Summary: In the first two chapters of this series we looked at thecircumstances leading up to General George B. McClellan’s failedattempt to overthrow President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War,the collapse of his aborted insurrection after White House securityofficials were tipped off to McClellan’s plans, and the beginning of the court-martial against McClellan. In this installment we’ll reviewMcClellan’s testimony in his own defense.

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It was a grim and vengeful George B. McClellan who took the witness stand to testify in his own defense. His feelings about the court-martial, already quite negative to begin with, now bordered on outright hostility; he had come to view the proceedings as nothing less than a Lincoln-orchestrated smear campaign intentionally designed to further stain his already much-tarnished reputation. He had all he could do not to lash out at the presiding judge as he was duly sworn in and sat down to testify on his own behalf. And the persistent cries of “Traitor!” and “Dirty Reb!” that hounded him from the spectators’ gallery could not have done anything to help his self-control at that moment.

But he maintained his poise somehow. Assuming a calm he didn’t quite feel, General McClellan placed his hand on the Bible and took the customary oath that his testimony before the court-martial would be the full truth in regard to the matter of his thwarted attempt to overthrow the United States government. One New York World-Telegram correspondent who’d been sent down to Washington to cover McClellan’s trial couldn’t help but feel just a bit cynical about the stance of noble martyrdom the disgraced general was assuming for the benefit of the gallery and the board of inquiry. In his account of the general’s testimony, the jaundiced newswriter observed: “At times, Mr. McClellan seemed to be conducting himself in a manner far more befitting to the vaudeville stage than to a court of law.”

Even some of McClellan’s admirers felt he was laying it on a bit thick for the board of inquiry, but the general saw it as merely vigorous defense of himself and his actions. He portrayed himself not as a turncoat who had damaged the Union war effort but as a patriot seeking to intervene in his country’s defense against an overreaching president who was mismanaging the war to the point where the Union was now teetering on the precipice of disaster. In terms so verbose and so mawkishly sentimental that they would have made a Victorian romance novelist cringe, the disgraced general portrayed himself as a lonely crusader for the endangered honor of the Republic against a government and a president whose actions were threatening to destroy the Union no matter how the war against the Confederate States turned out. In his determination to claim the status of righteous victim of Lincoln’s personal animosity against him, McClellan conveniently forgot to take note of the small yet important detail it had been the South which had started hostilities and thus largely been responsible for many of the harsh actions Lincoln had taken to control dissenters of his policies for fighting the Southern rebels.

Nor did he seem particularly concerned with acknowledging the unpleasant fact that much of the suffering the Union Army had endured and was continuing to endure was a direct result of his own hesitancy in engaging Confederate forces in the early days of the war. To hear McClellan tell it, Lincoln was totally to blame for the break between the North and South and the carnage which had ensued thereafter. Many of the spectators in the courtroom’s public gallery were barely able to contain their anger at McClellan’s seeming indifference toward the lives that had been lost as a result of his personal ambitions and his overcautious nature; at least three times during McClellan’s initial testimony the presiding judge at the court-martial found it necessary to bang his gavel for order after a spectator threw something in the general’s direction. (The third incident in particular nearly led to a blanket ban on civilians in the courtroom other than witnesses for the
prosecution and defense.)

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The chief prosecutor wasted little time going on the attack when it came time to start his cross-examination of McClellan. He’d been just as appalled by the general’s self-serving testimony as the gallery crowd had been; he would not be satisfying with anything less than publicly eviscerating McClellan on the witness stand. A Harper’sWeekly correspondent who happened to be present in the courtroom at the time observed the prosecutor “seemed to be breathing the fires of Hades itself” during his questioning of McClellan. He was certainly relentless enough in his interrogations of the general to remind many of the spectators at the hearing of the prophets of the Old Testament.

He mercilessly pounced on the slightest of inconsistencies in McClellan’s statements. When the general tried to fall back on memory loss as a defense, the prosecutor confronted him with documents which shattered that alibi-- including a handwritten transcript by one of the general’s own aides of the secret conference at which McClellan first made the fateful decision to launch his doomed uprising against President Lincoln. That transcript may have been the fatal blow to the defense’s efforts to gain an acquittal; it certainly seemed to take a good deal of the starch out of McClellan, who collapsed on the witness stand in a dead faint when confronted with the document.

In desperation, McClellan’s chief defense counsel tried to get the transcript thrown out as a forgery and raise objection to the prosecutor’s cross-exam questions as leading the witness. The court- martial turned him down flat on both counts; the transcript had been authenticated by an independent civilian investigator and the cross- exam questions leveled by the prosecutor were deemed perfectly valid by the chief judge on evidentiary grounds. When McClellan’s wife heard the news she urged him to throw himself on the mercy of the court in hopes that doing this might gain him a more lenient sentence. Being a man of great pride, McClellan refused to even consider such an idea; he was not going to give his enemies the satisfaction of watching him grovel-- even if it meant being hanged.