George B Mcclellan Quotes

Anybody will do for you, but not for me. I must have somebody.

He (recently-appointed and new-to-command Robert E Lee) will be timid in the irresolute in action.

The clear suggestion is that there ought not to be civilian control of the military. What have callow noncombatants giving brisk orders to grizzled soldiers? How could Lincoln have fired the slavery-loving Gen. George B. McClellan, or Truman dismissed the glorious Douglas MacArthur?

These reconnoissances were made under the supervision of Captain Robert E. Lee, assisted by Lieutenants P. G. T. Beauregard, Isaac I. Stevens, Z. B. Tower, G. W. Smith, George B. McClellan, and J. G. Foster, of the corps of engineers, all officers who attained rank and fame, on one side or the other, in the great conflict for the preservation of the unity of the nation.

Crediting Beauregard with 100,000 men poised for attack was McClellan’s own analysis.

George McClellan was by no means the only Civil War general to believe he was outnumbered when he was not, but he was the only one to believe it so obstinately and for so long.

McClellan received not a scrap of factual evidence on September 15 (for there was none) that Jackson’s command had actually reached Sharpsburg: no reports from the cavalry, no information from deserters or prisoners, no sightings by civilians. He simply made one of his deductive leaps, first imagining the worst that might happen, then believing that it had happened. His exercise in unreason ensured that the worst did in fact happen. When at last he fought the Battle of Antietam, he would face the entire Army of Northern Virginia.

Antietam was the only battle that George McClellan ever planned and directed—indeed, it was the only Civil War battle he ever witnessed from start to finish—and he fought it less to gain a victory than to forestall a defeat.

One of Pleasonton’s officers later observed that at Antietam the Federal cavalry arm “had not yet fallen into the hands of those who knew the proper use to make of it.

On three straight days, while the Army of the Potomac fought to survive, he abdicated the position of commanding general and went to the rear, leaving it to others to direct all the fighting.

The Army of the Potomac’s command system, by contrast, had worked effectively during the Seven Days, the measure of its success the fact that the army survived consecutive, critical days of fighting when it was abandoned by the general commanding.

George McClellan was beaten in the battle for Richmond by an army that existed only in his mind’s eye, its overwhelming numbers real enough to him so that he was able, in a final act of evasion, to make a plausible case to his own army and to the country and to himself that nothing of what had happened was actually his fault.

General Lee, having defended Richmond in June with 200,000 men and threatened Washington in August with 120,000, would hardly invade the North in September with an army of less than 120,000. That in fact General Lee commanded a third of that number—that he was daring to challenge the Army of the Potomac with so small a force—was a reality contrary to George McClellan’s most strongly held conviction.

By July 13, 1861, the Confederate forces in western Virginia had been eliminated by Union forces led by the “Young Napoleon,” George B. McClellan. McClellan’s campaign gave the Union control of the land and railroads, and West Virginia would eventually become a separate state on June 20, 1863, while the eastern portion maintained the name Virginia.   McClellan’s

Behind the recriminations was the fact that in this first test as a battlefield commander McClellan took resort in caution when his plan miscarried, leaving a portion of his army in possible peril.

With Calvinistic fatalism he believed his path to be the chosen path; anyone who raised criticisms or objections—whether president or Cabinet officer or legislator or editor or fellow general—was at best ignorant and misguided and at worst a traitor.

Like Pinkerton, Alfred Pleasonton combined great industry with small judgment.

General Lee, in his confidence that he could complete the Harper’s Ferry operation and reunite his army without interference, once again displayed an intuitive ability to read his opponent’s mind. It was an ability that General McClellan conspicuously lacked.

on September 17, 1862, “more errors were committed by the Union commander than in any other battle of the war.

He was not forced to resort to a siege by the president’s order, nor did it affect how the siege was conducted nor even how long it lasted. What made “rapid and brilliant operations impossible” was his own decision, already taken, to abandon any effort to turn Yorktown.

When the Peninsula dispatches were made public in 1864, James Russell Lowell wrote that he had to go back to Cervantes’s Don Quixote to find a self-deception comparable to General McClellan’s.

Halleck replied, “The President has read your telegram, and directs me to suggest that, if the enemy had more occupation south of the river, his cavalry would not be so likely to make raids north of it.

In the end, the Army of the Potomac proved to be no weapon for a coup d’etat, and George McClellan no general to lead one.

When it became necessary to replace Burnside, Joe Hooker’s popularity with the men would be a decisive factor in selecting him over John Reynolds or George Meade.

Any officer serving under Sumner, who had joined the army in 1819, had to learn to cultivate the pose “that he is utterly ignorant, professionally—& that his colonel is not,” Johnston explained, and added “—the last most difficult.” Such a pose was unimaginable for anyone of George McClellan’s sensibilities.

The issue was at once sectional, political, and economic, and the result was a hopeless deadlock.

Whatever advantage he would have as a military administrator in 1861, he possessed no more tactical insights into the war to come than did any of his fellow (or opposing) generals.

It is something of a curiosity that the American cavalry arm utilized a tactical manual and a saddle developed by an officer who had never served—and would never serve—a day with the cavalry.