Generals South, Generals North by Alan Axelrod

Author:Alan Axelrod
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780762774883
Publisher: Lyons Press

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Scott, Lincoln, and McClellan himself had every reason to believe that he would perform admirably. Gallant in battle, a brilliant West Point graduate who had seen European warfighting close up, and, as a railroad executive, versed in the military potential of rail transportation, the commander his soon-to-be adoring soldiers would nickname “Little Mac”—he stood five-foot-eight, but his disproportionately short legs made him seem much shorter overall—seemed nevertheless to tower head and shoulders over the great majority of officers, Union or Confederate.

As commander of Ohio forces, McClellan was assigned to a theater of war removed from the eastern seaboard, where the most intense action was about to take place. His mission was to clear out Confederate resistance in western Virginia, an area with strong Union sympathies (which, sometime after Virginia seceded, would break away and declare loyalty to the United States as the state of West Virginia). He scored easy victories against small forces at Philippi on June 3 and Rich Mountain on July 11, which moved The New York Times to predict (in a most peculiar turn of phrase) that McClellan, “wise and brave,” had “a future behind him.”

Appointed in the wake of Bull Run to command what would become the Army of the Potomac, he basked in public clamor for a hero and savior but hardly rushed to become either. Instead of leading his army straight into battle, he devoted the rest of the summer and early autumn of 1861 to building it, organizing it, and training it. At the same time, he went about the work of transforming Washington into a fortress city, ringing it with forty-eight strong points and a number of full-scale forts. Collectively, the capital’s defenses bristled with nearly five hundred cannon, many of which, doubtless, would have been of more use in the field. But President Lincoln did not complain. He knew that to lose Washington to a Confederate attack would be to lose the war. Besides, the press had taken to calling “Little Mac” the “Young Napoleon,” and who was the president, installed in the White House by a mere electoral plurality, not a majority, to argue with popular acclaim?

If McClellan was popular with the public, he made himself adored by his troops. He secured for the Army of the Potomac the best equipment, accommodations, and food he could requisition. He mingled with his men, demanding much of them in training and drill but also developing an extraordinary rapport. In an age that regarded soldiers as so much cannon fodder, McClellan made it clear that he cared about his troops—and it was no act; he really did care about them.

Even as he drilled and trained the soldiers he had, McClellan sent appeal after appeal to General Scott to lay aside the “Anaconda,” his strategy of slow strangulation through naval blockade while gradually building up an army of invasion, and instead hurl everything into one force, namely the Army of the Potomac. As it approached one hundred thousand men, it was already the

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