Comments on the command crisis timeline

Thanks to readers for expressing their enjoyment of the command crisis timeline post, especially Eric Wittenberg and Brian Downey. And Will Keene actually went through the OR - I suspect to check out how selective my items may have been, a good thing to do. (Reminds me of myself.) There's a risk in long posts - they seem unbloglike - so the feedback was helpful.

When you go through the primary material - always start with the timeline as Joe Harsh says - you taste the effect Tom Rowland referred to after he wrote his McClellan book:

Q: How has your McClellan historiography affected the way you read history in general?

Rowland: Well, it has made me quite humble. I realize just how much effort was expended to understand the historiography of one figure. It makes me aware of just how much study is required to make well informed judgements about issues and persons during the Civil War. It also made me aware of just how reliant I am upon the consensus thinking of most events in virtually all historical writing. That realizaton is both amusing and frightening at the same time.

I will post briefly on the command crisis next week, exploring what McClellan and Marcy may have meant what they wrote to Pope about your command...

If you still have a taste for timelines, I have an old one here to map the period between McClellan's submission of his Urbanna plan to the capture of Yorktown. The thing is long and tries to do too much - it needs to be segmented - and I did not at the time cite each entry. It's interesting reading, I hope, but it needs an overhaul.