Considering he was, as you put it, a dick to veteran and national war hero not to mention arguably America's greatest ever General Winfield Scott I find the idea that he would treat Davis better because of some kind of comeradery unlikely.
McClellan in Grey - AKA The Lion of New Orleans
- Thread starter Nytram01
- Start date
Considering he was, as you put it, a dick to veteran and national war hero not to mention arguably America's greatest ever General Winfield Scott I find the idea that he would treat Davis better because of some kind of comeradery unlikely.
Aggressive Southern generals also were the only ones who secured anything that lead to the Confederacy surviving, so its a toss up. Virginia was held in large part due to the fact Lee was willing to fight for it, Mississippi was lost because of various reasons, but it wasn't Confederate recklessness - same with Tennessee.
Sufficient to say, General I Never Have Enough of Anything would probably make Johnston's performance at Jackson - "I am too late." just after arriving and all - look reckless.
Criticize it or defend it, that was not the act of an aggressive general - and Joe was more aggressive than McClellan.
Nytram, if this thread is a sneaky ploy to get me to defend Johnston by comparison to McClellan, its working.
As for getting along with Davis, I think McClellan might be less snobbish with Davis than he was to Lincoln, but his (Mac's) personality defects would be even worse with a boss like Davis who was (to put it charitably) frustrating, than one like Lincoln who tried to support him against his congressional critics.
And any less-snob is purely Davis as more blueblooded (at least in appearance) than Lincoln, not "fellow West Pointer" and all.
As Nytram said, if he could act like he did to Scott, Davis's record is pretty unimpressive.
67th Tigers
Banned
Since he advanced after most of his victories you must be referring to the Seven Days. McClellan's army had been turned and the lines of communication cut. There were two possibilities; change base or be destroyed. He successfully changed base whilst inflicting more casualties than inflicted. A superbly executed task, but one in which "advancing" was actually impossible without losing the army. Grant faced with the same situation at Holly Springs did exactly the same.
Thomas spent much of 1862 complaining about how raw the troops were. There are a lot of parallels to be drawn between Thomas and McClellan (and Buell, Rosecrans, Meade etc.). These competent but shrude generals often came acropper due to the civilians misplaced idea in the ease of pursuing a defeated but unbroken enemy. Remember the same civilians who fired McClellan, Buell and Rosecrans also agitated for the removal of Meade and Thomas.
I know that its impossible for an army lead by McClellan to actually make a Confederate army do what he wants it to do rather than being forced by the Confederate army to do what its commander wants him to do, but advancing was very much possible and very much unlike Holly Springs.
Of course, that would have required a general who wasn't more afraid of Lee's ineffectual pounding on Porter than aware of what he could do to keep Lee from attacking him, since it would require thinking of how to harm the enemy - something McClellan seems to have been incapable of in the Seven Days.
http://www.civilwarhome.com/richardsonsevendayor.htm Doesn't sound like someone who feels the army is threatened in the way suggested, does it?
Reading Fitz-John Porter's account would be interesting, as well.
But from McClellan we have the following, which is damning:
From http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/sources/recordView.cfm?Content=012/0051
I have just heard that our advanced cavalry pickets on the left bank of Chickahominy are being driven in. It is probably Jackson's advance guard. If this be true, you may not hear from me for some days, as my communications will probably be cut off. The case is perhaps a difficult one, but I shall resort to desperate measures, and will do my best to outmaneuver, outwit, and outfight the enemy. Do not believe reports of disaster, and do not be discouraged if you learn that my communications are cut off, and even Yorktown in possession of the enemy. Hope for the best, and I will not deceive the hopes you formerly placed in me.
Bold language (pun not intended). Now let's see how his behavior a month later when facing Lee's counter-offense compares to the text in bold:
From http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/sources/recordView.cfm?Content=012/0053 A change of base to meet a threat - it hasn't actually happened yet, but in order to prevent it he's choosing to pull back. Heaven forbid that the Army of the Potomac be used to prevent the enemy from being able to take advantage of the opportunity by virtue of pushing against Lee and forcing him to worry about his defenses. Oh no.
And in a striking display of "Hey these look close to the actual figures": http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/sources/recordView.cfm?Content=012/0056
Specifically, how he refers to Porter having about 35,000 vs. about 70,000. So that means that if the Army of Northern Virginia is ~100,000 men strong, only thirty thousand menare present to threaten the rest of the Army of the Potomac, which means...why isn't McClellan attempting to put pressure on that third of Lee's army with the part of his army not with Porter? Surely if most of Lee's army is tied up facing Porter there's at least the opportunity to make him worry about what McClellan is doing if the latter acts aggressively.
