Throughout the first half of the Civil War, the U. S. Army on the field performed like beer-league backups against a team of All-Stars. It is natural a series of essays about its leadership would present a dispiriting chronicle of utter ineptitude. Mostly it does.
Stephen W. Sears, who has written about those early years of the Army of the Potomac across several campaign-specific books, takes stock of Northern leadership performance during the war as a whole. He would seem the right author; yet for all his expertise Controversies & Commanders is not as satisfying as his other works.
It may just be that much of this book is ground he covered before, in chapters of other books. Or the brevity of his essays, or the lack of their originality as he mostly plumbs secondary sources and offers non-controversial conclusions.
The book may promise controversy, but he’s too reasonable a historian to deliver.
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| A scene from Hamlet is recreated by Civil War cartoonist Justin Howard. It features Gen George McClellan as the dithering Dane squaring off against Lincoln as the head of a clown. In 1864 the two went from butting heads over the course of the war to running against each other for President. Image from https://elections.harpweek.com/1864/cartoon-1864-medium.asp?UniqueID=34&Year=1864 |
If there is a unifying thesis behind this book, it is that leadership was a quality not only earned on the battlefield, but in the halls of Congress and the White House as well. You could actually get by without the former easier than you could the latter. Take for example the legendary Dan Sickles, whose path to glory included nearly losing the North’s greatest victory at Gettysburg.
On the opposite side of the ledger, an early essay spotlights the ordeal of Charles Stone, a loyal general undone by “innuendo” of disloyalty because of the dislike of one man, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton:
To Stanton, General Stone’s real guilt was his lack of heart for the kind of unsparing war needed to destroy the South and the slave power. So long as Stone was shut away in military prison, incommunicado but for all to see, he was an object lesson to others of his kind (others like General McClellan), a warning that generals must be subservient to the policies and politics of the administration that employed them.
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| Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was a forceful enemy of McClellan within Lincoln's cabinet, urging his dismissal from command of the Army of the Potomac. Stanton's list of charges included "the destruction of our armies, the protraction of the war, the waste of the national resources, and the overthrow of the government..." Image from https://www.history.com/articles/edwin-m-stanton |
George McClellan, the Army of the Potomac’s first true commander, dominates several of Sears’s essays, as he did most of Sears’s Civil War output before this book. Both a biographer and harsh critic of the general known as “Little Mac,” Sears makes many of the same points he did before, about McClellan’s delusive belief in the enemy’s size and his lack of decisiveness in the clutch.
This time, though, he is more interested in how McClellan’s example of resisting more aggressive direction from Washington left a negative imprint on his command long after he was dismissed from the field:
“George McClellan, as it were, fathered the Army of the Potomac, and while his command of it ceased before the war reached its halfway point, his influence on its high command, for good or ill, lasted through to Appomattox,” he writes in his Preface.
The book proper begins with the essay “Little Mac and the Historians,” an overview of how McClellan has been treated in the public record since the end of the war. It’s an unexciting essay that promises more than it delivers, though it makes a unique point about the need to take into account “not one General McClellan but four General McClellans.”
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| Difficult as McClellan's days of command was for the Northern army, there were worse options. At First Bull Run (above), Union troops were poorly drilled and led by rank incompetents. McClellan injected his men with fighting spirit and discipline that kept defeats from becoming routs. https://www.thoughtco.com/first-battle-of-bull-run-2360940 |
In short, he was an excellent administrator and morale-builder before battle, but dilatory to an extreme when he glimpsed the Confederate jugular at Malvern Hill and again at Antietam.
Despite McClellan’s lack of initiative, Sears pushes back hard at a common contention, then and now, that the guy didn’t want to fight because he didn’t believe enough in the cause, or more specifically that he wanted to negotiate a truce that allowed slavery to continue. “Whether at headquarters or on the battlefield or in the political arena, in defeat and disappointment, George McClellan never wavered in his determination to put down the rebellion,” Sears concludes.
The shadow of McClellan nevertheless proved the undoing of many Union generals, like Fitz John Porter. Porter was a good commander, Sears acknowledges in “The Court-Martial of Fitz John Porter,” but more as a defender than attacker. Accused of treason at Second Bull Run, Porter became a sacrificial lamb to Stanton’s desire to whip his generals into a more sanguinary fervor.
Sears’s essay on Porter outlines the weak nature of the charges against him, leveled by the incompetent losing commander of Second Bull Run, John Pope, only to concur with the wisdom of Porter’s removal: “That he was guilty of an attitude so contemptuous of his commanding officer that it colored his every action was beyond his admitting.”
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| Fitz John Porter, in a double image captured by Mathew Brady. Sears calls him "the highly visible representation of McClellanism, the disease the general's detractors defined as bad blood and paralysis infecting much of the officer corps of the Army of the Potomac." Image from https://www.thoughtco.com/first-battle-of-bull-run-2360940 |
The Union’s top ranks were riven by dissention, much of it deserved, but all of it ruinous to ultimate victory. “Personal jealousies and professional rivalries, the bane and curse of all armies, had entered deeply into ours,” Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles is quoted observing in Sears’s essay “September Crisis.” This examines the almost preordained return of McClellan to top command in the days before Antietam.
