Which side was mcclellan on

He thought there were , Confederates facing his , Union soldiers; then he thought there were , He kept telling Lincoln, I need more men; I need more equipment before I can move. He always inflated Confederate numbers.

He always seemed to find an excuse not to move rapidly and not to force the issue militarily. The bottom line is that McClellan lacked what they would have called, in the nineteenth century, the moral courage to commit this wonderful instrument he had created, the Army of the Potomac, to a decisive contest with the Rebel opponents. He played it safe. He sought perfection, and, as a result, he can never be counted among the great generals of the war. In July , George B. McClellan was given the command of the Union armies in the East, and later he was promoted to the position of General-in-Chief, the commander of all of the Union armies across the entire strategic map of the civil war.

Besides this, McClellan is also known for building the Army of the Potomac into a formidable force of more than , well-equipped and well-trained men. George B. McClellan had won some little victories in western Virginia early in the war, which is the reason why he was selected as the commander of the Union armies in the east, when President Abraham Lincoln decided to replace Irvin McDowell.

McClellan was part of the Union Army. In fact, he was the General-in-Chief of the Union Army. The biggest flaw of George McClellan was that he was a chronic procrastinator. Even though he had built a formidable army in the shape of the Army of the Potomac, he repeatedly delayed proceedings and allowed the Confederates to regroup and bring in reinforcements.

He was also guilty of continually overestimating the strength of the Confederate armies. By Gary W. Gallagher, Ph. McClellan was a major development in the American Civil War. He was General-in-Chief— the commander of all of the Union armies across the entire strategic map of the war—as well as the commander in the field of the Army of the Potomac.

Who Was George McClellan? Seven Pines had another adverse impact on the campaign. Lee was appointed to replace him. Taking advantage of McClellan's cautious streak, Lee hammered at the inert Army of the Potomac in a series of fierce and unrelenting assaults. Following Pope's failure to capture Richmond, the subsequent Union defeat at the Battle of Second Manassas , McClellan was once again leading the army that had such strong affection for him.

After a series of skirmishes along the Blue Ridge mountains, the two armies met in an epic contest at Antietam on September 17, , the single bloodiest day of the war. Battle weary and bloodied, the Confederate Army retreated back into Virginia under the cover of darkness.

Though he had managed to thwart Lee's plan to invade the North, McClellan's trademark caution once again denied the northern cause a decisive victory, and the once-cordial relationship between the army commander and his Commander-in-Chief had been badly damaged by the former's lack of success and excessive trepidation. After the battle, a disappointed Lincoln visited McClellan in camp to express his frustration at the general's inability to capitalize on this most recent success.

The general countered by saying the army needed time to rest and refit. In November of that year McClellan was relieved of command for the last time and ordered back to Trenton, New Jersey to await further orders, though none ever came.

In , McClellan became involved in politics when he was nominated to be the Democratic candidate for president against his former boss, Abraham Lincoln. McClellan ran on an anti-war platform, promising that he would negotiate peace terms with the Confederacy to help end the war as soon as possible.

But by November of , a string of Union successes had convinced many that the war was in its final phase. McClellan resigned his army commission on Election Day, but ultimately Lincoln was elected to a second term. After the war, McClellan served as an administrator for a number of engineering firms and, in , was elected Governor of New Jersey. Military historian Jon Latimer succinctly describes the entire episode in his tome on military legerdemain, A History of Bluff in Wartime :.

In the two months and one week since the Battle of Manassas, the Union army had been kept in place, at least in this little field in northern Virginia, by so many harmless sections of tree trunks and archaic wagon parts. McClellan Part 1. Warren Perry. McClellan,