they do nominate george b. mcclellan, who is essentially a war man, but put him on a peace platform. politicians have a way of doing that. that immediately helps the cause of the republicans. far more importantly, september 27bd, william t. sherman wires atlanta is ours and fairly won. it is as though sherman had disappeared in georgia since early early may and they had been fighting outside, of course, of the capitol -- or over atlanta for over a month. and finally, once he cut the railroads rksz john hood had to retreat. this is critical and turning. at the same time, grant decides, okay, we have to do something finally with sheridan, if you will. so grant travels to the valley. he arrives there. they meet in charlestown. the house where they met was standing a few years ago near the casino. they met in the house and then out in the yard. grant came with the ideas, well, he let sheridan talk outlined an offensive campaign and told sheridan, go in. and they designated september 19th, 1864. up until that point, he operat

i do not care what somebody like george mcclellan says. may 13th, 1862.tle different. it's the one that everybody knows about, everybody cares about, everyone follows. the army of the potomac that is trying to take richmond. huge, symbolic value because it's right outside washington, d.c.'s door. in the army of the potomac, the conciliatory policy hangs on longer. even there, even there on the ground reality starts to get in the way. so the peninsula campaign, as you know, brought union army forces, the army of the potomac, within four miles or six mimes, within sight of the gates of richmond. didn't take richmond, we'll get to that, but they get close. how did they get so close? lots of things contribute. one factor is spying and intelligence of the lay of the land. who on the peninsula knows the lay of the land who is sympathetic to the union cause? absolutely. so there's all kinds -- slaves spying networks going on, even as early as the peninsula campaign. the general served in the army of the potomac and didn't invent baseball, didn't care for basebal

george mcclellan thought halleck, "the most hopelessly stupid of all men in high position." and that was the judgment of one quite qualified to judge that category. when grant he took the reins as general in chief, halleck stepped down from field service and became the union's chief of staff. he proved excellent at military housekeeping. his office became the operations center for grant's orders to all union forces on duty. most importantly, by shouldering all the administrative matters associated with a huge army, halleck freed grant to give full attention to the events in the field. and let me add as an aside that this would never have been possible but for the recent invention of a little machine called the telegraph, which enabled grant, say, at culpepper to know what was going on in chattanooga or in the shenandoah valley or elsewise. surprisingly, grant made but one major command change on the high level. general philip sheraden accompanied grant from the west to take charge of meade's poorly led cavalry. sheraden was then 33. 5'6" tall. weighed barely 115 pounds. he w

predicted before hand that he would be good at the presidency, you might have wanted to elect george mcclellan during the civil war. he did run in 1864 and he lost. i was thinking what president in our time you might have thought on paper was most prepared for the domestic side of the presidency and surrounded himself with a lot of people. wiz richard nixon. think of who he had working with him, george schultz. i think part of the reason we have this problem is because i think the framers' design for the presidency is different than the one we expect. i think we focus on the american presidency at least at equal parts for its domestic program, where i think the framers actually had a much narrower view of the presidency in mind. i think the framers really expected the executive branch to be devoted to foreign affairs. and here i think we have seen in the last ten years of presidency. despite george w. bush's presidency, trying to actually buying themselves in foreign policy. so dmesic affairs, there's not a long discussion about the role of the president in domestic affairs. the framers would

it is inconceivable that irvin mcdowell, george mcclellan, ambrose burnside, or joseph hooker would have willingly given the cooperation that meade tendered for the rest of the war. from their first meeting, grant and meade sensed that they could work well together. mutual warmth and respect between the two officers was a major factor behind union successes in virginia in the last year of the war. in mid-march, grant returned briefly to the west. he had, by then, made a number of principled decisions. one, it was impossible to command all of the northern military forces from west of the mountains. nor was the capital an alternative. grant had been shocked when he first arrived in washington to find a congressional investigating committee still conducting sessions on why lee, eight months earlier, was not pursued with more vigor after gettysburg. grant's friend general sherman told him for god's sake and for your country's sake, come out of washington. as for members of congress, sherman later wrote his brother, "i hope grant will make it a death penalty for one of those guys to go south

we still have general george mcclellan saying any declaration of radical views, especially on the slavery question, will rapidly disant great these armies. and he's out of step and almost everybody except mcclellan knows it. well, almost everybody in the army, not everybody at home. and congress, so july, july 17th of 1862, congress passed a second act. second confiscation act is important, because the first act, remember, has said that it essentially made a law out of butler's policy, that any slaves actively used in support of the rebellion were confiscated from their owner, if they weren't their owner's property anymore, but it didn't answer the status question. the didn't say are they property of the federal government or free? itsay. the second confiscation act does say. july 1862 not only can slaves be used in active support of the rebellion be confiscated, any slave of any disloyal owner can. so whether or not you were using that slave to build a ditch, if you support the confederacy, the slave can be confiscated and freed. second confiscation act says freed. it's a big step. in ju

valley campaign began in march, 1862, and it stemmed from his frustration with major general george b. mcclellan. lincoln gave him permission to move the water bourne movement in spring of 1862, on the explicit condition that mcclellan protect washington. so in order to ease lincoln's preoccupation with the capitol, mcclellan promised to augment the city's 18,000 men garrison with 55,000 troops from the army of the potomac which he said would be deployed in and about washington, in and about washington. what mcclellan did not tell lincoln was that he had assigned his covering force role so to speak to nathaniel banks fifth score, which was then in the shenandoah valley at winchester. hardly in and about washington, d.c. mcclellan really expected no trouble from stonewall jackson's small army in the valley, so before he embarked for the peninsula, he ordered banks out of the valley and into this covering force blocking position near men as is junction in and around washington, d.c. so all seemed well and good until jackson attacked the only division of banks that was still in the valley on march

he did retire and remember 1861, replaced by george b. mcclellan who at that moment was the great man on horseback to try to win this war for the union, and both the press and president lincoln had a great deal of confidence in this young 34-year-old, less than half of scott's age to take over and infuse great energy, and aggression in the union army, and of course we all know how that came up. >> i mean i always think that lincoln had a sort of a sentimental attachment to scott, not only because of his declaration of loyalty to the country which some virginians did not manifest but also because he was really lincoln's only important military adviser during the interregnum between his election and his inauguration, even if he was also sharing his letters with william sue ward and the press, at least lincoln was hearing about the federal sports in the south and the federal garrisons and munitions places from scott and scott was the only one out there with a plan, so i think it was hard for him to cut him loose in a way. >> that's true. >> they say t

joseph eggleston johnson, george b. mcclellan, abr in double day. a book such as these, put gordon in that collection as well, though not without merit, they often tell us much more about what these men were up to in their post approximate tick frame of mine than about the events they're actually describing. tell us more about senator john gordon than the battle of cedar creek, for example. other memoirs are at the other end of this spectrum of how useful they are. i'll put euless sis s. grant and alexander at that end, they define, movingly written, deeply analytical and often more pour separative than almost all modern historians. the union's greatest military hero filled his two-volume memoirs with a number of remarkable pass sanls, few more instructive than his pee into the citizen soldiers who saved the republic and killed the institution of slavery. the armies of europe are machines. the men are brave and the officers capable, but the majority of the soldiers in most of the nations of europe are taken from a class of people who have very littl