Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided (4 page)

Governor Dennison outlined the predicament. Ohio's army needed to be built from scratch. There was little military experience
on staff—a skilled leader was needed to take charge. McClellan offered keen insight. Given a few weeks' preparation, he vowed the state forces could be made ready for active service. When Dennison solicited his advice for defending Cincinnati, McClellan instructed the governor, “There is only one safe rule in war—i.e. to decide what is the very worst thing that can happen to you, & prepare to meet it.”

Dennison offered the Ohio command; McClellan promptly accepted. Within hours, the governor strong-armed a bill through the legislature to secure his man. On April 23, 1861, thirty-four-year-old George McClellan became a major general of Ohio Volunteers. His selection was viewed as “full of promise and hope.” Great deeds were expected of young McClellan. It seemed, according to Cincinnati journalist Whitelaw Reid, that “a very god of War” had leaped “out of the smoke and coal dust of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad Office.”
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That “very god of War” was born George Brinton McClellan on December 3, 1826, the son of a distinguished Philadelphia surgeon. A child of privileged society, he conversed in Latin and French by the age of ten and enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania at thirteen. His interests soon gravitated to the military. Ancestral McLellans of Scotland had fought with the Stuart kings, and a great-grandfather had earned a general's star in the American Revolution.

McClellan entered the U.S. Military Academy prior to his sixteenth year. He was a popular figure. One classmate wrote that he bore “every evidence of gentle nature and high culture, and his countenance was as charming as his demeanor was modest and winning.” McClellan graduated second in the West Point class of 1846—convinced he should have ranked first. He was commissioned a brevet second lieutenant in the elite Company of Engineer Soldiers.
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War with Mexico loomed. Accompanied by a black servant loaned from his Alabama brother-in-law, McClellan sailed to the Rio Grande in September 1846 and joined legendary General-in-Chief Winfield Scott in the advance to Mexico City. The young lieutenant promptly showed his mettle. At Puebla, he captured a Mexican cavalry officer; while conducting reconnaissance at Contreras, two horses were killed under him. Once felled by a grapeshot, McClellan arose with only a bruise—the hilt of his sword had absorbed the blow. A brevet promotion was his for “gallant and meritorious conduct.”
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McClellan further distinguished himself under fire while erecting batteries for Captain Robert E. Lee. Shortly after daylight on September 14, 1847, the American flag waved over Mexico City. To his brother, McClellan wrote: “Thank God! our name has not suffered, so far, at my hands.” His courage and initiative were rewarded with a second brevet promotion. Captain George McClellan returned to Philadelphia a hero.
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Plumb assignments followed. McClellan translated a French manual on bayonet tactics. He joined an expedition under Randolph Marcy to discover the sources of the Red River and explored the Cascade Range in 1853 for a transcontinental railroad route. He toured Europe to study armies during the Crimean War. Captain McClellan was a rising star. Adapting a Russian manual for horse-soldiers, he also invented the famous McClellan saddle—standard issue until the horse became obsolete. All this from an officer who never served a day in the cavalry.
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Yet in 1857, McClellan resigned from the army to become chief engineer for the Illinois Central Railroad. The autonomy and doubling of his salary may have prompted the move. Within a year, he rose to vice president of the railroad, working with men of influence, among them a gangly, backwoods barrister named Abraham Lincoln. McClellan, however, preferred Stephen A. Douglas in the 1858 Illinois senatorial race, and traveled with him by private rail car to one of the Lincoln–Douglas debates.

On May 22, 1860, McClellan married explorer Randolph Marcy's daughter Ellen. In August of that year, he accepted a post as superintendent of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad and soon became president of the eastern division in Cincinnati—one of the highest-paid railroad executives in America. The war of 1861 interrupted his idyllic life. McClellan believed radical Northern abolitionists and fire-eating Southerners bore equal responsibility for the crisis, but when Fort Sumter was fired on, his choice was clear: “The Govt. is in danger, our flag insulted & we must stand by it.” George McClellan was a talent in great demand. And now he paced the Statehouse floor as a major general of Ohio Volunteers.
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Ohio's quota of soldiers under President Lincoln's call was thirteen regiments, more than ten thousand men. Recruiting was easy—volunteers came forth in astonishing numbers. They paraded through the streets of Columbus, overwhelmed private homes, and spilled into the Statehouse. Catching the spirit, members of the legislature pirouetted at evening drill.

Amid this patriotic groundswell, McClellan penned a letter to General-in-Chief Winfield Scott. He vowed that Ohio could supply fifty thousand men to the cause. “I have never seen so fine a body of men collected together,” McClellan wrote. “The material is superb, but has no organization or discipline.…I find myself, general, in the position of a commander with nothing but men—neither arms or supplies.…You can imagine the condition in which I am without a single instructed officer to assist me.” He pledged to protect Cincinnati and the Ohio River line. He would create a “secret service” to gather intelligence. He requested experienced officers and regular troops. The letter was delivered by special messenger; telegraph and mail links to Washington had been cut off by Maryland secessionists, and would remain so for more than a week.
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McClellan next inspected the State Arsenal. Only a few boxes of rusty smoothbore muskets were discovered—no cartridge boxes, belts, or other accouterments. In one corner stood two or three worn-out six-pounder field guns, badly honeycombed from years of firing salutes. In another corner lay a mildewed heap of artillery harnesses. There was little else. McClellan dryly remarked, “A fine stock of munitions on which to begin a great war!”

