McClellan's Military Career, Reviewed and Exposed: The Military Policy of the Administration Set Forth and Vindicated (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from McClellan's Military Career, Reviewed and Exposed: The Military Policy of the Administration Set Forth and Vindicated

One would suppose from'the tone of General mcclellan that when he came to the Army of the Potomac there was no army to command. I found, says he (page no army to command - a mere collection of regiments, cowering on the banks of the Potomac, some perfectly raw, others dispirited by the recent defeat. Now, the facts of the case are that he came into command of fifty thousand men, and the were very far from being a mere collection of regiments. The brigade and dive sional organization existed and had existed, having been established by General mcdowell. The organization of modern armies is a matter long ago 'fixed, and is not an affair which admits either of invention or of innovation. The hierarchy Z the battalion, brigade, division, and corps, first formulated in the Ordonnance Roi, is the military system of every European nation; and our own military code is, in fact, a translation of it. It is not clear, therefore, how there was room for this exercise of any such m sterious powers of organization as have been attributed General mcclellan, an he certainly put forth none. He found the framework of brigades and divisions, and he continued it; simply piling up more brigades and more divisional There only remained to push the organization one step higher, and that step he did not take. Our regular arm having always been very smafl, no higher unit of organization than the division had existed or had been required. What became absolutely necessary as soon as the needs of the war created great armies of one or two hundred thousand men was to establish the higher fighting unit - the corps d'armée - without which no large army can effectively enter upon an active campaign. General mcclellan would never consent to the establishment éf corps. The only novelty of organization, therefore, which it was possible for him to institute, he would not and did not. He left the army an acephalous agglomer ation of thirteen divisions, without correlation, unity or cohesion; and it became necessary for the President, months afterwards, and in opposition to General Ma Clellan, to constitute corps just as the army was on the point of setting out on an ac tive campaign.

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