The Professionalization of George B. McClellan and Early Civil War Field Command: An Institutional Perspective

THE PROFESSIONALIZATIONOF GEORGE B. McCLELLAN AND EARLY CIVIL WAR FIELD COMMAND: An Institutional Perspective Edtmrd Hagerman This essay is an analysis of the field command of General George B. McClellan in the context of an emerging professionalism in the United States Army as it coped with the origins of modern warfare. By the 1820's professional subcultures, including the officers corps of the U.S. Army, had begun to exchange pre-industrial community traditions of interdependent social roles for specialized and functional definitions of place as society organized increasingly around science, technology , and industrial development. McClellan, who was a graduate of West Point, the son of a famous surgeon and teacher who was also the physician at West Point, and for a time an industrial manager as vice president of a railroad, matured in a cross-section of these groups. Born in 1826 and graduated from the Academy in 1846, McClellan grew up and received his higher education within the growing professional awareness that produced and sustained the army reforms of 1821. Designed to prevent a repetition of the unpreparedness exposed in the War of 1812, the 1821 reforms acknowledged the specialized nature of warfare to the extent of creating a permanent professional core in a military organization still dominated by the militia system. West Point was the training ground for the new professional officer. ' For the emergence of professionalism in the period that shaped McClellan's milieu see William B. Skelton's excellent study, "The United States Army, 1821-1837: An Institutional History" (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1968). For a brief survey of professionalism to the Civil War see Rüssel F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Strategy and Policy (New York, 1973). For the medical profession in the United States Army see Percy M. Asbum, A History of the Medical Department of the United States Army (Boston, 1929). For the broader context of professionalism in the practice of medicine see the important case study in Daniel H. Calhoun, Professional Lives in America: Structure and Aspiration, 17501850 (Cambridge, Mass., I960). For the civilian context of the conflict within the professionalism of the officer corps, particularly within the elite corps of engineers, between identification as a professional military officer and identification with the civilian profession of civil engineering, see Daniel H. Calhoun, The American Civil Engineer: Origins and Conflict (Cambridge, Mass., 1960). For the civilian atmosphere that might persuade a professional officer to opt for a civilian identification, see Charles Robert Kemble, The ¡mage of the Army Officer in America: Background for Current Views (Westport, 113 114 CIVIL WAR HISTORY McClellan's education and his early experience as a professional officer contained contradictions that shaped his definition of military reality for the remainder of his career. From the standpoint of field command the military problem is to achieve and sustain tactical and strategic mobility; the purpose of the military system to develop and to integrate theory, doctrine, organizational procedures and operational planning to mobilize, move, maneuver, fight and maintain an army in the field. McClellan's military education and pre-Civil War service occurred in a professional officers corps which succumbed to the prestige of French military thought in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. The West Point curriculum, and theory and doctrine developed by the professional officers corps, defined tactics and strategy primarily as static applications of the eighteenth century mechanistic principles of warfare revived by the Empire and Restoration generation of French military thinkers. The dominance of the corps of engineers as the elite of the new army accentuated this tendency toward mechanistic and technical definitions of strategy and tactics. The lasting influence of Sylvanus Thayer, the dominant figure in the creation of the new professional officers corps when West Point superintendent, 1817-1833, equated military professionalism with a mastery of applied scientific and mathematical principles to implement given principles of warfare. There was practically no allowance for a continuing evaluation of strategy and tactics as a complex of changing factors. The only significant challenge to this definition of military reality came from Dennis Hart Mahan, professor of military and civil engineering and the science of war at West Point, 1832...