Not only did Lee commit treason, but West Pointers in the Union Army seriously debated overthrowing the Lincoln admin & to install a dictatorship. Gen. George B. McClellan, their leader, "joked" that people are "calling on me to save the nation—alluding to the Presidency, Dictatorship &c."
Good idea. Cadets should be able to recognize a traitor when they see one.
What other country honors its traitors? I can’t think of one. I guess the South has risen again? Can the NE secede this time?
Of course
The guardians of pedophiles are all traitors, we are at war with their coup, they must be dealt with accordingly.
Re-Reconstruction, that’s what we’re watching. We are NOT going back. 💪🏼✊🏼
Lincoln tread very carefully with McClellan as a result, eventually firing him for incompetence only to have him run against him on a proslavery platform in 1864.
The main takeaway is that if we're talking abt the legacy of West Point in the Civil War, what we really need to grapple with as a country is that even its graduates who remained faithful to the Union overwhelmingly positioned themselves as enemies of emancipation & civil rights.
The other main Civil War history takeaway is that the triumphalist nationalism stuff is almost always bullshit.
Bingo! This was an overwhelmingly reactionary institution & pearl-clutching over whether to honor those graduates who committed literal treason glosses over the ways that so many of those who remained hated democracy & equality, & fought vigorously to suppress it.
Sorry I should have been clearer in the OP; the McClellan quote above is from his correspondence, not from the article, which I think kinda misses the point of the actual role that West Point played in the Civil War. Tried to squeeze too much into too small a space.
When I think of Union generals who mused about overthrowing democracy I think of Hooker, first. He did effectively reorganize the Army of the Potomac but then lost badly at Chancellorsville, ending that plan.
I likewise refuse to join in praise for Sherman and Grant simply because, for all of their cerebral leadership and thoughtful command, they, like so many other Union officers, energetically pursued the ethnic cleansing of indigenous Americans, post-war.
It kinda makes you wonder how we should think of the state (& its relationship to liberal democracy, for that matter) for which they struggled. I don't think the current triumphalist narrative fits the facts.
It certainly makes the preservation of the union more compelling as the primary motivation even to the very end of the war, after abolition had become so prominent. I think that the triumphalism obscures the fact that many Southerns were conscripts, unenthusiastic about their cause,
prone to desertion, and resentful of the elites who had reduced them to a property-less existence prior to the war and then conscripted them into it. And, thus, were ready to partner, if uneasily, with freedmen and support radical political change. Until racism split them off.
I think that’s exactly right, though I argue in my work that U.S. policy itself was designed to break up this alliance & limit Black freedom. To that end, I think we actually totally misunderstand the postwar state & the regime of rights it concocted.
One has to wonder if the Peninsula Campaign was deliberately unsuccessful.
Worse still, it appears that McClellan did in fact try to orchestrate the total annihilation of John Pope's more radical Union forces at Second Manassas.
Was that out of rivalry with Pope or were there darker motives do you think?
It was in response to Pope's support for Fremont's earlier policy of emancipation, which inspired more West Point coup grumblings even when Lincoln overturned the policy. McClellan gloated in the aftermath of the battle at having ensured Pope's defeat.
would you recommend any books on this? I've been rereading Battle Cry of Freedom the last week or so (the times call for it, sigh) but I need something meatier. general civil war reqs are welcome too!
Not quite on this topic, but Confederate Reckoning by Stephanie McCurry gets at the underlying issues in this convo & is maybe the best book I’ve read on the Civil War proper. I’m reviewing another great one right now that will hopefully transform the field, but it won’t be out for another year.
Thanks! I've meant to read McCurry's book for *years* after reading excerpts in college, and it always got away from me. Just ordered it! can't wait re: the new book, please don't forget to post about it when it comes out! probably also dividing back into Foner after I finish Battle Cry
Yeah, my civil war history professor argued the peninsula campaign was the combination of McClellan’s unconscious fear of actually fighting and his very conscious desire to push for “the constitution as it is/was” and forestall the impending collapse of slavery
I had forgotten about all of this (and, as far as I can remember, was totally unaware of Hooker’s treasonous ponderings) so I’m very thankful for this thread, going to lose a whole evening read up on this
Wasn’t it also over having units from the Army of the Potomac attached to Pope’s Army of Virginia? Porter faced a Court-martial over it!
That's right. McClellan viewed Pope's ascent as a demotion.
I hate McClellan with a fire of more than a thousand suns. That being said, I have a half joke/half serious take that Lee can’t be the best general of the Civil War if he couldn’t defeat the worst - George McClellan. Lee didn’t annihilate him on the peninsula and McC stopped him at Antietam
Lee also consistently misunderstood the larger political & strategic dynamics governing the war he waged. Whether we look at Seven Days, Antietam, or Gettysburg, he misunderstood the manpower deficit of white supremacy & its unpopularity outside of the enslaving class.
Disagree. I think Lee was so aggressive *because of* the manpower disadvantage. Ot was going to get *more* disadvantageous over time, w/ the enlistment of Black troops and the draft, as he and Jeff Davis undrrstood, so it made all the sense in the world to attempt to push things to a conclusion...
...before the Union manpower advantage could be put into the field. Didn't work, of course. But I don't think it was irrational, or bad strategy. In 1870, the Prussians won w/ a smaller army by maneuvering aggressively, at a high operational tempo.
But dopey West Point reactionaries did have a special talent for making him look good in one-off battles.
Even the “common clay” racists of the South weren’t too crazy about the Southern elite’s desires to restrict democracy if that version of “democracy” excluded them.
This relates to one of McC’s huge blind spots: constantly overestimating the enemy’s strength. Pinkerton was giving him bunk intel but shouldn’t logic say that if the Union has a larger population, is more organized, and has better infrastructure, how could the rebs field armies that dwarfed his?
Lee was a great general, so was Genghis Khan, but this is not the requirement to be celebrated by a democracy (as if the US still was one)
This is the rebirth of the traitorous white supremacist group that wanted to continue with slavery!
PUCK this FENTAGON