"McClellan After the War" Topic

I've been rereading Sears' Landscape Turned Red again and it made me wonder; did Little Mac publicly defend his record in the post-War years?

I suppose what intrigues me most is whether he ever addressed his repeated overestimations of enemy strengths. So much of the post-War poo flinging involving other generals rested on personal testimonies, e.g., "I never heard General So-and-so give the order" or "I personally witnessed the General hiding in his tent." And then the other side produces witnesses to refute these testimonies.

With McClellan's chief failing, however, it would seem that even a smattering of surviving strength returns would show how repeatedly and undeniably wrong he was. So, did he ever concede his errors?

We played the Antietam campaign recently. The union forces didn't repeat McClellan's mistakes -- they attacked with force. Unfortunately, by not being cautious they didn't guard their rear area well, and us Rebs managed to move around the strong union forces and march into a virtually undefended Baltimore.

The point is that with hindsight, it is easy to blame McClellan. But just maybe, by being cautious and not losing, he had a big part to play in winning!

You should read his autobiography first.

Yes, he did try to defend himself and was half-blind in doing it.

The point is that with hindsight, it is easy to blame McClellan.

It's not that I'm trying to blame him, but rather wondering how he responded in later years when confronted with the facts. Frankly, I half expected he ignored the whole thing.

Ah, Landscape Turned Red. The Antietam book that even gets the location of McClellan's command post wrong….

However, if you ever look at Pinkerton's estimates and understand them you'll realise he wasn't that wrong. The major mistakes made where the misidentification of a number of regiments. The numbers Pinkerton reported were ration strengths, which were much higher numbers than combat effectives. In the Seven Days Pinkerton was roughly 22% high in his estimate. In Maryland he was about 27% high. Consider the post-Antietam strength as straggling died away:

30th September: 69,091 aggregate present, 149,441 present and absent (using cavalry return for 10th October)
10th October: 78,204 aggregate present, 154,888 present and absent
20th October: 79,585 aggregate present, 153,779 present and absent
10th November: 83,385 aggregate present, 151,766 present and absent

Lee invaded Maryland with about 95,000 +/- 5,000 (ca. 76,000 PFD / 0.8 to convert to approx. "aggregate present") with the army. This is not combat effectives or "for duty", but the simply the number of men moving with the army. McClellan's estimates are a bit high, but are not phantasmal.

Sears assiduously fails to engage with the fact that the rebel army was larger than the Lost Cause tried to claim because it was inconvenient. McClellan and Pinkerton were not seeing double or triple. They were a bit high, but not excessively so. Much of the excess is due to 46 regiments apparently identified but not assigned to formations by Pinkerton. Having examined Pinkerton's estimates of regiments in the Seven Days I can say this is an extension of the 37 regiments he misidentified as present at that battle. Whilst I haven't seen the Antietam raw estimates it is true that a dozen new regiments joined Lee's army soon after the Seven Days, but most of the green regiments were left at Richmond.

Lee etc. claimed to have only have had less than 40,000 at Antietam due to straggling. Firstly one should note that McClellan's army didn't pick up large numbers of stragglers, and so McClellan had no way of knowing about this if it were true. Secondly one should note the rebs really low-balled their strength, and were reporting only men shouldering a musket or operating a cannon. Even officers and sergeants with the battlelines are typically excluded, as were troops on the skirmish lines etc., and of course all their logistics.

Lee's "for duty" strength at Antietam can be estimated from his immediate post-battle return plus casualties (remembering 10-12,000 stragglers rejoined during the battle) – roughly 55,221 if using the official casualty figures or about 58,426 using Gene Thorp's corrected figures, and should be used for wargaming.

The other approach is to accept the Confederate counting method, but use the same method for the Federals, or use Carman for both.

If using Carman then his methodology would add 10,916 "unengaged" to the engaged for a total of 66,872, but this is certainly an overestimate due to mixed methodologies and many of Carman's strengths being PFD rather than effectives.

