Even his fiercely loyal lieutenant William T. Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?”īy contrast, Grant had never been an enthusiastic student of military art and science. Lincoln grew so frustrated with McClellan’s inaction that he responded to the general’s October 1862 request for more horses with an exasperated telegram: “I have just read your despatch about sore tongued and fatiegued horses. After the Battle of Shiloh, it took the latter almost a month to advance 20 miles south to attack the vital Confederate railroad junction at Corinth, Mississippi. Yet McClellan and Halleck both proved reluctant to take decisive action in the field. READ MORE: The Key Way West Point Prepared Ulysses S. Halleck, the author of Elements of Military Art & Science, was regarded as a master theoretician. In the 1850s, McClellan had studied the Crimean War at first hand as a member of an official delegation of American observers.
McClellan, who replaced the aging Scott early in the Civil War, was an able administrator who organized the Army of the Potomac. Winfield Scott, whose experience dated back to the War of 1812, had led the army since 1841. Grant’s predecessors in command of the Union Army were far more accomplished in military art and science. In one of history’s unexpected developments, the military profession Grant “had always disliked,” in the words of his biographer Bruce Catton, ultimately “turned out to be the calling made for him.” How did an ambivalent soldier who had been away from the army for several years-and who had drifted during that interval from one civilian occupation to another in search of elusive success-end up leading a vast force to victory and saving the Union?
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