Civil War Historical Figure Sources Handout: George B. McClellan (1826-1885)
Secondary Source:
George Brinton McClellan was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on
December 3, 1826. He went to good schools and by thirteen was enrolled
at the University of Pennsylvania. By 1842, when he was fifteen,
McClellan had been accepted into the United States Military Academy.
McClellan fought in the Mexican War and became a captain. After the
Mexican War, he designed a saddle that the army used for their cavalry,
became an engineer of the Illinois Central Railroad, and in 1860 was
president of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad. When the Civil War broke
out in 1861, he decided to fight for the Union, even though he believed in
state’s rights. After the Battle of Bull Run, Lincoln gave him command of
the Army of the Potomac. His was loved by his troops and called “Little
Mac.” However, he was weak in carrying out his battle tactics and Lincoln
replaced him in November 1862. George McClellan was angry and later
ran against Lincoln as the Democratic nominee for president in 1864. The
Northern Democrats were anti-war and promised to end the war and negotiate with the Confederacy. In 1877,
he later ran and won the election as Governor of New Jersey.
Primary Sources:
The day after McClellan became leader of the Army of the Potomac in July 1861, he wrote to a friend:
I find myself in a new and strange position here – President, Cabinet, General Scott, and all deferring to me –
By some strange…magic I seem to have become the power of the land.
McClellan wrote a letter to President Lincoln on July 7th, 1862
Our cause must never be abandoned; it is the cause of free institutions and self government. The Constitution
and the Union must be preserved, whatever may be the cost in time, treasure and blood. If secession is
successful, other dissolutions are clearly to be seen in the future. Let neither military disaster, political faction or
foreign war shake your settled purpose to enforce the equal operation of the laws of the United States upon the
people of every state.
Military power should not be allowed to interfere with the relations of servitude, either by supporting or
impairing the authority of the master; except for repressing disorder as in other cases. Slaves, contraband under
the Act of Congress, seeking military protection, should receive it.
McClellan wrote his autobiography called, “McClellans’ Own Story” before he died, in 1885.
After all that has been said and written upon the subject, I suppose none now doubt slavery was the real knot of
the question and the underlying cause of the war….In the South, the habit of carrying, and using on slight
provocation, deadly weapons, the sparse settlement of the country, the idle and reckless habits of the majority of
the illiterate whites, the self-assertion natural to the dominant race in a slave-holding country, all conspired to
impress them with an ill-founded assumption of superior worth and courage over the industrious, peaceful, lawabiding Northerners.