This Day in Civil War History (Emancipation Paved by Bloody Antietam)

September 22, 1862—The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln was a public document shaped with the law and international diplomacy in mind, but made, paradoxically, possible and necessary by the massive expenditure of blood five days earlier at the Battle of Antietam.

By warning the Confederacy that slaves in states under Northern control after the coming January 1 would be considered “forever free,” the President did so from what was, ostensibly, a position of strength: victory, albeit an incomplete one, on the bloodiest day in the nation’s history. That was, in actuality, an illusion: The war was dragging on for longer than anyone had expected, and the President had determined that he must strike at the institution that not only was at the heart of the Southern economy but that enabled its able-bodied males to engage en masse in rebellion against the Union.

Lincoln had wanted to emancipate the slaves a few months earlier, but Secretary of State William Seward had persuaded him that, given the Army of the Potomac’s recent string of losses, it was better to do so after a victory, when the North would be seen not as desperate but as a credible battlefield victor.

That moment had come on September 17, on the 75h anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, when thousands of young soldiers under the command of General George B. McClellan had repelled Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the North at Sharpsburg, Md. (In keeping with prior practice, the North named the battle after a prominent geographic feature, in this case Antietam Creek, while the South named the fight after the nearest town.) The result, while not as clear-cut as both sides would have liked, ensured that the national experiment in freedom would continue. 

It should not have been shocking that Union and Confederate casualties would total more than 25,000 (including at least 5,000 dead) at Antietam: In a battle pitting one overconfident commander against a timorous (if arrogant) one, amid a larger war that began with massive miscalculations on both sides, it was inevitable that so many would pay for the mistakes of leaders. The war’s great paradox on this particular week was that a battle rife with enormous blunders had ended with the signing of a document so meticulously planned that many abolitionists regarded it with all the joy of beholding a legal contract.

The chief military mistake was made by Robert E. Lee, with his initial decision to invade the North. His triumph at Second Manassas at the end of August (see this prior post of mine) solidified his belief that his soldiers were skilled and brave enough to do whatever he asked of them.

But the Army of Northern Virginia was not good enough to overcome the disadvantages of being divided in the face of the enemy and of passing through a part of Maryland filled more with German immigrants loyal to the Union that with Confederate  sympathizers. Nor could Lee’s troops overcome the impact of his famous Lost Orders, which had been found in an abandoned Rebel encampment and presented to the Union commander. Here was the intelligence coup of the war for the Union: Lee's whole strategy and plan for attack.

McClellan then proceeded to make his own critical errors—notably, taking more than a day to move his army, which allowed enough time for several units of Lee’s army return in time for battle. On the day of battle itself, McClellan, wildly overestimating his fee’s strength, kept  several major units out of the fight, and he ordered uncoordinated troop movements that failed to deliver the knockout blow.

There are a number of fine accounts of the subsequent battle, notably Stephen W. Sears’ Landscape Turned Red. But there is no substitute for actually visiting the battlefield, which, unlike other areas (including Gettysburg), remains largely undefiled by modern development. On my visit to the battleground site nearly two decades ago, I crossed the narrow, stone arch bridge that it took Union General Ambrose Burnside hours to seize because of ferocious Confederate fire. My eyes swept over The Cornfield, where, that morning, 40% of Union General John Sedgwick’s division had become casualties. I walked along the half-mile Bloody Lane, where, a century and a half ago, I could not have touched ground without stepping on a body, the result of 5,600 killed or wounded in only three hours of fighting.

McClellan had been congratulated (none doing more so than himself) as the victor, but he squandered his chance, before and during the battle, to eliminate Lee’s army as a fighting force, just as he would do so again, over the next six weeks after the bloody engagement, in allowing the Army of Northern Virginia to slip back to the Richmond region to replenish itself. Yet he felt eminently qualified to offer his President not merely military, but also political advice. Before the battle, he had sent Lincoln a memo noting that his soldiers would fight for the Union but not for emancipation.

By this time, Lincoln was having none of it, from McClellan or, indeed, anyone else. As far back as June, he had taken into his confidence his loyal Vice-President, Hannibal Hamlin, and read him what would become the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. (The abolitionist-minded Veep was delighted.) A month later, before his Cabinet, Lincoln had taken Seward’s advice about not issuing the proclamation when it could be misinterpreted as an act of desperation.

There had been a million reasons, in the first year of the conflict, why Lincoln had not moved decisively against the “peculiar institution” that had made the rebellion inevitable, especially the need to keep in the Union fold the border slaveholding states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, as well as his recognition that under the Constitution, he had no authority to interfere with slavery where it already existed.

