The winter months of 1862 saw Grant and Foote tear open the center of the Confederacy and advance into its heartland. That spring Albert Sidney Johnston first planned and then died trying to carry out his desperate effort to throw back the Yankees at Shiloh. All the while McClellan continued to plan and prepare for his grand offensive in the East. As the months passed without action in the East, Lincoln grew concerned. The Radical Republicans in Congress and their allies grew increasingly impatient. Among the most impatient were Secretary of War Stanton and the members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.
In response to Lincoln’s General War Order Number One and his addendum singling out the Army of the Potomac and directing that it advance on the direct route to Richmond via the Rebel encampment near Centerville, McClellan had finally relented and revealed to the president his plan. He would land the army at the town of Urbanna, Virginia, he explained, near the mouth of the Rappahannock. From there it would march west along that river so as to come between Johnston and Richmond, cutting off the Confederate army and forcing its surrender. Then the Rebels would have to abandon Richmond. As McClellan saw it, this would win the war in one brilliant stroke with minimal bloodshed.
Lincoln reluctantly accepted McClellan’s program, though he doubted that the plan would really yield such grand results. As he saw it, the Rebels were going to put up a scrap before they gave up Richmond or their cause. McClellan would have a battle to fight, whether he did it at Centerville or on the Rappahannock. Centerville was more convenient. Nevertheless, Lincoln acquiesced in the plans of the renowned professional soldier and allowed McClellan to continue with his preparations and leave the Army of the Potomac idle in its camps on Washington’s Birthday.
Yet the president continued to have doubts about the way his dashing young general was running the army. For one thing, the Army of the Potomac now consisted of twelve divisions, too many for army headquarters to maneuver efficiently. The obvious solution was to organize the divisions into four corps, an arrangement first devised in France three-quarters of a century before. Napoleon had organized his army in four corps, and it had been one of the keys to his success. McClellan did not wish to do so because, he said, he wanted to see how his generals did in battle before he elevated four of them to the more responsible position of corps commander. It may not have entered into McClellan’s motivation, but it was also a known fact that the army’s senior generals were mostly Republicans, while the more junior division commanders were Democrats and McClellan favorites because their commander shared their political beliefs. These Democratic favorites would have to accomplish something in battle before McClellan could dare to promote them over their Republican seniors.
Of more sinister import, as time passed and McClellan did not move against the Rebels, some influential people in Washington began to question his commitment to the Union cause. Could it be that McClellan did not attack because he did not wish to see the rebellion crushed in a way that might damage the institution of slavery? And what of his Urbanna Plan? If it put McClellan between Johnston and Richmond, it would also put Johnston between McClellan and Washington—and a good deal closer to the latter than McClellan would be to the Rebel capital. Could that be deliberate? Lincoln did not quite share their darkest suspicions, but he did find the matter troubling.
On March 8 Lincoln met with McClellan and the division commanders of the Army of the Potomac. The generals supported McClellan’s plan, and a somewhat reassured Lincoln continued his tentative support. He did, however, issue General War Order Number Two, stipulating that McClellan must leave in and around Washington enough troops to guarantee it against Rebel capture. The following day, without consulting McClellan, the president also issued an order organizing the Army of the Potomac into four corps and appointing its four senior generals, three of whom were Republicans, to command them. McClellan was disgusted at this interference with his genius, but he had no choice but to acquiesce.
Two days later came a further blow. Lincoln removed McClellan from the position of general in chief of all the Union armies. McClellan had previously held that job along with his position as commander of the Army of the Potomac. In removing McClellan as general in chief, Lincoln explained that in his campaign on the Virginia coast, McClellan would be far from Washington. Communications would have to go a long way around to reach him—down the Rappahannock, up Chesapeake Bay, and then up the Potomac. In addition, with the Army of the Potomac actively engaging the enemy, it would be better for McClellan to focus his attention on its operations. All of this was true, but removing McClellan as general in chief was certainly not a vote of confidence, and the general knew it. The Young Napoleon fumed and raged against Lincoln “the gorilla” in letters to his wife and conversations with his friends, but he could do nothing about it. This was in any case turning out to be an exceptionally bad week for “Little Mac,” as his soldiers affectionately called him (behind his back).
