeffrey Wert in The Sword Of Lincoln is quite fair. There are enough even handed books in the literature that the criticism of McClellan should have subsided a little. Why hasn't it?

 

[wausaubob]

The fundamental problem with McClellan's operation was that it could not produce sudden victory. Richmond was not the same as Mexico City. The Confederates were not similar to the Mexicans and both Jos. Johnston and Robert E. Lee were well trained officers.
Unfortunately General McClellan did not have the gravitas to explain that as long as the United States had a well supported position on the James River, the Confederates were trapped into defending Petersburg. If McClellan could explain it, Lincoln and Stanton were not ready to accept that "On to Richmond" meant heaps of casualties and a campaign of many months.

 

[wausaubob]

Sadly, though, I think he was denied the opportunity to ask. Oh for McClellan to be put in charge of the siege ops at Petersburg!


And, unfortunately for this particular example, Barnard had a bit of a tendency to blame McClellan for things that McClellan either could not have avoided or which Barnard endorsed at the time.

We have discussed that, and I think Barnard includes some of his own mistakes in his reports. But I think you suggested that someone re-wrote General Barnard's report for political purposes.

 

[wausaubob]

The problem is that Nevins and Catton wanted to spin a version of the Lost Cause in which both Grant and Lee come off as honorable. That leaves their version of history in need of an antagonist, and McClellan's reputation was a handy whipping boy.

 

[Saphroneth]

There are enough even handed books in the literature that the criticism of McClellan should have subsided a little. Why hasn't it?

Because it's easier to just treat him as a joke. It's become so inculcated from a generation of that stuff that whenever you refute a particular criticism of McClellan people treat it as the exception - even if you've done all of them.

If McClellan could explain it, Lincoln and Stanton were not ready to accept that "On to Richmond" meant heaps of casualties and a campaign of many months.

Well, heaps of casualties not so much - regular approaches mean short, sharp assaults with plentiful artillery support, so not many casualties. And months, maybe, but not that many - certainly not nearly as many as the Siege of Petersburg took.

 

[wausaubob]

Sadly, though, I think he was denied the opportunity to ask. Oh for McClellan to be put in charge of the siege ops at Petersburg!


And, unfortunately for this particular example, Barnard had a bit of a tendency to blame McClellan for things that McClellan either could not have avoided or which Barnard endorsed at the time.

The best job for McClellan would have been as Chief of Staff for Butler. Then Butler would not have to anything involving fighting.
The problem with that is McClellan might get on the Petersburg-Richmond railroads, become a hero, quit, run for President and win.
The good part could have been that the war would have been all but over before the election occurs. Then everyone can claim the win.

 

[Saphroneth]

The best job for McClellan would have been as Chief of Staff for Butler. Then Butler would not have to anything involving fighting.

McClellan was senior, so nothing doing. He was junior to Grant, though.
McClellan's MG(R) rank made him senior to everyone in the US Army without three stars - he was junior to the Commanding General and junior to any Lt.Gen either regular or volunteer - though I can't find any actual LG(V) appointments offhand.