What happened to the month ago statement of his intent to "outmanuever, outwit, and outfight"? It transformed into "I liked the James better anyway so I'm retreating to use it as a supply line rather than defend the one I have."
I'm assuming shrude is shrewd, what is acropper?
I'm not sure how you can compare Thomas's record to McClellan's when McClellan has more to work with and less to show to his credit.
You can draw parallels in a vague sort of way between Thomas and McClellan, but comparing the guy who broke the AoT as an army to any Union general except Grant is not going to look good for the other guy.
In an effort to not completely derail this, I think McClellan's behavior on the Peninsula indicates an area that he and Davis would be unable to tolerate each other.
I'd like to think I'm not as narrow minded as Davis (though a degree of that is one of my faults), and my reaction to McClellan's reports is somewhere between suspicious and hostile.
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67th Tigers
Banned
Which is odd, because in the Seven Days it was McClellan who got inside Lee's Boyd Cycle and Lee was primarily reactive to McClellan. What you propose is exactly what Lee wanted McClellan to do (because ultimately it would lead to the destruction of his army), but Lee thought it unlikely McClellan would play ball.
Someone three command levels down (Wing - Corps - Division)?
I incline to think that Jackson will attack my right and rear. The rebel force is stated at 200,000, including Jackson and Beauregard. I shall have to contend against vastly superior odds if these reports be true; but this army will do all in the power of men to hold their position and repulse any attack.
It is clear McClellan does not ascribe to the notion of 200,000 enemy, which is merely the highest report (and reported as grand aggregate). The sad fact is McClellan *was* outnumbered. He was facing ca. 113,000 effectives (Tenney), with ca. 88,000 (Burton). The Seven Days is one of the few occassions where numbers were on the Confederate side.
Again, you're playing Lee's game. He had left ca. 45,000 men in the Richmond fortifications, more than enough to make any penetration impossible (it took Grant 10 months siege against lower troop densities with a more favourable situation). He hoped McClellan was stupid enough to dash himself against the defences. In modern theory this was to be Lee's "fix" function.
Your idea of a dash by maybe 30,000 troops against 45,000 in strong permanent entrenchments with heavy artillery, cleared fields of line and depth is silly in the extreme.
As you've been conditioned to be. McClellan is a foil to the martyr Lincoln. His achievements are obvious; the Union was restored and there was no success during the "Confederate High Tide" of 1862. Grant's opinion remained he was a good general who merely had been a victim of "earliness":
McClellan is to me one of the mysteries of the war. As a young man he was always a mystery. He had the way of inspiring you with the idea of immense capacity, if he would only have a chance. Then he is a man of unusual accomplishments, a student, and a well-read man. I have never studied his campaigns enough to make up my mind as to his military skill, but all my impressions are in his favor. I have entire confidence in McClellan’s loyalty and patriotism. But the test which was applied to him would be terrible to any man, being made a major-general at the beginning of the war. It has always seemed to me that the critics of McClellan do not consider this vast and cruel responsibility—the war, a new thing to all of us, the army new, everything to do from the outset, with a restless people and Congress. McClellan was a young man when this devolved upon him, and if he did not succeed, it was because the conditions of success were so trying. If McClellan had gone into the war as Sherman, Thomas, or Meade, had fought his way along and up, I have no reason to suppose that he would not have won as high a distinction as any of us.
Apologies for not responding to the rest, but I don't think its getting us anywhere except another round of the Seven Days Battles Debate, which doesn't do much good at illustrating how McClellan would have fared in gray.
So I presume this text being quoted is from Grant's memoirs.
Sufficient to say, and assuming Grant is right (though given his appraisal of a guy as incompetent as Sheridan, it is up for question) - it would be a vaster and even more trying responsibility to be a general in gray, with less in the way of everything needed for an army.
Burton K Wheeler
Moderator
The implication that someone has been "conditioned" to hold opinions that are contrary to yours is something that is not helpful to productive discussion.
I've seen you argue Little Mac was facing that many.
I note how you're cherry-picking numbers from different sources. How many men did Tenney say McClellan had or Burton say that Lee had?
US Grant said:
This illustrates Grant's generosity more than McClellan's skill.
So you feel that Lee turning McClellan's army, cutting McClellan's lines of communication, and forcing McClellan to change base or be destroyed was Lee being reactive to McClellan?
