THE MAKING OF A SOLDIER

CONDITIONAL CADET McClellan was disheartened by everything about his first two weeks at West Point except the spectacular setting. He was desperately homesick and his feet hurt from drilling in shoes that were too tight, and he was nearly ready to pack up and return to Philadelphia. "I am as much alone as if in a boat in the middle of the Atlantic, not a soul here cares for, or thinks of me — not one here would lift a finger to help me," he wrote his sister Frederica. "I am entirely dependent on myself ... & take the blame of all my mistakes. ..." He had to put his letter aside to answer the drill call, but when he returned he was rejuvenated; with new shoes his awkwardness disappeared and he outdid everyone. "You can't imagine how much more inspirited I feel since I have acquitted myself handsomely at this mornings drill," he told Frederica. He was sure now that he could do his duty "as well as anyone who ever did go through here." George Brinton McClellan would rarely lack confidence in his soldierly abilities, and this first experience of doubt was typically brief.

His homesickness may be accounted for by his age. At just over fifteen and a half, he was the youngest of those who arrived at West Point in June 1842 to seek places as fourth classmen in the Military Academy. His confidence grew when he passed the physical examination — thirty of his potential classmates failed, he noted — and then the entrance examination. One hurdle remained, but his promise was such that in his case the authorities waived the minimum entry age of sixteen. On July 1 he was admitted to the class of 1846.

In a brief sketch of his boyhood, written late in life, George McClellan traced his interest in West Point back to the age of ten, when a fellow student at a private school in Philadelphia, Alfred Sully, son of the prominent painter Thomas Sully, had received an Academy appointment. There was an ancestral military background of sorts — the Mclellans of Scotland fought in support of the Stuart kings — but the only American McClellan of direct ancestry to take up arms before young George was his great-grandfather, Samuel McClellan, of Woodstock, Connecticut. Samuel served in the militia in the French and Indian War, and shortly before the Revolution raised a troop of horse at Woodstock. A family tradition of dubious authority placed him in the Battle of Bunker Hill. At any event, he served in the local militia for the remainder of the Revolution. Although not called to action during any of the British raids on Connecticut, he was a capable enough administrator to rise in rank to brigadier general of militia by 1779. He was married to a descendant of Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony, lived out his life much honored and respected, and was known to his posterity, including his great-grandson, as General Sam.

The succeeding generation remained in Woodstock, where General Sam's sons James and John founded the Woodstock Academy. The sons of James McClellan, George and Samuel, made their careers in medicine and sought a wider world. George, the father of Cadet McClellan, graduated from Yale College in 1816 and earned his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania three years later. He set up a surgical practice in Philadelphia, specializing in ophthalmology. A man of great energy, he founded the Jefferson Medical College and headed its faculty, maintained a substantial practice, edited a medical journal, wrote on the principles and practice of surgery, and kept a stable of fast trotters.

Dr. McClellan moved in the upper rank of Philadelphia society and numbered among his acquaintances such notables as Daniel Webster. Regarded as charming and courtly of manner, he was also stubbornly opinionated and not amenable to compromise, traits that in 1838 led to his departure from the medical school he had founded. In that day the rewards of medicine were not great, even for someone of Dr. McClellan's stature. His assumption of his father's considerable debts and the cost of a medical education for his eldest son, John Hill Brinton McClellan, created financial pressures, and no doubt the prospect of a free education helped steer his second son and namesake toward West Point.

In 1820 Dr. McClellan had married Elizabeth Steinmetz Brinton, of a leading Philadelphia family, and the couple produced five children: a daughter, Frederica; then three sons, John, George, and Arthur; and finally another daughter, Mary. From the evidence of her letters, Elizabeth McClellan was a woman of culture and refinement, and she saw to it that her children had the best education Philadelphia could offer. In a draft of his memoirs, General McClellan remarked that "before I went to West Point I had received an excellent classical education, was well read in History for a boy, and was a good French scholar."

George Brinton McClellan was born on December 3, 1826, and at the age of five attended what was called an infant school. This was followed by four years in the private school of Sears Cook Walker. Walker was a Harvard graduate and a man of considerable scientific attainment — "far above the grade of an ordinary scholastic," in McClellan's words — who would go on to important work with the United States Naval Observatory and the Coast Survey. Leaving Walker's school at age ten, young George next took instruction from a private tutor whom he described as "a one eyed German Jew by the name of Schiffer ..., a magnificent classical scholar & an excellent teacher. We were obliged to converse in Latin & French, and at an early age I became a good scholar in the classics. ..." In 1838 he enrolled at a preparatory academy of the University of Pennsylvania directed by the Reverend Samuel W. Crawford. Two years later, at the age of thirteen, he entered the university.

He resigned himself without enthusiasm to a career in the law, but after two years there he changed his goal to the military. "The youth has nearly completed his classical education at the University," his father wrote the secretary of war in the spring of 1842, "and desires to go through the West Point school for the serious purpose of devoting his life to the service of the Army of the U. States." There was some delay in his acceptance by the Academy, Dr. McClellan told the secretary, and he had requested President John Tyler's "kind consideration of my son's application. ..." Whether Tyler actually endorsed young McClellan is not known, but thereafter his nomination and acceptance proceeded without a hitch.

Little is recorded of George McClellan's...