Thoughts on this take on Lincoln's civil war strategy?

[Aurelius]

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-bicentennial-lincolns/

This is a summary of James McPherson's thesis on Abraham Lincoln's military strategy in Virginia during the civil war, as written by Allen Guelzo. Both of these men are giants of Civil War scholarship, but this take is very different than the conventional one - that McClellan was a dawdler afraid of his own shadow, and that Grant was the one, after a long series of failed Virginia generals, who finally grasped the importance of taking advantage of the North's numerical and material superiority and taking the fight directly to Lee's army itself.

(very, very long article... CTRL+F to find the quoted section)

But what, actually, did Lincoln learn from his autodidactic pursuit of military science? The standard textbooks of the day were written under the spell of Napoleon Bonaparte, and they hewed to the belief that victory in war was the product of single, decisive battles in which one side, in one massive stroke, disabled the opposing army and compelled its political leadership to come to the peace table. This might have served Napoleon's purposes at Jena and Austerlitz. But by the 1850s, field armies had swollen to dimensions which ensured that single-stroke, "decisive" victories would be impossible. What would certainly cripple an enemy army, however, would be to shift the blow to the enemy's logistics—lines of supplies, depots, and manufacturing centers—since these newly-gargantuan armies had stomachs which no mere foraging on the countryside could any longer satisfy. McClellan, curiously, understood this, and so his initial plans for war-making were aimed at the Confederacy's logistical centers, rather than at its field armies. Hence McClellan's grand plan to side-step the rebel army in Virginia, shift his own Army of the Potomac by water to the James River peninsula, and hit the Confederate capital at Richmond through its back door.

But Lincoln, who already had ample reason to resent McClellan's unconcealed contempt for the president he called "the original gorilla," interpreted McClellan's strategy as politics, not warfare—as a desire to avoid a straight-up, knock-down confrontation with the rebels. When Robert E. Lee and the Confederate army turned the tables on McClellan and ripped out McClellan's own logistical wiring during the Seven Days' Battles, McClellan hastily retreated. This looked to Lincoln like cowardice, not prudence, and when Lincoln finally relieved him of command in November 1862, he was adamant that McClellan's successors stop fooling around with plans to take Richmond, and drive up the middle, overland, to slug it out with Robert E. Lee and the Confederate army. "Lee's Army," he told Joseph Hooker, "and not Richmond, is your true objective point."

But was it? Obediently, a succession of generals—Burnside, Hooker, Meade—struggled to follow Lincoln's directive, and ended up with nothing to show for it but indecisive collisions with the rebels. When Lincoln brought Ulysses S. Grant to take control in Virginia in 1864, Grant was handed the same mandate. But Grant enjoyed Lincoln's political confidence like no other of the generals, and after another resultless string of stalemates, from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor, Grant prevailed on Lincoln to let him try the McClellan strategy below the James River. The result was a siege of Richmond and Petersburg which drained the life out of Lee's army, and when Lee finally broke away and tried to make a run for it in April 1865, the rebel army, lacking a logistical base, stumbled and collapsed into Grant's arms. The same pattern held true elsewhere in the war—it was not the defeat of rebel armies at Perryville or Murfreesboro, but the capture of Chattanooga and Atlanta, which wrecked the Confederacy's war-making capacity. In retrospect, Lincoln's directive to make "Lee's army…your true objective" was almost the worst advice a commander-in-chief could have given in the 19th century. Which only goes to show that even a great man cannot be wise in everything. But we do not even catch a glimmer of this from Tried By War.

[vitoNova]

Reading between-the-lines in the passage above--and with basic knowledge of 10th grade American history--it's quite obvious George McLennan had undercover Dixiecrat sympathies and thus his heart and soul was not fully committed to abolition and emancipation.   So Lincoln was right in giving him the boot.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

This is an interesting take, and one I had not considered before; however, I still think Lincoln's (and history's) indictment of McClellan is deserved. The Civil War may well have shown the wisdom of targeting "lines of supplies, depots, and manufacturing centers," but it was still a war and it was still necessary to confront the AoNV and defeat it in battle. This McClellan was unwilling to do, and he squandered multiple opportunities to take Richmond and punish Johnston's/Lee's army during the Peninsular Campaign. If McClellan understood his activities on the peninsula as a modern war campaign targeting logistics, he was nevertheless a failure by this count as well.

Guelzo is indeed a giant of Civil War scholarship, but there are times when I think he jumps the horse a little, and this is one of them.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Anyways, I highly recommend reading the full article, because this historical cat fighting is hilarious.