But it did not escape his notice how much slavery had buoyed the war effort of the Confederacy. “For as many slaves who ran away,” notes historian Allen Guelzo in his analysis of Emancipation in today’s Wall Street Journal, “many thousands more were being used as manual laborers, teamsters and camp followers to help the Confederate war effort. They might tip the military balance in the Confederacy's favor.”

That brought the President to a crucial juncture in his thinking. “I must save this government if possible,” he wrote Maryland Senator Reverdy Johnson in the summer of 1862. “What I cannot do, of course I will not do; but it may as well be understood, once for all, that I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed.”  

The last “available card” was emancipation. In his Cabinet meeting of September 22, Lincoln told his principal advisers that he had made up his mind, and that there wasn’t going to be any further discussion about it, either among themselves or with Congressional Democrats, whom he had come to see as obstructionist.(The only surviving draft of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in Lincoln's handwriting, by the way, is now touring New York State, including a stop at the Schaumburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem through September 24. See this New York Times Artsblog post.)

The document Lincoln signed that day, which thrilled abolitionists and outraged Confederates, noted at its beginning that the war was being fought with the purpose of “practically restoring” the Union, then went on to note that he would send Congress proposals for compensation for slaveholders and African colonization of freed slaves. Lincoln was not only laying out this ground with an eye on the border states with this doctrine of military necessity, but also on the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the infamous opinion in the Dred Scott case, stood ready to rule as an unconstitutional infringement on private property any attempt to strike at slavery. Nor did Lincoln want any chance that, with any possible resolution of the war by either himself or a predecessor, that the freed slaves would be returned to their owners, as had happened at the end of the War of 1812. An argument for emancipation based on his war powers as President was the most likely to be sustained at the polls and in the courts, he felt.

In the year after Lincoln issued his proclamation, much changed on the political and military fronts. The proposals for slaveholder compensation and colonization went nowhere on Capitol Hill, disabusing the President of any notion that anything other than the most radical means necessary would be required to root out slavery. In the Western theater of operations, the victories of Ulysses S. Grant put more slaveholding territory directly under Union control, ensuring that plantations would not have the labor required to sustain them—and swelling the ranks of Union armies with African-American troops. Moreover, Great Britain and France, which had been itching to recognize the Confederacy as a means of cutting down to size the new colossus on the North American continent, had second thoughts about supporting a government propped up by slavery. For the first time, a document with no practical effect when it was first signed now posed a mortal threat to slavery.

Two decades before, in 1841, with Lincoln’s depression reaching near-suicidal levels, the ambitious Springfield lawyer feared that his life would end without him having accomplished anything. After the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, however, he told longtime confidante Joshua Speed that this feeling had at last passed. He had taken a long time to free the slaves, but now there was no going back, and he would press for their freedom with ever-greater tenacity until his life ended at the hand of someone other than his himself two and a half years from this point. The onetime religious skeptic believed that he had become an instrument of divine providence in eliminating the greatest defect of the American government. Lincoln had indeed now done something "to make any human being remember that he had lived."

Flashback, June-July 1862: Lee Takes Command

The creation of the Robert E. Lee legend in the collective mind of the South was hardly preordained. Many in the Confederacy—including the common soldiers he would call on, time and again, to perform extraordinary deeds on the battlefield—were apt to write him off in the early part of 1862 because of a poor showing in western Virginia over the winter.  And his visibility was not high, because of his largely behind-the-scenes role as military adviser to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

But by mid-year 1862, several factors led Lee on a course with destiny:

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           *   Union General George B. McClellan’s amphibious Peninsula Campaign represented the most serious threat to the Confederate capital, Richmond, up to that point.

·         * The wounding in late May 1862 of General Joseph E. Johnston, at the Battle of Seven Pines, necessitated that Lee take the field himself as his replacement.

·         * Lee’s determination to take the offensive, in a series of short, savage engagements known as the Seven Days Campaign, electrified the South—even though, in strategy and long-term results, it was more flawed than many realized at the time.

Lee had many gifts—resolution, daring, an aristocratic dignity that made men look up to him in absolute loyalty—but he was gifted in nothing so much as his early Union opponents. Generals as different as John Pope, Ambrose Burnside, and Joseph Hooker were nettled when he did something unexpected. The first of these commanders, McClellan, represented the most stunning example of how he could throw a Union commander way off guard.