On March 8, the same day that Lincoln had held his conference with McClellan and the other generals, the Confederacy had unveiled its long-rumored wonder weapon. When Virginia had seceded back in April 1861, rebellious Virginia militia had seized the U.S. Navy yard at Norfolk. The officer in charge of defending or evacuating the post had not done a very good job. His biggest blunder was failing to extract the most powerful ship in the yard—and one of the five most powerful in the U.S. Navy—the fifty-gun steam frigate Merrimack. Two hundred seventy-five feet long and thirty-eight and a half feet wide, the Merrimack displaced 3,200 tons and drew twenty-four feet of water. She had been laid up at Norfolk for the repair of her unreliable steam engine. When it became apparent that there would not be time to get her out of the yard before the Rebels took over, retreating U.S. forces set fire to her on their way out. Since she had been carrying no ammunition at the time, Merrimack burned down to the waterline and then sank.
The Confederates raised the hulk and began to rebuild her not as the graceful frigate she had once been but as something much more modern and deadly. The idea of putting iron plates on ships was not entirely new. Designer Samuel M. Pook and builder James B. Eads were by late summer 1861 working on the river gunboats that would later take Fort Henry. The French navy had seven years earlier built a class of armored flat-bottomed barges called floating batteries, self-propelled by steam engines at very low speed and designed for shore bombardment in coastal waters. In 1858 the French had laid down what would become the world’s first ironclad oceangoing warship, La Gloire, commissioned in the summer of 1860. The British had commissioned their answer to La Gloire the following year, the nine-thousand-ton, iron-hulled monster Warrior.
What Confederate naval captain French Forrest and Lieutenant Catesby ap Roger Jones planned to make of the hulk of Merrimack was modest by comparison. Following plans drawn up by Lieutenant John M. Brooke, CSN, Forrest and Jones built a weather deck where the Merrimack’s surviving hull stopped at the waterline, and atop it they built a casemate extending most of its length and all of its breadth. The casemate’s sides were made of twenty-four inches of oak and pine covered with four inches of iron and sloped steeply inward. Firing out through narrow gun ports in the casemate were ten heavy cannon. To her bow the builders affixed an iron beak for ramming. The resultant warship looked like a barn roof floating downriver in a flood. It was sluggish and hard to maneuver, and its theoretical top speed of nine knots was provided by the Merrimack’s condemned engine, which had not been improved by several weeks’ immersion in salt water. The Confederates christened their new naval behemoth Virginia.
Word of what the Confederates were up to at Norfolk had leaked out, as such information almost invariably did during the Civil War, and the U.S. Navy Department had sought designs for ironclads of its own, finally selecting three. One was the big, bluff, 3,500-ton frigate New Ironsides. Another, USS Galena, was a seven-hundred-ton sloop of war with an experimental system of armor plates. The third was something absolutely revolutionary.
The work of Swedish American engineer John Ericsson, USS Monitor displaced one thousand tons and rode almost entirely below the surface so that its main deck, like the Virginia’s, was barely above the water. There the similarity stopped. Whereas Virginia’s deck was mostly taken up with its armored casemate, Monitor’s was empty save for a tiny, boxlike pilothouse forward and a squat, twenty-one-foot-diameter cylindrical turret amidships housing Monitor’s entire battery of two eleven-inch Dahlgren guns, the largest guns that had ever gone to sea up to that time. Monitor’s hull was made of five-eighths-inch iron but was out of reach of enemy shot below the waterline. Her turret was protected by eight inches of iron plate. A steam engine drove her at speeds up to eight knots by means of the marine screw Ericsson had invented. The world had never seen the like of her. The Navy Department had it doubts but agreed to acquire the craft, provided Ericsson committed himself to reimburse the full cost if his strange design proved a failure. Other critics noted skeptically that the vessel looked like “a tin can on a shingle.”
