They were eventual victors in the highest-stakes battles their country ever fought, enduring gut-wrenching reversals and hellish casualties all the way. They also made for some of the whiniest, brattiest, narcissistic headcases this side of an ‘80s teen comedy.
With such leaders was the Union saved.
The main takeaway from this book, the first by Civil War historian Stephen Sears to cover the entire war rather than a specific campaign, is just how brutal a spectacle it was not just during specific battles but all the way through. Yet the prima donna aspect hits home, too.
They sure could dish on one another:
Erasmus Keyes: “I am called a Republican and if you know the manner in which McClellan & his clique make war on republicans, you will understand what pressure I am obliged to sustain.”
Samuel Heintzelman: “No one appeared to know what to do, or rather to think it necessary to do anything.”
After the Second Battle of Bull Run, corps commander Franz Sigel said his defeated leader John Pope was “…affected with looseness of the brains as others with looseness of the bowels.”
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| The image of high command harmony among Northern generals was easier to capture on canvas than in reality. "Grant And His Generals" Painting by Ole Peter Hansen Balling at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, from https://www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/union-and-confederate-military-leadership.html |
Sears does a masterful job laying out all the inter-army friction and putting it into the right perspective; namely, how such a crew managed to see their way through to defeat Robert E. Lee.
Ulysses S. Grant was the eventual commander of the fight against Lee, overseeing units that included the Army of the Potomac, which holds the spotlight as Sears concentrates on the Eastern part of the war. Grant was magnificent, but he could also be single-minded to a fault in his strategy, favoring bloody frontal assaults. George Meade, actual commander of the Army of the Potomac from 1863-1865, had the opposite problem, being at times too slow and defensive.
Together, however, they made a formidable partnership. “However much in his home letters Meade chafed at his public anonymity, he worked selflessly and in mutual respect with Grant,” Sears writes.
They would be the exception rather than the rule. Many generals of equal rank held one another in various degrees of contempt, riding each other for imagined or real displays of disrespect, chafing at the senior commanders they had to obey.
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| A constant thorn in the side of the Northern cause during the first half of the war was its overall army commander, Henry Halleck. Sears notes he was little more than a clerk, offering Lincoln little guidance and often a source of delay. He was known as "Old Brains" by his fellow generals. Image from https://www.americanhistorycentral.com/entries/henry-halleck/ |
At times this included the President himself, Abraham Lincoln. When he was the commander of the Army of the Potomac, George McClellan frequently called his commander-in-chief a “gorilla.” After fighting scared and losing at Gaines Mill, he shot off a bitter telegram to the President: “If I save this Army now I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons in Washington – you have done your best to sacrifice this Army.”
That McClellan held onto his post several months after the President got that message was a sign of the North’s desperation. Lincoln had to make do with the leaders he was given; in many cases he did so for too long.
Lincoln’s Lieutenants presents a colorful rogues’s gallery of egos run amok. Several generals conspire against each other, using friends in and around the White House to denigrate their opponents. This is often the case where the generals lack effectiveness in the field.
Daniel Sickles disobeyed direct orders from his commander Meade at Gettysburg and left his sector of the battlefield with a huge gap that Lee exploited, destroying Sickles’s command (and his leg) in the process. While he recovered, Sickles had allies in the press to spread baseless criticisms about how Meade let Lee escape.
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| In reality, Meade (at right, on a white horse) told Sickles (facing him at left) that he was out of position just before the Confederates struck Gettysburg's Peach Orchard, not during it. When Sickles asked if he should pull back, Sears records Meade's tart reply: "I wish to God you could, but the enemy won't let you." Image from https://historynet.com/dan-sickles-gettysburg/ |
Others more quietly directed criticism at Grant for making endless, often unsuccessful attacks. “Has he no other recourse in tactics?” wrote one officer in his diary. “Or is it sheer obstinacy?”
McClellan comes off worst in this regard, not a surprise given Sears’s track record as “Little Mac’s” biggest critic. Sears marshals some facts for his case. Throughout his campaigning, McClellan kept most of his corps commanders at arm’s length, with the exception of “pets” William Franklin and Fitz John Porter. The result was a cliquey command structure where sameness in thinking was a rule.
This was especially fatal when it came to intelligence about enemy strength. At one point late in 1861, before Lee took command of the Army of Northern Virginia, McClellan declined to push on to Richmond despite outnumbering his foe by more than two-to-one. (104,000 versus 44,000, according to Sears.)
McClellan actually believed the reverse, assuming the enemy had more than 200,000 troops at their disposal based on gross overcounting by his intelligence chief, Allan Pinkerton. “Of all McClellan’s potential chances to crush or cripple his foe, none was missed by a greater margin than this,” Sears writes.
