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McClellan's War
The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union
By Ethan S. Rafuse Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2005 Ethan S. Rafuse
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-00611-0
CHAPTER 1
"Traditions and Associations ... Were All on the Side of the Old Whig Party"
December 1826 was a time of anxiety and excitement in the American republic. Only a few months earlier, the country had celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. All Americans agreed that their ability to preserve their experiment in republican government for so long was cause for much celebration; yet it was also clear that profound changes were taking place in their economy, society, and politics that were generating deep anxieties regarding the republic's future. Only six years after James Monroe had run unopposed for his second term as president, these anxieties had produced great divisions in the country, symbolized by the continuing uproar over the outcome of the 1824 presidential election. Depending on one's point of view, John Quincy Adams and his supporters either stole the election from Andrew Jackson in defiance of the popular will or saved the republic from the dangers of unfettered "mob rule." Out of the passions stirred by this controversy and the divisions in American society it reflected would emerge the political culture in which George Brinton McClellan spent his formative years.
McClellan was born on December 3, 1826, the second of George and Elizabeth Brinton McClellan's three sons, in a house on Fourth Street between Walnut and Spruce Streets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Shortly after his birth the family moved first to a house on Washington Square and then to one at 246 Walnut Street, directly across the street from the building that housed the First Bank of the United States. There the family resided when McClellan departed for West Point in 1842.
The first sixteen years of McClellan's life have received little attention from historians. Although somewhat understandable, given the paucity of source material related to McClellan's childhood, by glossing over this period of his life, scholars have neglected a crucial period in the future general's story. Moreover, even if it is impossible to reconstruct the year-to-year course of McClellan's early life, it is possible to gain a clear sense of the general milieu within which he spent the first fifteen years of his life and the forces that first shaped his distinctive political and cultural outlook.
During McClellan's formative years American political culture was shaped by a fundamental reordering of economic life that historians have labeled the "market revolution." In 1800, most Americans were small farmers or small-scale manufacturers. Living in relatively isolated rural communities, yeoman farmers produced crops to attain subsistence for their households, while artisans, working in their homes or independent shops, manufactured a relatively limited number of products utilizing skills learned through a long apprenticeship. The efforts of artisans and farmers to achieve subsistence were supported by the labor of the entire household and informal networks of community cooperation, with goods and services exchanged on a barter basis. Although this subsistence economy did not produce great wealth, it did provide its members with a sense of personal independence and community as well as a fairly even distribution of wealth.
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, the United States began to change from a country of subsistence economies and communities to a commercial society. By the 1790s, a rapidly growing population had begun to exceed the amount of available productive land in the Northeast, producing an "agrarian crisis" that strained the ability of family patriarchs to maintain a sufficient level of subsistence for their households. At the same time, war in Europe created a boom in prices for American agricultural products, while improvements in transportation significantly reduced the cost of transporting goods and introduced formerly isolated subsistence communities to a dramatically wider range of luxury items. Farmers eager to take advantage of these developments began producing surpluses of certain crops, eschewing barter exchange, and joining regional trade networks where they exchanged goods with merchants for cash.
Meanwhile, those displaced by the agrarian crisis and the emergence of commercial agriculture provided New England entrepreneurs with the cheap labor necessary to create the first large-scale industrial enterprises in the country. These mechanized and broke down the manufacture of goods into a series of simple tasks to lower labor costs and produce goods of higher quality in greater quantity, and lower cost, than the small shops of the skilled artisans. Accompanying the emergence of a commercial society were complex problems of labor management, capital formation, and market exchange. To manage them a white-collar bourgeoisie of clerks, bankers, and merchants emerged, who, along with members of more traditionally specialized fields—lawyers, ministers, and physicians —began to develop a distinct middle-class culture in America's towns and cities.
The shift to a market economy accelerated dramatically after 1815 thanks in part to the assistance it received from government. The Fourteenth Congress that met in the aftermath of the War of 1812 was dominated by a nationalistic and commercially oriented faction in the Republican Party. Led by Henry Clay, these "National Republicans" embraced the new market economy and looked to use the power of the state to promote and give rational direction to economic modernization and national consolidation. With the blessing of Presidents James Madison and James Monroe, Clay and his allies were able to enact much of what would be known as "the American System": a Bank of the United States to regulate credit, high tariffs to promote domestic manufacturing, and federal support for internal improvements.
