All the Plans of the Rebels: The Mystery of Special Orders #191, Part II

The plan that McClellan came up with, and reluctantly agreed to by Lincoln, was to move his army by water to the Virginia peninsula and advance on Richmond from the east.

By March, the bulk of McClellan's army had arrived on the peninsula, and by early April they were approaching the Confederate defensive line near Yorktown. The Rebels were badly outnumbered, but a clever ruse on the part of the local Confederate commander fooled a readily convinced McClellan into believing he was outnumbered.

McClellan balked at attacking, giving Joe Johnston's army time to move into position to oppose his advance. "No one but McClellan could have hesitated to attack," wrote a derisive Johnston to Robert E. Lee, President Jefferson Davis' military advisor.

Caution and hesitation were traits that contemporaries, historians, and students of the war would come to know all too well about the general affectionately known to his men as "Little Mac." Despite habitually outnumbering his opponent, McClellan instead habitually believed himself outnumbered, and just as habitually burned up the wires to Washington demanding reinforcements.

A fair amount of blame for McClellan's mindset in this regard is often laid at the feet of Allan Pinkerton, the man that McClellan had hired to keep him informed of Rebel movements and numerical strength.

Pinkerton, head of the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency, invariably overestimated the strength of the Confederate army by incredible amounts. But to pin the blame for McClellan's caution solely on Pinkerton would be a mistake.

McClellan had other means besides Pinkerton of obtaining more accurate information on the enemy, but chose to lean quite heavily on what Pinkerton told him and was more than willing to believe it. The reason for this would appear to lie within McClellan himself.

Along with a touch of paranoia, the general seems to have had something of a martyr complex. He had written of offers for being made president or even dictator in return for military victory, and said he had been called upon to "save the country." Privately, he hinted that General-in-Chief Winfield Scott - a living military legend and a man of unquestioned loyalty - might be a traitor to the Union cause. (The fact that he wanted Scott's job at the time may have had something to do with that!)

Remarkably enough, he had even come to look upon Abraham Lincoln, among others, as a personal enemy who was out to destroy him. In a sense, he believed himself facing two opponents in his one-man quest to save the country - the Confederate army in front and his own government from behind.

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