George McClellan: Quaker Guns, Special Order 191 and an Unused Reserve

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In the spring of 1862, the Army of the Potomac, more than 100,000 strong, halted on the Virginia Peninsula before logs painted black to look like cannon. This episode traces how George B. McClellan, its commander, came to that moment. Born into a Philadelphia medical family, he entered the University of Pennsylvania at 14 and West Point at 15, graduated second in his class, and learned slow, methodical siege warfare under Winfield Scott in Mexico. Friendships with Southern cadets shaped his opposition to abolition. As an Illinois Central Railroad executive he mastered telegraph dispatching and large-scale freight, the skills he used to rebuild the army after Bull Run at age 34.

The episode follows his insults toward Lincoln, his reliance on Allan Pinkerton's inflated enemy counts, and his retreat to the gunboat USS Galena during Malvern Hill. Handed Lee's lost Special Order 191, he waited about 18 hours to move, then fought Antietam in piecemeal attacks while holding Fitz John Porter's V Corps in reserve. That narrow result gave Lincoln the opening for the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, a policy McClellan opposed. He lost the 1864 election to Lincoln and later served as governor of New Jersey.

• Ellen Marcy turned down McClellan's proposals nine times and had once been engaged to A.P. Hill before accepting him.
• McClellan once came home to find Lincoln waiting in his parlor and went upstairs to bed.
• The lost Confederate orders were found in a field wrapped around three cigars.
• In 1864 McClellan ran on a Democratic peace platform he personally disagreed with, and his own soldiers voted heavily for Lincoln.
• Asked years later to name the best general he faced, Robert E. Lee named McClellan.