The most unashamed bid to transform Lincoln into a usable historical commodity emerges from the pages of Eric Foner's collection of essays, Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, in which Foner unblushingly claims that "Lincoln remains in many ways our contemporary." This is, to say the least, a quixotic anthology: of its eleven contributors, only four have ever published anything substantial about Lincoln, and of those four, only two—Harold Holzer and Richard Carwardine—have really built scholarly reputations around the study of Lincoln. At least Holzer and Carwardine have something worth saying. As for the other seven, their chief credential for inclusion in this book seems to be a more than routine case of left-wing holy-rolling.

[Aurelius]

Anyways, I highly recommend reading the full article, because this historical cat fighting is hilarious.

The most unashamed bid to transform Lincoln into a usable historical commodity emerges from the pages of Eric Foner's collection of essays, Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, in which Foner unblushingly claims that "Lincoln remains in many ways our contemporary." This is, to say the least, a quixotic anthology: of its eleven contributors, only four have ever published anything substantial about Lincoln, and of those four, only two—Harold Holzer and Richard Carwardine—have really built scholarly reputations around the study of Lincoln. At least Holzer and Carwardine have something worth saying. As for the other seven, their chief credential for inclusion in this book seems to be a more than routine case of left-wing holy-rolling.

It gets even better: the Claremont Review published quite a bit of correspondence they received about the essay, including something from at least one of the people Guelzo raked over the coals.

Read it here.

I stumbled on all this while looking for critical reviews of Burlingame's two volume biography after I finished reading it. It's a goldmine.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Anyways, I highly recommend reading the full article, because this historical cat fighting is hilarious.

The most unashamed bid to transform Lincoln into a usable historical commodity emerges from the pages of Eric Foner's collection of essays, Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, in which Foner unblushingly claims that "Lincoln remains in many ways our contemporary." This is, to say the least, a quixotic anthology: of its eleven contributors, only four have ever published anything substantial about Lincoln, and of those four, only two—Harold Holzer and Richard Carwardine—have really built scholarly reputations around the study of Lincoln. At least Holzer and Carwardine have something worth saying. As for the other seven, their chief credential for inclusion in this book seems to be a more than routine case of left-wing holy-rolling.

It gets even better: the Claremont Review published quite a bit of correspondence they received about the essay, including something from at least one of the people Guelzo raked over the coals.

Read it here.

I stumbled on all this while looking for critical reviews of Burlingame's two volume biography after I finished reading it. It's a goldmine.

lmao

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Relevant reply to Guelzo by John C. Briggs from the above-linked rebuttals:

Guelzo argues that the dominant military doctrine of the time, shaped by the influence of Napoleon Bonaparte, saw victory in war as the result of a war-winning, decisive battle of annihilation along the lines of the emperor's defeat of the Third Coalition at Austerlitz in 1805 and the of Prussians at Jena-Auerstadt in 1806. He contends that such decisive battles were impossible by the 1850s because of the size of field armies, and that therefore Lincoln's directive to his generals to focus on defeating the Rebel armies was "almost the worst advice a commander-in-chief could have given in the 19th century." Guelzo asserts that the proper focus instead should have been on destroying the Confederate logistical system.

This assessment is flawed in a number of ways. First, it was impossible to get at the Confederacy's logistical infrastructure without first defeating the Rebel field armies. It is true, as Guelzo claims, that it was the capture of Chattanooga and Atlanta that wrecked the Confederacy's war-making capacity, but to capture those places required Grant and Sherman to first fix and defeat the Confederate Army of Tennessee that barred the way to those cities.

The bloody Union victory at Shiloh was not decisive, but it led to the capture of the important rail junction at Corinth, Mississippi. Neither were the Union victories at Perryville and Murfreesboro, but they were the necessary precursors to the capture of Chattanooga, which allowed the Union to penetrate the Appalachian barrier and open the way to Atlanta.

Second, the real problem of Union generals early in the way was not that they operated under the spell of Bonaparte, but under the spell of Baron Antoine Henri Jomini, the renowned military theorist, from whom they learned that the purpose of a campaign was to maneuver an opponent out of position without actually fighting him. This was the true curse of those steeped in the military theory of the day, especially McClelland, Buell, and Halleck, who did seek to destroy the Confederacy's logistical infrastructure while avoiding battle.

Third, there were decisive victories in the mid-19th century: the Prussians over the Austrians at Konnigratz-Sadowa in 1866 and over the French at Sedan in 1870. In addition, there were two "near misses" by the Confederacy that could well have changed the outcome of the war: Bragg's Army of Tennessee came close to annihilating Rosecrans's Army of the Cumberland at Chickamauga and Lee came astoundingly close to victory on the second day at Gettysburg.