For wargaming one can construct some interesting scenarios. Throw the Federal player in "knowing" he massively outnumbers the enemy, but secretly declare the straggling is overstated and he is actually attacking a superior forces…..

More details on Carman, please. And Gene Thorp too so I can purchase their books.

In Battles and Leaders Little Mac continued to say he was outnumbered.

Only thing I will ever say in defence of that little twerp is that not only did he have Pinkerton to contend with, most of the time Pleasonton was feeding him garbage as well!

Of course that doesn't excuse the fact he wanted to believe all that guff anyway but it certainly didn't help!

Wow!

67thtigers, that's great stuff! Funny how Pinkerton is so often dismissed out of hand, like he was completely out of his depth. Do you happen to know how much of his data he passed on to the AoP as "raw information"? I'm curious, because someone on the staff would surely have pointed out that ration strengths would be higher than the number of effectives. I presume that Pinkerton presented his numbers as "processed"?

Also, frankly, I had never considered the effect of the Lost Cause mythos.

Any estimate of Lee's strength at Antietam should use the best research, in the books of Joseph Harsh.

But just maybe, by being cautious and not losing, he had a big part to play in winning!

you could also say He had a big part in the War being as drawn out as long as it was.

Wow, 67thtigers, now we don't have to wonder what he would have said – you said it for him.

Pinkerton used multiple sources and passed a lot of it on unfiltered. McClellan employed the French prices to filter it, but they'd gone by Antietam.

One of his sources was a file of detected units in the enemy army, with brigade and division assignments where known. There are some pretty big mistakes in it, the most obvious being the overcounting (Seven Days) of 36 infantry and 1 cavalry regiment not present, and double counting some battalions (in one case triple counting – the 1st Louisiana Special Battalion, Wheat's Tigers and the Louisiana Zouaves are all listed but are of course the same unit). If you delete the 37 extra regiments and the oddness in the "miscellaneous unit" section then Pinkerton would have prettymuch dead on for aggregate present.

Another source was agents infiltrated into the commissary. He was getting reports of the number of rations being issued, but these are increased by the feeding of black laborers constructing the Richmond defenses and other men with similar skin colors with the armies logistics who were also fed by the government.

He also took interviews and read the papers. One of these is in the OR, and Pinkerton notes most soldiers when captured report regiments as 1,000 when they were actually much weaker.

Fishel wasn't a particularly careful researcher, but one of his more interesting observations is that one of the computers employed was making a systematic error when calculating the estimated number sick, which was reckoned to be 1/6th, but the computer was using 6%. However most estimates that are in the literature haven't removed the sick so this isn't a major factor.

However, with respect to Antietam the question isn't how many were at Antietam, but how many in Maryland. The two best estimates (i.e. modern ones not computed by Lost Cause historians) are:

Joseph Harsh's student John Owen Allen used the unit records to estimate 75,528 PFD on 2nd September.

Gene Thorp using the same methodology as Livermore estimated 77,769 PFD – this is the first return of the army after stragglers are recovered plus casualties incurred. see- link

Yes, Lee's army straggled and was below strength, and we accept Confederate claims of meagerness unchallenged (although before the 1960's it was not uncommon to find Livermore's numbers used making Lee much stronger than he claimed). We tend to then compare this against the gross estimates of McClellan's strengths, so simultaneously making the Confederates weaker than they actually were, and the Federals stronger.

In fact the most careful examination of strengths would place Lee somewhere in the 50,000's and McClellan in the 60,000's.

The best analysis is Carman, who used all available information, but usually simply asked members of units how many men they had. See link

I'm waiting for delivery of Dan Vermilya's paper on Federal strength at Antietam, which hopefully will arrive soon – link

Take Sears's Landscape Turned Red.

