"The fiction as to Lee's forces is the most remarkable in the history of modern wars. Whether McClellan was the victim or the accomplice of the inventions of his 'secret service,' we cannot tell. It is almost incredible that he should be deceived, except willingly. I confess to a contempt for all organizations of spies and detectives, which is the result of my military experience. The only spies who long escape are those who work for both sides. They sell to each what it wants, and suit their wares to the demand. Pinkerton's man in the rebel commissariat at Yorktown who reported 119,000 rations issued daily, laughed well in his sleeve as he pocketed the secret service money.""As to the enemy's organization and numbers, the only information I ever found trustworthy is that got by contact with him. No day should pass without having some prisoners got by "feeling the lines." These, to secure treatment as regular prisoners of war, must always tell the company and regiment to which they belong. Rightly questioned, they rarely stop there, and it is not difficult to get the brigade, division, etc. Even when the captured person tells nothing he is bound to conceal, enough is necessarily known to enable a diligent provost-marshal to construct a reasonably complete roster of the enemy in a short time."-- Jacob D. Cox, "Military Reminiscences of the Civil War Volume 1: April 1861-November 1863"
>>18216392McCuck was a cuck.
>>18216392"In the Atlanta campaign I always carried a memorandum book in which I noted and corrected all the information of this sort which came to me, and by comparing this with others and with the lists at General Sherman's headquarters, there was no difficulty in keeping well up in the enemy's organization. It may therefore be said that every commanding officer ought to know the divisions and brigades of his enemy. The strength of a brigade is fairly estimated from the average of our own, for in people of similar race and education, the models of organization are essentially the same, and subject to the same causes of diminution during a campaign. Such considerations as these leave no escape from the conclusion that McClellan's estimates of Lee's army were absolutely destructive of all chances of success, and made it impossible for the President or for General Halleck to deal with the military problem before them. That he had continued this erroneous counting for more than a year, and through an active campaign in the field, destroyed every hope of correcting it. The reports of the peninsular campaign reveal, at times, the difficulty there was in keeping up the illusion. The known divisions in the Confederate army would not account for the numbers attributed to them, and so these divisions occasionally figure in our reports as "grand divisions."
>>18216474Cox had a bit of an odd relationship with McClellan. They had a small falling out during the early Western Virginia Campaign but were on friendly terms when McClellan returned to command after 2nd Bull Run.
>>18216495Cox is I think fair to McClellan. The miscalculation of Confederate strength would have completely altered strategy and tactics to such a point that when Cox found out the level of deception afterwards, he thought there must have been something negligent or malicious about it.I have no theory about this particular point, if Cox couldn't figure out what was at work here, neither can I. A mix of incompetence all around? Gullibility trusting reports from purported Unionists that were not so? Refusing to take in slaves and the intel they offered? There's a notable weakness. Some of the strongest Unionists would be slaves, they were usually extremely helpful to Union commanders in offering information on Confederate army movements and positions. McC was shooting himself in the foot on that respect.
>>18216514Cox also said this in Vol. 1 at page 250:"He had taught the Army of the Potomac to believe implicitly that the Confederate army was more than twice as numerous as it wasin fact. With this conviction it was natural that they should admire the generalship which had saved them from annihilation. They accepted with equal faith the lessons which came to them from headquarters teaching that the "radicals" at Washington were trying for political ends to destroy their general and them. In regard to the facts there were varying degrees of intelligence among officers and men; but there was a common opinion that they and he were willingly sacrificed, and that Pope, the radical, was to succeed him. This made them hate Pope, for the time, with holy hatred. If the army could at that time have compared authentic tables of strength of Lee's army and their own, the whole theory would have collapsed at once, and McClellan's reputation and popularity with it. They did not have the authentic tables, and fought for a year under the awful cloud created by a blundering spy-system. The fiction as to Lee's forces is the most remarkable in the history of modern wars. Whether McClellan was the victim or the accomplice of the inventions of his 'secret service' we cannot tell. It is almost incredible that he should be deceived, except willingly."Separately, Cox didn't have a lot good to say about McClellan's friend Fitz-John Porter.
>>18216392>yfw you realize Antietam was fought a mere 18 days after 2nd Bull RunThat's actually quite surprising, at first you'd think it was two months later.
In counting the Confederate strength prior to the 7 Days Battles, McClellan included 36 regiments not in front of Richmond. he heard rumors that Beauregard was coming with 20k men. he thought that Jackson had another 30k.
>>18217490Allan Pinkerton on June 26 reported 180,000 Confederates. On August 14 he reported 200,000 men. Yeah.
>>18217501maybe the data was bad but McClellan still in the end believed those numbers because he wanted to believe them
>>18216438^This.
>>18218339Yeah fucking obviously he took a safe bet and acted according to a high estimate as opposed to a “reasonable” unknown.There’s nothing actually wrong with McClellan’s decision making if you look at the information available to him. All the criticisms come from post war hindsight saying “heh, what a coward, he balked at a smaller army” but completely ignoring McClellan didn’t actually know the size of Lee’s army and the numbers he handled were accurate he just didn’t know the distribution. Lee DID have well over 100,000 men in his theater at his disposal in totality but his on hand forces were roughly 80,000. McClellan had zero way of knowing this and no way to gain more information in a timely manner.It’s dumb to say he should have continued marching into hostile territory against unknown numbers, knowing his enemy could bring significantly more forces down on him at any given moment.
>>18219355Also this was untrue, they did have a good count on how many regiments and brigades were in Lee's army and as Jacob Cox said, prisoners would freely give up this information. Based on all that data, it was quite impossible for Lee to have the giant horde of men McClellan thought he had.
What is the point?
>>18219492>random enlisted men know the exact details of their strategic deployments???they don’t even know these things in the digital age, this was the before the South even had telegraph lines.
>>18216438>>18218921the cucks were the white men sent to die for niggers
>>18219509I think what he meant was prisoners would usually readily tell their company, regiment, etc and from there it was easy to find out what brigade or division they belonged to.
>>18219509McClellan was getting two sets of numbers, those from his officers on the frontline, and the inflated numbers from Pinkertons, he always erred towards the larger numbers.
>>18219492Montgomery Meigs read Richmond newspaper announcements of Confederate regiments arriving and was able from that to make a quite accurate estimate of the ANV's manpower.
It got worse in the West.>after Shiloh>Beauregard sends a message to Richmond that he only has 35,000 men and needs every reinforcement he can get>this message was intercepted by Union army intelligence, decoded, and printed in a New York newspaper but produced no result other than for Lee to warn Beauregard to change his cypher
It’s easy to mock McClellan’s caution in hindsight but he didn’t want to be the one to hand the Confederates their only hope—the destruction of a Union army. Campaigning around Yorktown would have reminded him of what can happen. Better to do a methodical ponderous campaign, playing not to lose, than pitch in guns blazing at a dangerous foe. His strategy was similar to the Howe brothers at New York in 1776. Just like McClellan the Democrat, they were Whigs who thought if they brought the enemy to bay and slapped them around a bit, the rebels would come to their senses and rejoin the fold.
>>18220230McClellan called himself a Douglas Democrat, but in reality he was a Whig without a party and his main point of disagreement with the Lincoln Administration was on abolition. This is not surprising since his home state was traditional Federalist/Whig territory.