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| Gen. Phil Kearny was a frequent critic of McClellan's timidity who had the opposite problem, an attack-first mindset he preferred to direct from the front. At Chantilly in September 1862, this would cause his untimely death. "As always (and senselessly as always), Phil Kearny trusted no one but himself to seek out the enemy," Sears writes. Image from https://emergingcivilwar.com/2025/09/01/the-autopsy-of-philip-kearny/ |
For a reader of Sears’s other Civil War histories, McClellan’s failings as the leader of the Army of the Potomac are nothing new. What is different is getting to read his takes on bookend battles for the first time, those fought earlier and later in the war.
The First Battle of Bull Run was amateur hour for both sides: “The 2nd Wisconsin was fired on by comrades who saw only their gray uniforms. After a stiff fight on the plateau they fell back, only to be mistaken this time for charging enemy troops and again peppered by friendly fire. The 2nd Wisconsin suffered 88 men killed and wounded this day, with no knowing how many were hit by fellow Yankees.”
After that battle, the knives were out for Union commander Irwin McDowell, creating a vacancy for McClellan to fill. That became a constant theme as the war went on, subordinates taking it on themselves to get their leader dismissed, which happened whether that leader was Joseph Hooker or Ambrose Burnside.
Sears is by no means a critic of all these generals. He is actually partial to Hooker, and open-minded enough to credit Burnside, McDowell and other subpar generals with their moments of real merit. His word portraits of the many generals who served the North are on the whole balanced, insightful, even entertaining.
Yet he tends to emphasize shortcomings. Gen. Edwin Sumner was a dedicated and brave leader but a relic of old ideas, discouraging entrenchment because he believed it bred timidity. Sears notes: “Given a direct order to march from point A to point B, Edwin Sumner was the soldier to carry it out. Given discretion, given command independence, as at Williamsburg, revealed him beyond his depth.”
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| Edwin Sumner was seen as out of step with current military thinking by McClellan and other generals. Still, he was definitely courageous and devoted to the cause. After being wounded at Glendale, during the Seven Days' campaign, he urged his men on: "I've been hit twice this afternoon but it is nothing when you get used to it." Image from https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cwpb.01556/ |
Gettysburg showcased the Army of the Potomac at its best, able to overcome Sickles’s big mistake and deliver a hammer blow to Lee’s last big offensive. Yet backbiting and infighting would mar its aftermath. Sears notes Meade had a chance to cut off Lee’s retreat but moved too slowly, hobbled as they were by high casualties and low ammunition. This led to more carping and questioning of authority.
At one point, the Confederates were able to retrench and drive off a piecemeal Union attack. This would become the norm for the next two years, which from a military history perspective is maybe the dullest and certainly the most depressing part of the war, a long and bloody series of draws where Grant exchanged tactical defeats for strategic victories.
Sears quotes Theodore Lyman, a staff officer in the Army of the Potomac, after the 1864 battle of Spotsylvania Court House:
“This whole death struggle is almost without a parallel, 8 days, and heavy fighting during seven of them, with night marches and every species of toil! It seems like two giants reeling about each other, bleeding and faint, but unyielding to the last breath.”
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| In an effort to shorten the protracted siege of Petersburg, Union forces under General Burnside dug a mine under enemy lines and then attempted to swarm through the hole it made. Known as the Battle of the Crater, it only extended the high casualties on both sides and revealed command incompetence. Two generals were getting drunk in a bombproof shelter while their attacking troops were slaughtered. Image from https://www.facebook.com/100064043315489/photos/the-battle-of-the-crater-part-of-the-american-civil-war-took-place-on-30-july-18/10157635629114612/ |
Sears points out this became the practice in subsequent battles, maneuver replaced by sledgehammer tactics more familiar to students of World War I than Napoleon. “This new-style war of entrenchments spawned a new-style war of attrition,” Sears writes.
In the last year of the war, the generals still fought each other as hard as the enemy. Sears draws on one of the most famous of these rivalries, between corps commander Gouverneur Warren and cavalry leader “Fighting Phil” Sheridan. Warren would eventually lose his command when Sheridan got permission from Grant and Meade to take it away.
Sears presents the case for both leaders, favoring Warren’s case for the specific battle that cost him his command but also criticizing Warren’s slowness and willingness to make up his own orders in other instances. Sheridan brought dash to his field command, but also neglected the cavalry’s principle role of providing infantry support.
Of all the Union generals, the one that comes off best in Lincoln’s Lieutenants is probably Meade, surprisingly so given how much Grant dominates discussion. Leaving Meade in charge of the Army of Potomac may have been one of Grant’s soundest decisions, as Sears explains it.
“It
can hardly be in human nature for men to show more valor, or Generals to
manifest less judgment, than were perceptible on our side that day,” Sears quotes
a press report after a Union defeat at Fredericksburg. This proves a running theme
throughout Lincoln’s Lieutenants, and helps keep a reader engaged across
its epic length.
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