On the McClellan-Go-Round

On the McCIellan-Go-Round Joseph L. Harsh Sound and fury swirl around the historical reputation of George Brinton McClellan. "By some persons he is considered the greatest strategist of the age," sighed an early biographer. "By others he is regarded as unfit to command even a hundred men." And surely McClellan was controversial during the later months of his command of the Army of the Potomac and as the Democratic candidate for President in 1864. Partisans expended bales of paper and gallons of ink over his peninsula strategy, his Antietam tactics, and his fitness to fill the highest office in the country. New York lawyer and politician, Sam Barlow, for example, could scarcely bound his praise: "He is the salt of the Earth ... as pure as the Chevalier Bayard; and I believe him equal to the great emergency in which he is called to perform so distinguished a part." Professor Francis Lieber of Columbia University thought otherwise; and, although he could not finally make up his mind, the choices he set forth were grim: "McClellan may be: a coward. ... Or he may be one of those people who possess everything except the faculty of resolving. . . . Or he may have a good deal of copper in his head, and shrink from decisive action against the wayward sisters. Or he may be a downright traitor. . . . Whatever he may be I think there is a large portion of the bona fide fool in his composition."1 Seemingly, the debate in extremis has continued. Later writers can be found who sing hymns to McClellan as "a gifted, efficient, exemplary man, in every period and in every function of his life"; while others charge that he "did not wish to fight" and must have been "either a coward or disloyal." Ninety years after the war's close, Warren Hassler insisted that the "Young Napoleon" was the "shield" that saved the Union; at about the same time Kenneth P. Williams closed two volumes of stinging criticism with his famous verdict that "McClellan was merely an attractive but vain and unstable man, with considerable military knowledge, who sat a horse well and wanted to be President."2 1 The quotation in the text is from an anonymous biography published by T. B. Peterson & Brothers, The Life, Campaigns, and Public Services of General McClellan . . . (Philadelphia, cl864), p. 19. Samuel Latham Mitchell Barlow to Henry Douglas Bacon, Jan. 17, 1862, Barlow Collection, Huntington Library; and Francis Lieber to Charles Sumner, Apr. 28, 1863, Lieber Collection, ibid. 2 James Havelock Campbell, McClelkn. A Vindication of the Military Career of George B. McClellan: A Lawyer's Brief ( New York, 1916), p. 442; Guy Carleton Lee, The True History of the Civil War (Philadelphia, 1903), p. 296; Warren W. Hassler, Jr., General George B. McCleUan: Shield of the Union (Baton Rouge, 101 102CIVIL WAR HISTORY The counterplay of such contrary views has caused some historians to despair of ever settling upon a final assessment and earned for McClellan the dubious sobriquet, "problem child" of the Civil War.3 Yet, when the sound and fury are pierced, the core of McClellan historiography is mostly empty. A survey of the vast literature which bears wholly or largely on McClellan reveals that for many years he has been the subject of a broad historical consensus. Whatever numerical advantage McClellan may have held on historical battlefields, he has been overwhelmed by the opposition in the historiographical war of words. In fact, McClellan support has been limited both in scope and in time. Favorable views have been confined almost entirely to biographies and reminiscences, and, by the third-quarter of the twentieth century, both of these sources have played out. As might be expected, McClellan's warmest advocates have been his biographers. Thirteen or so works purport to tell the life of "Little Mac," and viewed together on the library shelf they are a mixed lot: dime romance, campaign biography, lawyer's brief and scholar's monograph .4 The seven oldest works, published during and shortly after the war, are predictably biased and uncritical. The volumes by Addey, Delmar , Hillard, Victor and the one anonymously authored are simply pot-boilers.5 Only the essays of George...