After Antietam, the song remained the same. Only now it was who was to be brought in to replace McClellan a second time. “Revolt of the Generals” details the fates of his many heirs apparent, as well as the itchiness of at least some generals to put McClellan back in charge. Sears quotes one unnamed general: “Why does he not take us down with him to Washington, and clear out the Abolition crew, as Cromwell did the Rump Parliament?”
Other essays constitute well-trod ground for Sears. “Last Words on the Lost Order” looks at how McClellan was able to get hold of Robert E. Lee’s directive splitting his force as he marched for the Antietam River. It doesn’t say much more than Sears offered in his epic history of that battle, Landscape Turned Red. Sears’s rare admiration for one Union leader, Joe Hooker, is explained with “In Defense of Fighting Joe,” though Sears made mostly the same points he did in his campaign chronicle of Hooker’s big moment in the war, Chancellorsville.
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| Eschewing facial hair and refusing to hide his enjoyment of prostitutes were just two ways Joe Hooker stood out as different from the Union high command. "Hooker talked far too much and too indiscreetly and with too much brag, but what he said, upon examination, often sounds suspiciously like truth," Sears writes. Image from https://encyclopediavirginia.org/293hpr-a5dabf9cdd190fc/ |
I can’t shake the feeling that what Sears liked about Hooker was his willingness to take the initiative compared to McClellan, never mind how badly he fumbled it in the end.
Both the best and the weakest essays in this collection are those that move beyond McClellan’s part in the war. To begin with the latter, “Raid on Richmond” presents the story of a poorly conceived Union cavalry attack on the Confederate capital and its repercussions after it went awry. Sears concludes that the idea to transform a mission of prison liberation into one of assassination was Stanton’s brainchild, and that it somehow set the stage for Lincoln’s assassination. It’s blurry and unconvincing, with a lot of projection by Sears.
Sears is on firmer ground retelling the drama of Dan Sickles, a legendary incompetent who kept rising despite his lack of battlefield authority. “He is a hero without a heroic deed! Literally made by scribblers,” fumed General Alpheus Williams, with justice, even before Sickles exposed an entire Union flank to near disaster at Gettysburg.
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| What ironically saved Dan Sickles from dismissal from the Union Army was the cannonball that carried off his right lower leg at Gettysburg. That, along with his friendship with Stanton, ensured he would remain the bane of many Union leaders who wanted him kept far from a battlefield. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Sickles%27s_leg |
In “Gouverneur Kemble Warren and Little Phil,” Sears spotlights the dismissal of corps commander Warren near the very end of the war, called out for lack of aggression by two Union leaders, U. S. Grant and Phil Sheridan. This despite ample evidence Sears wheels out of Warren doing his part to crush Lee at Five Forks.
This is a longer essay than most, and newer territory for Sears. As a result, he seems more engaged, both by the episode and the dynamic it presents. When did it make more sense for the Union to demand action from its leadership, and when was caution more needed? Warren was an military engineer by trade who tended to approach battlefields methodically, with some care taken for his troops. Grant and Sheridan prized aggression, to the point of ordering bloody frontal charges.
Both saw Warren, as did another senior Northern leader, George Meade, as too dilatory, even timid. At Five Forks, despite Warren driving his command to the front and even landing a killing blow on the enemy host at the climactic moment, he was accused of insubordination by Sheridan and immediately dismissed from command:
On April 1 [1865], after Warren’s cool, aloof manner had served to prime him, Sheridan ignited in the heat of battle and sacked Warren because he “wasn’t in the fight” at his side in the one small segment of the battleground that he, Sheridan, witnessed.
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| Gouverneur Warren's greatest moment in the Civil War is commemorated with this statue at Gettysburg's Little Round Top, where Warren commanded a successful last-minute defense. As an attacker, Sears notes he could often be hesitant, though he did show initiative and courage at Five Forks. Image from https://www.gettysburgdaily.com/warren-statue-its-not-easy-turning-green/ |
Sears describes this as “a grave injustice” yet sees some justice in how it turned out, describing Warren as “very much an echo of General McClellan, whom he admired extravagantly.” Generals who don’t fight can cost their nations a lot more than high casualties on a battlefield, as Antietam proved.
Controversies & Commanders goes some way to nailing down this thesis. Still, it does not have the same readability or authority of Sears’s campaign histories. The essays showcase Sears’s familiarity with the war but often lack a sharp point beyond the inability of this or that general at a particular moment in time, hardly revelatory information, especially if you have read Sears’s other Civil War books.
Sears’s brilliance as a leading historian, to my lights, is more in the field of amassing vast troves of information and presenting them in ways that are both understandable and exciting. Hot takes are not his thing, which is what you get here even with the essays on Warren and Sickles, which are both solid reads. The rest work best as appetizers for people interested in how the Army of the Potomac nearly lost the war in multiple ways before finally embracing a hard and bloody path.
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