Historians frequently state that Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan suffered from a messianic complex and that he alone believed he had been called by God to save the Union. McClellan’s religious beliefs are often presented as a character flaw, personality disorder, or psychological malady. A quick look at the historiography of the general reveals that belief began with his contemporaries. In an 1894 article for Century Magazine, James B. Fry, formerly on McClellan’s staff, wrote, “The belief that he had been called to ‘save the country’ had seized upon him….[T]he strong religious element of his character served to fasten the conviction and blind him to the obligations and influences which governed him at other times. Under the power of this hallucination he was insensible of his own weaknesses and errors.”
Modern historians have agreed with Fry’s assessment. In his 1952 book, Lincoln and His Generals, T. Harry Williams bluntly stated that McClellan “developed a Messianic complex.” James B. McPherson echoed that in his 1988 Pulitzer Prize–winning Battle Cry of Freedom, claiming that “McClellan’s letters to his wife revealed the beginnings of a messiah complex.”
That same year, in his biography, Stephen W. Sears offered: “Taking the role of God’s chosen instrument might be dismissed as nothing more than a harmless conceit but for the effects it produced on his generalship. It was at once the prop for his insecurity and the shield for his convictions. With Calvinistic fatalism he believed his path to