“The Young Napoleon” had come to Washington with tremendous faith placed in him by the republic. In late 1861, he had begun raising, outfitting and training the Union’s Army of the Potomac, but still had to be prodded by President Abraham Lincoln to take the offensive against the Confederates.

The President, with good reason, wasn’t terribly keen on “Little Mac’s” eventual plan: to ship his 122,000 troops by sea to the tip of the York-James peninsula, then fight his way to Richmond. The campaign threatened to expose Washington to a Confederate attack, and one of its reasons for being—the supposed huge army obstructing the way to the rebel capital—already hinted at the tendency to see phantoms that plagued McClellan throughout the rest of his service as commander.

But Lincoln was happy at this point to get his general moving at all, and the plan did have two advantages: it exploited Union naval superiority and it sidestepped the problem of rebel concentration of forces behind interior lines, McClellan's principal objection to an overland campaign against Richmond. Lincoln, then, allowed the plan to move forward, and on March 17 McClellan began shipping his army—the largest ever to conduct an amphibious operation in North America—to Fort Monroe, guarding the way to Hampton Roads. Thus began the Peninsula Campaign, a 3½-month nightmare of feints, bad weather, muddy roads, badly coordinated attacks, and missed opportunities.

One of these was the Battle of Williamsburg, fought on May 5. Things had not been going well at all for the Federals until General Phil Kearny rallied his men with perhaps my favorite battle cry of the war: "I am a one-armed Jersey Son-of- a-Gun, follow me!"  Winfield Scott Hancock’s flanking maneuver then forced the Confederates to abandon the Wiliamsburg Line. But instead of seeing it as an opportunity to exploit, McClellan regarded it as "an accident caused by too rapid a pursuit."

Even before he assumed Johnston’s command, Lee had already made a significant contribution to the Confederate attempt to drive away the enemy. He suggested to Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson that activity in the Shenandoah Valley would make the administration in Washington fearful of an attack against the Union capital. Jackson’s lightning-fast campaign in the region made his reputation in the Confederacy.

When Johnston fell wounded, Lee faced a desperate situation. The Union seemed to be pressing the Confederacy on every front: with Ambrose Burnside in North Carolina, with Ulysses S. Grant in Tennessee, with naval control of New Orleans—and now, an enemy so close to Richmond that Davis was seriously considering withdrawing from the capital. 

Moreover, the costs of war began to come home to Richmond for the first time, with the dead and wounded being brought into the city. As Constance Cary Harrison recalled the atmosphere a half century later in Recollections Grave and Gay (1911): “During the night began the ghastly procession of wounded brought in from the field. Every vehicle the city could produce supplemented the military ambulances. Many slightly wounded men, so black with gunpowder as to be unrecognizable, came limping in on foot. All next day, women with white faces flitted bareheaded through the street and hospitals, looking for their own.”

Once taking charge in the field, Lee issued one set of orders that seemed to confirm Johnny Reb's early misimpression: to dig extensive entrenchments outside Richmond. Soldiers would rather shoot than dig, especially in the hot early-summer sun, and it wasn't long before Lee was christened "The King of Spades." But the move gave him a foothold as he began to formulate a characteristically audacious strategy. 

In addition to Jackson in the Shenandoah, Lee made effective use of another subordinate, General J.E.B. Stuart, by ordering reconnaissance of the Union forces. Stuart’s implementation of the mission was daring (he rode completely around the Union forces) and, in contrast with his later performance in the Gettysburg campaign (when he did not provide Lee with adequate knowledge of Union troop movements just before the campaign), gave the commander serviceable intelligence: McClellan’s right flank was exposed.

Beginning on June 25, Lee attempted a series of frontal assaults, along with an envelopment of the Union right. At this point, the campaign became more than a clash of thousands of men, even of creative use of the latest military technology (ironclad warships, 200-pounder rifled cannon, battlefield telegraph, and aerial reconnaissance,) but instead boiled down to a contest of two commanders’ wills.

Key to Lee’s strategy was Johnston’s perception of the early days of the Peninsula Campaign: "no one but McClellan could have hesitated to attack." In one of the great intelligence failures of Army military history, McClellan’s intelligence adviser, Allan Pinkerton (yes, future head of the famed detective agency), advised the Union leader that he was facing 200,000 men.

Lee had nothing like these forces at hand—in fact, he had about 65,000 when he took control of operations—but what he had, he would use. From June 25 to July 1, he ordered several major battles that put McClellan back on his heels--Mechanicsville, Gaines' Mill, Savage's Station, Frayser's Farm, and Malvern Hill.   

