McClellan's War

By Ethan S. Rafuse

“An important book that rescues George B. McClellan’s military reputation.” —Chronicles
 
Bold, brash, and full of ambition, George Brinton McClellan seemed destined for greatness when he assumed command of all the Union armies before he was 35. It was not to be. Ultimately deemed a failure on the battlefield by Abraham Lincoln, he was finally dismissed from command following the bloody battle of Antietam. To better understand this fascinating, however flawed, character, Ethan S. Rafuse considers the broad and complicated political climate of the earlier 19th Century. Rather than blaming McClellan for the Union’s military losses, Rafuse attempts to understand his political thinking as it affected his wartime strategy. As a result, Rafuse sheds light not only on McClellan’s conduct on the battlefields of 1861-62 but also on United States politics and culture in the years leading up to the Civil War.
 
“Any historian seriously interested in the period will come away from the book with useful material and a better understanding of George B. McClellan.” —Journal of Southern History
 
“Exhaustively researched and lucidly written, Rafuse has done an excellent job in giving us a different perspective on ‘Little Mac.’” —Civil War History
 
“Rafuse’s thoughtful study of Little Mac shows just how enthralling this complex and flawed individual continues to be.” —Blue & Gray magazine

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9780253006141

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Traditions and Associations . . . Were All on the Side of the Old Whig Party

December 1826 was a time of anxiety and excitement in the American republic. Only a few months earlier, the country had celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. All Americans agreed that their ability to preserve their experiment in republican government for so long was cause for much celebration; yet it was also clear that profound changes were taking place in their economy, society, and politics that were generating deep anxieties regarding the republic’s future. Only six years after James Monroe had run unopposed for his second term as president, these anxieties had produced great divisions in the country, symbolized by the continuing uproar over the outcome of the 1824 presidential election. Depending on one’s point of view, John Quincy Adams and his supporters either stole the election from Andrew Jackson in defiance of the popular will or saved the republic from the dangers of unfettered mob rule.¹ Out of the passions stirred by this controversy and the divisions in American society it reflected would emerge the political culture in which George Brinton McClellan spent his formative years.

McClellan was born on December 3, 1826, the second of George and Elizabeth Brinton McClellan’s three sons, in a house on Fourth Street between Walnut and Spruce Streets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Shortly after his birth the family moved first to a house on Washington Square and then to one at 246 Walnut Street, directly across the street from the building that housed the First Bank of the United States. There the family resided when McClellan departed for West Point in 1842.²

The first sixteen years of McClellan’s life have received little attention from historians. Although somewhat understandable, given the paucity of source material related to McClellan’s childhood, by glossing over this period of his life, scholars have neglected a crucial period in the future general’s story. Moreover, even if it is impossible to reconstruct the year-to-year course of McClellan’s early life, it is possible to gain a clear sense of the general milieu within which he spent the first fifteen years of his life and the forces that first shaped his distinctive political and cultural outlook.³

During McClellan’s formative years American political culture was shaped by a fundamental reordering of economic life that historians have labeled the market revolution. In 1800, most Americans were small farmers or small-scale manufacturers. Living in relatively isolated rural communities, yeoman farmers produced crops to attain subsistence for their households, while artisans, working in their homes or independent shops, manufactured a relatively limited number of products utilizing skills learned through a long apprenticeship. The efforts of artisans and farmers to achieve subsistence were supported by the labor of the entire household and informal networks of community cooperation, with goods and services exchanged on a barter basis. Although this subsistence economy did not produce great wealth, it did provide its members with a sense of personal independence and community as well as a fairly even distribution of wealth.⁴

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, the United States began to change from a country of subsistence economies and communities to a commercial society. By the 1790s, a rapidly growing population had begun to exceed the amount of available productive land in the Northeast, producing an agrarian crisis that strained the ability of family patriarchs to maintain a sufficient level of subsistence for their households. At the same time, war in Europe created a boom in prices for American agricultural products, while improvements in transportation significantly reduced the cost of transporting goods and introduced formerly isolated subsistence communities to a dramatically wider range of luxury items. Farmers eager to take advantage of these developments began producing surpluses of certain crops, eschewing barter exchange, and joining regional trade networks where they exchanged goods with merchants for cash.⁵

Meanwhile, those displaced by the agrarian crisis and the emergence of commercial agriculture provided New England entrepreneurs with the cheap labor necessary to create the first large-scale industrial enterprises in the country. These mechanized and broke down the manufacture of goods into a series of simple tasks to lower labor costs and produce goods of higher quality in greater quantity, and lower cost, than the small shops of the skilled artisans. Accompanying the emergence of a commercial society were complex problems of labor management, capital formation, and market exchange. To manage them a white-collar bourgeoisie of clerks, bankers, and merchants emerged, who, along with members of more traditionally specialized fields—lawyers, ministers, and physicians —began to develop a distinct middle-class culture in America’s towns and cities.⁶

The shift to a market economy accelerated dramatically after 1815 thanks in part to the assistance it received from government. The Fourteenth Congress that met in the aftermath of the War of 1812 was dominated by a nationalistic and commercially oriented faction in the Republican Party. Led by Henry Clay, these National Republicans embraced the new market economy and looked to use the power of the state to promote and give rational direction to economic modernization and national consolidation. With the blessing of Presidents James Madison and James Monroe, Clay and his allies were able to enact much of what would be known as the American System: a Bank of the United States to regulate credit, high tariffs to promote domestic manufacturing, and federal support for internal improvements.⁷

The McClellan family’s roots in this emerging commercial society were established well before the 1790s. The future general could trace his roots back to William Bradford of the Mayflower, although the McClellan name did not reach America until his great-grandfather emigrated to Worcester, Massachusetts, after participating in the Scottish struggle against British rule at the 1745 battle of Culloden. A member of the second generation of American McClellans, Samuel, then migrated to South Woodstock, a farming community in the northeastern corner of Connecticut, after marrying into one of the town’s prominent families in 1757 and serving as an officer in the Seven Years’ War.⁸

Samuel McClellan acquired a farm upon his arrival in South Woodstock but quickly abandoned efforts to cultivate crops in the poor upland soil of Windham County to open a store. He soon prospered as a merchant and trader who imported goods from as far away as Great Britain and became a link between northeastern Connecticut’s subsistence culture and the larger commercial world. Economic success and a strategic marriage quickly catapulted him to prominence within his community. In October 1773, McClellan was appointed captain of a local cavalry unit and, although his unit was mobilized after Lexington and Concord, was selected to represent Woodstock in the Connecticut General Assembly in 1775 and 1776. By 1778, McClellan had risen to the rank of colonel, but served primarily in administrative posts during the Revolution. In June 1784, he was promoted to brigadier general and thereafter was known to friends and family as General Sam.⁹