The McClellan family's roots in this emerging commercial society were established well before the 1790s. The future general could trace his roots back to William Bradford of the Mayflower, although the McClellan name did not reach America until his great-grandfather emigrated to Worcester, Massachusetts, after participating in the Scottish struggle against British rule at the 1745 battle of Culloden. A member of the second generation of American McClellans, Samuel, then migrated to South Woodstock, a farming community in the northeastern corner of Connecticut, after marrying into one of the town's prominent families in 1757 and serving as an officer in the Seven Years' War.
Samuel McClellan acquired a farm upon his arrival in South Woodstock but quickly abandoned efforts to cultivate crops in the poor upland soil of Windham County to open a store. He soon prospered as a merchant and trader who imported goods from as far away as Great Britain and became a link between northeastern Connecticut's subsistence culture and the larger commercial world. Economic success and a strategic marriage quickly catapulted him to prominence within his community. In October 1773, McClellan was appointed captain of a local cavalry unit and, although his unit was mobilized after Lexington and Concord, was selected to represent Woodstock in the Connecticut General Assembly in 1775 and 1776. By 1778, McClellan had risen to the rank of colonel, but served primarily in administrative posts during the Revolution. In June 1784, he was promoted to brigadier general and thereafter was known to friends and family as General Sam.
General Sam had three children with his first wife, Jemima, of whom little is known. Two years after Jemima's death, Samuel married Rachel Abbe, to whom future generations of McClellans would owe their connection to the Mayflower. Samuel and Rachel McClellan had five children, the second of whom, James, the grandfather of the Civil War general, had four children. James would become a prominent person in the community in his own right, holding at various times the posts of justice of the peace and postmaster, although it was his elder brother, John, who was groomed to assume the role of family patriarch upon General Sam's death. By the time the old soldier died in October 1807, John was a prominent lawyer, a leading figure in the community, and a member of the Connecticut General Assembly, where he served several terms between 1792 and 1824.
Woodstock was at the epicenter of New England's "agrarian crisis" during the 1790s. During the War for Independence, Connecticut experienced a commercial boom, with interior towns such as Woodstock enjoying unprecedented prosperity as the center of trade moved away from the vulnerable coastline. After the war, traders and merchants flooded the market with consumer goods that drained the state of specie, produced a severe economic depression, and pushed Connecticut farmers to search for a cash crop. However, the thin Connecticut soil, particularly in upland counties such as Windham, was already too exhausted to produce sufficient crops for individual farm families to maintain self-sufficiency much less a cash crop that would help the state regain a satisfactory balance of trade.
Several other developments during the Early National Period pushed Connecticut's shift to a market economy. The adoption of the Constitution, which the state overwhelming endorsed, and the outbreak of war in Europe produced a commercial boom in the 1790s that helped restore prosperity. Entrepreneurs looking to take advantage of the increasingly large population of unskilled laborers displaced by the agrarian crisis successfully petitioned the state government for aid in developing manufacturing enterprises through the granting of monopolies and the privilege of incorporation and subsidizing textile production. To facilitate trade, the state also aided the construction of turnpikes. Workhouses were also created for the purpose of reforming vagrants, beggars, and criminals, so that they might develop the personal qualities that would enable them to become productive members of commercial society. In Woodstock, General Sam was appointed administrator of the town's workhouse.
As merchants, the McClellans brought the market revolution and its values to their community. Although trained as a lawyer, General McClellan's grandfather focused his energies on running James McClellan & Co., a mercantile firm, while maintaining a wool-growing interest on the side. As the prosperity of the 1790s boosted trade and the need for better links between Woodstock and outside markets became evident, the McClellans were among Woodstock's most conspicuous champions of internal improvements. Their association with the Norwich and Worcester Turnpike Company played a critical role in nurturing community support for its construction, which was completed in 1801. During the 1830s, James served on a committee that endeavored to get a railroad being constructed between Norwich, Connecticut, and Worcester, Massachusetts, routed through Woodstock. With their wool-growing interests, the McClellans were also active champions of government assistance to cloth manufacturers during the early nineteenth century.
As was typical of Americans who embraced the new market economy and its ethos of modernization and improvement, the McClellans took an active interest in education. When the Connecticut state legislature authorized establishment of Woodstock Academy in 1802, General Sam was named a proprietor/trustee of the school. Although not named in the legislation creating the school as their father was, James and John McClellan also served as proprietors/trustees of Woodstock Academy. In their search for a teacher, the school's administrators naturally looked to Connecticut's Yale College. The first master of the school, Thomas Williams, came on the recommendation of Yale President Timothy Dwight—as did nine of eleven men who served in that post between 1801 and 1819.
