Area October 31, 2012 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • Page 11 Groups stage replay of Lincoln-McClellan debate Lincoln said. The differences between Lincoln and McClellan were both subtle and substantial, as the introduction and the debate explained. McClellan wanted to save the Union, welcome the South back “with open arms” if they agreed to re-join the United States, and leave the desirable termination of chattel slavery to Congress once the Union was preserved. “Slavery must be abolished, but through the proper channels, with equity both to the ex-slave and to the exmaster,” McClellan said. “I feel, as any God-fearing man must feel, that the idea that one man may own another man is detestable.” McClellan said. McClellan said slaves and slave owners should both be compensated financially: the slaves for the work they had done in bondage; the owners for loss of their lawful property since slavery had been permitted by the U.S. Constitution. “What are you going to do with them?” McClellan asked Lincoln. “I would rather have free black men walking the streets of the country than listen to the continuous clatter of their chains,” Lincoln said. Lincoln argued that Union and freedom had now become inseparable and that the war, following the Emancipation Proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863, had two goals: reunite the states and free the slaves. McClellan and Lincoln differed less over their moral dislike of slavery than over personalities. Each posed as the wounded party in a failed friendship. Lincoln reminded McClellan that McClellan had once been his boss. McClellan, as a veteran of the Mexican War, had been president of the Illinois-Central Railroad while Lincoln was the railroad’s chief counsel. “I thought we had a good relationship, even though a lot of my friends said I didn’t charge you enough,” Lincoln said ruefully. Ken Hall as General George McClellan and Robert Costello as President Abraham Lincoln. by John Koster Abraham Lincoln, who lost two elections in New Jersey, took on George McClellan, who carried the state in 1864 and later served as New Jersey’s governor, at the Brick House in Wyckoff for a replay of the 1864 campaign debate. McClellan, portrayed by Ken Hall, was up against more than an election contest. Not only was Lincoln a higher profile in American political and sentimental history than McClellan, even in New Jersey, but Hall was up against Robert Costello, who has been portraying Lincoln for longer than Lincoln was president. Against staggering odds, Hall put up a great fight with an ample knowledge of McClellan’s life and a sensitive and sympathetic understanding of his motives and beliefs. The debate, which followed lunch, went on for about 90 minutes. Two-thirds of the debate consisted of questions from the audience. While nobody was voting for a winner or a loser, the audience acknowledged that Hall was an extremely capable impersonator. Costello’s Lincoln remained indestructible but nobody who heard the debate would ever again write off McClellan as a lightweight. Little Mac and Honest Abe both impressed the audience. Each candidate introduced himself and then fielded questions from the audience. Joseph Truglio of the North Jersey Civil War Round Table was one of the first to ask a question. “At the end of the war, will the two Virginias be reunited?” Truglio asked. “No,” Abraham Lincoln said bluntly. Lincoln said West Virginians decided to leave the Old Dominion state when most of Virginia seceded, and that West Virginia would retain its internal independence. “I agree,” McClellan said. “It will be a separate state.” McClellan recalled how he had won his first victories, successfully defending West Virginia from the Confederates, and that these victories had brought him to Lincoln’s favorable attention (before they became political rivals). Kevin Collins of Saddle River asked Lincoln a question about the basis for the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln explained that the Emancipation Proclamation had freed only those slaves living in the Confederate states, whose secession from the Union had been an act of treason. Since the Constitution allowed the property of traitors to be confiscated, and since the courts had ruled that slaves were property, Lincoln said he, as president, had the right to confiscate the traitors’ property and free the slaves he had confiscated. “I am just taking their property and turning it loose,” Lincoln also remembered the incident when he and Secretary of State William Seward paid a call on McClellan, and were told he was attending a wedding. Lincoln and Seward sat down to wait in McClellan’s Washington parlor, and were quietly astounded when McClellan walked in past them without a nod and walked straight upstairs to bed. McClellan never came back downstairs. The slightly veiled implication that McClellan was seriously drunk in the middle of a war was a telling point. McClellan also had grievances to relate. “The Army of the Potomac belongs to me!” he said. “I created the Army, I trained it, and I fought with it.” He said that after Lincoln had relieved him of command following McClellan’s bloody victory over Robert E. Lee at Antietam, the Army of the Potomac had been taken from him and handed over to incompetents who sent his men to slaughter at Fredericksburg (13,000 casualties) and Chancellorsvile (17,000 casualties) -- both embarrassing defeats by a much smaller Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. He noted that his own friend, General George Gordon Meade, had lost 23,000 casualties at the three-day battle of Gettysburg, and that Ulysses S. Grant had lost 50,000 casualties in a month in 1864 without winning the war. “I believe you love the Army, but I believe you may love it too much,” Lincoln retorted. He pointed out that McClellan’s 1862 victory at Antietam had led to 23,000 Union casualties in a single day and McClellan failed to pursue and destroy the heavily damaged Confederate Army even though he had a copy of their marching orders, found wrapped around a bunch of cigars before the battle and tucked into McClellan’s pocket. McClellan argued that a war of encirclement, outflanking, and siege with the lowest possible casualties was the best way to wear down the Confederates, that their return to the Union was mandatory, and that if (continued on page 12)