In his notes he makes it clear that the strength of the AoP is overstated, and in his gross calculations tries to make a stab at the actual strength. He starts with Carman's figures and states he added 80% of PFD of unengaged units. That's a good estimate and would get you:

46,102 infantry engaged
5,992 artillery engaged (essentially all of it)
4,320 cavalry engaged (actually more than was present on the field as this is PFD of the whole cavalry division, including detachments)

Add:

Morell = (5,407 PFD – 2x 118 in 2 engaged batteries) * 0.8 = 4,137 infantry
Add one unengaged battery in Morell's division = 118

Unengaged regulars = 978 (with Lovell's brigade use 20th September report and assume the one uncovered battalion is average)

Warren's brigade – 225 (assuming straggling in 10th NY the same as the 5th NY)

Add Franklin's 5 "unengaged" brigades: whole corps = 12,300 PFD = 9,840 effectives, deduct artillery (901) and Irwin's brigade (1,684) = 7,255 unengaged

Unengaged forces = 12,713

Total of army
Engaged infantry = 46,102
Engaged artillery = 5,992
Cavalry = 4,320
Unengaged of all arms = 12,713
Total = 69,127

This is rather high. Depending on your approach using Carman as a basis you'll typically derive 60-70,000 Federal effectives on the field in total, and about 55,000 on the field at the start of the day (which may be 5,000 too high), with Morell's division and Franklin's corps arriving as reinforcements in the mid to late morning.

The Confederates according to Carman had 34,773 on the field that morning and received reinforcements of AP Hill with 2,568 engaged plus 2 brigades unengaged and not enumerated (Pender and Field with 1,670 if their ratio of strength vis the 3 engaged brigades is unaltered from the previous return) = 39,011 (excluding reserve artillery defending the fords). This is likely well below actual strength.

Thus on the morning of the 17th McClellan had 55,000 effectives (probably closer to 50,000) available to cross the creek and assault the Confederates with 35,000 in a positional defense (probably closer to 40,000). He received 14,000 reinforcements during the morning, and Lee received about 4,200 in the afternoon in AP Hill, and 5-6,000 stragglers (Carman) coming up during the day (and another 6,000 coming in after dark).

Just as we critique Centennial Lost Cause historians, so the Bicentennial historians will look at us and remark at just how much effort we took to demythologize Lee, and set it against the background of an America fracturing into two pieces, with the intelligentsia *largely* on the side that found Confederate flags highly distasteful.

As an Englishman, I'm part of the declining American empire, of course, but I'm a provincial cousin and not all that motivated by the same things; so I'd say the fact that McClellan constantly believed misgathered figures, tended to believe the worst of the situation (cf Fitz John Porter and his "last reserve" declamation), and was repeatedly dilatory should weigh against him. Lee thought him a better tactician than his other opponents; given Mac's performance both at the Peninsula and at Antietam, I have to wonder whether there's a degree of revisionism on Lee's part there.

As for Pinkerton, we can truthfully recognize exactly what went wrong and accept it wasn't gross cowardice or idiocy, but it was a repeated methodological mistake that a statistician would have seen through in a second. It was also coupled with repeated histrionics that Mac mirrored – in parallel situations when badly outnumbered (as McClellan thought he was), Lee attacked and won. Maybe that was just Lee's luck; maybe we can demythologize him that way; but the Old Napoleon had an observation about luck and generals.

We can all have fun sitting back in our armchairs with the advantage of hindsight.
We don't have to make the decision to sending thousands of men to their death (we only command lead and plastic) with the intelligence you have at hand.

McClellan built the Army of the Potomac after 1st Bull Run, the did not put the Army in to poison to suffer a Chancellorsville or a 2nd Bull Run.

McClellan was a safe pair of hands, he won't lose you the war but he won't win you one either.

McClellan was a fine organizer, but I don't know whether that made him *actually* a safe pair of hands. A decisive strike at Antietam might have led to a very early fall of Richmond and a far lower cost in lives. Grant chose to act the Butcher because it saved more lives in the long term.