General Sam had three children with his first wife, Jemima, of whom little is known. Two years after Jemima’s death, Samuel married Rachel Abbe, to whom future generations of McClellans would owe their connection to the Mayflower. Samuel and Rachel McClellan had five children, the second of whom, James, the grandfather of the Civil War general, had four children. James would become a prominent person in the community in his own right, holding at various times the posts of justice of the peace and postmaster, although it was his elder brother, John, who was groomed to assume the role of family patriarch upon General Sam’s death. By the time the old soldier died in October 1807, John was a prominent lawyer, a leading figure in the community, and a member of the Connecticut General Assembly, where he served several terms between 1792 and 1824.¹⁰

Woodstock was at the epicenter of New England’s agrarian crisis during the 1790s. During the War for Independence, Connecticut experienced a commercial boom, with interior towns such as Woodstock enjoying unprecedented prosperity as the center of trade moved away from the vulnerable coastline. After the war, traders and merchants flooded the market with consumer goods that drained the state of specie, produced a severe economic depression, and pushed Connecticut farmers to search for a cash crop. However, the thin Connecticut soil, particularly in upland counties such as Windham, was already too exhausted to produce sufficient crops for individual farm families to maintain self-sufficiency much less a cash crop that would help the state regain a satisfactory balance of trade.¹¹

Several other developments during the Early National Period pushed Connecticut’s shift to a market economy. The adoption of the Constitution, which the state overwhelming endorsed, and the outbreak of war in Europe produced a commercial boom in the 1790s that helped restore prosperity. Entrepreneurs looking to take advantage of the increasingly large population of unskilled laborers displaced by the agrarian crisis successfully petitioned the state government for aid in developing manufacturing enterprises through the granting of monopolies and the privilege of incorporation and subsidizing textile production. To facilitate trade, the state also aided the construction of turnpikes. Workhouses were also created for the purpose of reforming vagrants, beggars, and criminals, so that they might develop the personal qualities that would enable them to become productive members of commercial society. In Woodstock, General Sam was appointed administrator of the town’s workhouse.¹²

As merchants, the McClellans brought the market revolution and its values to their community. Although trained as a lawyer, General McClellan’s grandfather focused his energies on running James McClellan & Co., a mercantile firm, while maintaining a wool-growing interest on the side. As the prosperity of the 1790s boosted trade and the need for better links between Woodstock and outside markets became evident, the McClellans were among Woodstock’s most conspicuous champions of internal improvements. Their association with the Norwich and Worcester Turnpike Company played a critical role in nurturing community support for its construction, which was completed in 1801. During the 1830s, James served on a committee that endeavored to get a railroad being constructed between Norwich, Connecticut, and Worcester, Massachusetts, routed through Woodstock. With their wool-growing interests, the McClellans were also active champions of government assistance to cloth manufacturers during the early nineteenth century.¹³

As was typical of Americans who embraced the new market economy and its ethos of modernization and improvement, the McClellans took an active interest in education. When the Connecticut state legislature authorized establishment of Woodstock Academy in 1802, General Sam was named a proprietor/trustee of the school. Although not named in the legislation creating the school as their father was, James and John McClellan also served as proprietors/trustees of Woodstock Academy. In their search for a teacher, the school’s administrators naturally looked to Connecticut’s Yale College. The first master of the school, Thomas Williams, came on the recommendation of Yale President Timothy Dwight—as did nine of eleven men who served in that post between 1801 and 1819.¹⁴

It was at Yale, under Dwight’s leadership, that the most significant effort to give theological sanction to the emerging commercial economy was made. Dwight and his followers staunchly defended Connecticut’s established Federalist order against the infidel doctrines of the French Revolution, Jeffersonian Republicanism, and the more democratic Baptist and Methodist sects. Suspicious of the rural masses and determined to preserve traditional patterns of deference to elites, they purged the New Light divinity of Jonathan Edwards of its anti-establishment, egalitarian thrust. Dwight’s Moderate Light theology gave sanction and encouragement to capitalist ambition by, in the words of historian Charles Sellers, equating Christian grace with capitalist effort, poverty with sinful self-indulgence. This New Divinity also championed a concept of social paternalism that held that those who achieved success and membership in the elite were obligated to give leadership and direction to the rest of society.¹⁵

In 1812, James McClellan decided to send his 16-year-old first son, George, to Yale. Dwight’s Yale was an intellectually rigorous and tightly ordered place. Yet Dwight did not enforce discipline through punishment. In line with his belief in a social hierarchy where power was in the hands of a paternal and enlightened elite, Dwight believed bonds between rulers and ruled must be based on mutual confidence. Force was, in his mind, the tool of the uncultivated despot and resort to it a symptom of moral weakness in a leader, who should lead by the power of his intellect and setting an example of self-restraint and discipline. Consequently, Dwight opposed the use of corporal punishment or coercive measures to instill discipline in his young charges. (When George McClellan sent his son, the future general, to the preparatory school at the University of Pennsylvania, he pointedly instructed him not to permit himself to be whipped.)¹⁶

Dwight believed the best way to instill proper values and standards of behavior in both his students and society as a whole was through a paternal style of leadership. Leaders, he believed, must appeal to the intellect and reason of their followers to persuade them to follow the proper path and set a proper example if they were to expect their charges to follow their direction. It was difficult for a young man not to be impressed by Dwight, who possessed a commanding presence and a powerful intellect and carried himself with the dignified air of a truly great man. Although a man of firm principles and beliefs, as an educator he continually challenged his students to consider all sides of the moral, cultural, and political issues that faced the country and use their reasoning powers to find the proper solutions. The power of Dwight’s personality was such, however, that it was rare that a student at Yale who properly utilized his reasoning powers did not develop a correct view of things.¹⁷

George McClellan excelled in his studies at Yale. After twelve years of study under the direction of Dwight protégés at Woodstock Academy, he was well prepared for the program at New Haven. Described by one contemporary as a small, well set, active youth, his energy, intellect, and ambition quickly set him apart from his classmates. He developed a close circle of friends who gave him a nickname that would later be attached to his son: Little Mac. His excellent classical education, recalled one observer, was blended with a continued fondness for literary pursuits, and a lively interest in general science. McClellan’s talent for science attracted the attention of Benjamin Silliman, Yale’s celebrated professor of chemistry and natural sciences, who took McClellan under his wing. Silliman had himself been closely mentored by Dwight while a student at Yale and fully shared his mentor’s conservative politics. Close interaction with Dwight and Silliman served to reinforce the views of society and politics George McClellan had brought to Yale from Woodstock.¹⁸

