Voices From the Past: “An Inferior Force”


“Well, so far we seem to have applied a new maxim of war, always to meet the enemy with an inferior force at the point of attack.”

—General George B. McClellan, as overheard in a comment to headquarters staff, in the wake of the Union debacle at Ball’s Bluff.

Source: Wilder Dwight, Life and Letters of Wilder Dwight (Boston, 1891), 122.

Photo Credit: Library of Congress.

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