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Incompetence That Shaped History

Khalid Elhassan March 9, 2020 33 min

Nineteenth century Washington Metropolitan Police Force officers. Washington Metropolitan Police

20. The Union Commander Who Let Himself Get Conned Out of Winning the Civil War

Union General George B. McClellan outflanked the Confederate main army in Northern Virginia in March of 1862, by landing 121,000 men on the Virginia Peninsula to his enemy’s south, between the James and York rivers. The goal was to march up the Peninsula and capture Richmond before the Confederates had time to rush in reinforcements to protect their capital. Things went smoothly at first, as McClellan successfully disembarked with no difficulty, and began marching to Richmond.

The only opposition standing between McClellan and Richmond were 12,000 Confederates at Yorktown, commanded by John B. Magruder and outnumbered 10 to 1. Realizing that his small force stood no chance in a fight, and desperately needing to buy time until reinforcements arrived, Magruder set out to bamboozle McClellan into slowing down. The Union commander proved more than sufficiently gullible to let a certain victory slip from his grasp.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.