In my 2009 monograph on the topic of Lincoln as war president, Abraham Lincoln: Democratic Statesmanship in War, I claimed that Lincoln intuitively understood war in a Clausewitzian sense and that part of this understanding was that the field armies of the Confederacy constituted the "center of gravity" for the Union effort. Although there were no decisive battles of annihilation, even the war of attrition that the Civil War became required the Union to defeat Confederate field armies.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Clausewitz vs. Jomini, always hated that underdefined set of options towards the start of Victoria: Revolutions, especially when you click it by accident.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

It is interesting how American progressives have been creating a new founding mythos of America in the Civil War and Reconstruction as a rival to and replacement for the tainted-by-slavery cult of the Founding Fathers.

[Aurelius]

It is interesting how American progressives have been creating a new founding mythos of America in the Civil War and Reconstruction as a rival to and replacement for the tainted-by-slavery cult of the Founding Fathers.

Yes. And even though the Just Cause narrative is much closer to the mark than the Lost Cause narrative, the last few years it's increasingly gotten in the way of objective analysis of both the Civil War itself and that era of American history as a whole.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Just Cause narrative

ftr, this term is only ever used by deranged Lost Cause conspiracists and pseudo-historians attempting to create a false equivalency between legitimate scholarship and their drivel. Gotta be careful about this stuff.

[Aurelius]

Just Cause narrative

ftr, this term is only ever used by deranged Lost Cause conspiracists and pseudo-historians attempting to create a false equivalency between legitimate scholarship and their drivel. Gotta be careful about this stuff.

What's the generally used term then? I didn't know this - I saw it somewhere on something explaining the four big schools of civil war historiography - it called these schools Lost Cause, Just Cause, Reconciliation, and some fourth one I forget. And to be clear I'm not talking about mainstream scholarship but the sort of stuff like raging against Lincoln for not immediately declaring emancipation as the goal of the war, countermanding Fremont's declaration, etc.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Just Cause narrative

ftr, this term is only ever used by deranged Lost Cause conspiracists and pseudo-historians attempting to create a false equivalency between legitimate scholarship and their drivel. Gotta be careful about this stuff.

What's the generally used term then? I didn't know this - I saw it somewhere on something explaining the four big schools of civil war historiography - it called these schools Lost Cause, Just Cause, Reconciliation, and some fourth one I forget. And to be clear I'm not talking about mainstream scholarship but the sort of stuff like raging against Lincoln for not immediately declaring emancipation as the goal of the war, countermanding Fremont's declaration, etc.

Gary Gallagher's established four schools in a video I saw on C-span about 4 years ago:

Union Restoration: Faded between 1900 and 1930 - Basically what is says on the tin. The War was necessary to preserve the union and eliminate slavery as a threat to that. Regards the South as traitors, was carried along by the presence of the GAR (part of the reason why it declined in the period mentioned is the veterans dying off). You had veterans groups who opposed Confederate statues at Gettysburg for instance.

Liberation School: Declined in late 19th century, massive revival in late 20th century- This was one popular among African-American figures, basically centered around the war being a necessary to purge the US of the sin of slavery.

The Reconciliation School: Dominant view for much of the 20th century - This is the one that you often here from say Fuzzy Bear and was espoused in a 1990s C-span clip on Youtube by Shelby Foote of their being some kind of "Grand Compromise whereby the South acknowledges slavery had to go, but the North acknowledges that the South gave a good fight for a noble cause". I am horribly butchering this quote, and I suggest finding the original videos but it basically drains the Civil War of purpose and leads to phrases that you often heard some decades ago "A pointless war between brothers" and Gallagher points to a stamp or something from the 1970s that was basically along the lines of "Why did we ever fight?"  

The Lost Cause: Dominant view in the South from the late 19th century until late 20th century, has experienced a massive resurgence thanks to the internet. Seeks to recast the Civil War away from race and slavery, to one of state's rights and "free trade". Venerates Lee and other Confederate Generals, denounces figures like Longstreet and overemphasizes material advantages of the North, while discounting the ability of Union commanders like Grant and Sherman.

[Aurelius]

Just Cause narrative

ftr, this term is only ever used by deranged Lost Cause conspiracists and pseudo-historians attempting to create a false equivalency between legitimate scholarship and their drivel. Gotta be careful about this stuff.

What's the generally used term then? I didn't know this - I saw it somewhere on something explaining the four big schools of civil war historiography - it called these schools Lost Cause, Just Cause, Reconciliation, and some fourth one I forget. And to be clear I'm not talking about mainstream scholarship but the sort of stuff like raging against Lincoln for not immediately declaring emancipation as the goal of the war, countermanding Fremont's declaration, etc.