So you feel that Lee turning McClellan's army, cutting McClellan's lines of communication, and forcing McClellan to change base or be destroyed was Lee being reactive to McClellan?
I can sorta-kinda puzzle out something that sort of makes sense, but it involves a lot of dubious reasoning and assumes McClellan wanted to draw Lee away from Richmond (which would have been a good goal, but doesn't seem to be what he intended based on what he wrote). Hopefully 67th's explanation is better than mine.
Snake Featherston
Banned
The Confederacy gets a second Braxton Bragg, the Union sees the Army of the Potomac formed and used to actually win battles, the Civil War is shorter and less socially revolutionary, which is far from necessarily a good thing. Bragg ends up looking better by comparison to McClellan who becomes another Joe Johnston, more famous for what he might have done than anything he actually did.
McClellan probably gets walloped by Grant or Thomas.
McClellan probably gets walloped by Grant or Thomas.
Snake Featherston
Banned
It would make a difference-Joe Johnston and Braxton Bragg would look better by comparison by far.
Bollocks. What Joe Hooker did before the Chancellorsville Campaign and George Thomas's creating an army out of a mixture of what nobody else wanted in a few weeks before the Battle of Nashville argue that this is very much *not* the case. If anything the US Army starts moving earlier and with 120,000 soldiers against Joe "I can't fight, I might have to work for a living" Johnston that's only going to be good for the Union.
He would have made John Floyd and John Pemberton look like geniuses.
Actually for all but one of those battles Fitz-John Porter won. He continued to inflict crippling casualties on a Confederate army whose leadership couldn't add 2 and 2 to get 4 and which in the word of one of the Hills was "lavish with blood in those days." Had McClellan been like George Thomas, or even William Sherman Richmond would have fallen somewhere after the Battle of Malvern Hill if not before that. Instead he liked dining with French aristocrats and leaving it to Fitz-John Porter to be the Grant to his Halleck and then accusing Porter of losing when he was winning.
That's unjust. Thomas routed Confederate armies, and had the same ability to get good luck in carload lots and brutalize the CSA whenever its generals made even little mistakes. Where McClellan won all but two of his battles with Lee due to having subordinates who were fighters.
Er, no. Lee tried to wipe out McClellan's army, but his plans to do this kept failing thanks to the CS Sherman (Stonewall Jackson) and Fitz-John Porter walloped the Army of Northern Virginia over and over again. Only McClellan would have turned Oak Grove, White Oak Swamp, and particularly Malvern Hill into a complete and utter defeat where Lincoln "had done your best to sacrifice this army." He was the best general the CSA ever had.
That tends to happen when the battles are the entire Confederate army against the one Corps in the early 1862 Army of the Potomac willing to actually *mix it up* with them, and even then the Corps of Porter had all the advantages and used them well.
Actually Grant's situation was *less* favorable. Grant had to deal with a design where two elements of it failed and with the problem of political generals and having to handle the seniority issue. The command structure in the Overland campaign was as bulky as any in military history and despite that Grant broke Lee's army in eight weeks and trapped him in the kind of battle the CSA could never win.
His achievements are interpreting victory as defeat, relying on subordinates who could actually fight (that is to say Rosecrans in what became West Virginia and Porter in the Seven Days, and leaving Antietam entirely to Burnside, Sumner, and Hooker) while being too far backward of the line, to ludicrous extents at Malvern Hill, and getting credit for doing in months what Joe Hooker did in weeks. The same Joe Hooker who got curbstomped at Chancellorsville. The example of PGT Beauregard, who was the actual general behind Pittsburg Landing, who oversaw the successful land defense of Charleston, and who saved the CSA at First Petersburg argues that McClellan was in fact a Semyon Budenny.
In fairness to McClellan, building an army from scratch is harder than merely rebuilding it after a pummeling.
It still makes me favor Joe Johnston as the one who should get credit, if anyone, for being an Builder of Armies in turning his force from something that resembled an armed mob to something that resembled what became one of the war's top five armies (if admittedly #3 or #4 on the list) for fighting determination.
The Army of Tennessee being #1, for the curious.
Here's a challenge for you. McClellan vs. Polk.
It still makes me favor Joe Johnston as the one who should get credit, if anyone, for being an Builder of Armies in turning his force from something that resembled an armed mob to something that resembled what became one of the war's top five armies (if admittedly #3 or #4 on the list) for fighting determination.
The Army of Tennessee being #1, for the curious.
Here's a challenge for you. McClellan vs. Polk.
