Note that McCellan didn't have the Democratic southern strongholds to help him in this election because these states had succeeded from the Union.
…
THE DEMOCRATIC EXCEPTION
Still, Democrats have to look pretty far — nearly 123 years — to find a general leading their presidential ticket. The 1880 presidential race featured two civil war generals, Republican James A. Garfield and Winfield Hancock, a Democrat. Garfield barely won the popular vote, and served less than a year in office before being assassinated.
A more interesting case is that of George McClellan, who won the Democrat’s nomination in 1864. While the world has changed drastically in the years since, there are some similarities to what Clark would face in 2004.
McClellan found himself, like Clark may in 2004, running against a wartime president during a conflict that began with predictions of swift victory but which turned out to be far bloodier than expected.
The conflict, of course, was the Civil War. The Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, had his first term interrupted by war even earlier that that of Bush. The war began in April 1861 and by July, disorganized Union troops already had suffered defeat at the hands of the Confederacy at Manassas, Virginia — the first Battle of Bull Run — a defeat so devastating that Washington itself suddenly lay undefended. In response, Lincoln named Gen. McClellan, a railway engineer recalled to the army when the war started, as commander of his military forces.
McClellan’s engineering background served him well as he went about reorganizing Union forces into the enormous Army of the Potomac. But he proved inept in command, and in 1862, after Antietam, a battle that remains the worst loss of American lives in a single day, Lincoln relieved him.
With the war dragging on and no end in sight, the Democratic Party nominated the embittered McClellan as their candidate in 1864. While many Democrats favored suing for peace with the Confederacy, McClellan did not and he campaigned hard arguing that Lincoln had wasted thousands of lives by appointing inept commanders and allowing corrupt arms merchants to run amok behind the lines. He also attacked the Emancipation Proclamation, not so much because it freed the slaves but because it offered no plan for dealing with the dislocation that would follow.
According to Harper’s Weekly, the nation’s preeminent news magazine in the mid-19th century, Lincoln early on felt he might loose, largely because of the nation’s war-weariness. But victories by the Union Army in September 1864, and Gen. William Tecumsah Sherman’s “March on Georgia” that followed, helped stoke optimism in the north. Lincoln used the war deftly, making sure overwhelmingly loyal Union soldiers got to vote, warning Americans “Don’t swap horses in the middle of the stream.” On election day, Lincoln trounced McClellan, taking 78 percent of the vote.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/967389.asp…
The deeper the political commentators go into backgrounding McClellan, the more awful the errors, not only of fact but of inference and speculation.
MSNBC's Michael Moran starts:
"McClellan found himself, like Clark may in 2004, running against a wartime president during a conflict that began with predictions of swift victory but which turned out to be far bloodier than expected."
This does not match my memory of the predictions made for the Iraq war, but the value here, which should have been developed, is the idea of a general running against the president in wartime.
Moran then embarks on a series of errors, first characterizing McClellan as "embittered." McClellan was philosophical, not bitter, and had to be coaxed into running.
"While many Democrats favored suing for peace with the Confederacy, McClellan did not and he campaigned hard arguing that Lincoln had wasted thousands of lives by appointing inept commanders and allowing corrupt arms merchants to run amok behind the lines." McClellan hardly campaigned at all. He certainly did not make these charges against Lincoln: these were made by the Democratic Party press.
I am grateful to see them in print again, after so many years.
This is not the place for McClellan advocacy; such advocacy has its own
website. What is striking about the comments about George B. is that they run the gamut, positive to negative, and that the negative comments are not entirely tied to the lockstep Nevins/Catton/Sears/McPherson consensus, the formulaic "Lincoln Finds a General" motif that dominates academic interpretations of the Civil War.
That good news makes the maligning of McClellan almost tolerable.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