Gary Gallagher's established four schools in a video I saw on C-span about 4 years ago:

Union Restoration: Faded between 1900 and 1930 - Basically what is says on the tin. The War was necessary to preserve the union and eliminate slavery as a threat to that. Regards the South as traitors, was carried along by the presence of the GAR (part of the reason why it declined in the period mentioned is the veterans dying off). You had veterans groups who opposed Confederate statues at Gettysburg for instance.

Liberation School: Declined in late 19th century, massive revival in late 20th century- This was one popular among African-American figures, basically centered around the war being a necessary to purge the US of the sin of slavery.

The Reconciliation School: Dominant view for much of the 20th century - This is the one that you often here from say Fuzzy Bear and was espoused in a 1990s C-span clip on Youtube by Shelby Foote of their being some kind of "Grand Compromise whereby the South acknowledges slavery had to go, but the North acknowledges that the South gave a good fight for a noble cause". I am horribly butchering this quote, and I suggest finding the original videos but it basically drains the Civil War of purpose and leads to phrases that you often heard some decades ago "A pointless war between brothers" and Gallagher points to a stamp or something from the 1970s that was basically along the lines of "Why did we ever fight?"  

The Lost Cause: Dominant view in the South from the late 19th century until late 20th century, has experienced a massive resurgence thanks to the internet. Seeks to recast the Civil War away from race and slavery, to one of state's rights and "free trade". Venerates Lee and other Confederate Generals, denounces figures like Longstreet and overemphasizes material advantages of the North, while discounting the ability of Union commanders like Grant and Sherman.

Gotcha. Sounds like the general consensus is a synthesis of the Union Restoration and Liberation schools, perhaps leaning toward the former. And the stuff I was taking issue with was the radical fringe of the Liberation school.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Just Cause narrative

ftr, this term is only ever used by deranged Lost Cause conspiracists and pseudo-historians attempting to create a false equivalency between legitimate scholarship and their drivel. Gotta be careful about this stuff.

What's the generally used term then? I didn't know this - I saw it somewhere on something explaining the four big schools of civil war historiography - it called these schools Lost Cause, Just Cause, Reconciliation, and some fourth one I forget. And to be clear I'm not talking about mainstream scholarship but the sort of stuff like raging against Lincoln for not immediately declaring emancipation as the goal of the war, countermanding Fremont's declaration, etc.

Gary Gallagher's established four schools in a video I saw on C-span about 4 years ago:

Union Restoration: Faded between 1900 and 1930 - Basically what is says on the tin. The War was necessary to preserve the union and eliminate slavery as a threat to that. Regards the South as traitors, was carried along by the presence of the GAR (part of the reason why it declined in the period mentioned is the veterans dying off). You had veterans groups who opposed Confederate statues at Gettysburg for instance.

Liberation School: Declined in late 19th century, massive revival in late 20th century- This was one popular among African-American figures, basically centered around the war being a necessary to purge the US of the sin of slavery.

The Reconciliation School: Dominant view for much of the 20th century - This is the one that you often here from say Fuzzy Bear and was espoused in a 1990s C-span clip on Youtube by Shelby Foote of their being some kind of "Grand Compromise whereby the South acknowledges slavery had to go, but the North acknowledges that the South gave a good fight for a noble cause". I am horribly butchering this quote, and I suggest finding the original videos but it basically drains the Civil War of purpose and leads to phrases that you often heard some decades ago "A pointless war between brothers" and Gallagher points to a stamp or something from the 1970s that was basically along the lines of "Why did we ever fight?"  

The Lost Cause: Dominant view in the South from the late 19th century until late 20th century, has experienced a massive resurgence thanks to the internet. Seeks to recast the Civil War away from race and slavery, to one of state's rights and "free trade". Venerates Lee and other Confederate Generals, denounces figures like Longstreet and overemphasizes material advantages of the North, while discounting the ability of Union commanders like Grant and Sherman.

Gotcha. Sounds like the general consensus is a synthesis of the Union Restoration and Liberation schools, perhaps leaning toward the former. And the stuff I was taking issue with was the radical fringe of the Liberation school.

The decline of the Lost Cause has basically crippled the Reconciliation consensus and since the Lost Cause is built on a number of factual inaccuracies, this arguably was a given to occur once an objective analysis of the Civil War occurred. This took place in the last 30 years and explains why as recently as the early 1990s Shelby Foote was regarded with high esteem among respectable Civil War scholars and now is regarded much less so.

Gallagher attributed the revival of liberation school to the success of movies like Glory and in its aftermath you have monuments start to be built honoring the contributions of black soldiers in the war. This is a good thing mind you.

The revival of union preservation/restoration is a natural outflow of the collapse of its opponents. Once you acknowledge that the war was about slavery and that the excesses of southern radicals were at virtually every stage what pushed the country to war, it becomes the natural consensus position that yes the South brought upon itself its own cataclysm and that the war was indeed necessary after that point, the union had to be preserved and slavery was both a threat to the union and to the founding principles of the country.

