The Generals' Civil War by Stephen Cushman

Author:Stephen Cushman [Cushman, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877), Military
ISBN: 9781469665023
Google: BYspEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2021-09-15T02:43:39+00:00

I hope and trust that God will watch over, guide, and protect me. I accept most resignedly all He has brought upon me. Perhaps I have really brought it on myself; for while striving conscientiously to do my best, it may well be that I have made great mistakes that my vanity does not permit me to perceive. When I see so much self-blindness around me I cannot arrogate to myself greater clearness of vision and self-examination. (July 17, 1862)

The first of these passages was written ten days after the fiasco at Ball’s Bluff, the second six days after Henry W. Halleck was named to replace McClellan as general-in-chief. If he sounded like anyone in these passages, it was not Jesus, the anointed one, but Paul, apostle to the Gentiles, who called himself the worst of all sinners (1 Timothy 1:15–16) and spoke figuratively of having a thorn in his flesh that kept him from becoming conceited in the course of his missionary work around the eastern Mediterranean in the middle of the first century (2 Corinthians 12:7). The Messiah or Christ about whom he preached never refers in the gospels to his own small ability, his great mistakes, his vanity, or his blindness. In three of the gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus prays in Gethsemane that the cup of death be removed from him, and in Luke only he quotes from the cross the opening of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (King James Version). But these are very different utterances from Paul’s or McClellan’s, and they are conspicuously absent from John, the most Messianic or Christological of the gospels.23

Writing to Nelly in these moments, McClellan showed himself, in his midthirties, to be all too human and, to his credit, aware of it. Even his reference to the uselessness of having the greatest intellect that was ever given to man showed disarming self-awareness. In his biography of his uncle, Fitzhugh Lee stated in a footnote, “General Lee said, after the war, that he considered General McClellan the most intellectual of the Federal generals,” but as both Lees learned after Grant assumed overall command in 1864, the most intellectual general and the most effective general are not necessarily the same. In context the footnote followed the statement that “General Lee … was sorry to part with McClellan” in November 1862. The cynical reading would be that Lee was sorry to part with someone he bested in the Peninsula Campaign, if not in the Maryland one. In fact Fitzhugh Lee took his uncle’s reference to his adversary’s intellectual superiority to mean “that as long as McClellan was in command everything would be conducted by the rules of civilized warfare.” For his part, McClellan knew that his intellectual power often made him vain, arrogant, and, in the memorable formulation of William Starr Myers, “one of the worst subordinates and best superiors that ever lived.” At least McClellan’s frequent invocations of God included some that acknowledged this truth.

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