About 10 years ago, I visited the Richmond National Battlefield Park. What impressed me about the park was its sheer size. The National Park Service advises to spend 1 to 1 1/2 days to visit the site. Even this feels inadequate. In these now-peaceful rural areas, the Union and Confederate armies squared off in some of the most intense fighting of a war filled with them.

Though he won all but one of these engagements, McClellan was rattled enough to withdraw to a defensive position on the coast, from which he withdrew a month later. The entire campaign demonstrated that McClellan had, as historian Stephen W. Sears noted in his fine history of the Peninsula campaign, To the Gates of Richmond, lost “the courage to command.”

In his perceptive study, Grant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship, the British Major General J.F.C. Fuller put the reason why Lee won so much acclaim for this campaign in as crisp a form as possible: “it was he and he alone who saved Richmond.” Immediately,  however, in the very next sentence, he qualifies that assessment: “His conceptions were brilliant, his executions faulty and unnecessarily costly.” 

In the century after the war, Ulysses S. Grant came in for much criticism as a “butcher” with his men’s lives. But it is hard to see how he can be faulted on this count more than Lee, and in another crucial respect—one that applies to the Seven Days and subsequent campaigns—he was the Confederate’s superior: Grant’s orders were crisply written, while Lee’s were oral and sometimes garbled. You'd be hard pressed to find a subordinate in any doubt what Grant wanted them to do, but Lee’s sometimes misconstrued his orders—and that can be seen in this particular campaign, when poorly coordinated Confederate attacks resulted from Lee's lieutenants not being in position to attack when he wanted them to do so.

In the confusion of war, even Lee could confuse what he wanted done. Appalled at the grim slaughter at Malvern Hill, he asked General John Magruder why he had pressed on with the attack in the face of McClellan’s strong defensive position. “Because of your orders, twice repeated,” Magruder responded. (Those Lee apologists who still blame James Longstreet for the failed Pickett’s Charge on the third, decisive day at Gettysburg might want to look to the earlier exchange with Magruder and reconsider their position.)

The talk with Magruder also raises the issue of casualties. Lee was already facing an overall numerical disadvantage in terms of manpower, and his predeliction for the grand offensive didn’t help matters. As Alan T. Nolan pointed out in Lee Considered (1991), throughout the Seven Days campaign, McClellan lost approximately 9,800 soldiers killed and wounded, or 10.7% of his force; Lee lost 19,700 men, or 20.7% of his army.

Similar numbers recurred throughout the rest of his campaigns. From McClellan through Hooker, Northern commanders were knocked so silly by Lee’s blows that they never really recovered their equilibrium after the first strike. In Grant, however, Lee faced a leader who, after agreeing with Sherman that they had had “the devil’s own day” in their first 24 hours at Shiloh, continued: “Lick ‘em tomorrow, though.”

If he could, Grant would stick with his initial tactics; if not, he would try another. But, whether inVicksburg or Northern Virginia, he would continue the campaign. Lee had never faced anyone quite like him before. The losses he sustained in offensive operations now came back to haunt him, as he had no men to spare for either other fronts or even his own offensives.

In the Seven Days, Lee had driven the Army of the Potomac away from Richmond, making him the victor of the campaign. The Confederacy could ill afford his kind of bloody victories in the future, though.

This Day in Presidential History (Lincoln Fends Off Critics)

December 31, 1861— As the first year of his administration drew to a close, President Abraham Lincoln sought to ease the concerns of a small group of meddlesome but highly influential Congressmen that the direction of the effort to crush the Confederacy needed to be changed quickly. Seldom has the Clausewitz dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means been demonstrated so much as in Lincoln’s attempt to maintain unity between the nation’s representatives and its armed forces, as well as among the states.

The postwar public deification of Lincoln should not blind us to the fact that, well into his administration, he had neither a master plan to win the Civil War nor the extensive military experience that provided instant credibility for George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower on national-security issues. His was, inescapably, a reactive Presidency: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me,” Lincoln wrote in a letter in April 1864.

The subject of this letter was the measures Lincoln had adopted to advance the Union effort. His observation that “indispensable necessity” had guided him throughout, despite seeming policy changes, can be seen nowhere more vividly than with the slavery issue.