After obtaining his degree from Yale in 1815, McClellan spent a year studying in the office of Dr. Thomas Hubbard in Pomfret, Connecticut, before going to Philadelphia, the nation’s leading city in medical education, armed with a letter of recommendation from Silliman, to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. McClellan received his doctorate in the spring of 1819, with the subject of his thesis being the tying of arteries. During his time as a student, McClellan impressed Philadelphia society with his energy, character, and intellect, and demonstrated that he embraced the social paternalism of the New Divinity through service at the hospital of the Philadelphia Almshouse. This marked the beginning of an active and enthusiastic lifelong engagement in charity work, for which he would attract, his eldest son John later recalled, the most unbounded popularity among the poorer classes. His truest mourners, one observer predicted on the occasion of Dr. McClellan’s death in 1847, will be the innumerous crowd who daily filled his halls, receiving without fee, the aid of his unrivalled skill and his ever-ready sympathy and aid.¹⁹

During his first years of practice, Dr. McClellan confirmed the high expectations he had inspired as a student and before long was recognized as one of the finest physicians in the country. He thought, executed, and communicated in a day, a contemporary recalled, more than others did in a week— his weeks were as the months of ordinary men. . . . He consequently distanced his contemporaries, and, as a youth, was found among his seniors and the masterspirits of his profession. After only two years of practice, McClellan began a distinguished career as an educator by founding an institution to study diseases of the eye and a private school. The latter, where he taught anatomy and surgery, quickly became the most successful of its kind in Philadelphia.²⁰

A successful school and recognition as an exceptional practitioner were not enough to fully satisfy Dr. McClellan’s energy and ambition. Although still only in his 20s, in 1824 he assumed leadership of a campaign to establish a second medical college in Philadelphia. Such a step was long overdue but nonetheless prompted bitter resistance from McClellan’s alma mater, which used its power in the state legislature to block his effort to secure for his school an act of incorporation. After meeting frustration with the legislature, McClellan took his case to the trustees of Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, and persuaded them to establish a medical department in Philadelphia, which opened in 1825 as the Jefferson Medical College.²¹

McClellan’s belief that Philadelphia could support two medical colleges was quickly vindicated. Under his direction, Jefferson flourished without diminishing the reputation of his alma mater in the least. McClellan taught anatomy and surgery at Jefferson, where his lectures, recalled an observer, were models of terse statement and lucid analysis. Yet McClellan also possessed a streak of self-righteousness and could be impolitic when he was certain of his course, which fueled a controversy, the subject of which is lost to history, that led to his dismissal from the faculty at Jefferson in 1838. Later in life, McClellan would confide to a friend that he deeply regretted the differences into which he was led by the impulsive indiscretion of youth; and emphatically declared, that were it possible to live that part of his life over again, his course should be influenced by greater conciliation and forbearance. By the time of his death McClellan had, one newspaper noted, succeeded . . . in conquering the prejudices and subduing the resentments which had rendered his outset of life stormy, and in making friends of many who had once been enemies. After leaving Jefferson, McClellan established another medical school, this one connected with Pennsylvania (later Gettysburg) College. Meanwhile, he maintained his private practice, contributed numerous papers to professional journals, and remained actively engaged in charity work.²²

In 1821, Dr. McClellan further secured his place in the upper strata of Philadelphia’s social hierarchy by marrying Elizabeth Brinton, a descendent of Pennsylvania’s original Quaker settlers, whose family had accumulated spectacular wealth during the late eighteenth century by transforming their modest southeastern Pennsylvania farms into full-fledged capitalist enterprises. Elizabeth McClellan was a highly intelligent woman who took a keen interest in the professional fortunes of her family and the political events of the time. Letters between her and her soldier son George from the 1850s indicate that he relied on her to keep him updated on events when he was stationed on the frontier and respected her opinions, which she freely shared. Yet it is also clear that she adhered to the role assigned to her by a social ideal embraced by America’s emerging commercial and professional middle class called the cult of domesticity. No longer needing their labor to support the household’s material wants, commercial society assigned women the task of overseeing the moral and intellectual development of their children and the maintenance of the home as a bastion of morality that nurtured proper values in children and provided a refuge from the exclusively male world of business and politics.²³

The cult of domesticity was a manifestation of the preoccupation with order, efficiency, discipline, rationality, and self-improvement of the new American middle class that gave rise to a secular ideal known as politeness. Polite culture, in the words of historian Daniel Walker Howe, undertook to make the world a better place by reshaping individuals into better people through a code of behavior that emphasized self-restraint, proper etiquette, and personal dignity. The ability to adhere to the code of gentility, like success in the marketplace, did not come naturally but required conscious development of the self. If an individual adhered to standards of good taste, personal morality, social responsibility, and proper manners, this told others that he shared the passion for self-improvement and had the control over his appetites that distinguished the well-constructed character. As a consequence, observes historian Robert H. Wiebe, sons and daughters of respectable Americans learned to judge one another through a set of readily observed or inferred qualities of character. . . . [E]verybody’s true self stood nakedly on display.²⁴

Adherents to polite culture were part of an emerging transatlantic culture known as Victorianism. Central to the thinking of Victorian Americans was the problem of accommodating society to economic modernization. Members of the emerging commercial, managerial, and professional classes like Dr. McClellan viewed the market revolution as a positive development that fostered a spirit of improvement in individuals by providing them with opportunities for upward mobility. Out of this, in their view, came not only modernization of the economy but of society and individuals as well. The nature of commercial society and the way it distributed rewards had the salutary effect of compelling humans to reorder their personal habits and economic and social relations and adopt a value structure that emphasized rational calculation, specialization, cosmopolitanism, and a progressive mindset. Market-oriented Americans, in the words of historian Charles Sellers, passed from a use-value world permeated by familial/communal ties . . . to a market world that takes the competitive ego for human nature and rationality for revelation. . . . Success required not only unremitting effort but a habit of rational calculation, beginning with measurement and counting of labor-time, capital, commodities, and money.²⁵