The North’s industrial superiority would soon make itself felt in the production of saltwater ironclads even as it already was out west in the building of the ironclad river gunboats. Parts for the Monitor were forged in nine different foundries and brought together to make the novel ship in only 120 days, while the New Ironsides and the Galena were still weeks or even months from completion. Yet the Confederates had the jump on Union builders with the Virginia, and the Rebel builders had had an engine, such as it was, as well as half a hull to begin with. In early March the hastily completed Monitor was still making a difficult voyage down to the Virginia coast from its birthplace in Brooklyn (Monitor’s low freeboard gave it questionable seaworthiness) when the Confederates at Norfolk decided the time had come for Virginia to make her debut.
On March 8 Virginia sortied from Norfolk under the command of Captain Franklin Buchanan and entered the body of water known as Hampton Roads, where the James River emptied into Chesapeake Bay and where Flag Officer Louis M. Goldsborough’s North Atlantic Blockading Squadron rode at anchor. Virginia first attacked the sloop-of-war Cumberland, riddling her with shells that slaughtered her crew and covered her decks with gore and then ramming her while Cumberland’s own return fire bounced off Virginia’s sloping casemate, doing little damage. In the finest tradition of the U.S. Navy, Cumberland’s gunners kept firing as long as their guns were above water. One hundred twenty-one men went down with the ship. So too did Virginia’s iron beak, which had broken off in Cumberland, creating a slight leak forward in Virginia.
With Cumberland dispatched, Virginia turned next to the frigate Congress, whose commander, seeing the fate of Cumberland, attempted to maneuver his ship into water too shallow for the Virginia to follow. His trick backfired, however, when Congress herself ran aground. Virginia could not approach, but she could and did stand off and batter Congress with her guns. With scores of men dead on deck, including the commander, the senior surviving officer surrendered. Unable to take possession of his prize because of rifle fire from Union infantrymen ashore (part of the garrison of Fort Monroe, Virginia, which had remained in Union hands since the outbreak of the war and had recently been reinforced), Buchanan ordered his men to bombard it with red-hot shot, projectiles heated in a vessel’s furnace and designed to set its opponent afire. They worked, and Congress burned on through the evening and well into the night before the flames reached her magazines and she exploded. One hundred ten men of the U.S. Navy were lost with her.
Next in line for destruction was USS Minnesota, one of the navy’s five biggest frigates, of which Merrimack had been one in her previous life. Minnesota had been coming up to join the fight but had also run aground and looked like easy prey. The tide was falling, however, and Virginia could not close in to ship-killing range. Light was failing too, and Virginia had sustained various minor damage, none of it threatening but all adding up to a nuisance—here an iron plate loose, there a man wounded by fragments coming in through a gun port. The smokestack was riddled so that the boiler fires drew poorly, and the ship became even slower. There was also the leak where the beak had broken off. Buchanan himself was wounded, and his executive officer, Catesby ap Roger Jones, decided to take Virginia back to port, make temporary repairs, and come out to finish what was left of the Yankee fleet the next morning.
That night the Monitor steamed into Hampton Roads, still lit by the blazing Congress, and on orders from the senior naval officer afloat, anchored alongside the Minnesota. The next morning when the Virginia came out, Monitor stood out to meet her. For the next several hours the two ironclads blasted away at each other at close range, their sides sometimes actually touching, but neither ship’s guns could pierce the other’s armor, though each suffered minor damage. A shell penetrated the Monitor’s pilothouse, wounding her commander, Lieutenant John L. Worden. His executive officer took over and prepared to continue the fight, but by that time Virginia was retiring toward Norfolk.
Both sides claimed victory, but though Union losses had been greater, the U.S. Navy had achieved its strategic purpose at Hampton Roads, maintaining the blockade and containing the Virginia. Still, the continued existence of a weapon like Virginia presented problems for the Union, especially for McClellan, whose strategic ideas focused on approaching Richmond via Chesapeake Bay.
