A brief conversation with Edward Bonekemper will give you enough information to infer his opinion about one of the Civil War’s worst generals.
Bonekemper, a military history lecturer at Muhlenberg College, outlined at a North Carolina History Project luncheon today many of Gen. George McClellan’s failures as a Union commander.
Among McClellan’s chief faults was his fear of failure (video clip):
McClellan consistently overestimated enemy strength, and of course that reinforced his fear of defeat. He had a fear of defeat. It’s almost like a fear of embarrassment.
There are a couple of recent writers who come at it from a psychological point of view. Their point — and it’s hard to debate, quite honestly — is that McClellan wanted a situation where either he was guaranteed victory or he was so badly outnumbered (or claimed to be) that if he was defeated he couldn’t be held responsible.
That’s what he wanted. He wanted things really good or really bad. What gave him a lot of concern was a middle-of-the-road situation where he could be blamed because you didn’t know who was going to win. And so in those situations he would back off and not fight.
Bonekemper contends McClellan’s unwillingness to fight probably extended the Civil War by two years and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
