CHAPTER 1
THE MAKING OF A SOLDIER
CONDITIONAL CADET McClellan was disheartened by everything about his first two weeks at West Point except the spectacular setting. He was desperately homesick and his feet hurt from drilling in shoes that were too tight, and he was nearly ready to pack up and return to Philadelphia. "I am as much alone as if in a boat in the middle of the Atlantic, not a soul here cares for, or thinks of me — not one here would lift a finger to help me," he wrote his sister Frederica. "I am entirely dependent on myself ... & take the blame of all my mistakes. ..." He had to put his letter aside to answer the drill call, but when he returned he was rejuvenated; with new shoes his awkwardness disappeared and he outdid everyone. "You can't imagine how much more inspirited I feel since I have acquitted myself handsomely at this mornings drill," he told Frederica. He was sure now that he could do his duty "as well as anyone who ever did go through here." George Brinton McClellan would rarely lack confidence in his soldierly abilities, and this first experience of doubt was typically brief.
His homesickness may be accounted for by his age. At just over fifteen and a half, he was the youngest of those who arrived at West Point in June 1842 to seek places as fourth classmen in the Military Academy. His confidence grew when he passed the physical examination — thirty of his potential classmates failed, he noted — and then the entrance examination. One hurdle remained, but his promise was such that in his case the authorities waived the minimum entry age of sixteen. On July 1 he was admitted to the class of 1846.
In a brief sketch of his boyhood, written late in life, George McClellan traced his interest in West Point back to the age of ten, when a fellow student at a private school in Philadelphia, Alfred Sully, son of the prominent painter Thomas Sully, had received an Academy appointment. There was an ancestral military background of sorts — the Mclellans of Scotland fought in support of the Stuart kings — but the only American McClellan of direct ancestry to take up arms before young George was his great-grandfather, Samuel McClellan, of Woodstock, Connecticut. Samuel served in the militia in the French and Indian War, and shortly before the Revolution raised a troop of horse at Woodstock. A family tradition of dubious authority placed him in the Battle of Bunker Hill. At any event, he served in the local militia for the remainder of the Revolution. Although not called to action during any of the British raids on Connecticut, he was a capable enough administrator to rise in rank to brigadier general of militia by 1779. He was married to a descendant of Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony, lived out his life much honored and respected, and was known to his posterity, including his great-grandson, as General Sam.
The succeeding generation remained in Woodstock, where General Sam's sons James and John founded the Woodstock Academy. The sons of James McClellan, George and Samuel, made their careers in medicine and sought a wider world. George, the father of Cadet McClellan, graduated from Yale College in 1816 and earned his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania three years later. He set up a surgical practice in Philadelphia, specializing in ophthalmology. A man of great energy, he founded the Jefferson Medical College and headed its faculty, maintained a substantial practice, edited a medical journal, wrote on the principles and practice of surgery, and kept a stable of fast trotters.
Dr. McClellan moved in the upper rank of Philadelphia society and numbered among his acquaintances such notables as Daniel Webster. Regarded as charming and courtly of manner, he was also stubbornly opinionated and not amenable to compromise, traits that in 1838 led to his departure from the medical school he had founded. In that day the rewards of medicine were not great, even for someone of Dr. McClellan's stature. His assumption of his father's considerable debts and the cost of a medical education for his eldest son, John Hill Brinton McClellan, created financial pressures, and no doubt the prospect of a free education helped steer his second son and namesake toward West Point.
In 1820 Dr. McClellan had married Elizabeth Steinmetz Brinton, of a leading Philadelphia family, and the couple produced five children: a daughter, Frederica; then three sons, John, George, and Arthur; and finally another daughter, Mary. From the evidence of her letters, Elizabeth McClellan was a woman of culture and refinement, and she saw to it that her children had the best education Philadelphia could offer. In a draft of his memoirs, General McClellan remarked that "before I went to West Point I had received an excellent classical education, was well read in History for a boy, and was a good French scholar."
George Brinton McClellan was born on December 3, 1826, and at the age of five attended what was called an infant school. This was followed by four years in the private school of Sears Cook Walker. Walker was a Harvard graduate and a man of considerable scientific attainment — "far above the grade of an ordinary scholastic," in McClellan's words — who would go on to important work with the United States Naval Observatory and the Coast Survey. Leaving Walker's school at age ten, young George next took instruction from a private tutor whom he described as "a one eyed German Jew by the name of Schiffer ..., a magnificent classical scholar & an excellent teacher. We were obliged to converse in Latin & French, and at an early age I became a good scholar in the classics. ..." In 1838 he enrolled at a preparatory academy of the University of Pennsylvania directed by the Reverend Samuel W. Crawford. Two years later, at the age of thirteen, he entered the university.