Cosmopolitan and nationalistic in outlook, economically progressive but culturally conservative, highly competitive, and keenly ambitious, Victorians sought, in Howe’s words, to humanize the emergent industrial-capitalist order by infusing it with a measure of social responsibility, strict personal morality, and respect for cultural standards. Preoccupied with consciously arranged order and improvement, they sought to make order and improvement the central traits of their character through education, self-discipline, and rational planning. Convinced of their own moral, cultural, and intellectual superiority, Victorians also perceived a duty to provide paternalistic direction to society through active involvement in education, social reform, and benevolent institutions.²⁶

Dr. McClellan’s profession was not, however, one where great wealth was attained, and when his son entered West Point, the family’s economic status was reported as moderate. It did, however, provide sufficient income (which Dr. McClellan, like many who participated in the market economy, supplemented through credit, resulting in his leaving considerable debts to his family when he died suddenly in 1847) for the maintenance of a proper Victorian household. George and Elizabeth McClellan observed the conventions of polite culture, pushed their children to pursue self-improvement through education, and trained the children to view personal refinement as a reflection of character. Dr. McClellan’s professional accomplishments, good marriage, and personal qualities propelled him into the forefront of Philadelphia society, where his influence, one newspaper editor wrote several years later, was large and commanding. "He was, in every sense of the word, a genius," Philadelphia’s Whig newspaper eulogized after his death. All his qualities, moral and intellectual were of the highest order. . . . His first striking trait of character was independence; a manly pride which . . . refused to owe anything to patronage, and which sought all, and won all, by simply deserving all. . . . [H]is sense of honor, or moral sense, graduated to the highest scale of manly refinement. . . . He was indeed the most placable and forgiving of foes; and the truest, warmest, and most constant of friends.²⁷

The market revolution did not, however, distribute its benefits equally. Although people who, like the McClellans, possessed the ambition and self-discipline necessary to thrive in commercial society experienced dramatic improvements in their economic and social lives, for artisans, small farmers, and working-class Americans the first half of nineteenth century was a time of crisis. Unable or unwilling to adapt to the new order, some ended up in the ranks of the rural poor; others ended up working in factories for wages. These losers of the market revolution lived a miserable existence, endured horrible working conditions that offered limited rewards, and lost the personal independence, security, and satisfaction that gave dignity to artisan manufacturing and subsistence agriculture.²⁸

Speaking for these people in the aftermath of the War of 1812 was a faction within the Republican Party that believed the National Republican program to promote the market revolution was contrary to the nation’s republican principles. Before the 1820s, however, the Old Republicans experienced frustration in their efforts to rally the masses in opposition to the National Republican agenda. In part, this was due to the end of party competition with the demise of the Federalist Party, which fostered popular apathy toward politics, but it was also a product of the postwar economic boom, which encouraged an infectious spirit of commerce and enterprise. Too many Americans were too busy enjoying the fruits of the market revolution to deal with the questions Old Republicans, displaced small farmers, wage laborers, and struggling artisans were raising about the market revolution and its values.²⁹

The Panic of 1819 and the depression that followed dramatically changed the situation. Hard times shook Americans out of their political apathy and in many cases replaced it with anger. Hostility became particularly severe toward banks that tightened credit during hard times and the National Republicans, who, by attributing the boom of the postwar period to their policies, had firmly linked economic outcomes to government policy in the public mind. As a consequence of economic hard times, a growing number of Americans began to agree with the Old Republicans that the National Republicans and their policies were the tools of corrupt and selfish aristocrats; these Americans then energized efforts to roll back the activist government measures of the National Republicans.³⁰

The event that precipitated the end of the one-party rule of the Era of Good Feelings—and the formation of the first modern political parties around the economic, social, and cultural divisions in society produced by the market revolution—was the presidential election of 1824. In that contest, John Quincy Adams, a supporter of the National Republican agenda, finished second to Andrew Jackson in the popular vote and the electoral college. Jackson, however, failed to win a majority in the electoral college, and in the House of Representatives Henry Clay used his influence to swing the election to Adams. Adams then selected Clay to be secretary of state and laid out an ambitious agenda to further expand the use of the federal government’s power to promote the market revolution. Taken together with the circumstances surrounding the 1824 election, Adams’s actions provided his opponents with a powerful idea around which to rally the common man against the National Republicans: the notion that a corrupt bargain had been made by political and economic elites who looked to destroy republican government.³¹

The efforts of Jackson’s followers to portray Adams and his supporters as anti-republican elites were facilitated by the fact that the National Republicans were manifestly unenthusiastic about the democratization of politics during the early nineteenth century that resulted from states lowering or eliminating property restrictions on who could vote or hold office. National Republicans preferred that political power rest in the hands of an aristocracy of talent and believed government worked best if elites were unconstrained by the parochial whims of the masses. This would allow them to exercise their broad knowledge and intellect to make public policy decisions based on reason and the needs of the country as a whole, while forging compromises between competing interests that preserved national unity and institutional stability.³²

Embracing the democratization of politics and repudiating the National Republicans’ ideal of deferential politics with a vengeance, Jackson’s supporters responded to the corrupt bargain by organizing the first truly popularly based political party. Under the direction of professional politicians like Martin Van Buren, money was raised to purchase newspapers to promote Jackson and attack the corrupt bargain; conventions, parades, barbecues, and rallies were organized to rally the faithful and attract new followers; and loyalties were cemented through the distribution of patronage. In 1828, the Democrats and their new style of politics elected Jackson president. Nostalgia for the consensus of the Era of Good Feelings and a traditional model of politics combined with a disdain for the divisive tone of mass democratic politics to initially retard efforts by Jackson’s opponents to organize themselves into a single, unified, and effective party. Defeats to Jackson in 1832 and Martin Van Buren four years later, however, finally convinced the National Republicans to join with other anti-Jackson forces to establish the Whig Party and adopt the organizational techniques of their adversaries. By 1840, the United States had a vibrant, highly competitive two-party system.³³

During the 1830s, most Americans came to view partisan politics as critical to the success of republican government. For a republic to work, citizens needed to believe that they could change what government did. By offering voters clear policy alternatives, the two parties provided Americans with confidence that they could alter policy by changing the direction of the government. Although fundamentally sound, it was believed that republicanism demanded eternal vigilance to protect those institutions from conspiracies by self-seeking individuals and groups. In their appeals to the electorate, both parties sought to portray the principles and policies of the other party as deviants from the republican creed and themselves as the defenders of the republic.³⁴