As much as he had felt a bone-deep hatred for "the peculiar institution" since a trip down the Mississippi to Louisiana in the early 1830s, Lincoln felt that he had to tread cautiously in stamping it out, and not only because that action would break a campaign promise only to limit its spread,  not to interfere where it curently operated. Use of slaves to crush the Confederacy by force might only lead border states such as Kentucky and Missouri to throw in their lot with their secessionist sisters farther south. The President preferred colonization and/or compensation emancipation for slaveholders. The failure of these proposals, along with reverses in the eastern theater of the war, led him to conclude later in 1862 that necessity required “military emancipation.”

But Lincoln had not reached this point when he and his Cabinet met with the Joint Select Committee on the Conduct of the War on the last day of 1861. Only appointed by the House and Senate less than two weeks before, the Republican majority on this group were already giving the President severe agita, and much more would come from them by war’s end. While well-meaning and capable of performing useful investigations (on such matters as military supply abuses, the Fort Pillow massacre, and Union troop deaths in Confederate prisons), they were also already driving the President crazy with their preference for state militias over West Point-trained soldiers, as well as their relentless urging to take Richmond, never mind the preparedness of Union troops for doing so.

Now in their sights was the Army of the Potomac’s new commander, General George B. McClellan. “Little Mac” had long put off any move toward invading Virginia, claiming that the less than two months he had had since being appointed commander was hardly enough time to train, provision, and organize his 100,000 troops. But discussions with other military commanders led the committee to believe that the general could have moved far sooner. This added to their initial grievances against him: his Democratic leanings and his stand against interfering in any way with slavery.

Even McClellan’s latest claim to Lincoln--that he was in bed with typhoid--cut the general little slack with the group. Senator Benjamin Wade from Ohio, the committee chairman whose lack of diplomacy led a reporter to call him "grim as a bear in ill health," got right to the point: “Mr. President, you are murdering your country by inches in consequence of the inactivity of the military and the want of a distinct policy in regard to slavery.”

This put Lincoln in a bind. He did not want to undercut the man he had chosen to succeed General Winfield Scott as America’s leading soldier. At the same time, unlike Confederate President Jefferson Davis—not only a West Point graduate, but also a hero of the Mexican-American War and Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce—Lincoln had no sterling military credentials. Not only had he made himself conspicuous by opposing the conflict that started Davis’ upward trajectory, but he liked to joke about the limits of his own service record—three months in the Illinois militia in the Black Hawk War of 1832.


And so, the President chose, when he wasn't cheerleading the war effort, to bring the committee's Republicans and his balky general closer together. On New Year’s Day, Lincoln wrote McClellan to put aside his "uneasiness" about the joint committee's "doings": "You may be entirely relieved . . . The gentlemen of the Committee were with me an hour and a half last night; and I found them in a perfectly good mood. As their investigation brings them acquainted with facts, they are rapidly coming to think of the whole case as all sensible men woud."

Had Lincoln lived in the 21st century, it’s unlikely that this letter, however well-intentioned, would have done him any good. Just imagine this, a scenario repeated, with only slight variations, in recent years: lack of progress in the war leads the Democrats to regain control of Congress. When Lincoln removes McClellan from command, the Senate investigates. McClellan, called to testify, produces the President’s letter. “Honest Abe” ends up looking like a spinmeister, The Great Dissembler rather than the Great Railsplitter.

Over the next two weeks, the joint committee grew increasingly outspoken about the President's trust in his commander. Indiana's George Julian was stunned to find that the President and his Cabinet had no information on any of McClellan's plans, and that "Mr. Lincoln himself did not think he had any right to know, but that, as he was not a military man, it was his duty to defer to General McClellan."

Even at the time, Lincoln’s trust in his general didn’t sit well with several people, not just the Joint Committee. Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase made it plain even during the meeting that he agreed with the Congressmen and Senators.

More influential was Attorney-General Edward Bates. He, like Chase and Secretary of State William H. Seward, had battled Lincoln for the Republican nomination as President, but, with instincts more conservative than Chase’s, could not be written off as a radical abolitionist.

In his diary, Bates confided his dismay over what he had just witnessed: "The Prest. is an excellent man, and in the main wise; but he lacks will and purpose, and I greatly fear he, has not the power to command." In dealing one on one with the President,  however, he was far more diplomatic, able to couch his tough love in legal arguments that Lincoln would find compelling.

It would not do for Lincoln to defer so often to McClellan, Bates claimed. The Constitution had explicitly vested in him power as Commander in Chief. Thus, Lincoln should "organize a Staff of his own, and assume to be in fact, what he is in law."

