The Union’s Most Defensive General

George B. McClellan has remained somewhat of an enigma to his numerous biographers over the years. It is perhaps easiest to reduce McClellan to a petulant and ambitious egotist who failed to effectively communicate with Washington, or to an unstable and indecisive general who squandered field opportunities based on an imagined manpower disadvantage. Such was the inclination of early scholars, from Bruce Catton to T. Harry Williams, while Stephen Sears’ George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon (1988) presented a more nuanced inspection of McClellan that nevertheless confirmed the general’s penchants for self-paralysis, vague planning, and deficient command and control. In contrast, McClellan defenders, such as Warren Hassler, H. J. Eckenrode, and Bryan Conrad, emphasized the Young Napoleon’s brilliance in organization, engineering, and artillery, calling attention to the public’s (and Lincoln’s) unreasonable expectations for a quick win early in the war when even Ulysses S. Grant would have to face a nine-month siege before victory. Ethan Rafuse, in perhaps the most unique of McClellan biographies, McClellan’s War: The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union (2005), dispensed with the troublesome habit of divorcing the political from the military man. He posited that McClellan’s Whiggish roots and West Point training gave rise to his preoccupations with outmaneuvering the enemy, tactical reliance upon engineering and artillery, and discrediting Confederate leadership.

Chester Hearn’s new analysis of McClellan does not meaningfully diverge from its predecessors, but rather it filters McClellan’s politics and generalship through the prism of his relationship to Lincoln as the two attempted to craft early Union military strategy. It is a narrow focus, and while it predominantly relies upon the perspective of McClellan rather than the commander-in-chief, Hearn ultimately indicts McClellan for weak performances as commander of the Army of the Potomac, general-in-chief, and 1864 Democratic presidential candidate. Hearn concludes that the root causes of McClellan’s failures lay in his European defensive tactical training, which was solidified at West Point and in his European travels; in McClellan’s infatuation with Napoleon and his inability to translate Napoleonic principles to the contemporary realities of Virginia terrain and technological innovations; and in McClellan’s propensity to generate personal conflict. Hearn argues that, while Lincoln grew and learned from his mistakes, McClellan patently rejected any idea that did not originate in his own brain.

In the first two chapters, before plunging into the war, Hearn dwells very briefly upon Lincoln’s and McClellan’s military backgrounds. Unlike John C. Waugh’s 2010 Lincoln and McClellan at War, which more extensively investigated how the two men crossed paths before the 1860s, Hearn is more interested in Lincoln’s early dearth of strategic knowledge and support from decrepit General-in-Chief Winfield Scott and inept Secretary of War Simon Cameron. It was this atmosphere in which McClellan first came to Washington, solidifying his high regard for his own skills in contrast to those floundering around him. McClellan would scarcely depart from the original strategy he laid out on August 3, 1861, after possibly consulting with the Comte de Paris. In what McClellan deemed the primary theater of war, Virginia, he demanded 273,000 troops for himself to be transported by water to threaten Richmond. He agreed with Winfield Scott’s alternate so-called Anaconda Plan in just one respect—targeting the Mississippi Valley—but allocated just 20,000 troops to that region. Hearn faults McClellan’s plan for focusing too heavily on the East and for making Southern cities instead of rebel armies his targets. Hearn also criticizes the general for failing to understand Lincoln’s goals, which included driving the Confederates from Manassas and maintaining a strong Union force between the Rebel and Federal capitals—an early sign that McClellan neither listened to nor respected his commander-in-chief.

While McClellan capably built up the demoralized and undertrained Army of the Potomac in the wake of the defeat at First Bull Run...