PAT wrote:
McClellan was a very good logistics man IMO. What he wasn't was a strategist. Or any sort of tactician. That is, he would have made an excellent peacetime general or behind-the-lines support leader.
Exactly.
Unfortunately, he was thrust into a position that played into his weakness and not his strength due to the fact that for a long time, the South has all the tactical virtuosos. And that times had changed very suddenly and drastically.
One other problem with McClellan was a lack of commitment to the cause. While he may not have been pro-slavery, he certainly was anti-emancipation.
Lincoln looked long and hard for anyone with any strategic abilities whatsoever - because those had not been called for during the long, long time of peace between the War of 1812 and the firing on Fort Sumter. Oh, we had our little foreign adventures, but they didn't seem to call on the generals' abilities to fight an all-out was to that extent.
I disagree. Some 13,000 Americans died in the Mexican-American conflict and many of the best generals in the Civil War cut their teeth in that conflict, Lee, Grant and Jackson among them. Technologies and tactics used in the Civil War were perfected in Mexico.
Lincoln's problem wasn't that there weren’t any good generals, It was that most of them were on the wrong side.
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