Democrats tended to belong to segments of society that resented the economic and social changes associated with the market revolution—artisans, wage laborers, and small farmers. To them, the class stratification and concentration of economic power produced by the market revolution were incompatible with the egalitarian values upon which republicanism rested. Democrats viewed the world as a place where the virtuous masses battled with corrupt, self-serving elites who sought to enslave and exploit them, and they looked to political action to protect society and individuals from institutions that restricted liberty. They saw in National Republican programs a design to build up a Money Power by giving special privileges to private interests. Unlike the National Republicans, Democrats welcomed the expansion of suffrage and the rise of mass democratic politics and extolled what historian Joel Silbey has labeled the partisan imperative. They believed political parties provided the virtuous majority with the necessary organizational means for preventing selfish elites from using government power to serve their own narrow interests. Democrats embraced the concept of political parties, professional politicians, and the tactics of mass democratic politics, viewing all three as necessary tools for maintaining vigilance over government.³⁵

The Jacksonian attitude toward government also flowed from their faith in human intuition and skepticism toward special claims of expertise in any field. Believing true wealth was created by the labor of farmers, mechanics, and wage earners, Democrats were suspicious of lawyers, bankers, and other white-collar professionals and viewed with hostility their bourgeois values and their belief that training and education gave them a special monopoly on particular fields of human endeavor. With their faith in the common man, Democrats rejected the notion of an aristocracy of talent. Because they envisioned a limited role for government and a simple society, Democrats rejected Whig claims that the task of governing was, or should be, so complex as to require special training, talents, or expertise. Common sense and responsiveness to constituents were the most important qualities the Jacksonian Democrat looked for in his leaders.³⁶

Whigs tended to be members of the upwardly mobile commercial and professional middle class that embraced the market revolution but were less comfortable with the modernization of politics. The professionals, evangelicals and members of traditional established churches, merchants, and commercial farmers who supported the Whig Party viewed themselves as the sober, church-going, educated, respectable classes. They championed the market economy on the grounds that it rewarded hard work, self-discipline, and the calculated pursuit of self-interest, but were concerned that the rise of a more individualistic society and political democracy posed a threat to social order, harmony, and stability. What Democrats viewed as tools by which elites enslaved and exploited the common man, Whigs believed were essential means to give order and rational direction to society. Democrats, in the minds of Whigs, threatened republicanism by encouraging mob rule, attacking institutions and values that gave order to society, appealing to self-interested passion, and slavishly following an impulsive, reckless military chieftain.³⁷

Whig political culture owed much to Common Sense moral philosophy. Like the American Whigs, the Scottish Enlightenment intellectuals who formulated Common Sense precepts during the eighteenth century were members of their society’s cosmopolitan, commercial, and socially conservative upper middle class and championed the economic modernization and political consolidation of their societies. Central to Common Sense moral philosophy was faculty psychology. The faculty psychology paradigm conceived, in the words of historian Daniel Walker Howe, of human nature as consisting of a hierarchically arranged series of powers or faculties. In competition for supremacy were the lower faculties of emotion and selfish appetite—the passions—and the higher faculties of reason and conscience. In the well-constructed individual, the faculties were balanced, with passion subordinate to reason. The higher faculties, unfortunately, were by nature the weakest, and passion the strongest, of the faculties. Yet individuals could overcome this and achieve the status of a self-made man, which meant possession of a moderate temperament and balanced character regulated by dispassionate reason, if they cultivated their higher faculties through education and constant self-discipline.³⁸

Whigs not only applied faculty psychology to their analysis of individuals but to society and politics as well. When a Whig looked at the world, he saw a contest for supremacy between the forces of enlightened reason and unrestrained passion. In contrast to the Democratic definition of progress as the liberation of people from artificial restraints, Whigs emphasized the need for conscious, careful, deliberate, goal-oriented planning based on established principles to foster the ascendancy of reason and restraint of passions that distinguished a progressive, enlightened society. To Whigs, their struggle with the Democrats for power would determine whether society would be governed by free men able to regulate themselves or by the forces of ignorance and fanaticism.³⁹

The vision of society as a contest between passion and reason shaped Whig attitudes toward the ends to which political action should be directed. A desire to ensure a harmonious polity in which reason was ascendant led Whigs to extol the virtues of moderation. Recognizing that American society was composed of diverse economic, religious, and social groups, and that competition for power among these groups could be a source of instability, Whigs championed a vision of political action called constitutional unionism. Constitutional unionism celebrated the art of compromise, which, by assigning primacy to moderation, practicality, and conciliation, ensured the ascendancy of reason, civility, and the general good over fanaticism, extremism, and narrow-minded parochialism.⁴⁰

Whigs rejected the Jacksonian complaint that the market revolution and the use of government power to promote it endangered republicanism. It was inevitable, they argued, that individuals who developed their talents through education, worked hard, practiced rational planning, and exercised self-discipline would acquire a disproportionate share of power and wealth. Whigs believed the opportunity for upward mobility into the aristocracy of talent provided by the new economy encouraged Americans to develop the moral discipline and control over the passions that made them good republican citizens.⁴¹

Whig attitudes toward economic development were complemented by their views on ethnocultural conflicts in Jacksonian America. In the decades after the contested election of 1824, the United States experienced a steadily growing influx of immigrants from Ireland and Germany who brought to America alien customs, cultural values, and Catholicism, which conflicted with the religious and social values espoused by Whigs. These values were shaped by a religious and spiritual movement known as the Second Great Awakening, which gave theological justification to capitalism and drew its support from the entrepreneurial and professional middle class. Inspired by a belief in the perfectibility of mankind, evangelicals launched moral reform movements that looked to promote the middle-class values of order, politeness, and sobriety by encouraging individuals to discipline their passions.⁴²

Indeed, Whigs believed the control over the passions and cultivation of the higher faculties that made economic success and true piety attainable made those who achieved it particularly well suited to the task of providing leadership to others. The concept of paternalism was central to notions of political leadership that were popular among Whigs with roots in Federalism or National Republicanism. Although they adopted the tactics of mass democratic politics— most spectacularly in the log cabin and hard cider campaign of 1840—Whigs’ commitment to consensus building meant that they tended to resist the partisan imperative. This was manifest in a powerful antipathy toward professional politicians. The politician was scorned as a selfish and unprincipled man who lacked the independence or intellectual capacity to comprehend the complex problems of governance, vision to fashion constructive policies, or self-discipline to control his own passions. Instead, he pandered to the ignorant masses and worked solely to advance the narrow interests of his own constituents rather than the general good.⁴³

