restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations
War Lessons from George B. McClellan
I dont have many favorite Union Generals from the War of 1861, but if I had to choose one individual who comes closest to my concept of an officer and a gentleman, he would have to be General George Brinton McClellan. Robert E. Lee himself expressed a high opinion of McClellan, and Lee rarely had anything very complimentary to say about Union generalship.
The coming war with Iraq will almost certainly involve fighting among civilian populations. Just war theory requires that American troops not only avoid targeting civilians but that they do all they can to avoid civilian casualties. Of course, in one sense the war has already begun. What is going on almost daily over Iraq has the elements of a sustained military operation. There are bombs, missiles, fighter jets, anti-aircraft fire, targets destroyedand civilian casualties. But other than the Iraqis, virtually no one, including U.S. officials and the rest of the Arab world, is drawing much attention to it.
In the U.S. air war over Afghanistan, about 3,000 to 3,400 civilian deaths have already occurred. One legacy of the ten-year Afghan Civil War during the 1980s is that many military facilities came to be located in urban areas where the Soviet-backed government had placed them. The apparent willingness of the U.S. military to drop bombs upon heavily populated areas of Afghanistan gives one pause about what might happen in Iraq. A heavy bombing campaign must necessarily result in substantial numbers of civilian casualties simply by virtue of proximity to military targets. Factor into that human error and equipment malfunction, and the question becomes not whether there will be civilian casualties in an Iraqi war, but just how many casualties will occur.
If there is a precedent for the targeting of civilians, that precedent was set during the War for Southern Independence. As documented by Thomas DiLorenzo and others, between 1861 and 1865 Union commanders pillaged the South, abusing civilians in unspeakable ways, destroying railroads and factories, slaughtering livestock and decimating crops, and burning private homes, public buildings, schools, and libraries. As early as the first major battle of the war, the Battle of First Manassas (Bull Run) in July of 1861, federal soldiers were plundering and burning private homes in the northern Virginia countryside. Such behavior quickly became so pervasive that on June 20, 1862, one year into the war, General McClellan, commanding the Army of the Potomac, wrote Lincoln a letter imploring him to see to it that the war was conducted according to the highest principles known to Christian civilization and to avoid targeting the civilian population to the extent that that was possible. Lincoln replaced McClellan a few months later and ignored his letter.
The Geneva Convention of 1863 condemned the bombardment of cities occupied by civilians, but Lincoln ignored all such restrictions. The bombardment of Atlanta destroyed ninety percent of the city, after which the remaining civilian residents were forced to depopulate the city just as winter was approaching and the Georgia countryside had been stripped of food by the federal army. In his memoirs, Sherman boasted that his army destroyed more than $100 million dollars in private property and carried home $20 million more during his famous march to the sea. After the Confederate army had evacuated the Shenandoah Valley in the fall of 1864, General Philip Sheridans troops essentially burned the entire valley to the ground. As Sheridan described it in a letter to Grant, in the first few days his soldiers destroyed over 2200 barns [and] over 70 mills [and] have driven in front of the army over 4000 head of stock, and have killed not less than 3000 sheep . Tomorrow I will continue the destruction.
Reports detailing such carnage were sent to General Halleck in Washington. In a typical report issued on September 17, 1863, Sherman stated, We will remove every obstacleif need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper. When Robert E. Lee invaded Pennsylvania in 1863, many Southerners hoped that he would give the Yankees a taste of their own medicine. But Lee was a man of integrity. Not only did he prohibit wanton injury to private property, he also ordered his soldiers to pay for any supplies taken from civilians.
By 1864, the people of the North themselves had become greatly agitated on the question of the propriety of the war, its further prosecution, and the manner in which it was being conducted by the Lincoln administration. In the presidential contest of that year, Lincoln and Johnson were the candidates of the Republican or War Party, and McClellan and Pendleton were those of the Democratic or Peace Party. The convention that nominated McClellan and Pendleton met in Chicago on August 29, 1864, with Governor Horatio Seymour of New York as its chairman. This convention adopted a platform containing these remarkable words:
That after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war, during which, under the pretence of a military necessity of a war power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution has been disregarded in every part. Justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for the cessation of hostilities, with the ultimate convention of all the States, that these may be restored on the basis of a federal union of all the States, that the direct interference of the military authorities in the recent elections was a shameful violation of the Constitution, and the repetition of such acts will be held as revolutionary, and resisted; that the aim and object of the Democratic party is to preserve the federal union and the rights of the States unimpaired, and that they consider the administrative usurpation of extraordinary and dangerous powers, not granted by the Constitution, as calculated to prevent a restoration of the Union; that the shameful disregard of the administration in its duty to our fellow citizensprisoners of wardeserves the severest reprobation.
At first it appeared that McClellan would defeat Lincoln, but Union victories in the field diminished the publics war weariness. Winning in only three states, he resigned from the army on Election Day. Active in state politics, he served as New Jerseys governor in the late 1870s and early 1880s. He died on October 29, 1885, at Orange, New Jersey, and is buried in Riverview Cemetery, Trenton.
Unlike our current leaders, I dont think General McClellan would have employed such euphemisms as collateral damage to describe civilian casualties. In his book 1984, George Orwell described doublethink as the willingness to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed. Earlier, in an essay titled Politics and the English Language, Orwell said, In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Repression and atrocities can indeed be defended, Orwell added, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.
Our use of weapons of enormous destructive capability, including fuel air bombs, B-52 carpet bombing, BLU-82s, and CBU-87 cluster bombs (proven to be highly effective at killing and maiming civilians who happen to come upon the unexploded bomblets) reveals the emptiness in the claim that the U.S. has been trying to avoid Afghan civilian casualties. Even though civilian deaths have not been the deliberate goal of the bombing campaign as they were for the terrorists of 9/11, the end result has been the same.
The example of General McClellan continues to be unheardand unheeded.
February 11, 2003
David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com.