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Acknowledgments | |
Prologue | |
Armies | |
Politics | |
Strategy | |
Marching | |
Delay | |
Camp | |
History | |
Discontent | |
Preparations | |
Crossing | |
Orders | |
Artillery | |
Breakthrough | |
Attack | |
Perseverance | |
Futility | |
Retreat | |
Carnage | |
Wounds | |
News | |
Recrimination | |
Winter | |
Freedom | |
Morale | |
Mud Epilogue Order of Battle | |
Notes | |
Bibliography | |
Index | |
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I can't offer you either honours or wages; I offer you hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Anyone who loves his country, follow me. --Garibaldi
Few people could be neutral about Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan. Both loved and reviled, the "Young Napoleon"--as admirers dubbed him--curiously combined strengths and weaknesses. A superb organizer but cautious fighter, McClellan earned the respect, admiration, and especially affection of countless officers and enlisted men. Yet he was nothing if not deliberate, and he readily produced reams of excuses for inaction. His obsessive secretiveness raised questions about his willingness to fight and even about his loyalty. At once arrogant and insecure, he treated his military and civilian superiors with condescension and occasionally contempt.
McClellan regularly and all too indiscreetly questioned the military and political judgment of President Abraham Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, and Gen. in Chief Henry W. Halleck. McClellan favored a war of maneuver with limited objectives, fought by conventional rules, and even tried to protect civilian property. Whatever his private views on slavery, he opposed forcible emancipation. Nor did he discourage national Democratic leaders from using him as a cat's-paw against the Lincoln administration. A man of deeply conservative instincts, McClellan sometimes saw himself as God's appointed agent in the war, and with a conviction bordering on megalomania, he fully believed that the fate of the Union rested in his hands. This egotistic confidence, however, failed to mask deep fears about supposed enemies, whether real, potential, or imaginary.
Had he not saved the Army of the Potomac after the retreat from the Virginia Peninsula and John Pope's debacle at Second Bull Run? And had not his victory at Antietam been a great masterpiece and a vindication of his generalship? Unfortunately Robert E. Lee's army had escaped destruction; Lincoln and his advisers failed to recognize McClellan's genius. Halleck and Stanton had refused to provide the needed men and supplies. Worse, they had plotted to poison the president's mind against him.
As the warm days of early fall 1862 passed quickly with the Army of the Potomac still immobile, Lincoln abandoned his gingerly approach to the touchy McClellan. "You remember my speaking to you of what I called your over-cautiousness," the president wrote on October 13. "Are you not over-cautious when you assume that you can not do what the enemy is constantly doing? Should you not claim to be at least his equal in prowess, and act upon the claim?" Attack the Rebels' communications, the president urged. Strike at Lee's army. Obviously irritated, Lincoln closed his letter with a flippant remark that surely enraged McClellan: "It is all easy if our troops march as well as the enemy; and it is unmanly to say they can not do it."[1]
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Excerpted from Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! by George C. Rable
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