Whig paternalism and distaste for party politics and politicians was manifest in idealization of the figure of the statesman. Unlike Democrats, who had faith in the common man’s ability to identify his own interests, Whigs believed that without educated leaders to provide guidance and instruction, individuals tended to take a narrow perspective on problems and worry only about their own interests. Guided by his moderate temperament, powerful intellect, and broad perspective, the statesman rose above party, local, and personal prejudices to solve problems in a manner that served the long-term interests of the entire country. Only men who possessed exceptional knowledge and breadth of vision, self-discipline, and public spiritedness were believed to be capable of carrying out the difficult task of balancing, reconciling, and harmonizing competing interests through compromise and developing rational methods for accommodating change and republicanism.⁴⁴

In few places in antebellum America were the fault lines produced by the market revolution and the rise of mass democratic politics sharper than they were in Philadelphia, which during the 1830s and 1840s was being rapidly transformed from an eighteenth-century seaport to a modern industrial city. Whereas economic relations had previously supported community-based social relations, the rise of the factory system and market-based economic exchange undermined this source of social stability. This, of course, was a change that communities throughout the nation were experiencing. In Philadelphia, however, the changes associated with the market revolution were played out in a major population center. Consequently, they were much more dramatic and the conflicts they produced were much more intense. And as young George B. McClellan looked on, the economic and social tensions produced by the market revolution fueled a fierce contest for power between Whigs and Democrats that was played out in the city’s shops, political salons, and streets.⁴⁵

The most important result of the dramatic change in the city’s economy was the displacement of the small-shop artisans. As was the case throughout the nation, some adapted to the new emphasis on specialization and rationalization of economic tasks associated with industrialization and moved into the middle class as entrepreneurs, factory managers, or merchants. Many were not so fortunate and slipped into the ranks of the permanent working class. Their frustration gave rise in 1828 to a Workingman’s Party, which nominated candidates for public office from 1828 to 1831 and took anti-privilege, limited government positions. The persistent inability of this organization to secure control of city and state governments led to a change in tactics. In 1835–1836, the city experienced a series of strikes that represented the peak of the organized labor movement during the antebellum period. The Panic of 1837, however, drove a stake into the heart of the labor movement and it was absorbed by the Jacksonian Democratic Party.⁴⁶

As their inability to overturn the city’s political and economic power structure became evident, working-class anger and frustration in Philadelphia was increasingly directed against the city’s large African American population. Racism was one value Philadelphia’s lower and upper classes shared, for the city was in style and temperament a Southern city. Popular antagonism toward blacks and abolitionists by these groups was exacerbated during the 1830s by a dramatic increase in antislavery activity in the city. Philadelphia’s respectable middle and upper classes disapproved of the antislavery movement, which they, like many conservative Northerners, viewed as a threat to social order and traditional lines of social and political life. Thus, during the 1830s anti-black and anti-abolitionist violence was a feature of life in Philadelphia. In August 1834, the city experienced the first in a series of destructive race riots. One year later a group of rioters seized and dumped stacks of antislavery pamphlets in the Delaware River. In 1838, a mob burned Pennsylvania Hall to the ground to break up an antislavery convention.⁴⁷

At the center of the commercially oriented, cosmopolitan, and politically conservative Philadelphia elite to which the McClellans belonged was Nicholas Biddle, the brilliant president of the Second Bank of the United States. The tendency of Philadelphia’s aristocracy of talent to embrace a National Republican-Whig vision of politics and society was manifest even before Jackson and the Democrats declared war on the National Bank in 1832. This was partially rooted in a sense of connection with Benjamin Franklin, the country’s early exemplar of commercial society, the ideal of self-improvement through development of the higher faculties, and Enlightenment rationalism. Viewing themselves as stewards of the republic, members of the McClellans’ social and economic circle possessed the preoccupation of conservative Whigs with the preservation of social order. To eliminate the threat from below posed by the ignorant masses, they promoted education and prison reform. To preserve harmony among themselves, Philadelphia’s elites supported political leaders who sought consensus and worked to forge compromises and cooperation among competing interests.⁴⁸

Almost as soon as the Federalist Party had disappeared, the Jeffersonian-Republicans in Philadelphia split into two bitterly antagonistic factions. The New School faction was composed of the city’s traditionally Federalist elite and its new entrepreneurial and professional classes, who supported National Republican efforts to promote the market revolution and the consensual harmony of the Era of Good Feelings. Opposing them was an Old School faction supported by artisans and working-class immigrants who, allied with farmers in the interior, were instrumental in the organization of the national Democratic Party. Not until Jackson declared war on the Second Bank of the United States did the New School faction accept the need for an organized party if they were to save their vision of an orderly and harmonious republic from King Andrew and mob rule. Nonetheless, the Philadelphia elite were able to keep their city, particularly the Dock Ward in which the McClellans resided, firmly in the Whig column throughout the 1830s and 1840s.⁴⁹

As a member of Philadelphia’s aristocracy of talent who had roots in Federalism, Dr. McClellan shared the social and political outlook of the National Republicans. Although he did not enter the field of electoral politics, during his son’s youth, Dr. McClellan became, in the words of a Democratic newspaper editor, one of the most devoted of Whigs and an active presence in Whig circles. During the effort to revive the Bank of the United States in the early 1840s, Dr. McClellan reviewed a memorandum for Biddle defending his management of the Second Bank and counseled Whig Senator John M. Clayton of Delaware on his efforts to rally public support for the bank. Courage . . . my dear fellow, and lay it on tough & tight, he advised Clayton, making every point strong before the people. If the Whigs succeed at all they must succeed with and by means of a Bank & a few bold & strong spirits . . . [to] lead public opinion to the right point.⁵⁰

Dr. McClellan was especially close to Clayton, one of Henry Clay’s and Daniel Webster’s key lieutenants during the 1830s and 1840s. Clayton had been a classmate at Yale and would be a warm acquaintance of the McClellan family until his death in 1856. In 1849, army officer George B. McClellan would write to the senator seeking his aid in blocking congressional efforts to enact legislation that would, in his opinion, wrongly provide for the discharge of the enlisted men of his company. Six months later, McClellan solicited Clayton’s help for his efforts to get the War Department to send him to Europe to observe military operations during the Hungarian revolution of that year. In 1856, McClellan sent Clayton a long letter laying out his views on the state of American military preparedness and closed the letter by writing, as you were my father’s friend, and have always shown a warm interest in me, I can speak perfectly unreservedly to you.⁵¹