The Confederacy's existence and its justification is built on a untenable premise, that cannot reasonably be defended if one takes and objective view of the historical record of the period leading up to the Civil War. The "foote consensus is thus dead" because it was built in large part on a lie.

What has happened since though, is indeed the replacement of one identitarian historiagraphy with another. Both take the same approach but from opposite directions and the key indicators are often myopic focus on a single thing and/or massive historical revisionism. Revulsion to this extremist, is now creating its own polarized feedback loop and combined with people who were conditioned for years to accept the South's cause as noble, and combined with the post fact world of the internet, means that the gains against the Lost Cause in the 1990s and 2000s are being obliterated.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Gotcha. Sounds like the general consensus is a synthesis of the Union Restoration and Liberation schools, perhaps leaning toward the former. And the stuff I was taking issue with was the radical fringe of the Liberation school.

When it comes to hysterical Twitterati pundits complaining that Lincoln didn't end slavery on his first day in office, these people generally aren't historians and aren't part of any academic school. In my experience, this analysis is almost always the result of ignorance colored by a general skepticism of whatever is perceived to be the "conventional" narrative around American history, and Lincoln's reputation as the "Great Emancipator" is exactly the sort of mainstream popular interpretation that becomes a lightning rod for people who have a vague sense that things are more complicated than that, but aren't sure how. The insular and exclusive nature of academia, where even today there is still an allergy to popular commercial success in some circles, means that most history for a general audience is being written by journalists, novelists, etc. who don't have an academic background in history and as such often simply lack context for something like the Greeley letter (plus are motivated by a need to sell copies of their book/magazine/documentary, which is better aided by the headline "LINCOLN RACIST???" than a more measured "Flawed Historical Figure Represents Gradual Change Over Time").

I'm sure you're very familiar with the sorts of criticisms of Lincoln that get fielded by serious historians, but I'm yet to run across the kind of sensationalist narrative you're describing in an academic history: nuance and complexity, sure, but not partisan invective. "All history is politics," and much like the Lost Cause, it is more the domain of culture warriors than scholars these days.

[Storr]

Anyways, I highly recommend reading the full article, because this historical cat fighting is hilarious.

The most unashamed bid to transform Lincoln into a usable historical commodity emerges from the pages of Eric Foner's collection of essays, Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, in which Foner unblushingly claims that "Lincoln remains in many ways our contemporary." This is, to say the least, a quixotic anthology: of its eleven contributors, only four have ever published anything substantial about Lincoln, and of those four, only two—Harold Holzer and Richard Carwardine—have really built scholarly reputations around the study of Lincoln. At least Holzer and Carwardine have something worth saying. As for the other seven, their chief credential for inclusion in this book seems to be a more than routine case of left-wing holy-rolling.

It gets even better: the Claremont Review published quite a bit of correspondence they received about the essay, including something from at least one of the people Guelzo raked over the coals.

Read it here.

I stumbled on all this while looking for critical reviews of Burlingame's two volume biography after I finished reading it. It's a goldmine.

LMAO: "Like many self-esteem projects, however, it tends to function in a vacuum of evidence."

[Cassandra]

What has happened since though, is indeed the replacement of one identitarian historiagraphy with another. Both take the same approach but from opposite directions and the key indicators are often myopic focus on a single thing and/or massive historical revisionism. Revulsion to this extremist, is now creating its own polarized feedback loop and combined with people who were conditioned for years to accept the South's cause as noble, and combined with the post fact world of the internet, means that the gains against the Lost Cause in the 1990s and 2000s are being obliterated.

When it comes to hysterical Twitterati pundits complaining that Lincoln didn't end slavery on his first day in office, these people generally aren't historians and aren't part of any academic school. In my experience, this analysis is almost always the result of ignorance colored by a general skepticism of whatever is perceived to be the "conventional" narrative around American history, and Lincoln's reputation as the "Great Emancipator" is exactly the sort of mainstream popular interpretation that becomes a lightning rod for people who have a vague sense that things are more complicated than that, but aren't sure how. The insular and exclusive nature of academia, where even today there is still an allergy to popular commercial success in some circles, means that most history for a general audience is being written by journalists, novelists, etc. who don't have an academic background in history and as such often simply lack context for something like the Greeley letter (plus are motivated by a need to sell copies of their book/magazine/documentary, which is better aided by the headline "LINCOLN RACIST???" than a more measured "Flawed Historical Figure Represents Gradual Change Over Time").

