George B. McClellan

About the George B. McClellan

George Brinton McClellanwas an American military officer and politician who served as the 24th governor of New Jersey and as Commanding General of the United States Army from November 1861 to March 1862. He was also an engineer, and was chief engineer and vice president of the Illinois Central Railroad, and later president of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad in 1860.

A West Point graduate, McClellan served with distinction during the Mexican-American War before leaving the United States Army to serve as a railway executive and engineer until the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861. Early in the conflict, McClellan was appointed to the rank of major general and played an important role in raising the Army of the Potomac, which served in the Eastern Theater.

McClellan organized and led the Union Army in the Peninsula campaign in southeastern Virginia from March through July 1862. It was the first large-scale offensive in the Eastern Theater. Making an amphibious clockwise turning movement around the Confederate Army in northern Virginia, McClellan’s forces turned west to move up the Virginia Peninsula, between the James River and York River, landing from Chesapeake Bay, with the Confederate capital, Richmond, as their objective. Initially, McClellan was somewhat successful against General Joseph E. Johnston, but the emergence of General Robert E. Lee to command the Army of Northern Virginia turned the subsequent Seven Days Battles into a Union defeat. However, historians note that Lee’s victory was in many ways pyrrhic as he failed to destroy the Army of the Potomac and suffered a bloody repulse at Malvern Hill.

McClellan and President Abraham Lincoln developed a mutual distrust, and McClellan was privately derisive of Lincoln. He was removed from command in November, in the aftermath of the 1862 midterm elections. A major contributing factor in this decision was McClellan’s failure to pursue Lee’s army following the tactically inconclusive but strategic Union victory at the Battle of Antietam outside Sharpsburg, Maryland. He never received another field command and went on to become the unsuccessful Democratic Party nominee in the 1864 presidential election against the Republican Lincoln. The effectiveness of his campaign was damaged when McClellan repudiated his party’s platform, which promised an end to the war and negotiations with the Confederacy. He served as the governor of New Jersey from 1878 to 1881; in McClellan’s later writings, he vigorously defended his Civil War conduct.