The young general began the enormous task of organization. Detailed schedules and estimates of ordinance were created. It was labor at which he excelled. “Feel in my own element,” McClellan wrote on April 24, but the mood soon turned bittersweet. A misdirected telegram arrived from Governor Curtin, offering command of Pennsylvania's troops. Had it come two days sooner, McClellan would have gladly accepted. Instead, he gracefully responded that the Ohio forces “need my services & I am bound by honor to stand by them.” That wayward telegram would prove fateful to McClellan's rise.
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“The general government and the Northern States were utterly unprepared for war,” McClellan recorded in his memoirs. “ We in the West were therefore left for a long time without orders, advice, money, or supplies of any kind, and it was clear that the different States must take care of themselves and provide for their own means of defense.”

His task was compounded by the overwhelming response to President Lincoln's call. Ohio's quota of ten thousand recruits was reached in a matter of days. When thousands more appeared, Governor Dennison accepted them all. Ohio soon had twenty-two regiments in service—thirteen of three-month volunteers under Lincoln's call, plus nine state militia units. All would later be recast as three-year Federal regiments, creating major administrative headaches.
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A camp of instruction was needed for the volunteers. McClellan chose sprawling fields along a bend of the Little Miami River near Cincinnati, naming it Camp Dennison in the governor's honor. The first trainload of troops to arrive there on April
30 was met by a dynamic West Point engineer by the name of William S. Rosecrans. Brandishing a compass and chain, Captain Rosecrans laid off the ground for regimental camps and saw to it that wooden shelters were erected. Cincinnati became General McClellan's new headquarters.
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During that hectic first week, McClellan composed an extraordinary letter to General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, outlining “a plan of operations intended to relieve the pressure upon Washington and tending to bring the war to a speedy close.” The region north of the Ohio and between the Mississippi and the Alleghenies formed “one grand strategic field,” McClellan observed, “in which all operations must be under the control of one head….” The implication was that
he
would be that head.

McClellan proposed to cross the Ohio River, invading Western Virginia via the Great Kanawha Valley, then continuing east across the Alleghenies to Richmond. “I know there would be difficulties in crossing the mountains,” he admitted, “but would go prepared to meet them.” If Kentucky assumed a hostile posture, he would invade that state. Then he would march on Nashville, eventually uniting with an eastern army moving on Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans to end the conflict decisively.

McClellan's letter was noteworthy as the first documented strategy to prosecute the war. It was also brash advice from the Union Army's youngest general to a warrior forty years his senior. General Scott fingered its weaknesses: McClellan's reliance on the three-month volunteers—men whose term of service would expire by the time they were fully engaged, and dependence on “long, tedious and break-down” marches across the mountains. Scott then revealed his own proposal “to envelope the insurgent States and bring them to terms.” This “Anaconda Plan” consisted of a blockade of Southern ports coupled with an advance down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. Diplomatically, Scott advised that McClellan might “take an important part” in the effort.
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On May 3, McClellan was placed in command of the Department of the Ohio, comprising the states of Ohio,
Indiana, and Illinois. A portion of Pennsylvania and Western Virginia north of the Great Kanawha and west of the Greenbrier River were soon added. The young general promptly opened communication with the governors of his new department, all of whom were raising troops. He petitioned General Scott for officers and ordinance, including heavy artillery and armored gunboats. The general-in-chief could not do enough. Governor Dennison and the Ohio legislature came to the rescue, passing bills and appropriating monies for arms, ammunition, clothing, and equipment.

McClellan repeatedly pressed for experienced officers, detained those temporarily assigned, and grabbed others who happened to pass through Cincinnati. “I do not expect your mantle to fall on my shoulders, for no man is worthy to wear it,” wrote McClellan to General Scott, “but I hope that it may be said hereafter that I was no unworthy disciple of your school. I cannot handle this mass of men, general; I cannot make an army to carry out your views unless I have the assistance of instructed soldiers…. I cannot be everywhere and do everything myself. Give me the men and I will answer for it that I will take care of the rest.”

McClellan's “implicit confidence” in Winfield Scott proved tenuous. A rift was developing between the two. When Scott denied a request to organize cavalry and artillery units, McClellan ignored him. To obtain cannons, he nabbed three companies of the Fourth U.S. Artillery traveling on assignment. Scott reluctantly allowed them to stay, but when McClellan sent an officer to Washington with additional demands, the general-in-chief thundered, “I know more about artillery than Gen. McClellan does, and it is not for him to teach me.”
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