Gather the kids: It’s time for my Annual McClellan Birthday Story. This is the saga of his 1st Great Campaign, which led to his 1st Soul-Crushing Defeat & his 1st Ignominious Retreat. It’s got it all: love, war, revenge ...

Yep, I’m talking about his marriage proposal. #BuckleUp

Look at Mrs. McClellan’s face! If a picture is worth 1,000 words, Ellen’s is worth a dictionary. “Surely,” you ask, “George didn’t pitch woo as clumsily as he commanded an army in the field?”

To which I say: “Buddy, Antietam was a well-coordinated assault by comparison.”

It took Ellen six (6) years to say yes after George asked. No WONDER he loved her! George served under her dad so he went for a direct advance, writing Ellen’s mom that he’d “make a bold plunge” and “win her if I can.” They met, he took his plunge …

… right off a Ball’s Bluff.

Because, like Lee during the Seven Days Battles, Ellen shook her head firmly "No" and ushered George, ever so gently, over a Malvern Hill of the Heart, through a Savage's Station of the Soul, before dumping him into a proverbial James River of Woe. #FallBack #ToTheGunboats

How did George take the rejection? He wrote Ellen’s mother, and, yes, these are his exact words, and, yes, it’s my all-time favorite McClellan quote: “I succeeded in making a very great blunder & doing a very foolish thing.”

Let that one sink in for a minute. #Foreshadowing

Lil Mac realized the problem wasn’t that Ellen didn’t like him (she did) but that he pushed “too far & too quickly.” (Smash-cut to Lincoln banging his head on a desk.) So George decided to do what he did best: He called up the Siege Guns of Love and settled in to wait. And wait.

Now things took a turn! “I hope there is no rascally interloper in front of me that I’ll have to poison or shoot!” he wrote to Ellen’s mom. But there was! And he was THE MOST RASCALLY: A.P. Hill, the future Reb general.

Who’d been George’s roommate at West Point. #OhhhhShit

The smart & beautiful Ellen had many suitors. But she fell for Hill cuz he was ... wait for it, nice guys … a bad boy. (GRITS TEETH) Lemme guess: he’s a “bad boy” cuz he’s introspective (selfish), plays in a band (sigh), and cool (indifferent to your needs).

What. A. Catch.

But A.P. Hill stole Ellen’s heart. He proposed and she accepted. Her parents, however, were PISSED. And they were THOSE parents. Ellen’s dad (this guy) threatened to disown her (not cool), but Mrs. Marcy REALLY put her foot down. Cuz, and there’s no polite way of putting this ...

SHE TOLD EVERYONE A.P. HILL HAD GONORRHEA. (And you think YOUR mother-in-law is bad.) He didn’t deny it, exactly, he was like, “Yeah, but it’s probably cleared up by now.” McClellan stood by his friend; he accused Mrs. Marcy of spreading “unpleasant and bitter” words. (I’ll say.)

Hill fired off an angry letter to MR. Marcy that remains a masterpiece of Victorian euphemism, employing such phrases as “youthful indiscretions,” “early imprudences,” “blush to hear,” “decided hostility,” “I hope you appreciate my situation,” and “deep feeling of mortification.”

Now we fast-forward (sorry, George) 5 years. Ellen’s dad was assigned to St. Paul, so George invited the family to crash at his pad in Chicago, like an 80s rom-com. You know what made it even more like an 80s rom-com? George’s roommate was AMBROSE FUCKING BURNSIDE. (cue air horn)

(I’ll say it again: if I were a real scholar and hadn’t written this thread on a napkin in a dive bar in 1996, my PhD thesis would be “Ambrose Burnside Was the Best Wingman of the 1800s.” He was a magnet for good times. Take that idea, grad students. Thank me in the forward.)

When Ellen’s family left Chicago for St. Paul, George went along and lent them his private rail car (boss move). A little way into the journey, he proposed again. And Ellen, impressed by this NEW George McClellan -- railroad exec and roommate of that fun Ambrose guy -- said yes.

It was the ninth (!) proposal she’d received. But Lil Mac’s patience won out. (Maybe not the BEST lesson for him to learn.) But he loved her deeply; they wrote every day when apart. And in those letters, which she kept, he was always unflinchingly … himself. For better or worse.

They married in May 1860 at the Calvary Church in NY. George called it “the day of his life.” Future Rebel Gens. Joe Johnston and D.H. Hill were guests. And on warm spring nights at Calvary Church, they say, you can still hear the sound of Burnside storming the dance floor.

Ellen McClellan is a fascinating figure. He died at 58; she outlived him for quite awhile. But if not for the letters she kept -- which were put into a posthumous edition of his memoirs by an editor -- George would be even more of “a great mystery of the war,” as Grant put it.

And the Hill-McClellan romantic rivalry spilled into the war. McClellan’s men grumbled that Hill’s Light Division fought hardest against them. On the Peninsula, when under a particularly galling fire from Hill, one Yankee yelled: “For God’s sake, Nelly, why didn’t you marry HIM?”