Landing on the Pamunkey River—and
force McClellan to evacuate his works east
of the city to defend his vital supply line.
Although Lee had performed superbly in
the Mexican War—he was brevetted three
times and deemed by Commander-in-
Chief Winfield Scott to be the “best sol-
dier he had ever seen in the field”—Lee
had yet to command a large army in the
field. He had assumed his current com-
mand only days earlier, after General
Joseph E. Johnston was wounded at the
Battle of Seven Pines. Lee had inherited a
loose-knit army composed of Johnston’s
First Manassas veterans, the original
Peninsula defensive force commanded by
Maj. Gen. John Magruder, and a mixture
of untested reinforcements mostly from
Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas,
which he named the Army of Northern
Virginia. With his new forces, Lee moved
to drive the huge Union juggernaut—the
largest army ever assembled on the North
American continent to that point—from
in front of the Confederate capital.
After the Union defeat at the First Battle
of Bull Run (or First Manassas, as it was
known in the South), President Abraham
Lincoln summoned McClellan east to takecommand of the Army of the Potomac. A
talented, energetic officer only 34 years of
age, McClellan initially enjoyed the adu-
lation of the press and politicians who
dubbed him “the young Napoleon.” He
first experienced warfare in 1847 during
Scott’s siege of Vera Cruz during the Mex-
ican War. In 1855 McClellan was a mem-
ber of a military commission sent to
Europe by Secretary of War Jefferson
Davis to study military developments there
and observe firsthand the fighting in the
Crimea. There he gained further insights
into the logistics of transporting allied
forces by sea, a portent of his amphibious
movement during the Peninsula campaign
of 1862. After serving under incompetent
political generals and witnessing the relief
of his mentor, General Scott, by President
James K. Polk in 1848, McClellan had
developed a thorough contempt for civil-
ian control and management of wars.
After resigning his commission in 1857
and becoming superintendent of two Mid-
western railroads, McClellan first displayed
the extraordinary organizational skills that
eventually led to a commission to organize
Ohio regiments for the Union when the
Civil War erupted in 1861. In June and Julyof that year, McClellan led a small army to
two modest victories that secured control
of much of the region that soon became the
Union state of West Virginia, successes that
brought the call to Washington, D.C., five
days after the Bull Run disaster. Few
observers were aware that McClellan had
been conspicuously absent from the field
during much of the fighting in western Vir-
ginia, preferring instead to allow subordi-
nates to make crucial battlefield decisions.
Nevertheless, a skilled and meticulous
organizer, McClellan molded the Army of
the Potomac into a huge, well-disciplined
fighting force, and when he finally led it on
campaign, he had his soldiers’ unques-
tioned loyalty and affection.
As the autumn days slipped by and the
Army of the Potomac did nothing to drive
off Confederate outposts 25 miles from
Washington, the honeymoon ended and
McClellan’s shortcomings began to mani-
fest themselves. He consistently overesti-
mated the strength of enemy forces con-
fronting him, using these flawed figures as
a reason for inaction, and his lethargy,
arrogance, and political convictions
injected a poison into relations between
the Lincoln administration and the armyCWQ-Sum16 Mechanicsville_Layout 1 4/20/16 4:15 PM Page 46