In the wake of the epic clash at Antietam in September 1862, Dr. Lewis Henry Steiner, a member of the U.S. Sanitary Commission stationed in Frederick, Maryland, wrote glowingly in his diary about the performance of the Army of the Potomac and its commander, Major General George B. McClellan. The battle “was fought with such a display of strategy and power on the part of our General, and of heroism and daring from our men, that the enemy was glad to resign all hopes of entering Pennsylvania, and to withdraw his forces across the Potomac,” Steiner wrote. “McClellan had shown himself worthy of the love (amounting almost to adoration), which his troops expressed on all sides.”
Not all northerners—including many in the Union army—shared Steiner’s enthusiasm for McClellan. Roughly seven weeks later, the general known as “Little Mac” would be stripped of command by a dissatisfied Abraham Lincoln and sent north to await assignment. As historian George Rable documents in this issue’s cover story, “Little Mac’s Big Fall” (page 32), Lincoln’s decision was complicated and controversial, and reactions to it were split.
McClellan’s next assignment would never come, leaving him open to run for president on the Democratic ticket in 1864. While many Democrats, including McClellan, supported the war effort, a large faction of the party remained steadfastly against the conflict and the Lincoln administration. As Fergus Bordewich shows in this issue’s second feature, “The Great Dissenter” (page 44), arguably no person embodied that opposition more than Democratic congressman Clement Vallandigham, who didn’t let his arrest and banishment to the Confederacy stop his vehement antiwar advocacy.
Together, these articles serve as reminders that northern support for the war was neither unanimous nor monolithic. Indeed, the final feature in this issue, Frank Cirillo’s “Abolitionists at War” (page 56), details how the country’s leading abolitionists were divided over the conflict—some willing to work with the Lincoln administration on anti-slavery issues, others refusing to abandon their mistrust of politicians and the government. While the efforts of William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists would help push the administration to enact the Emancipation Proclamation, it was an accomplishment that came at a great cost to the decades-old movement, which effectively collapsed in 1865.
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