News of the Battle of Hampton Roads and the appearance of the Virginia complicated McClellan’s strategic problems. So too did a simultaneous Confederate movement in northern Virginia. On March 9, the day the Monitor and the Virginia slugged it out in Hampton Roads, Joseph Johnston put his Confederate army on the retreat from its positions near Centerville and fell back all the way to the south bank of the Rappahannock. Though the retreat turned over several hundred square miles of northern Virginia to Union control and would have allowed McClellan’s army to advance a good thirty miles closer to Richmond, if he had wanted to go that way, it completely destroyed his plan for a landing at Urbanna that would turn the Confederate position at Centerville and made it that much harder for McClellan to resist Lincoln’s hints that he ought to adopt a direct overland approach to Richmond.
But resist he would. On March 13 McClellan got his corps and division commanders to agree to his new plan to land not at Urbanna but rather on the peninsula between the York and James rivers, using the Union enclave at Fort Monroe, scene of the recent naval battle. The Virginia’s presence at Norfolk would make the operation riskier and preclude the kind of easy access up the James River that the U.S. Navy could otherwise have offered. Every misgiving that applied to the Urbanna Plan applied a fortiori to the proposed Peninsula Campaign, but with McClellan and his generals presenting a united front, Lincoln felt he had to accept their recommendation. After once again cautioning McClellan in writing about the absolute necessity of leaving adequate troops in the Washington area to ensure the security of the capital, Lincoln gave his approval to the general’s new scheme. Four days later, on March 17, McClellan began embarking his troops at Alexandria, Virginia, for their short voyage down the Chesapeake to Fort Monroe.
Meanwhile, Union troops had advanced and temporarily taken over the abandoned Confederate camps before returning to their own bases in the Washington area. Newspapermen who accompanied the troops found a number of peeled logs, painted black and placed in gun embrasures in the Confederate fortifications to give the appearance to Union observers at a distance that the Confederates had more cannon than they actually did. These “Quaker Guns,” as they were quickly dubbed in the press, suggested that McClellan had for months been held at bay by an enemy force of such extreme weakness that its cannon were mere wooden dummies. The logs became a subject of ridicule of McClellan in the public and especially among the Radical Republicans in Congress, who, according to their dispositions, became either increasingly contemptuous of the general’s ability or increasingly suspicious about his allegiance.
Though Johnston’s retreat had come as a severe blow to McClellan, it was not correspondingly welcome in Richmond. Johnston had enjoyed a sterling reputation in the prewar U.S. Army, and Davis prided himself as a former officer and secretary of war on knowing the best officers. He remained unshakable in his belief that Johnston possessed enormous skill, but he was becoming increasingly frustrated with that general’s propensity for precipitate retreat. During the early days of the war, prior to Bull Run, Johnston had been stationed at Harpers Ferry and had bombarded Richmond with requests to be ordered to retreat. Recently he had started making noises about possibly having to abandon Manassas Junction and fall back behind the Rappahannock. Davis had admitted that such a step might become necessary, but he had counseled that Johnston make thorough preparations for any withdrawal so that valuable stocks of supplies and equipment would not be lost.
Johnston did the opposite, retreating suddenly and with no further warning to Davis or to the officers in charge of logistics. Immense stocks of baggage were left behind. Worse, the army abandoned mountainous supply depots that had taken the Confederate commissary department all winter to build up. Throughout the rest of the war the Confederate commissary department in Virginia never really caught up with demand after that loss. The last Rebel cavalrymen to pull out of the abandoned camps had orders to set fire to the supplies, and as the never-overly-well-fed Rebel soldiers turned their backs to the enemy and marched south, they were tantalized by the smell of sizzling bacon, wafting far and wide across the Virginia countryside from the burning supply depot. Davis was as disgusted as his soldiers, but he maintained Johnston in command and continued to believe he could do great things as a general if only he could be motivated to fight.