Lincoln was motivated enough by Bates' claims that he took out a book on military strategy from the Library of Congress. He became increasingly wedded to the idea of simultaneous attacks by Northern forces to prevent Confederate troop movements. While he continued to find the committee bothersome, they had shaken him enough that, from this point on, he challenged "Little Mac" more often to take the fight to the enemy.

As for the Joint Committee: They should be given due credit for recognizing early that McClellan was unsuited for his job and that emancipation was not only moral thing to do, but a weapon to destroy the Confederacy. But their thinking on other matters was terribly flawed. Their military favorites were leaders such as John Pope, Ambrose Burnside and Joseph Hooker--commanders hardly better than McClellan.

Their thinking about Lincoln was as myopic as it was cruel. After his assassination, several members were delighted that the President's successor, their former Democratic colleague, Andrew Johnson, would be far more vengeful against the South. By the end of Johnson's term, as he opposed one Reconstruction measure after another, Wade and company would have abundant reason to understand how wrong they had been about Lincoln, who, for all his seeming slowness, had embraced emancipation while eventually finding the commander who would put his strategy for dismembering the Confederacy into action.

This Day in Civil War History (McClellan, ‘”Young Napoleon,” Named Union Commander)

November 1, 1861—The greatest American professional soldier of the first half of the 19^th century was replaced by a onetime protégé who had begun to bewilder and bother his old boss. Worn down by a lifetime of labor, Winfield Scott, who had led armies in the War of 1812 and the Seminole Wars, then had influenced an entire new generation of future Civil War leaders on both sides during the Mexican War, had his retirement accepted by the administration of Abraham Lincoln, which then immediately named as his replacement George Brinton McClellan (pictured).

The contrast between the departing and incoming generals, at least in the minds of the media, could not have been more stark, and worked entirely to the advantage of the considerably younger and more vigorous “Little Mac.” At 75, Scott seemed old and washed-up, more than fulfilling the expectations created by his nickname, “Old Fuss and Feathers.” At 35, McClellan was hailed as the victor in the one area in the eastern theater of operations where Union forces had so far bested the Confederates: West Virginia. Goodbye, yesterday's superannuated hero. Hello, tomorrow's genius.

Unfortunately, appearances were as deceiving then as they are now. For the next year, McClellan would tantalize and, ultimately, vex the Lincoln administration--first displaying superb organizational and motivational skills, then engaging in insubordination and, fatally, what the incredibly tolerant President eventually concluded was a case of “the slows.”

McClellan’s career constitutes a warning to beware of military or political messiahs. He seemed on the fast track to success--graduating second in his West Point class, receiving two promotions as an engineer officer while on Scott’s staff in Mexico, being chosen by the Army to observe the Crimean War. His rise had been as meteoric in the civilian (chief engineer of the Illinois Central Railroad, then president of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad) as in the military realm.

Minor victories in what soon became West Virginia in the first half of 1861 stood out as specks of light in a very dark area of operations for the North. The Battle of Bull Run had frightened everyone out of their wits. Even McClellan’s harshest critics have nothing bad to say about his subseuqenunstinting work in organizing and training the Army of the Potomac in the aftermath of that debacle--actions that saved the nation’s morale at a dangerous time.

But already, trouble was surrounding “Little Mac”:

* It was rumored--correctly--that his success in West Virginia had nothing to do with him. At the Battle of Rich Mountain in July 1861, it was William Rosecrans rather than McClellan who conceived the maneuvers that won the battle--just as it was Rosecrans who, at the height of the fighting, continued to victory, even when McClellan, hearing the sounds of battle far off, was so convinced of a loss that he refused to reinforce his subordinate.

* He was believing his hype as the “Young Napoleon.” Height--and, perhaps, that habit of sticking his hand in his uniform that you see in the accompanying photo--might have had more to do with this than anything else. But, as Lincoln pressed him to take the fighting to the Confederacy--something other generals (including U.S. Grant in the West) were already doing--McClellan conceived of the idea of a Napoleonic “grand army” to move toward Richmond. But, as Williamson Murray noted in a MHQ article called “What Took the North So Long?”, Napoleonic set-piece tactics were about to be rendered obsolete by new weaponry that lengthened killing ranges by 300 to 400 yards--and dramatically increased the carnage. No, it wasn’t Napoleonic tactics that would secure victory, but a Napoleonic mindset of energy and daring. The cautious-to-a-fault McClellan didn’t possess these latter attributes.

