Excerpt from The Mexican War, Diary of George B. McClellan It has seemed to me that this diary should prove to be of special value at the present time, for it throws additional light upon the failure of our time honored volunteer system and fore casts its utter futility as an adequate defense in a time of national crisis or danger. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

"McClellan is to me one of the mysteries of the war." - Ulysses S. Grant Over the last 150 years, historians and Americans have endlessly debated over the Civil War, including its causes and the best and worst generals. Nowhere has there been a sharper debate than over the career and legacy of George McClellan, with a majority viewing him as the North's biggest goat and a small but vocal minority insisting that McClellan was a very good general who was made a scapegoat by the Lincoln Administration and its supporters. Many members of the "McClellan Society" continue to assert that McClellan would have ended the war in 1862 without the Administration's interference. In 1861, McClellan was looked upon as a hero and even possibly a savior. Dubbed "The Young Napoleon," the 35 year old had been a prodigy at West Point, finishing in second place in the Academy's most famous class, the Class of 1846. After earning praise for his service in the Mexican-American War, McClellan had a short but successful career in the railroad industry and had been a foreign observer at the siege of Sevastopol.during the Crimean War. At the outbreak of the Civil War, there was no question that McClellan was one of the brightest and most experienced of the North's generals. Ultimately, of course, McClellan went from hero to goat, at least in the eyes of President Lincoln, who famously wrote that McClellan "has the slows." It was a sharp critique of McClellan's cautious movements, but McClellan was also faulted for conservative battlefield leadership in the Peninsula Campaign and at Antietam. McClellan also constantly overestimated his opponent's manpower, at times thinking the Confederates had double his Army of the Potomac when the exact opposite was the case. It was after Antietam and his bickering with the War Department over why he wasn't chasing Lee's battered Army of Northern Virginia that Lincoln finally sacked him, effectively ending his Civil War career. McClellan is best remembered for 1862, but he was also a Governor of New Jersey, Lincoln's opponent in the 1864 presidential election, and a writer seeking to reestablish his reputation before his untimely death.

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2006 Scholar's Bookshelf reprint edition of an essential document in American military history recording the time from McClellan's departure from West Point through his experiences at the battle of Cerro Gordon in April, 1847. The work portrays the young McClellan, quite different and far more carefree than the Civil War general, and also provides valuable insight into the failures and difficulties of the volunteer system of his time as an adequate defense in a time of national crisis or danger.