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My Enemies Are Crushed McClellan and Lincoln  JAMES M. McPHERSON  On September 7, 1862, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan wrote to his wife exultantly that “my enemies are crushed, silent, and disarmed.” What on earth did he mean? Had he won a great battle against the Army of Northern Virginia that has somehow escaped the attention of historians? This was far from the only time that McClellan referred to titanic struggles with his enemies. “I am in a battle & must fight it out,” hewrote on another occasion. My “bitter enemies . . . are making their last grand attack. I must & will defeat them.”1 Abraham Lincoln would have been startled by such bellicose language from McClellan, whom he had compared to “an auger too dull to take hold.” McClellan, said the president, was a commander who “would not fight.”2 Lincolnwasright.McClellan’s“bitterenemies”whomhehad“crushed” in September 1862 were not the Rebels but instead other generals in the Union army and high officials in the U.S. government—Generals John Pope and Irvin McDowell, who had been relieved of command and whose troops had been absorbed into McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who had wanted to cashier McClellan. If McClellan had exerted as much energy and determination in his battles against the enemy army as he did against these supposed enemies in his own army and government, the North might have won the war in 1862. The strongest language McClellan used against Confederates was “those rascals,” while he described his adversaries in the Union Congress, administration, and army as “heartless villains . . . wretches . . . incompetent knaves a most despicable set of men.”3 When Winfield Scott was still general in chief and McClellan’s commanding officer in 1861, the thirty-four-year-old McClellan described him as “a dotard” and “a perfect imbecile.” He privately ridiculed Lincoln in the fall of 1861 as “nothing more than a well meaning baboon . . . ‘the original gorilla.’”4 As for 53  MY ENEMIES ARE CRUSHED members of Lincoln’s cabinet, Secretary of State William H. Seward was “a meddlesome, officious, incompetent little puppy” and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles was “weaker than a garrulous old woman.”5 McClellan reserved his greatest animosity for Stanton, who had been the general’s confidant and supporter before he became secretaryof war in January 1862 and lost faith in McClellan’s competence and determination. McClellan made Stanton the scapegoat for the failure of his Peninsula campaign in 1862. The secretary of war, he wrote his wife, was “the most depraved hypocrite & villain” he had ever known. If he “had lived in the time of the Saviour, Judas Iscariot would have remained a respected member of the fraternity of Apostles.”6 McClellan certainly had powerful paranoid tendencies, but he did not make up this vision of “bitter enemies” out of whole cloth. His sharpest critics were Radical Republicans in Congress and the cabinet—especially the congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase as well as Stanton. All of them had once been McClellan backers but had become profoundly disillusioned. After the Army of the Potomac was driven back from Richmond in the Seven Days battles, Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, a leading member of the Committee on the Conduct of the War, wrote privately that “McClellan is an imbecile if not a traitor. He has virtually lost the army of the Potomac” and “deserves to be shot.”7 After McClellan resisted orders to reinforce General Pope with the 6th and 2nd Corps at the second battle of Bull Run on August 29–30, 1862, Stanton wanted McClellan court-martialed and Chase said he should be shot.8 How had matters come to such a pass by August 1862? To answer this question, we must go back to the last week of July 1861. Lincoln had called McClellan to Washington after the Union defeat at First Bull Run to become commander of the newly named Army of the Potomac. Fresh from commanding a small Union force whose victories in western Virginia helped put that Unionist region on the path to becoming the new state of West Virginia, McClellan received a hero’s welcome in the capital. The press lionized him as a “young Napoleon”; the correspondent for the Times (London) described him as “the man on horseback” to save the country; the president of the United States Sanitary Commission said that “there is an indefinable air...

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