* McClellan’s barely concealed contempt for Lincoln put him on a collision course with the President. When he wasn’t offering advice that was not his business to give on Lincoln’s actions in dealing with the South, McClellan was privately telling friends that the President was “a well-meaning baboon.” At one point, when the President came to visit him, the commander, who had been out at a military wedding, did not bother even to greet the President, but went straight to bed. Lincoln, normally willing to abide nearly anything from a general so long as he produced victory, grew increasingly tired of his commander’s arrogance and excuses.

* McClellan was scoffing at eminently sane advice from Scott. When the old general had raised some practical objections to McClellan's original plans for marching on Richmond, "Little Mac" heaped scorn on his well-meaning mentor's "Anaconda Plan" for squeezing the life out of the Confederacy. Of course, this was the strategy that, when implemented by Grant and Sherman, won the war for the Union.

* McClellan was overly susceptible to faulty military intelligence he wanted badly to believe. Those assessments, provided by Allan Pinkerton (founder of the legendary American detective agency), wildly overestimated the enemy. They not only delayed McClellan from taking his army into the field, but, on the few occasions when he had finally screwed up his courage to do so, convinced him to let the initiative lapse when victory could still have been his.

* McClellan’s failure of nerve led to extraordinary vacillations during campaigns. In June 1862, toward the end of his Seven Days campaign against Richmond, McClellan fired off a set of amazing telegrams to his civilian commander--first claiming that he battled under “great inferiority in numbers,” then stating he was beginning “to think we are invincible,” then griping again about facing “vastly superior numbers,” and concluding that “You have done your best to sacrifice this army.” So shocking was this last statement that the supervisor of military telegrams in Washington took it upon himself to delete it, thereby ensuring McClellan a couple of months more of continued employment that he didn’t deserve.

* McClellan's lack of decisiveness led him to squander the greatest opportunity for cutting the Confederacy to pieces early on. When Robert E. Lee led the Army of Northern Virginia into Maryland on his first of two invasions of the North, McClellan had a golden opportunity to cut him to pieces when he received Special Orders No. 191--what became famous to history as the Confederate commander's "Lost Order." McClellan had what commanders dream of getting just before battle: an indication of the foe's placement of troops, movements, and ultimate objective. Better yet, Lee had no idea McClellan knew all of this. Moreover, "Little Mac" knew it, boasting to a subordinate that the coming battle would be reminiscent of Napoleon's 1796 victory at Castiglione.  But instead of annihilating the Army of Northern Virginia, McClellan only fought it to a bloody draw at Antietam, having forfeited his chance at glory by moving his troops with insufficient speed for four days. At the height of the battle, which caused the greatest loss of American military casualties on a single day, McClellan still withheld divisions from the attack.

Roughly a year after his appointment, Lincoln relieved McClellan of command. Still, for the comparatively short time he had as comander,  McClellan had affected the Army of the Potomac for the rest of the war. On the one hand, he had provided his beloved troops with the intensive training they needed to match their enthusiasm. But historian Joseph B. Mitchell delivered an even more devastating summary of his many faults as strategist and commander:

"McClellan set such a poor example--multiple excuses, timidity, lack of appreciation of the value of time, caution, and apprehension--that his army never completely recovered from the effects of his leadership until the very last days of the war when General Grant was in charge of its operations."

This Day in Civil War History (Scott Unveils “Anaconda Plan” for Crushing South)

May 3, 1861—At 75, he was out of shape, with not enough energy either to command armies in the field or even to stay awake in meetings called by the President. Some even wondered if he was slipping in intellectual candlepower.

But, in his last service to his country, by outlining the strategy eventually employed to bring the Confederacy to heel, Lt. General Winfield Scott demonstrated why he might have been the greatest American professional soldier between the American Revolution and the Civil War.

In its essentials, the strategy—which came to be known, derisively, as the Anaconda Plan for the slow, snake-life manner it proposed to squeeze the secessionist states—did indeed carry the day. But a plan like this required both the proper people to carry it out and a general belief that it was feasible, and both were lacking at this point.

When it comes to military conflict, Americans are much like Tennessee Williams’ heroine Blanche deBois: they don’t want realism--they want magic. When Gen. Eric Shinseki, for instance, made the mistake of telling a Senate committee that occupying Iraq would take “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers,” his testimony led then-Secretary of Defense Donalf Rumsfeld to force him out.

In private meetings with new President Abraham Lincoln, Scott--the general-in-chief of the army, a man who had led armies in the field during the War of 1812, the Seminole War and the Mexican War--had already been at pains to spell out what would be needed for the North to put away the South in the coming conflict:

* A young, talented general (“a Wolfe, a Desaix or a Hoche”)
* Months of intensive troop training
* 300,000 men
* Hundreds of millions of dollars
* Three years.

