This is the Jocco podcast Civil War excursion number three with JD Baker and me,

Jocco Willink. Good evening JD. Good evening Jocco.

On November 8th, 1861, a week after replacing Scott as general in chief,

McClellan spelled out his war aims to his confidant, Barlow. He wrote, I am fighting to preserve the

integrity of the union and the power of the government on no other issue. To gain that end, we cannot

afford to mix up the Negro question. It must be incidental and subsidiary. During his Western Virginia

campaign, he had assured slaveholders that their peculiar institution would be religiously respected,

that he would crush with an iron hand any attempted slave uprising. Later, he would repeat that

pledge to the Virginia landowner, Hill Carter, quote, I have not come here to wage war on the

defenseless upon non-combatants, upon private property, nor upon the domestic institutions of the land.

So that right there, some quotes from McClellan from a book called Landscape Turnred by Stephen W. Sears.

And we've been talking JD about kind of an attitude, a political attitude that was not unfamiliar

in the North. And that was the idea of just kind of a status quo. Hey, we'll just kind of keep

things the way we are, the way they are. And this is McClellan, right? And that probably fuels

when we talk about McClellan, the fact that he's not exactly a go-getter, he's not exactly a

proactive leader. He's not going out there to make things happen, he's not default aggressive.

He's more a slow roller. He's going to let things kind of play out a little bit and hope that

there's not much activity, hoping kind of like let the status quo continue. But when you have that

kind of attitude, when you have a non, we have a passive attitude, especially on the battlefield,

you can lose battles because of it. And right now Union troops, his Union troops are

are demoralized in the East. The first battle of Monassus, right? The Union troops got kind of

crushed. The peninsula campaign, Union troops didn't, didn't do what they needed to do.

...