Part 2

Summary: In the first chapter of this series we reviewed the circumstances leading up to General George B. McClellan’s failed attempt to overthrow President Abraham Lincoln and the collapse of his aborted insurrection after White House security officials were tipped off to McClellan’s plans. In this segment, we’ll look back at the convening of the board of inquiry against General McClellan.

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Within 72 hours of his arrest, General McClellan had been incarcerated at Fort McHenry in Baltimore along with most of his co-conspirators and a manhunt was underway for those men who’d somehow managed to elude the federal dragnet thrown around the White House after the McClellanites’ coup attempt was quashed. The next order of business was for the Union Army to convene a general court-martial against McClellan on charges ranging from treason to deserting his post in a time of war. The very least that the general could expect to happen to him if he were convicted on any of the counts he faced was a long prison term and dishonorable discharge. If he were found guilty on the most serious charge, treason, it would mean the gallows for sure.

News of the botched coup attempt against Lincoln provoked strong reactions on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Southerners, and many Northerners who opposed Lincoln’s policies, hailed General McClellan as a modern-day folk hero who’d tried to bring about a just end to an unjust regime; pro-Lincoln Northerners denounced McClellan as a 19^th- century Benedict Arnold who deserved nothing less than public hanging as punishment for his crimes. One of McClellan’s fellow Union officers even wrote a letter to President Lincoln volunteering to personally build the gallows for such a hanging. In his darker moments, Lincoln might well have been tempted to accept that offer....

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...but custom and military regulations dictated a trial should be held first, and so on March 10^th, 1863 the Union Army judge advocate general’s office convened a board of inquiry at the War Department’s headquarters in Washington to hear the charges against McClellan. And there were plenty to be heard: the disgraced general was faced with no less than sixteen possible indictments for his actions in relation to his failed plot to topple Lincoln. So hated was McClellan by the pro-  Lincoln part of the Northern population that the Union Army placed him under round-the-clock armed guard to be sure that he didn’t fall prey to vigilante justice; in prison he was placed in solitary confinement to minimize the risk of his being killed by another inmate. As Fort McHenry’s commander would wryly observe to a Harper’s Weekly writer chronicling the McClellan trial a decade later: "We didn’t want to see General McClellan get killed on the way to his own funeral."

That didn’t stop crowds from gawking at the disgraced general as he was being led into the courtroom-- or from throwing things at him when  his guards’ backs were turned. Everything from rotten apples to chunks of brick pelted the former Union officer turned would-be revolutionary before order was finally restored. And even after reaching the safety of the courtroom, McClellan still had to listen to catcalls and jeers coming from the streets outside. Even the presiding judge, who by all  rights should have conducted the hearings in a cool and dispassionate  manner, couldn’t help casting a disgusted glare at the defendant while the prosecution and defense made their respective opening statements.

 McClellan gave no outward sign of what he was feeling, but inside he must have been experiencing intense emotional turmoil. He’d thrown away everything in his life that mattered to him except his family in  hopes of bringing an early end to the war with the Confederate States, and instead the fighting was continuing unabated; on top of that, he was facing expulsion from the Union Army and possibly even execution as a result of his actions. At the end of the first day of his court- martial, extra guards had to be placed outside his cell to prevent him from making any suicide attempts.

The prosecutor’s opening statement painted a damning portrait of McClellan as a would-be 19^th century Cromwell. He repeatedly alluded to comments McClellan had made before the coup attempt that were critical of civilian control of the Union Army and cited such comments as proof that McClellan’s primary motive for the coup attempt had been not to save the Union but to make himself an absolute dictator; he also gave hints that the prosecution had evidence tying McClellan to an aborted  plan to seize Congress and jail those of its members who could not be persuaded to choose his side over Lincoln’s.

McClellan’s defense counsel, in his own opening statement, gave a sharply contrasting picture of the general as a heroic figure who  had been driven to desperate measures by the arrogance and the poor judgment of a president who couldn’t comprehend the realities of the Union’s strategic situation. The defense attorney went so far as to say it was Lincoln, not McClellan, who should have been standing trial for actions threatening the security of the Union. This last comment outraged several Lincoln supporters who were in the courtroom at the time; they tried to seize the defender and had to be restrained by the courtroom guards.

Once order was restored, the prosecution began calling witnesses to solidify its portrait of General McClellan as a traitor. One of the first such witnesses was the servant who had first tipped off federal authorities to the McClellan plot; the general had fight to keep from wincing as the servant testified to what he’d seen and heard the night the coup plot was first hatched. In a journal about the court-martial that was posthumously published in the 1880s, McClellan would recall actually cursing under his breath as the servant told his story of the McClellanite conspiracy to topple Lincoln. As McClellan saw it, the witness was taking the conspirators’ motives and twisting them into something sinister, whereas McClellan himself viewed his motives  for seeking to overthrow Lincoln as stemming from the noblest and most patriotic of intentions-- namely the desire to end the war while it was still possible to salvage something worthwhile from the wreckage of the Union.

He wasn’t much happier with the statements of Union Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who the prosecution had called before the court-martial as an expert witness regarding McClellan’s state of mind in the weeks and months prior to the coup attempt. Stanton drew, to say the least, a very negative picture of the general’s psyche, suggesting that McClellan might not have been in his right mind when he initially  conceived his plan to seize control of the federal government. It took repeated admonitions by the presiding judge at the court-martial(and the threat of a summary guilty verdict) to dissuade the angry general from continuing the tirade he was beginning to deliver against his former boss. And even after he’d gone silent, he kept writing furious notes for his attorney denouncing the Union war secretary as a "damned criminal liar".¹

The first day of the court-martial ended with McClellan’s former second-in-command, who had agreed to turn state’s evidence in exchange for immunity from prosecution, telling the board of inquiry that he’d strenuously objected to the general’s proposal for an uprising against Lincoln. McClellan, who had never forgiven his ex-aide for that, vowed to put an end to the man’s Army career once the court-martial had been concluded.

But it was McClellan’s own career which was about to end...