In reality, Johnston had begun to build a well-deserved reputation as the war’s foremost retreater. Lacking nerve, he hoped for a grand battle in which his Rebel troops would man entrenched positions and cut down waves of blue-clad attackers. Unfortunately for the Confederacy, that fantasy never materialized. Johnston lacked the skill and audacity required to goad an opposing commander to order such an attack, and when his tactical dream failed to materialize, he continued to cede ground to the Union, both during the Peninsula Campaign and throughout the remainder of the war.
When Lincoln had relieved McClellan of duty as general in chief of all the Union armies, he had appointed no other general to fill that role. Henceforth he would do his best, with the aid of fellow lawyer, Secretary of War Stanton, to “boss the job” himself, as he put it. Two days later, Jefferson Davis had appointed Robert E. Lee to fulfill the role of general in chief, at least nominally, for the Confederate armies. Davis, who unlike Lincoln had an extensive military background, was confident that he could direct the war himself, but he wanted the assistance and advice of Lee, a former engineer officer whom Davis seemed to consider rather bookish and well suited to a desk job. Davis would have been well advised to rely heavily on Lee or another officer as a sort of chief of staff since he tended to attempt to micro-manage the Confederate war effort in a way that proved detrimental both to it and to his own health.
So far, Lee was not having a very good war. He had served as Virginia’s top general prior to its official incorporation into the Confederacy and had organized the Virginia forces, but that role had kept him on the sidelines while Beauregard and Johnston won laurels at Bull Run. Then Davis had assigned him to try to repair Confederate fortunes in western Virginia, but nothing could save the Confederate cause there, and Lee had returned to Richmond branded a failure in the press. His next assignment was to oversee and inspect the defenses of the Carolina and Georgia coastline. There too the task was more or less impossible, as the Federals with their naval superiority could make successful landings at almost any given place along the coast. Lee made the best arrangements he could before being called back to Richmond to take on the new role as what really amounted to a top adviser and assistant to the president in the direction of the war.
One hundred thirty miles northwest of where Lee was in Richmond and eighty due west of Washington, Major General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, of Bull Run fame, commanded a small division of about 3,500 Confederate troops in the Shenandoah Valley. Jackson had had a frustrating winter. An expedition he led to take the town of Romney, Virginia (now West Virginia), from the Federals had resulted in much suffering for his troops in the bitter cold. Some of his officers had complained to Richmond, triggering an order from Davis to withdraw from Romney and a corresponding threat from Jackson to resign. His friends had smoothed the matter over, and now Jackson was the Confederacy’s man in the Shenandoah.
The Virginia iteration of the Great Valley of the Appalachians, the Shenandoah Valley comprised during the Civil War a curious feature of Virginia geography and culture. Bounded on the east by the Blue Ridge, on the west by the Alleghenies, and on the north by the Potomac, the Shenandoah was the breadbasket of Virginia, a land of agricultural plenty, faithfully maintained by thrifty, industrious farmers, many of whom were members of a pacifist German brethren sect who had migrated down the Great Valley from Pennsylvania. They gathered on Sunday mornings in plain, unadorned houses of worship, without steeples, and their insistence on baptism by immersion had led irreverent neighbors to nickname them Dunkers. Naturally the valley also had its share of Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians. It had fewer slaves than the rest of Virginia but was generally still committed to the twin causes of slavery and the Confederacy.
The valley had hitherto been a backwater of the war. In 1859 John Brown had done his part to help trigger the war at Harpers Ferry, at the extreme lower end of the valley (in the Shenandoah Valley, “lower” referred to the direction of the Shenandoah River, which flows generally southwest to northeast). Later Johnston had given Patterson the slip in the valley to get his troops to Manassas in time to help win the Battle of Bull Run. So far the valley had seen only minor fighting.
Now Jackson’s orders from Johnston directed him to take action to prevent the Yankees from sending any more troops from northern Virginia down to the peninsula. Believing the area reasonably well pacified, Union commanders were indeed pulling units away to add to McClellan’s massive army taking ship for the Chesapeake. In late March, Jackson got word that the Federals had pulled most of their troops out of the village of Kernstown, near Winchester in the lower valley, about thirty miles from Harpers Ferry. Supposedly only a small Union rear guard remained at Kernstown, and Jackson decided that the situation offered him the perfect opportunity to carry out his orders by attacking and destroying the Union outpost there, forcing the Federals to halt their movement toward the peninsula and turn back to deal with him.
