Lincoln Fires McClellan—But Isn’t Rid of Him

The message from President Abraham Lincoln was dated November 5, 1862—145 years ago today. It was terse and unadorned. “By direction of the President,” it said, “it is ordered that Major-General McClellan be relieved from the command of the Army of the Potomac, and that Major-General Burnside take the command of that army.” The recipient of the order, George B. McClellan, should not have been surprised.

Relations between Lincoln and McClellan had been strained for months. Lincoln favored a far more aggressive strategy against the Confederacy than McClellan wanted to adopt, and the two men increasingly disagreed on tactical matters as well. Still, less than two years into the Civil War, removing his commanding officer was a dramatic step for Lincoln to take. By doing so, the President cemented his antagonism with McClellan and enabled the general to act as an advocate for Lincoln’s political opponents. But at the same time, Lincoln brought the Union Army a little closer to a winning military strategy.

At first glance, the West Point–trained McClellan would not have seemed the kind of man who would end up getting fired by his Commander in Chief. He was a charming man, capable of charismatic and winning gestures, and held in high esteem by the rank-and-file soldiers he supervised. Though his historical reputation has been largely defined by his inauspicious exit from the armed forces, some have argued, including Jon Grinspan at AmericanHeritage.com, that his early performance in the Civil War was an important element to the Union’s long-term success. In states like Kentucky, McClellan worked to keep Republican abolitionists in check and thereby prevented conservative border-state residents from seceding. Indeed, he was so eager to placate the Confederacy’s potential allies that he went so far as to use his soldiers, throughout 1861, to recapture escaped slaves in the border states.

But though his instincts for caution and moderation may have helped him keep a few extra states under the Union banner, they put him at a terrible disadvantage on the battlefield. In the first 20 months of the war, he passed up repeated opportunities to confront the Confederate Army on favorable ground. In April 1862 his divisions faced a Confederate force at Yorktown, Virginia. Initially, the Union possessed an enormous numerical advantage: McClellan had 58,000 men at his disposal, with only 11,000 Confederates arrayed against him. Against all wisdom, he passed up an immediate assault, declaring it “simple folly.” In September of the same year, at the Battle of Antietam, he again chose a course of restraint. He kept back more than half his strength and attacked the Confederate forces in futile, numerically weak forays. These tactics produced the single bloodiest day in American history.

McClellan was not just timid on the battlefield; he was also uneasy about pushing his men physically, and he kept marches to a moderate 10 to 12 miles a day. Throughout his time in command, he telegraphed pessimistic messages to Lincoln, bemoaning his Army’s “desperate” fighting and describing the Confederate Army in unrealistic, alarmist terms.

Lincoln quickly tired of McClellan’s timidity. By the time he fired the general, the frustrated President probably would have agreed with the military historian who later wrote, “If [McClellan] had had his way, the invading army would have so conducted itself in Virginia that not a fence post would have been destroyed.” Time and again, Lincoln wrote to his subordinate urging him to act aggressively. When he learned of McClellan’s hesitation before Yorktown, for example, he telegraphed a message saying, “I think you better break the enemy’s line from Yorktown to Warwick River at once.” McClellan not only failed to comply with Lincoln’s suggestion but also seemed positively peeved that the Commander in Chief would interfere in the prosecution of the war. He wrote to his wife: “The Presdt very coolly telegraphed me yesterday that he thought I had better break the enemy’s lines at once! I was much tempted to reply that he had better come & do it himself.”

Unfortunately for Lincoln, firing General McClellan eliminated only part of his problem. With McClellan out of the way as a military leader, he could begin searching for more forceful commanders. After a series of false starts, he would eventually settle on Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. But now he had to deal with a new political threat—from George McClellan. Northern Democrats smelled blood in the political water after the 1862 congressional elections, and public dissatisfaction with Lincoln’s leadership ran high. Democratic leaders began to wonder whether they might be able to win an election against Lincoln by nominating, as their standard-bearer, the general Lincoln had treated so roughly. When he was approached about running for President, McClellan consented.

In a rare turn of good luck for the sixteenth President, his political and military fortunes both took a sharp turn for the better as the autumn of 1864 began. In August, Adm. David Farragut won the battle of Mobile Bay, providing a boost to Union morale. Then, in the first days of September, General Sherman marched into Atlanta, wiring back to Washington his famous message: “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” Suddenly the President’s military assertiveness seemed much more sensible. McClellan’s record as a general, and his party’s attitude toward the war, began to rapidly lose their appeal. On November 8, 1864, almost two years to the day after he had removed McClellan from command, Lincoln dispatched the man once and for all, this time at the polls.

Reflecting on his electoral defeat, McClellan wrote, “I was fully prepared for the result and not in the slightest degree overcome by it. For my country’s sake, I deplore the result. . . . I feel that a great weight is removed from my mind.” Judging from their graceful but disappointed tone, these words could just have easily been composed after McClellan’s earlier confrontation with the President. This time, though, McClellan was out of the war for good.