Book Review: Conflict of Command: George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln, and the Politics of War

Conflict of Command: George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln, and the Politics of War. By George Rable. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023.  Hardcover, 496 pp. $49.95.

Reviewed by John Hennessy

It is easy to dislike George B. McClellan. He gives us much to work with: his self-interested, self-aggrandizing musings to his wife; his occasional disrespect toward the president Americans love most; his disdain for rivals past and present; and his sometimes-maddening caution (Americans revere the un-cautious).

Stephen W. Sears spun an enduring image of McClellan in his 1988 biography, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon. Sears’s highly readable, personality-driven interpretation landed somewhere between unflattering and devastating for George Brinton McClellan. Among many students of the war, Sears’s interpretation of McClellan’s Civil War service settled in as conventional wisdom. It is simple (we love simplicities), entertaining, and in some aspects not wrong.

Not surprisingly, Sears provoked an historiographical counterassault, born of the mind of Dr. Joseph Harsh of George Mason University and prominently sustained by two of his former Ph.D. students, Ethan Rafuse and Tom Clemens. Collectively, these scholars (and others) have urged a reconsideration of McClellan—a move away from the personality driven image of him forged by Sears and his predecessors. The revisers have largely succeeded, at least within academic circles, though trolling of McClellan remains popular with many authors and the general public.

In Conflict of Command, George Rable examines McClellan through the lens of his 15-month entanglement with Lincoln as commander of the Army of the Potomac. Rable, Professor Emeritus at the University of Alabama, is simply one of the finest Civil War historians of our time. His work ranges from an unusually broad-minded look at Battle of Fredericksburg to a religious history of the Civil War, with many stops in between. He has examined the role of Women, Confederate nationalism, Reconstruction, and even Damn Yankees (no doubt a favorite among many). His purpose is not to get you to say, “I didn’t know that” (though you will say that often enough), but to muse instead, “I never thought of that.” He invariably succeeds.

Rable places the Lincoln-McClellan dynamic in the context of a war in evolution—a war effort increasingly (in 1862) riven less by personalities than by political division. This book is little concerned with debating the virtues of personality or even the strategic decisions that confronted McClellan and Lincoln in 1862. Rather it is focused on the political realities that shaped the relationship of the President and his most visible army commander, as each strived for success and, as Rable put it, “lasting historical fame.”

Rable’s book recognizes something essential to anyone interested in the Civil War: McClellan’s command of the Army of the Potomac coincided with a period of dramatic change in the Union war effort. Questions of strategy percolated. Policies on the operation of armies in the field and their treatment of civilians hardened notably in 1862. Tens of thousands of enslaved refugees entering Union lines helped force the federal government to put in place policies for managing them. Eventually those evolving policies led to the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln (a Republican) and McClellan (a Democrat) could hardly have viewed these and other issues relating to the conduct of the war more differently. Lincoln saw the need. McClellan—whose army would be responsible for implementing these policies in the field—cautioned against the measures. The issues fractured not just the Lincoln-McClellan relationship, but created a fissure in the Northern body politic that would define the stakes involved in the presidential election of 1864.

Rable disdains low-hanging cheap shots while avoiding the sometimes-painful defensiveness of McClellan’s most ardent defenders. Instead, Rable weaves together the dynamics of personality and politics better than anyone who has dared to treat the Lincoln-McClellan dynamic. That the relationship survived as long as it did is a testament to the fragility of the political underpinnings of the Union war effort in 1862—which rendered McClellan’s removal politically unwise so long as off-year elections loomed. Rable tracks the general’s long-lasting impact on the Army of the Potomac (pining for Little Mac persisted even into 1864), his rise to the Democratic presidential nomination in 1864, and the soldiers’ ultimate rejection of him at the polls.

Good thinkers sometimes are not good writers, but good writing invariably requires good thinking, and George Rable delivers. His text us built on a foundation of immense research and deep understanding born of decades of work in archives and historic newspapers (Rable sees the Press as an essential character in this story). Though built on a chronological spine, this book is deeply analytical. If you seek a deeper understanding of the Civil War, the evolving Union war effort, the Army of the Potomac, and George B. McClellan, George Rable’s Conflict of Command is an indispensable tool for getting there.

John Hennessy recently retired as the Chief Historian at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, where he worked for the final 26 years of his NPS career. He is the author of four books, most notably, Return to Bull Run: The Campaign and Battle of Second Manassas. His books and dozens of articles and essays have appeared under the imprint of Simon & Schuster, Cambridge University Press, Stackpole Books, LSU Press, the University of North Carolina Press, and another dozen publications. He is presently at work on several projects, including a history of the Fredericksburg region before, during, and after the Civil War, and a book exploring the sometimes-tenuous relationship between the Army of the Potomac and the government it served. He lives in Fredericksburg.