McClellan: genius at organization; mediocre at tactics?

I'm sure many of our number are watching the re-broadcast of Ken Burns' classic, The Civil War, this week on PBS (at least in the greater Philadelphia area). That work suggests in more than one instance that McClellan was a genius at organization, administration, and morale, but mediocre/pedestrian at best when it came to strategy and tactics.

For example, the account of Antietam indicated that even a modest amount of forcefulness/audacity would have led McClellan to follow up an attack on the Confederate center. Such a follow-up, Burns suggests, would have led to a breakthrough and essential annihilation of the Confederate forces--and very possibly an end to the war in 1862. The accounts of the Peninsula campaign indicate the same: extreme cautiousness that led to the repulsion of an overwhelmingly superior (in numbers) Union force by a relatively small Confederate force, when a bit more forcefulness could have yielded Richmond and the Confederate government in full flight.

So: discussion. Is this anywhere accurate? My inclination is to believe so, given Burns' penchant for research, but others may dissent.
 
I got the same impression from reading McPhersons' Battle Cry of Freedom. However, to be honest most generals on both sides were relatively mediocre tacticians. And the command and control was not easy those days.
 
The canonical answer is that if McClellan was more aggressive he could've scored a major victory against the Confederates. I am not inclined to agree with this assessment as both John Pope and Joe Hooker were aggressive and they didn't win majorly against them.
 
The canonical answer is that if McClellan was more aggressive he could've scored a major victory against the Confederates. I am not inclined to agree with this assessment as both John Pope and Joe Hooker were aggressive and they didn't win majorly against them.

Mclellan had the largest army in the history of the hemisphere. If he'd been like Grant, willing to sacrifice a few troops to annihilate the Confederates, he would have achieved more results.
 
The "ideal" commander has the correct mix of audacity and caution. McClellan was not that commander. He was also badly served by Pinkerton, whose agents consistently grossly over-inflated estimates of Confederate forces. What, IMO, condemns McClellan, is not that he made mistakes but that he failed to learn from them. When his intelligence service (Pinkerton) had failed by grossly overestimating opposing forces, he continued to believe them and make decisions based on their estimates. When his slow movements and reactions kept him from achieving a decisive victory, or turned a victory in to a defeat, no changes were made.

Had there been a "training command" McClellan would have made an excellent commander for that post. Of course he had other issues, such as a willingness to consider a coup (though it never went anywhere) seeing himself as the "savior" of the Union.
 
Though I lack the training to make the call myself, I've heard it claimed that McClellan was actually quite a good tactician if he was outnumbered as much as he believed himself to be; against an enemy force that outnumbered his by two or three times, his method of giving battle, inflicting damage from a defensive position, and retreating is probably one of the better ways to go about it. The problem, of course, was that he was just wrong about how many Confederates there were; it's a testament to Lee's perceptiveness that he was able to defeat McClellan against long odds by deceiving him into thinking the ANV was as large as he feared it to be.
 
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