Summary:

In the first three chapters of this series we looked at the circumstances leading up to General George B. McClellan’s failed attempt to overthrow President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War; the collapse of his aborted insurrection after White House security officials were tipped off to McClellan’s plans; the beginning of the court-martial against McClellan; and McClellan’s testimony in his own defense. In this final chapter of the series we’ll recall McClellan’s conviction and execution and the long-term consequences of his failed revolt on the course of the Civil War and American history as a whole.

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The normally boisterous public gallery of the courtroom where General George McClellan’s court-martial took place was as quiet as a cemetery at the moment the board of inquiry convened to announce its decision in McClellan’s case. Even the crowds in the streets outside the courtroom, who on other days had been known to jeer the disgraced general so loudly they could be heard on the outskirts of the next town over, was maintaining a conspicuous silence as the board prepared to render its verdict. McClellan himself may have already sensed his doom was impending, because he walked into the courtroom looking ashen gray. “The general was swathed in an air of melancholy.” his primary defense counsel would later recall. “When I stood up to greet him, he scarcely even made a passing effort to acknowledge me.”

The board of inquiry wasn’t much more demonstrative when they filed into the courtroom to announce their verdict. For once the judge in the case didn’t find it necessary to pound his gavel for silence, because the galleries were already deathly silent. The eerie hush that prevailed in the courtroom reminded one New York Times correspondent of “a deserted cemetery”. It wasn’t until the presiding judge asked the head of the board of inquiry whether a verdict had been reached that the silence was finally broken.

In a sepulchral tone, the board of inquiry chairman read the first verdict in McClellan’s trial. On the charge of conspiracy to to incite insurrection: guilty. McClellan nearly collapsed when he heard the decision; where there was one guilty verdict, there were sure to be more. And sure enough, the board of inquiry went on to convict McClellan on every one of the charges against him. When the last “guilty” was read by the court, the spark of life seemed to flee McClellan altogether, and he had to be helped out of the courtroom by two of the guards on duty. In his cell after the verdict was read, the disgraced general simply sat on his cot and retreated into a private inner world of melancholy, his mind almost completely shutting down.

Mrs. McClellan didn’t take the news much better; she broke into a fit of hysterical weeping upon learning of her husband’s conviction of the charges against him and had to be restrained from doing injury to others or herself. In fact, she was so devastated by the verdict she soon had a mental breakdown and would live out most of her final years in asylums in New York or Maryland. Her children, ashamed to be linked with a man now regarded by the American people and by his own army as a traitor, all went into hiding and changed their names at the earliest possible opportunity.

With McClellan having been found guilty of treason and conspiracy to overthrow the President of the United States, the board of inquiry now had the responsibility to decide whether General McClellan should be put to death or sentenced to life imprisonment. Popular sentiment, and the board of inquiry members’ own personal inclinations, leaned to a significant degree in favor of a death sentence. And in any case the U.S. military’s Uniform Code of Justice usually mandates execution for officers convicted of treason against the United States. So McClellan was doomed to die.

Three days’ after McClellan’s conviction on treason charges, the disgraced ex-general was sentenced to execution by hanging, along with two of his principal co-conspirators. One of his few remaining friends wrote a letter to President Lincoln insisting McClellan hadn’t been in his right mind at the time of the coup attempt and begging Lincoln to overturn the verdict, or at least grant the general a pardon. Lincoln refused to even consider the idea, still angry over what he considered an unforgivable betrayal by McClellan not just of the U.S. government but of Lincoln himself personally. He ordered the petitioners expelled from the White House and all but threatened to have them arrested.

On April 7th, 1863, just over a month to the day after George B. McClellan made his ill-fated attempt to topple the President, he and his two chief partners in the insurrection plot were hanged at Fort McHenry in Baltimore amidst a heavy guard presence. If there were any people among the spectators who felt a twinge of sympathy for General McClellan, they did an excellent job of keeping it to themselves; the only comments heard from anyone present at the execution were all to the effect that McClellan richly deserved his fate. So hated was the general that the burial detail assigned to dig his grave was directed on penalty of dishonorable discharge not to disclose the gravesite’s location to anyone other than Mrs. McClellan.

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McClellan’s coup attempt and his subsequent court-martial and execution did more than just ruin a military career and disrupt the Union war effort against the Confederacy; they ensured the American Civil War would drag on another four years after McClellan’s hanging. The Confederate Army took full advantage of the distraction created by the court-martial to hit the Union Army at several of the weaker points along its battle lines, and in so doing managed to push well north of the Mason-Dixon line; at the height of the Confederates’ success it looked like Washington, D.C. might soon fall into their hands-- and several of Robert E. Lee’s cavalry detachments actually did manage to make hit-and-run strikes against the nation’s capital. It took until the spring of 1864 for the threat to Washington to be finally neutralized; Union troops didn’t reach the Confederate capital city, Richmond, until July of 1865. And even after Richmond fell, the Confederacy continued to hang on until Confederate president Jefferson Davis was assassinated in March of 1867.

By the time the final surrender was signed at Hilton Head, South Carolina on April 14th, 1867, the United States was barely recognizable as a nation. The spirit of freedom on which the country had been first built more than nine decades earlier was, if not gone altogether, at the very least severely weakened by the anger and distrust spawned out of McClellan’s failed insurrection; many of America’s greatest cities had been bombarded into rubble, and her once dynamic economy now moved at a snail’s pace. Much of her prestige abroad had also vanished-- at one point in the early months after the Confederacy’s final surrender Andrew Johnson’s Secretary of State, William Seward, expressed grave fears to the President that Mexico might try to take advantage of the United States’ postwar troubles to mount an invasion of the Southwest in an attempt to recover the territories lost to the U.S. as a result of the Mexican War of 1846-48.

It would take the better part of two decades for America to recover from the self-inflicted wounds she had sustained from the Civil War and from George McClellan’s attempt to oust Abraham Lincoln as commander-in-chief, and another two decades after that for the country to finally attain the world power status which she had been on track to achieve before the war broke out. Race relations would be strained well into the 20th century and at times teeter on the brink of outright hostility; even today ethnic tensions related to the war and its aftermath still tear at the fabric of American society. But perhaps the greatest blow the coup inflicted on the country was the damage which it did to the principle of unswerving loyalty between the President and those who commanded his armed forces. The McClellan uprising would plant seeds of doubt that would undermine the American military’s effectiveness in future conflicts for years to come.

The End

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