Ouch.

The President, it seemed, valued Scott’s counsel, but that wasn’t the case with the man who succeeded the aging Virginian: Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan,, at the time a major general of Ohio volunteers but already being considered for a higher position. During the Mexican War, Scott had thought well of McClellan, but now, seeing some of the rising commander’s thoughts on crushing the South--including marching on Richmond overland from the direction of Ohio--he began to have his doubts, and voice them.

One day after receiving McClellan’s plan, Scott wrote down his own thoughts, and sent them off to the younger man. The commanding general of all Union armies started off by throwing cold water on any idea of relying on volunteers signed up for three months. Such soldiers, the old professional noted, would hardly be trained in time before their first campaign would almost be over.

Then Scott proceeded to the more strategic parts of the plan. One was already about to begin: a “complete blockade” of Southern ports along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. But it could be supplemented with a large thrust of Northern troops, transported by a riverine fleet, down the Mississippi River. That would slice the Confederacy in half. From that point on, Federal outposts along the way would further isolate these portions of the South from each other--and, more important, give Southern Unionists time to work on bringing down the secessionists.

If there was an Achilles heel to the plan, it was this last part. A Southern Unionist himself, the Virginian-born Scott believed that enough of his like existed to bring down the Confederacy. But the favorable conditions for Unionism in Virginia (Scott correctly pointed out that in the Western part of the state--the one that eventually seceded itself and rejoined the Union as West Virginia--matters were ripe for such an eventuality)--didn’t apply elsewhere. He should have gotten a hint of this when fellow Virginia Robert E. Lee passed on Scott’s offer to head up the Army.

McClellan scornfully referred to Scott’s strategy as the old general’s “boa constrictor” plan. The Northern press, once it got wind of it, gave a twist on the nickname, calling it the “Anaconda Plan.”

Beware reporters who fancy themselves as von Clausewitzes. A five-decade Army veteran, Scott knew a thing or two about strategy and logistics--and, in particular, his criticism of McClellan’s suggestion of moving troops by land (“long, tedious, and break-down…marches") was acute.
But the Northern press had become enamored of a new slogan, propagated by Horace Greeley‘s New York Tribune: “Forward to Richmond,” and it wanted it done as fast as possible--never mind the inevitable problems with the time needed to train the enormous force required to crush the rebellion. Lincoln bowed to the inevitable, and a force was pulled together to do so. It met disaster at Bull Run.

Before the year was out, Scott, weary in body and spirit (reading McClellan’s hysterical warnings about the possibility of Washington being vulnerable to attack would do that to anyone), had resigned, and the initiative had seemed to pass momentarily for his plan. What helped revive it were commanders who knew how to bring to pass key elements of the plan: on the Mississippi, David Farragut, who seized New Orleans and, later, Mobile Bay with his squadron; Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, who took the lessons they learned from moving troops along the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers with them further south when they executed the brilliant Vicksburg campaign (with a strong assist from Admiral David Dixon Porter, whose gunboats ran under the guns of that mighty fortress, helping Grant squeeze the city) that split the Confederacy in two.

And then there was a woman, now largely unknown to history, but at the time an influential behind-the-scenes player: Anna Ella Carroll, daughter of the former governor of Maryland and a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll.

Carroll, author of a number of political tracts in the 1850s, had helped keep her slaveholding state in the Union. She then began to serve as something of a consultant to the administration of fellow ex-Whig Party member Lincoln, writing papers on topics such as the war powers of the government.

One of her jobs became looking into the Mississippi Valley area. Interviews with experienced riverboat hands convinced her that the massive Federal boats then in existence would have trouble with the stiff currents of the Mississippi. But the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers could handle these boats, she noted, and the Confederates would have more trouble defending against Northern forces coming that way.

Carroll took her idea of a river thrust down the Tennessee directly to the President, and in 1862 Grant’s invasion of Kentucky and Tennessee followed along the lines she suggested.

Scott’s vision of the duration of the war and the strategy required to destroy the Confederacy were borne out by events. By the time of his death in 1866, he had the satisfaction of seeing McClellan (who, in an especially ridiculous moment, wrote his wife that the old war hero was “either a traitor, or an incompetent”) relieved of his command by Lincoln before losing the 1864 Presidential race to the Republican. Above all, the Union for which he had fought and been wounded had been preserved.