Dr. McClellan also took great pride in his association with Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. McClellan was, in the words of Democratic newspaperman John W. Forney, one of Henry Clay’s sincerest friends, and worked tirelessly in 1843 and 1844 for the Kentucky statesman’s presidential campaign. Keep up our good Whig course at all costs, Dr. McClellan exhorted a friend in 1843, I have done some great things in surgery of late but nothing which has gratified me half as much as the success I know I have had in turning the current of opinion for the glorious old fellow Henry Clay. . . . I will make him President if the heavens do not fall. Clay’s defeat in 1844 was a bitter blow to McClellan. One evening shortly after the election, he encountered Forney and could not resist expressing his bitterness over Clay’s defeat before they closed the controversy in a glass of wine.⁵²

Two years later Dr. McClellan had the melancholy duty of informing Clay that his grandson had died while in McClellan’s care. Clay wrote back unreservedly expressing his anguish. It is a great consolation, wrote Clay, to know that, in his last days, he . . . had the kind attention and care of yourself. . . . [M]y dear friend, I hope you have had a less measure of affliction than has fallen to my lot. When Dr. McClellan died in 1847, Philadelphia’s Whig newspaper predicted that Clay’s Ashland would be among the homes of genius in the nation where tears would be shed.⁵³

Webster was a patient and intimate friend of Dr. McClellan, whose soldier son became a fervent admirer of the Massachusetts statesman. While stationed in Washington during the winter of 1851–1852, the future general made a point of watching noble Daniel Webster argue a case before the Supreme Court and was captivated. Afterward he wrote his brother that

I never heard so clear, so logical, & so impressive a speech. No ranting, no straining for effect. But the sledge hammer blows of an intellectual giant. What an appearance he has! . . . The worn out simile of the lion pacing about his cage was truly applicate to him. You would pick him out of a crowd as the only man who could be Daniel Webster.⁵⁴

While serving on an expedition exploring the Red River in 1852, McClellan was offered the honor of naming the highest mountain in the Wichita mountain chain and reported to his family with delight that he christened it Mount Webster. He also passed his pride in the family’s association with Webster on to his own son. The celebrated daguerreotype of ‘Webster in the beaver hat,’ George Brinton McClellan, Jr., would boast in his autobiography, was taken in my grandfather’s company. During the Civil War, General McClellan would name his favorite horse Dan Webster.⁵⁵

No man cultivated the image of the republican statesman that appealed to Whigs like the McClellans as assiduously or successfully as Daniel Webster. As historian Irving Bartlett has observed, a cult of Webster emerged among segments of Northern society who cherished traditional notions of statesmanship and were uneasy with the tactics and divisiveness of mass democratic politics. To these admirers, Webster personified the Whig values of political moderation and disinterested statesmanship and was celebrated for being above the petty partisanship, parochialism, and undignified hullabaloo of mass democratic politics.⁵⁶

To Webster, the ultimate end of American politics was to preserve and defend the three great institutions inherited from the Founding Fathers: the Union, the rule of law, and the Constitution. Like his admirers, Webster was concerned with the problem of preserving social and political stability and civic virtue in a democratic, capitalistic society and sought to promote and direct the forces of progress and improvement so that they would support, rather than threaten, the institutions and values that gave order to society. Disturbed by the existence of centrifugal tendencies that threatened to divide the nation, he sought to promote institutions and values that encouraged people to rise above their selfish interests, recognize the existence of a harmony of interests, and develop a sense of unity and shared destiny. Foremost among these were the Union and the Constitution.⁵⁷

The resistance to party discipline that Webster’s admirers found so admirable in fact flowed in part from the fact that the party line and the personal ambitions of his rival Henry Clay were often one and the same. Yet Webster’s attitude on political partisanship also paralleled his religious ecumenism. Webster worshipped at Episcopal, Congregational, or Presbyterian churches depending on where he was at any particular time; did not concern himself with the theological niceties that distinguished one denomination from another; and lacked the burning piety from which was derived, in the words of historian Daniel Walker Howe, that driving spirit to remake the world that characterized many of the Whig evangelicals. Although he extolled American society for providing its citizens opportunities for social and economic improvement and sympathized with the movement for reform, he placed a higher value on stability, harmony, and order.⁵⁸

Not only did Dr. McClellan’s roots in New England Federalism and membership in the nation’s professional aristocracy of talent orient him toward the brand of Whiggery that Godlike Daniel championed, his religious outlook also appears to have paralleled Webster’s. Although the McClellans who emigrated to America were of Scotch Presbyterian stock, upon relocating to Woodstock and marrying into one of its most prominent families, General Sam joined the community’s Congregational Church. If this provoked any concerns in the McClellan family they were no doubt alleviated by Timothy Dwight’s success bringing the Presbyterian and Congregational Churches together in his 1801 Plan of Union. Upon settling in Philadelphia and marrying a member of the Brinton family, however, Dr. McClellan abandoned the Presbygational churches of his youth and Yale College. The services at his funeral were of the Episcopal Church and all five of his children were baptized into that denomination. Four were baptized at St. James’s Episcopal Church. The other child, George Brinton, was baptized at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church. Until 1832, both of these Episcopal churches were part of what was known as the United Churches, which consisted of the two congregations and their mother church, historic Christ Church.⁵⁹

Dr. McClellan’s acceptance of Episcopalianism and willingness to see his children baptized into that denomination were no doubt due in part to the character of the man who led the Episcopal Churches in Philadelphia. Like Timothy Dwight, Bishop William White, rector of the United Churches during much of General McClellan’s youth, was a man of strong character, moderate temperament, and powerful intellect who possessed a powerful sense of dignity. From his personality flowed a theological outlook that, in the words of one historian, stressed reason rather than emotion in religion, looking to Scripture and history for ‘empirical’ evidence to support his beliefs. White also shared Dwight’s paternal approach to spreading the Gospel. White did not seek to impose his views through appeals to the emotions or threats of eternal damnation. Instead he consciously endeavored to cultivate his parishioners’ higher faculties and to serve as an exemplar of the virtues of self-discipline, piety, and charity. White was also tolerant toward other Protestant sects, although he disapproved of the militant character of the evangelical movements produced by the Second Great Awakening and the frenzied preaching style of evangelical ministers, which he felt unnecessarily stirred up passions by appealing to the animal sensibilities of their congregations.⁶⁰