He resigned himself without enthusiasm to a career in the law, but after two years there he changed his goal to the military. "The youth has nearly completed his classical education at the University," his father wrote the secretary of war in the spring of 1842, "and desires to go through the West Point school for the serious purpose of devoting his life to the service of the Army of the U. States." There was some delay in his acceptance by the Academy, Dr. McClellan told the secretary, and he had requested President John Tyler's "kind consideration of my son's application. ..." Whether Tyler actually endorsed young McClellan is not known, but thereafter his nomination and acceptance proceeded without a hitch.
Little is recorded of George McClellan's youth beyond his schooling. His sister Frederica remembered him fondly if uncritically as "the brightest, merriest, most unselfish of boys ..., fond of books & study — & also of fun & frolic, & always the 'soul of honor."' He would recall childhood visits to his grandparents' home in Woodstock, but for the most part the McClellans' New England heritage became submerged in the Southern-oriented society of antebellum Philadelphia. (Some two decades later, General McClellan revealed how far he had departed from his family roots when he wrote disgustedly of "pestiferous wooden nutmeg, psalm singing yankees....") An incident suggestive of his forming character is one he himself related years later. At the Reverend Crawford's academy, when he was twelve or thirteen, he was accused of an offense he had not committed and made subject to punishment. "My father had told me not to permit myself to be whipped," he wrote, so when Dr. Crawford approached him with his rattan switch, "I met him with a kick & went out of the school." After a few days the dispute was mediated — there is the implication that his father intervened in his behalf — and he was readmitted at Dr. Crawford's "request." McClellan concluded his recollection of the episode with the remark that he "never had any more trouble with the rattan."
During his first two months at West Point, in the summer encampment of 1842, Cadet McClellan learned the fundamentals of soldiering in the regimen known as the School of the Soldier: the proper uniform, the use of musket and bayonet, the basic marching drills. The entire Corps of Cadets lived in tents in imitation of campaign conditions, with the plebes subjected to the harassing orders of smugly superior upper classmen. They were assigned to companies by height; McClellan, one of the smallest plebes as well as the youngest, found himself near the foot of the class, in stature, in C Company.
He had few complaints about the routine, he wrote home, except for the food, which was a universal complaint. He customarily skipped the Sunday dinner of pickled beef and potatoes, and observed that no bread ever reached the mess tables "younger" than a day old. Encampment life was not all drill and rigor. Superintendent Richard Delafield may have been "very economical with us" in regard to food, McClellan wrote, but he was indulgent in other matters. There was seldom any problem with obtaining permission for visits by relatives and friends, or in off-duty hours to go boating on the Hudson or to see the local sights. By the end of the summer he felt at home at the Academy. He carried his musket and wore his uniform with pride, he wrote his mother, and boasted that he was becoming as tough as a pine log.
The academic year began in September, and the cadets moved indoors to Spartan, drafty rooms in the stone barracks. Their twelve-hour days continued, but now it was two or three hours of drill and nine or ten of study and classroom recitation. The first year's curriculum was limited to two subjects — mathematics (algebra, geometry, and trigonometry) and French — but for many of the plebes it was a year of agony.
West Point was in theory an egalitarian institution, having at any one time a cadet from each congressional district plus a limited number of at- large appointees, and the comparatively easy entrance examination affirmed the principle. Classroom work, however, soon revealed the great disparity in educational opportunities across the country in the 1840s. For a George McClellan, educated at the best schools in Philadelphia, privately tutored and with two years of college, the classroom held no fears. For a Thomas J. Jackson, his classmate from rural Virginia for whom any mathematics beyond simple arithmetic and any language beyond English were utter mysteries, it was a struggle for survival. The physical and academic examinations proved too much for more than a third of the appointees of 1842, including one of McClellan's roommates. Just 83 of the 134 June arrivals survived the first year. McClellan would rank third in class "order of general merit"; Jackson fought his way to fifty-first place.
Cadet McClellan sometimes worked only as hard as was necessary to get by. At the examinations in January 1843 he stood first in mathematics but eighth in French, a subject in which he came to the Academy exceedingly well prepared. "I never studied at all at home," he admitted in a letter to his brother John; "now I do study a little (not much I must confess)," although he added that he was taking more pains with his work than formerly. Many years later, Charles S. Stewart, recalling their academic rivalry in the class of 1846, would say of McClellan, in praise that was somewhat faint, "He was well educated, and, when he chose to be, brilliant."
