"I have more confidence
in General McClellan than in any man alive."
(George A. Custer, 1862)
"McClellan is naturally
a superior man,"
"I know of no one competent unless it be McClellan..."
(MG William T. Sherman,
1861)
"McClellan was too good a man to command an
army in this country."
(MG Joe Hooker, December 28, 1863)
"There is nothing too
good that I can say of General McClellan. He was a man and a thorough
soldier."
(MG Winfield S. Hancock,
1885)
"I believe he was, both
as a military man and as a manager of a country under military
occupation, the greatest general this war has produced."
(Theodore Lyman, Meade's
ADC, writing at Cold Harbor, 1864)
"...there are strong grounds
for believing that he was the best commander the Army of the Potomac
ever had."
(BG Francis W. Palfrey,
historian and veteran, 1882)
"...they believed in
him, and so did I."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne
on the Army and McClellan, 1862)
"The one-armed lift
the wine to you,
McClellan / And great Antietam's cheers renew."
(Herman Melville, 1862, "The
Victor of Antietam")
"Bear
in mind that you are in the country of friends, not enemies; that
you are here to protect, not destroy. Your enemies have violated
every moral law - neither God nor man can sustain them. You will
pursue a different course. You will be honest, brave and merciful..." - McClellan's Orders in Western Virginia, 6/23/61
CLICK TO ENTER SITE
"At an hour of agonizing peril,
McClellan saved Washington and the Union cause."
(J.G. Randall, Lincoln
the President)
"...McClellan's superb
army could have taken Richmond regardless of Lee. Indeed, with
an undivided command, McClellan could have forced the evacuation
of the city before Lee assumed command."
(Clifford
Dowdey, The Seven Days)
"Had McClellan's
brilliant strategy been fully implemented, it would have ended
the Civil War in 1862, as intended."
(Rowena Reed, Combined
Operations in the Civil War)
"The decimation
of McClellan's army which the Committee and Stanton had contrived
touched off a storm which wrecked Lincoln's hopes for a coalition
government, undefiled by partisan motives, to prosecute the war."
(T. Harry
Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals)
"His removal was a wrong
done to the Union Army, which never gave its love to any other
leader." (Winston S. Churchill, A History of
the English Speaking Peoples)
Some Fine Print
This site
was founded in Spring, 1998 at the URL http://www.hopewellagency.com/McClellan.
It moved in 1999 to http://www.civilwarreader.com/McClellan with
the acquisition of that URL from Thomas Publications. The site
offers robust McClellan advocacy, unusual archival materials and
opinions and interpretations generally in contradiction to the
prevailing wisdom. It is an outreach program for the McClellan
Society. Contents (c) Dimitri Rotov 1998-2004, except where shown.
For more
ACW analysis and McClellanist analysis, see our sister site, the
Civil
War Bookshelf