Like Webster, Dr. McClellan’s approach to religion was conservative and ecumenical, in line with the Whig emphasis on social harmony and vision of a public servant’s obligation to society. In an 1836 address to the graduates of Jefferson Medical College, McClellan warned them not to let themselves be shipwrecked by associating with political or sectarian branches of society. Professional men, he added, had a duty to rise above parochial interests and perspectives and keep their hearts open to all denominations and parties so they would not compromise their ability to serve all of society. Moreover, although he clearly embraced the ideals of upward mobility, self-discipline, and social paternalism of the New Divinity, Dr. McClellan did not possess the driving spirit to remake the world that spawned reform movements such as temperance and abolitionism. The religious views that prevailed in the McClellan household endorsed worldly ambition and promoted the calculated pursuit of self-improvement and progress but also supported social stability by downplaying sectarian differences and emphasizing the values of rationalism, moderation, and order.⁶¹

Dr. McClellan’s son George Brinton formally began the process of earning his own place in America’s aristocracy of talent when he was 5 years old. Already fond of books and study, his sister would later write, and always the ‘soul of honor,’ McClellan first attended a school directed by a Mrs. Donaldson a few blocks away from his home. Soon thereafter, feeling too old to go to a ‘woman’s’ school, he joined his older brother, John, at a school directed by Sears Cooke Walker. Walker was, McClellan later recalled, a man of high ‘scientific’ attainment who after leaving the school went on to a prominent career as an astronomer. After leaving Walker’s school, McClellan studied under a man named Schiffen, whom he described as a magnificent classical scholar and an excellent teacher. After Schiffen’s death, McClellan entered Reverend Samuel W. Crawford’s preparatory school at the University of Pennsylvania and then, at age 13, began studies at the university itself, evidently with the intention of preparing for a career in that most bourgeois and cosmopolitan of professions, the law.⁶²

Yet as he neared completion of his studies at the University of Pennsylvania, another profession beckoned. McClellan later traced his desire, in his father’s words, to go through the West Point school for the serious purpose of devoting his life to the service of the Army of the U[nited] States to his days at Walker’s school when a fellow student left to enter West Point. McClellan’s interest in the military may also have been nourished by the family’s martial heritage as well as the numerous militia units and fire companies in Philadelphia, whose glamorous uniforms and colorful parades were a prominent part of the city’s social scene. Moreover, although there are allusions to eventually leaving the military to pursue a career in the law during his years at West Point and his early military career, there is evidence that suggests McClellan saw the legal profession as an inadequate outlet for his ambition.⁶³

In 1842, Dr. McClellan’s close friend and Whig Congressman Joseph R. Ingersoll submitted George Brinton McClellan’s name to the War Department as an applicant to enter West Point. Dr. McClellan himself also wrote personally to President John Tyler and Secretary of War John B. Spencer when his son’s name was not included on a list of nominees, even after the Engineer department issued a formal notice of receipt of a February 25 letter submitting McClellan’s name to the secretary of war. Finally, on April 23, 1842, George B. McClellan, with his father’s endorsement, formally informed the War Department of his acceptance of conditional appointment as a cadet at West Point.⁶⁴

Dr. George B. McClellan, Lt. George B. McClellan, and one of his younger siblings in 1846.

Courtesy Princeton University Firestone Library.

Scholars of political socialization have determined that, as the first agent of socialization, the family’s influence in establishing lifelong patterns and fundamental dispositions in regard to society and politics, especially in the area of party affiliation, is enormous. After extensive study of the role fathers play in the formation of a child’s political outlook, sociologists have identified three ways in which they influence their sons to adopt their own: maintaining a close personal relationship, serving as an overt and covert model for emulation, and placing the child in a particular social and cultural context.⁶⁵

Dr. McClellan was successful in all three regards. The relationship between him and his second son was by all accounts extremely close. His death in 1847 was a devastating blow to his son, who several months later described it as an event I do and cannot speak [of], for it can but call to our minds the remembrance of as noble a being as ever graced the earth. It is also clear that the future general viewed his father’s personal character as worthy of emulation and possessed great pride in being Dr. George McClellan’s son. In a letter to his younger brother, Arthur, in 1855, McClellan directed him to make it your rule in life to love his memory & do honor to their father’s name, which is a proud legacy he has left us—more valuable than any riches, which other more calculating, but less noble, less intellectual beings have left behind. Finally, Dr. McClellan maintained a household where, his son would recall in the first draft of his memoirs, traditions and associations . . . were all on the side of the old Whig Party.⁶⁶

These traditions and associations instilled in George B. McClellan a Whig worldview that would shape his actions before and during the Civil War. Like most Victorians, the McClellans were selective in their acceptance of the forms the modernization of American society took. During his youth, McClellan’s family instilled in him a cosmopolitan outlook as well as the market revolution’s emphasis on the disciplined pursuit of self-improvement, organizational and institutional innovation, and personal refinement. McClellan also developed the Whig view of society as a hierarchy based on merit and skepticism toward the egalitarian and libertarian thrust of post-1815 America. His Whig tendency to apply the faculty psychology paradigm’s concept of the world as a place where reason and passion battled for ascendancy led him to adhere to a concept of politics and government that emphasized consensus and harmony and would be manifest in a vicious hostility toward politicians and party politics. McClellan embraced the Whig model of statesmanship that looked for men of reason, moderate temperament, and refinement who could forge compromises that preserved social order and stability by conciliating competing interests and who could give paternalistic direction to national development and social progress.

An attachment to the values of Whiggery would stand George B. McClellan in good stead at West Point. If Dr. McClellan’s household was not the most auspicious environment for the shaping of a political and cultural outlook rooted in Whig values, the military academy on the Hudson River was one of the few that surpassed it.

CHAPTER TWO

I Can Do As Well As Anyone in Both My Studies and My Military Duties

By the time the ink was dry on his first letter home from West Point on June 28, 1842, 15-year-old conditional cadet George

Reviews for McClellan's War

[shrike58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In this book the author goes to some lengths to plumb the depths of McClellan's personal politics, and then puts this understanding in the context of Union high strategy and civil-military affairs through the duration of McClellan's command. The conclusion is that whatever Lil' Mac's virtues were as a general, and Rafuse is ready to pay due credit, the reality is that McClellan was so out of sorts with the administration's politics that he had to be removed, even if the timing was not exactly oppertune and the Lincoln administration was sometimes its own worst enemy. If there is a downside to this book it's that the author is on the staff of the Army's Command & General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, and this work sometimes has all the snap and sparkle of staff history.