These two paragraphs rhyme quite well. The culture war turning its gaze to the American Civil War has been an absolute disaster. Social media power-users making specious takes off of historical documents ripped from their context is the fuel for the current backlash against "CRT" and high school history teachers more generally. The entire situation is depressing. I can't help but feel that the only way out of this destructive loop is to "fix the algorithms." Whether that means regulating social media platforms as utilities, nationalizing and reprogramming them, or shutting them down entirely, I have no idea. But if this trend continues, I don't see a way out of some new form of civil conflict exploding violently in the coming years.

[Samof94]

Reading between-the-lines in the passage above--and with basic knowledge of 10th grade American history--it's quite obvious George McLennan had undercover Dixiecrat sympathies and thus his heart and soul was not fully committed to abolition and emancipation.   So Lincoln was right in giving him the boot.

There’s a reason why he ran for President.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Reading between-the-lines in the passage above--and with basic knowledge of 10th grade American history--it's quite obvious George McLennan had undercover Dixiecrat sympathies and thus his heart and soul was not fully committed to abolition and emancipation.   So Lincoln was right in giving him the boot.

There’s a reason why he ran for President.

Personally, I doubt McClellan was actively rooting for a Confederate victory—his letter accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in 1864 famously rejected the peace platform adopted by the party's national convention that year—but what is absolutely true is McClellan's particular brand of unionism (coming from the doughface Democrat school of accommodation rather than the Lincoln/Seward school of the "irrepressible conflict") left him inclined to go easy on the Confederacy in hopes of leaving the door open for an eventual settlement that would restore "the Union as it was" (i.e. with slavery intact). He certainly did not want to revolutionize the South and hoped that a massive display of force would cause Confederates to come to their senses without any major effusion of blood being necessary. Many Republicans took a similar yet distinct view early in the war, believing secession was only supported by the slaveholding upper classes and that a strong popular unionism existed among the poor white population that would assert itself once the war turned against the Confederacy. This, of course, failed to materialized much outside of pockets of east Tennessee and western Virginia, and by 1864 most Republicans—but not Democrats—had accepted that the Confederate population, and not just its armies, would have to be defeated in order to end slavery and restore the Union.

[Samof94]

Reading between-the-lines in the passage above--and with basic knowledge of 10th grade American history--it's quite obvious George McLennan had undercover Dixiecrat sympathies and thus his heart and soul was not fully committed to abolition and emancipation.   So Lincoln was right in giving him the boot.

There’s a reason why he ran for President.

Personally, I doubt McClellan was actively rooting for a Confederate victory—his letter accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in 1864 famously rejected the peace platform adopted by the party's national convention that year—but what is absolutely true is McClellan's particular brand of unionism (coming from the doughface Democrat school of accommodation rather than the Lincoln/Seward school of the "irrepressible conflict") left him inclined to go easy on the Confederacy in hopes of leaving the door open for an eventual settlement that would restore "the Union as it was" (i.e. with slavery intact). He certainly did not want to revolutionize the South and hoped that a massive display of force would cause Confederates to come to their senses without any major effusion of blood being necessary. Many Republicans took a similar yet distinct view early in the war, believing secession was only supported by the slaveholding upper classes and that a strong popular unionism existed among the poor white population that would assert itself once the war turned against the Confederacy. This, of course, failed to materialized much outside of pockets of east Tennessee and western Virginia, and by 1864 most Republicans—but not Democrats—had accepted that the Confederate population, and not just its armies, would have to be defeated in order to end slavery and restore the Union.

He was one of the copperheads as well. The white southern populace did have some desertions from the military but kept fighting for racial reasons.

[Aurelius]

Reading between-the-lines in the passage above--and with basic knowledge of 10th grade American history--it's quite obvious George McLennan had undercover Dixiecrat sympathies and thus his heart and soul was not fully committed to abolition and emancipation.   So Lincoln was right in giving him the boot.

There’s a reason why he ran for President.

Personally, I doubt McClellan was actively rooting for a Confederate victory—his letter accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in 1864 famously rejected the peace platform adopted by the party's national convention that year—but what is absolutely true is McClellan's particular brand of unionism (coming from the doughface Democrat school of accommodation rather than the Lincoln/Seward school of the "irrepressible conflict") left him inclined to go easy on the Confederacy in hopes of leaving the door open for an eventual settlement that would restore "the Union as it was" (i.e. with slavery intact). He certainly did not want to revolutionize the South and hoped that a massive display of force would cause Confederates to come to their senses without any major effusion of blood being necessary. Many Republicans took a similar yet distinct view early in the war, believing secession was only supported by the slaveholding upper classes and that a strong popular unionism existed among the poor white population that would assert itself once the war turned against the Confederacy. This, of course, failed to materialized much outside of pockets of east Tennessee and western Virginia, and by 1864 most Republicans—but not Democrats—had accepted that the Confederate population, and not just its armies, would have to be defeated in order to end slavery and restore the Union.

