McClellan says farewell to his troops; Burnside takes the Army of the Potomac
Abraham Lincoln had run out of patience with George B. McClellan, who was too cautious for the President's taste and had failed to pursue Robert E. Lee after Antietam. On November 9, 1862, McClellan rode out to the farm of Julia Claggett in New Baltimore, Virginia, to bid his troops farewell. In front of the Claggetts' house, the Army of the Potomac passed to Ambrose Burnside, whom Lincoln had chosen two days earlier. Burnside's first great test came on December 13.
Lincoln's removal of McClellan was a plain exercise of civilian control over the army, carried out in the middle of a war. Burnside was followed by Joseph Hooker as Lincoln kept looking for a general willing to fight Lee.
QWhat did Burnside write after being summoned to see Lincoln and Grant in December 1864?
Burnside wrote that he had not been told what he was meant to do. After the Battle of the Crater, he met with Lincoln and Grant to discuss his future in the Army, and afterward he wrote: "I was not informed of any duty upon which I am to be placed." The line comes two years after he took over the Army of the Potomac at New Baltimore, and it shows how far his standing had fallen by then. The man Lincoln once picked to lead the Union's largest eastern army left the meeting with no duty assigned.
QWhat did Lincoln do with Burnside after Fredericksburg and the Mud March, when Burnside might have been dismissed?
Lincoln offered him a way out and he did not take it. After replacing Burnside with Joseph Hooker on January 26, 1863, Burnside offered to resign his commission altogether, but Lincoln declined, saying there could still be a place for him in the army. He was transferred to command the Department of the Ohio instead. There he faced a different set of problems from those in Virginia: antiwar sentiment among civilians in the region and Confederate raiders. It was a quieter post than the Army of the Potomac, but it kept him in uniform and in the war.
QWho left a firsthand account of the change of command at the Claggett farm?
Columbia Claggett, the daughter-in-law of farm owner Julia Claggett, gave an account of the day after the war. She described the parade and the transfer of the Army to Burnside, which took place in front of the family's house. Her account matters because the ceremony happened on private farmland in New Baltimore, not in a camp headquarters or a government building. The family lived there, and the generals and soldiers were passing through their property. A civilian household watched one of the war's best-known command changes from its own front yard.
