The conservative friends of
McClellan cling with great pertinacity to the idea that he is a most wonderful General, and that his reappearance at the head of the army would change the whole aspect of Federal affairs.
We have never been able to see any reason in this
McClellan mania.
Never did General have a nobler opportunity of accomplishing great results, and never did General more signally disappoint the expectations of the world than this same
McClellan.
He had a whole year of preparation before he ventured to attack
Richmond, and for the greater part of that year his army quadrupled that of the
Confederates.
He was not only superior in numbers, but equally so in the scientific appliances of war. The world has never seen an army so admirably equipped as that which he commanded.
What did he do with it?
Why did he permit the
Confederates to recruit their forces and make some preparation for his reception?
Who ever heard of a great General sitting still for a year at the head of such an army as that of
McClellan's? And when he did start, what did he accomplish?
Magruder held him back with only ten thousand men on the
Peninsula; the
Confederates whipped him out of his senses at
Williamsburg, and the swamps of the
Chickahominy without any assistance but their own potent exhalations, decimated his ranks.
And when at last the great
battle of Richmond came off, what became of the wonderful General?
He was whipped like a dog from the strongest fortifications on the continent, and forced to seek inglorious refuge under the shadow of his gunboats.
It will not do to talk of
McClellan as a great General.
He is ‘"played out"’ long ago. He is a great braggart and a great falsifier, as his innumerable boastful and lying productions from this neighborhood demonstrated, and an insincere and weak-spirited man, as his hollow laudation of
Gen. Kearney, who had so roundly denounced him, fully proved; but he lost ten times as many men as
Burnside in his ‘"on to
Richmond."’ The
North need not expect to scare the
South from its propriety by the ghost of a dead and buried reputation.
