McClellan's War: The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union (review)

George B. McClellan, during his tenure as general-in-chief of the Union Army and as commander of the Army of the Potomac, was a lightning rod for those who wished to prosecute a "hard war" against the Confederacy. At the same time, he was much loved by his soldiers and by many of his subordinate commanders. Historians, however, have been nearly unanimous in agreeing with McClellan's contemporary critics. In McClellan's War, Ethan Rafuse mounts a full-scale effort to rehabilitate the general's reputation by contextualizing his beliefs and actions. It is an endeavor that raises as many questions as it answers.

Rafuse contends that McClellan's political and social beliefs had been shaped "by his early political socialization . . . in environments where the cultural values of the . . . the Whig Party . . . dominated." This conservative outlook, he argues, "colored his perspective on the sectional conflict and shaped his approach to the war and [its] conduct" (p. 5). The book's first four chapters clearly demonstrate this conservatism's origins and manifestations, but it is a strange sort of conservatism. McClellan (though certainly not alone in this regard) saw Northern abolitionists as a threat to national unity, not proslavery southerners (pp. 122–25). This might have been understandable before December 1860, but that McClellan continued to see the sectional conflict in these terms after secession and during the war is not adequately explained. How, after southern secessionists had broken the union, could a true "conservative" continue to see abolitionists as the problem? Indeed, most conservative Northern Whigs went the other direction once secession occurred, as did William Tecumseh Sherman, who had no love for abolition or of abolitionists. Why was McClellan different?

Rafuse, perhaps unintentionally, paints an unflattering psychological portrait of the general. McClellan, he tells us, "automatically presumed those who questioned him or his actions were motivated by ignorance, narrow-minded partisanship, or selfishness" (p. 123). Such rigidity, which seems more important than his Whiggish beliefs in explaining his actions, suggests that McClellan was particularly unsuited for high command. McClellan's conduct of the Peninsular Campaign, where he insisted on carrying out classic siege operations, exemplifies the problem. Rafuse argues that the general's "desire to avoid unnecessary wastage of life, maintain as complete control as he could over the battlefield, and ensure certainty of results" led him to the conclusion that "there was simply no contest between the merits of a siege versus those of a frontal assault" (p. 207). This passage, which describes McClellan's mindset at Yorktown, accurately reflects his thinking throughout the campaign. On 21 June, after nearly one month of inactivity outside of Richmond, McClellan proposed an advance on Old Tavern (not Richmond) that "would 'be chiefly an Artillery and Engineering affair'" (p. 221). Two days later Lee attacked at Beaver Dam Creek, rendering these plans moot. A student who recently wrote a paper on the Peninsular Campaign concluded that McClellan "imagined the campaign as it should have been and not as it was." Rafuse's account seems to support her conclusion. McClellan's political myopia was, perhaps, even more revealing. That he was unable, by the summer of 1862, to comprehend the magnitude and ramifications of "The exhaustion of Northern patience with conciliation" (p. 235) speaks volumes. The war had changed, but McClellan's rigid nature had not allowed him to change with it.

To Rafuse's credit, he is unsparing in his criticism of McClellan's personal conduct during the Seven Days' Battles, describing the general's absence from the Glendale battlefield as "dereliction of duty" (p. 227). But elsewhere he fails to support his defense of McClellan...