It was at Yale, under Dwight's leadership, that the most significant effort to give theological sanction to the emerging commercial economy was made. Dwight and his followers staunchly defended Connecticut's established Federalist order against the "infidel" doctrines of the French Revolution, Jeffersonian Republicanism, and the more democratic Baptist and Methodist sects. Suspicious of the rural masses and determined to preserve traditional patterns of deference to elites, they purged the New Light divinity of Jonathan Edwards of its anti-establishment, egalitarian thrust. Dwight's Moderate Light theology gave sanction and encouragement to capitalist ambition by, in the words of historian Charles Sellers, equating "Christian grace with capitalist effort, poverty with sinful self-indulgence." This "New Divinity" also championed a concept of social paternalism that held that those who achieved success and membership in the elite were obligated to give leadership and direction to the rest of society.
In 1812, James McClellan decided to send his 16-year-old first son, George, to Yale. Dwight's Yale was an intellectually rigorous and tightly ordered place. Yet Dwight did not enforce discipline through punishment. In line with his belief in a social hierarchy where power was in the hands of a paternal and enlightened elite, Dwight believed bonds between rulers and ruled must be based on mutual confidence. Force was, in his mind, the tool of the uncultivated despot and resort to it a symptom of moral weakness in a leader, who should lead by the power of his intellect and setting an example of self-restraint and discipline. Consequently, Dwight opposed the use of corporal punishment or coercive measures to instill discipline in his young charges. (When George McClellan sent his son, the future general, to the preparatory school at the University of Pennsylvania, he pointedly instructed him not to permit himself to be whipped.)
Dwight believed the best way to instill proper values and standards of behavior in both his students and society as a whole was through a paternal style of leadership. Leaders, he believed, must appeal to the intellect and reason of their followers to persuade them to follow the proper path and set a proper example if they were to expect their charges to follow their direction. It was difficult for a young man not to be impressed by Dwight, who possessed a commanding presence and a powerful intellect and carried himself with the dignified air of a truly great man. Although a man of firm principles and beliefs, as an educator he continually challenged his students to consider all sides of the moral, cultural, and political issues that faced the country and use their reasoning powers to find the proper solutions. The power of Dwight's personality was such, however, that it was rare that a student at Yale who properly utilized his reasoning powers did not develop a "correct" view of things.
George McClellan excelled in his studies at Yale. After twelve years of study under the direction of Dwight protégés at Woodstock Academy, he was well prepared for the program at New Haven. Described by one contemporary as a "small, well set, active youth," his energy, intellect, and ambition quickly set him apart from his classmates. He developed a close circle of friends who gave him a nickname that would later be attached to his son: "Little Mac." His "excellent classical education," recalled one observer, "was blended with a continued fondness for literary pursuits, and a lively interest in general science." McClellan's talent for science attracted the attention of Benjamin Silliman, Yale's celebrated professor of chemistry and natural sciences, who took McClellan under his wing. Silliman had himself been closely mentored by Dwight while a student at Yale and fully shared his mentor's conservative politics. Close interaction with Dwight and Silliman served to reinforce the views of society and politics George McClellan had brought to Yale from Woodstock.
After obtaining his degree from Yale in 1815, McClellan spent a year studying in the office of Dr. Thomas Hubbard in Pomfret, Connecticut, before going to Philadelphia, the nation's leading city in medical education, armed with a letter of recommendation from Silliman, to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. McClellan received his doctorate in the spring of 1819, with the subject of his thesis being the tying of arteries. During his time as a student, McClellan impressed Philadelphia society with his energy, character, and intellect, and demonstrated that he embraced the social paternalism of the New Divinity through service at the hospital of the Philadelphia Almshouse. This marked the beginning of an active and enthusiastic lifelong engagement in charity work, for which he would attract, his eldest son John later recalled, "the most unbounded popularity among the poorer classes." "His truest mourners," one observer predicted on the occasion of Dr. McClellan's death in 1847, "will be the innumerous crowd who daily filled his halls, receiving without fee, the aid of his unrivalled skill and his ever-ready sympathy and aid."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from McClellan's War by Ethan S. Rafuse. Copyright © 2005 Ethan S. Rafuse. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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