He was one of the copperheads as well. The white southern populace did have some desertions from the military but kept fighting for racial reasons.

McClellan was not a copperhead. He was a War Democrat.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Reading between-the-lines in the passage above--and with basic knowledge of 10th grade American history--it's quite obvious George McLennan had undercover Dixiecrat sympathies and thus his heart and soul was not fully committed to abolition and emancipation.   So Lincoln was right in giving him the boot.

There’s a reason why he ran for President.

Personally, I doubt McClellan was actively rooting for a Confederate victory—his letter accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in 1864 famously rejected the peace platform adopted by the party's national convention that year—but what is absolutely true is McClellan's particular brand of unionism (coming from the doughface Democrat school of accommodation rather than the Lincoln/Seward school of the "irrepressible conflict") left him inclined to go easy on the Confederacy in hopes of leaving the door open for an eventual settlement that would restore "the Union as it was" (i.e. with slavery intact). He certainly did not want to revolutionize the South and hoped that a massive display of force would cause Confederates to come to their senses without any major effusion of blood being necessary. Many Republicans took a similar yet distinct view early in the war, believing secession was only supported by the slaveholding upper classes and that a strong popular unionism existed among the poor white population that would assert itself once the war turned against the Confederacy. This, of course, failed to materialized much outside of pockets of east Tennessee and western Virginia, and by 1864 most Republicans—but not Democrats—had accepted that the Confederate population, and not just its armies, would have to be defeated in order to end slavery and restore the Union.

He was one of the copperheads as well. The white southern populace did have some desertions from the military but kept fighting for racial reasons.

As Cody says, McClellan was a War Democrat. Unlike the Copperheads, who wanted to seek an immediate armistice followed by negotiations which they imagined would restore the Union upon its old foundations, McClellan favored the prosecution of the war to its ultimate conclusion while opposing the Emancipation Proclamation. He makes his position clear in his letter accepting the Democratic nomination for president in the summer of 1864.

Let me add what I doubt not was, although unexpressed, the sentiment of the Convention, as it is of the people they represent, that when any one State is willing to return to the Union, it should be received at once, with a full guarantee of its constitutional rights.

If a frank, earnest and persistent effort to obtain those objects should fail, the responsibility for ulterior consequences will fall upon those who remain in arms against the Union. But the Union must be preserved at all hazards.

I could not look in the face of my gallant comrades of the army and navy, who have survived so many bloody battles, and tell them that their labors and the sacrifice of so many of our slain and wounded brethren had been in vain ; that we had abandoned that Union for which we have so often periled our lives.

A vast majority of our people, whether in the army and navy or at home, would, as I would, hail with unbounded joy the permanent restoration of peace, on the basis of the Union under the Constitution, without the effusion of another drop of blood. But no peace can be permanent without Union.

This was an all-but-explicit repudiation of the platform which the Democratic National Convention (dominated by Copperheads) had just adopted, and the open sparring between McClellan and the Copperhead element helped drive many War Democrats into the arms of the National Union party. McClellan was not a good general or a good American, but he wasn't some kind of "Manchurian Candidate" put up by the Confederacy; let's try to keep this conversation within the bounds of reality.

[Samof94]

Reading between-the-lines in the passage above--and with basic knowledge of 10th grade American history--it's quite obvious George McLennan had undercover Dixiecrat sympathies and thus his heart and soul was not fully committed to abolition and emancipation.   So Lincoln was right in giving him the boot.

There’s a reason why he ran for President.

Personally, I doubt McClellan was actively rooting for a Confederate victory—his letter accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in 1864 famously rejected the peace platform adopted by the party's national convention that year—but what is absolutely true is McClellan's particular brand of unionism (coming from the doughface Democrat school of accommodation rather than the Lincoln/Seward school of the "irrepressible conflict") left him inclined to go easy on the Confederacy in hopes of leaving the door open for an eventual settlement that would restore "the Union as it was" (i.e. with slavery intact). He certainly did not want to revolutionize the South and hoped that a massive display of force would cause Confederates to come to their senses without any major effusion of blood being necessary. Many Republicans took a similar yet distinct view early in the war, believing secession was only supported by the slaveholding upper classes and that a strong popular unionism existed among the poor white population that would assert itself once the war turned against the Confederacy. This, of course, failed to materialized much outside of pockets of east Tennessee and western Virginia, and by 1864 most Republicans—but not Democrats—had accepted that the Confederate population, and not just its armies, would have to be defeated in order to end slavery and restore the Union.

He was one of the copperheads as well. The white southern populace did have some desertions from the military but kept fighting for racial reasons.

