The outbreak of the war found the 45 year old Captain George Meade stationed in Detroit where he supervised the Great Lakes Commission. On April 20, 1861, six days after Fort Sumter surrendered, city officials, led by Senator Zachariah Chandler, demanded that all Federal officers in the city take a public oath of allegiance to the Union. The 48 year old Chandler was militantly anti-slavery and had helped to organize the Republican party in Michigan during the 1850s. Firmly opposed to any effort to reconcile with the South, Chandler sought, as he stated in his famous “Blood Letter, “no concessions, no compromise; aye, give us strife unto blood before yielding to the demands of traitorous insolence.” Meade met with his subordinates, who agreed that taking the oath was not necessary because they had already done so when they had been commissioned. With this action, Meade made an enemy of Zachariah Chandler, a circumstance that would cause Meade grief later in his career.
Meade sought an appointment to active service, but it was not until August 31 that he was summoned east to be commissioned a brigadier general of volunteers and assigned to command the second brigade of the Pennsylvania Reserves (3rd, 4th, 7th and 11th Pennsylvania Reserves). The other two brigades commanders in the division were John F. Reynolds and Edward O. C. Ord. All three brigade commanders would either be offered or appointed to army command before the end of the war.
It is recounted that Baldy Smith hosted a luncheon on December 14, which Meade attended along with several other prominent officers, including McClellan, McCall, Fitz John Porter, William B. Franklin, Winfield Scott Hancock, and W. T. H. Brooks. Supposedly, after the meal, the officers discussed the war and how long it might last. “It is my opinion that the war will continue for several years,” Franklin said, “and before the war is over, everyone present, with one exception, will be laid about on the shelf. That exception will be General George G. Meade. He will come out on top at the close of the war.”
Obviously Meade owed his commission in part to the political connections of the Sergeant family and also to McClellan. Like McClellan, Meade was the product of a socially prominent Philadelphia family. Politically and socially of the Whig persuasion (contrary to popular thought, Meade was not a Democrat -- he voted for John Bell in the 1860 election), he agreed with many of McClellan’s conservative views. Like McClellan, he believed the best course was to limit the war to restoring the Union, avoiding the question of slavery altogether, and he believed that radicals on both sides had caused the war. “We at the North should continue the good work of setting aside such men as Fremont and upholding such sentiments as those of Sherman, who declares the private property of the Secessionists must be respected,” he wrote in a November letter to his wife. “Let the ultras on both sides be repudiated and the masses of conservative men may compromise and settle the difficulty.”
Meade preferred a conciliatory approach toward the Southerners (it should be remembered as well that Meade’s brother-in-law was former Virginia Governor and current Confederate general Henry A. Wise, also two of his sisters married Southerners. His sister Charlotte had of her sons killed fighting for the Confederacy, and her plantation was plundered). A view like this was in direct conflict with those of the Radical Republicans who were gaining increasing influence over the war effort. Led by Senators Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Zachariah Chandler of Michigan. the Radicals moved to create the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War in December 1861. The committee’s stated purpose was to investigate “the causes of the disasters that have attended the public arms.” Although the Committee lacked any real authority, it would use its investigative power to intimidate generals and at times influence Lincoln. The Radicals scorned any effort at reconciliation and sought to crush the rebellion and the Southern slave power with it. They viewed with suspicion any one who did not share that point of view. They had little to no knowledge of military matters, and they judged a general’s competence according to his political beliefs. Their views were characterized by a strong suspicion, bordering at times on a pathological hatred, of West Pointers. For the Radicals, the war was an existential battle between the aristocratic, slave-holding South and the free-labor North. They could not understand the professional soldier’s preoccupation with logistics, and they did not appreciate the power of the defense in battle. The Committee would make life very difficult for those commanders who did not, in their view, hold the right political views.
In large part due to the Committee, the Army of the Potomac would be subjected to more scrutiny, not only by politicians but also in the press, than any other army in American history. Often this scrutiny was hostile, questioning not only the competence but also the patriotism of its officers. This fact, more than anything else, shaped the culture of the army’s officer corps. Believing that all that was necessary was “the proper martial spirit,” the Radicals expected the war to be won in a single, climactic, grand battle -- a stirring attack that would destroy the Rebel army and end the war. Meade was “dismayed at the arrogance of the fire-eaters, to whom Southern secession seemed like a simple Riot which would be suppressed by the mere appearance of Federal troops.”