George McClellan entered West Point a gentleman as well as a scholar, and his friendships reflected that fact. Thomas Neill, also the son of a Philadelphia doctor and a year behind McClellan at the Academy, described the caste system that prevailed. "The distinction here is very marked indeed," he wrote in an 1843 letter. "In almost every class those who are gentlemen associate together, and have nothing whatever to do with those forward, impudent fellows who never can be gentlemen." Social status was only a part of the distinction. As McClellan explained to his brother, commonly held beliefs, attitudes, and politics cemented the associations. "Some how or other I take to the Southerners," he wrote; "almost all my associates — indeed all of them — are Southerners; I am sorry to say that the manners, feelings, & opinions of the Southerners are far, far preferable to those of the majority of the Northerners at this place." Among his new friends were the Virginians Dabney Maury and his roommate Ambrose Powell Hill (but not that other Virginian, roughhewn Tom Jackson), Cadmus Wilcox of North Carolina, and James Stuart of South Carolina, with whom he roomed for much of his time at West Point and who became the closest friend of his early life. Like most of George McClellan's views, which, once fixed in his mind, rarely changed, his sympathy with Southern attitudes would remain constant — with the singular exception of the matter of secession.
In their second year cadets completed work in mathematics (more geometry, then calculus and surveying) in preparation for the scientific and engineering courses of their final two years. They also finished their study of French, the goal of which was to make them, if not fluent, at least conversant with French military and engineering treatises. There was instruction in English composition and grammar, and the first of two years of drawing, a preparation for later work in military and civil engineering. Robert Weir, a talented artist in his own right, headed the Department of Drawing. Sympathetic to the fact that artistic ability was not something learned, like French grammar, by "boning," Weir generally passed any cadet who tried his best, whether the results were recognizable or not. Drawing was the only course in his Academy years that McClellan failed to master. As a third classman he ranked eighteenth in the subject, although he was third in overall class standing. The next year's curriculum stressed science: chemistry and what was called natural and experimental philosophy, a catchall term embracing mechanics, acoustics, optics, and astronomy. McClellan's rank in drawing that year slipped to twenty-third, and his overall class position fell one place, to fourth. He described drawing — figure, topographic, and landscape sketching — as "hard work" and was glad to have it behind him. That year he was appointed cadet sergeant in C Company.
The summer encampments progressed from the infantry's School of the Soldier in the first year through the increasingly complex field maneuvers of the School of the Company, the School of the Battalion, and the "evolution of the line" in the second and fourth years. (In the third summer there was a two-month furlough, one of the most eagerly awaited events of a cadet's West Point experience.) Artillery instruction followed a similar pattern, advancing from the duties of the gunner through those of the gun crew and finally the battery. There was work as well in entrenching, pontoon bridging, and fortification. Second classmen were taught riding, but there was no instruction in cavalry tactics.
Life at all times was governed by rote and discipline. Reveille was at five in the morning in summer and at six in winter. The drum signaled every activity through the day. Even the call for church, where attendance was required, was by drum; the cadets fell in and were marched into the chapel, where they sat in assigned places to hear strict High Church Episcopal sermons. Demerits were factored into the formula for class standing, and were handed out for sloppiness of dress, badly cared-for equipment, tardiness, and similar violations. The most serious offenses, such as drunkenness, could lead to court-martial and possible dismissal. Discipline was so constant that on the few occasions when it was relaxed the men sometimes "kicked up an awful row," as Cadet Thomas Neill described it. He calculated that during one Christmas and New Year's period fully half the cadets were drunk at one time or another, and were saved from punishment only by friends covering up for them.
The youthful-looking McClellan, short and compact of build, with gray eyes and dark hair, attracted much favorable notice at West Point. Erasmus Keyes, his artillery instructor, wrote that "a pleasanter pupil was never called to the blackboard." Dabney Maury, his friend from Virginia, thought he bore "every evidence of gentle nature and high culture, and his countenance was as charming as his demeanor was modest and winning." His academic rival, Charles Stewart, remembered him as generous and honorable, with not "a mean thought in him." Yet he was far from stuffy. He himself reported that on New Year's Eve in his plebe year he and half a dozen friends risked demerits to enjoy an after-hours supper of oyster pies, most likely procured from the famous off-limits tavern in nearby Highland Falls run by Benny Havens.
