George B. McClellan (1826–1885)
Early Years
George Brinton McClellan was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on December 3, 1826, to Dr. George McClellan and Elizabeth Steinmetz Brinton. He studied law at the University of Pennsylvania for two years, beginning when he was just thirteen years old. His father, a distinguished ophthalmologist who had founded Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia in 1824, had good connections in the Whig Party. When young McClellan decided to abandon the law for the military, his father used those connections to earn his son an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. In 1846, McClellan finished second in a class of fifty-nine that included future Confederate generals Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson (who finished seventeenth) and George E. Pickett (who finished last).
During the Mexican War (1846–1848), McClellan was posted to the staff of General Winfield Scott—a Whig Party friend of his father's—and he served alongside Robert E. Lee and Pierre G. T. Beauregard. After the war, he commanded an engineering company at West Point, translated a French bayonet manual into English, and worked as a surveyor on the Red River in Texas. In 1855, he was promoted to captain and traveled to Europe to observe the Crimean War (1853–1856). When he returned to the United States, he wrote a cavalry manual and designed the so-called McClellan saddle that remained in use until the twentieth century.
Title: Major General George McClellan and his Wife, Ellen Mary Marcy
In 1855 McClellan began to court Ellen Marcy, whose other suitors included McClellan's old West Point friend A. P. Hill. Her father, Randolph Marcy, an Army officer, had for a time been McClellan's commander in the West. Having rejected his daughter's plan to marry Hill, Marcy acquiesced to this match, encouraged by McClellan's pursuit of a civil career. In 1857, McClellan became chief engineer of the Illinois Central Railroad, and by January 1858 was promoted to its vice president. That same year he opened his Chicago home to another West Point friend, Ambrose E. Burnside, who had been left destitute by a business failure; McClellan arranged a job for him with the railroad.
McClellan supported the Democrat Stephen A. Douglas in his successful 1858 U.S. Senate race against Republican Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was the Illinois Central's lawyer, and McClellan remembered him fondly from those days, despite assertions from biographers that personal hostility between the two men began at this time. McClellan married Ellen Marcy in May 1860 (with Joseph E. Johnston in attendance), took an executive position at the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad a month later, and in the November presidential election again supported Douglas over Lincoln. When Lincoln was elected, secession and civil war followed.
https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/McClellan_George_B_1826-1885#start_entry