Snake Featherston
Banned
True. Though McClellan didn't exactly build it out of scratch, and the degree of disorganization after First Bull Run tends to be exaggerated. People overlook that in its first battle the US Army of Northeastern Virginia almost defeated the CS Army of the Potomac, only for a SNAFU to turn into a FUBAR. That indicates that McDowell wasn't exactly a Budenny-type.
McClellan, when compared to what George H. Thomas did before the Battle of Nashville, or Phil Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley, comes across no better than he does in anything else. He *did* build a brilliant army and was a tolerable man with logistics, but his personality defects show that even when actually rather successful he was always viewing himself as defeated.
As far as Leonidas Polk........eh, he beat Grant at Belmont (to be fair, so did Rosecrans beat Lee at Cheat Mountain, which doesn't say much about either Lee or Rosecrans at that stage) but he was too busy disobeying orders to be counted anything but a good intriguer. McClellan's armies at least obeyed orders half-heartedly and won more than they lost.
Agreed. The "build it from scratch" is more how the Army of Northeastern Virginia wasn't - despite McDowell's efforts - much of a nucleus to build from, partially due to three month regiments.
Ugh, Sheridan. And yeah, McClellan always portrayed himself as either losing or in danger of losing. A little of Hooker's pre-Chancellorsville conviction that Lee will either fly or die would have gone a long way post Antietam to turn the ANV from battered to broken - maybe not destroyed depending on the details, but certainly pulverized. That army should not have been able to withdraw basically intact, with the most dramatic loss for the rearguard being Pendleton losing four artillery pieces.
Yeah.
It would be interesting to see the two in the same army. Interesting in a psychological study sort of way.
Sufficient to say, whoever had seniority would deserve the other one.
Snake Featherston
Banned
Precisely. Any competent organizer of the time could have done this. Thomas did it much faster under much more pressing conditions and proceeded to fight the most Napoleonic battle of the war. And that really *was* from scratch.
Actually, simply following the OTL plan as a single attack at the same time would have broken the Army of Northern Virginia had the Army of the Potomac committed all its resources. That required a leader who was actually a field commander, which McClellan was not.
Yes.....
I can only pity the poor man who'd have to handle *that* kettle of catfish. Yeah. I'm not sure how to compare the resources they were working with, but Thomas had more things against him and did it better as well as faster.
I mean, this odds-and-ends army not only routed the AoT but shattered it as an army.
Well, there is that. But even without "all its resources", more effective use of what was committed should have done more to keep the ANV from reassembling as an effective fighting force in the near future.
Yes.....
Is it wrong to say that it makes Bragg and Polk look like a minor quibble?
Bragg was conscientious to the point of neurosis, but not as egoistical or loud.
Snake Featherston
Banned
Where McClellan's brilliantly-built army wins most of its battles but all those victories are perpetually seen as defeats.
Lee had only one line of retreat, and an offensive all along the line would have overtaxed his resources to render retreat in any significant sense impossible.
Not at all. As at least Bragg knew he won Chickamauga.
Fearless Leader
Donor
Valuable discussion on the merits of McClellan as a commander aside, I think this discussion is missing a rather large part of the ramifications of the initial point of divergence. Namely, that if Lil' Mac heads south, then there will undoubtedly be a different commander in the North who will undoubtedly follow a different strategy than McClellan and in so doing drastically alter the course of the war.
Given that the runner up for McClellan in replacing Winfield Scott as the Commanding General of the Northern Armies was Halleck (Scott's preferred choice IIRC) and that Rosecrans would in all likelihood receive the same credit Mac did in West Virginia (Mac's absence doesn't change the overall result of that campaign IMO). Perhaps in TTL we see Halleck become General in Chief and Rosecrans become head of the AotP?
What kind of strategy would these two follow? Given Halleck's performance in the west, I'd imagine he'd try to assemble a gargantuan AotP before going overland via the shortest route towards Richmond (no Peninsula campaign).
Thoughts? Comments?
Given that the runner up for McClellan in replacing Winfield Scott as the Commanding General of the Northern Armies was Halleck (Scott's preferred choice IIRC) and that Rosecrans would in all likelihood receive the same credit Mac did in West Virginia (Mac's absence doesn't change the overall result of that campaign IMO). Perhaps in TTL we see Halleck become General in Chief and Rosecrans become head of the AotP?
What kind of strategy would these two follow? Given Halleck's performance in the west, I'd imagine he'd try to assemble a gargantuan AotP before going overland via the shortest route towards Richmond (no Peninsula campaign).
Thoughts? Comments?