As Cody says, McClellan was a War Democrat. Unlike the Copperheads, who wanted to seek an immediate armistice followed by negotiations which they imagined would restore the Union upon its old foundations, McClellan favored the prosecution of the war to its ultimate conclusion while opposing the Emancipation Proclamation. He makes his position clear in his letter accepting the Democratic nomination for president in the summer of 1864.

Let me add what I doubt not was, although unexpressed, the sentiment of the Convention, as it is of the people they represent, that when any one State is willing to return to the Union, it should be received at once, with a full guarantee of its constitutional rights.

If a frank, earnest and persistent effort to obtain those objects should fail, the responsibility for ulterior consequences will fall upon those who remain in arms against the Union. But the Union must be preserved at all hazards.

I could not look in the face of my gallant comrades of the army and navy, who have survived so many bloody battles, and tell them that their labors and the sacrifice of so many of our slain and wounded brethren had been in vain ; that we had abandoned that Union for which we have so often periled our lives.

A vast majority of our people, whether in the army and navy or at home, would, as I would, hail with unbounded joy the permanent restoration of peace, on the basis of the Union under the Constitution, without the effusion of another drop of blood. But no peace can be permanent without Union.

This was an all-but-explicit repudiation of the platform which the Democratic National Convention (dominated by Copperheads) had just adopted, and the open sparring between McClellan and the Copperhead element helped drive many War Democrats into the arms of the National Union party. McClellan was not a good general or a good American, but he wasn't some kind of "Manchurian Candidate" put up by the Confederacy; let's try to keep this conversation within the bounds of reality.

Who is a better  example of a Copperhead?

[Aurelius]

Reading between-the-lines in the passage above--and with basic knowledge of 10th grade American history--it's quite obvious George McLennan had undercover Dixiecrat sympathies and thus his heart and soul was not fully committed to abolition and emancipation.   So Lincoln was right in giving him the boot.

There’s a reason why he ran for President.

Personally, I doubt McClellan was actively rooting for a Confederate victory—his letter accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in 1864 famously rejected the peace platform adopted by the party's national convention that year—but what is absolutely true is McClellan's particular brand of unionism (coming from the doughface Democrat school of accommodation rather than the Lincoln/Seward school of the "irrepressible conflict") left him inclined to go easy on the Confederacy in hopes of leaving the door open for an eventual settlement that would restore "the Union as it was" (i.e. with slavery intact). He certainly did not want to revolutionize the South and hoped that a massive display of force would cause Confederates to come to their senses without any major effusion of blood being necessary. Many Republicans took a similar yet distinct view early in the war, believing secession was only supported by the slaveholding upper classes and that a strong popular unionism existed among the poor white population that would assert itself once the war turned against the Confederacy. This, of course, failed to materialized much outside of pockets of east Tennessee and western Virginia, and by 1864 most Republicans—but not Democrats—had accepted that the Confederate population, and not just its armies, would have to be defeated in order to end slavery and restore the Union.

He was one of the copperheads as well. The white southern populace did have some desertions from the military but kept fighting for racial reasons.

As Cody says, McClellan was a War Democrat. Unlike the Copperheads, who wanted to seek an immediate armistice followed by negotiations which they imagined would restore the Union upon its old foundations, McClellan favored the prosecution of the war to its ultimate conclusion while opposing the Emancipation Proclamation. He makes his position clear in his letter accepting the Democratic nomination for president in the summer of 1864.

Let me add what I doubt not was, although unexpressed, the sentiment of the Convention, as it is of the people they represent, that when any one State is willing to return to the Union, it should be received at once, with a full guarantee of its constitutional rights.

If a frank, earnest and persistent effort to obtain those objects should fail, the responsibility for ulterior consequences will fall upon those who remain in arms against the Union. But the Union must be preserved at all hazards.

I could not look in the face of my gallant comrades of the army and navy, who have survived so many bloody battles, and tell them that their labors and the sacrifice of so many of our slain and wounded brethren had been in vain ; that we had abandoned that Union for which we have so often periled our lives.

A vast majority of our people, whether in the army and navy or at home, would, as I would, hail with unbounded joy the permanent restoration of peace, on the basis of the Union under the Constitution, without the effusion of another drop of blood. But no peace can be permanent without Union.

This was an all-but-explicit repudiation of the platform which the Democratic National Convention (dominated by Copperheads) had just adopted, and the open sparring between McClellan and the Copperhead element helped drive many War Democrats into the arms of the National Union party. McClellan was not a good general or a good American, but he wasn't some kind of "Manchurian Candidate" put up by the Confederacy; let's try to keep this conversation within the bounds of reality.

Who is a better  example of a Copperhead?

Clement Vallandingham.