Jackson struck on March 23, but he was in for a surprise. His information had been wrong, and the Federals in Kernstown numbered nine thousand men under the command of Mexican War veteran Brigadier General James Shields. Jackson’s badly outnumbered troops put up a game fight, but they had no chance of winning, and Stonewall had to retreat, something he very much disliked doing but had to continue for most of the rest of the month, falling back far up the valley. Despite the drubbing he had taken from Shields, Jackson had nevertheless succeeded in accomplishing his strategic goal. His aggressiveness at Kernstown convinced Lincoln that more troops were needed in that sector. He halted the movement of troops out of the Shenandoah, ordered others back to the valley, and began to contemplate anew the potential vulnerability of Washington.
As more and more units of McClellan’s vast army arrived on the peninsula, it became increasingly obvious that the Federals were preparing a major campaign toward Richmond from that direction. McClellan may not have been the war’s most aggressive general, but his strategic vision, in a narrowly military sense that ignored political realities, was nevertheless excellent. The presence of his army on the peninsula posed a desperate threat to the Confederate capital. Standing between McClellan and Richmond were about fifteen thousand Confederate soldiers under the command of Major General John B. Magruder (West Point, 1830). McClellan seemed the only military man in Virginia that spring who did not see that his massive army could have run over Magruder’s corporal’s guard any time it chose to do so. Magruder certainly saw it and frequently reminded the Richmond authorities of his—and their—danger.
Davis needed little reminder. On March 27 he called a conference at his residence, Richmond’s Brockenbrough Mansion, so that he, Lee, Johnston, and current Secretary of War (the Confederacy’s third) George W. Randolph could discuss the Confederacy’s proper response to the threat. Of the four main participants in the conference, only Davis was not a Virginian. The discussion continued throughout the day and late into the night, sometimes growing passionate. Johnston believed that the correct policy was to withdraw Confederate forces all the way up the peninsula, virtually to the gates of Richmond, and there throw every soldier the Confederacy could possibly spare into a showdown battle while the enemy was as far as possible from his base of supplies at the foot of the peninsula.
Lee sensed in Johnston’s proposal a willingness not only to retreat but also to give up Richmond in the name of saving his army. Lee disagreed vehemently, arguing correctly that Richmond must be held and that the place to do so was as far down the peninsula as possible. Beginning the process of stopping the enemy there would open the possibility for potential counter-strokes as the Federals worked their way slowly toward the Confederate capital. Davis had to consider that coming on the heels of a winter and spring of Confederate disasters from the Atlantic coast to the Tennessee River, the loss of Richmond might demoralize southern whites to the point of giving up the fight. Whatever his thinking, Davis sided with Lee and ordered Johnston to take his army to the peninsula and join Magruder near Yorktown, where a line of Confederate entrenchments spanned the peninsula, and there contest every foot of ground with McClellan as the latter began his expected advance. Johnston returned sullenly to his command. As he later confessed, he had already made up his mind to retreat fairly rapidly up the peninsula and thus force his policy rather than Lee’s on an unwilling Davis.
McClellan and most of his army were on the peninsula and preparing to advance by the beginning of April, but McClellan still had himself convinced that he was up against twice his numbers of Rebels. Where the Confederates would conceivably have found that many troops is a riddle to which Jefferson Davis would undoubtedly have liked to know the answer. Nevertheless McClellan remained convinced that only his superior skill could overcome the Rebel hordes and therefore that he must be very careful. His state of mind grew worse when on April 3 Lincoln informed him by dispatch from Washington that he had decided to withhold one of the four corps of the Army of the Potomac, McDowell’s First Corps, for the protection of Washington.
Back when Lincoln had first approved the Urbanna plan, he had asked the generals what would be the minimum number of troops necessary to ensure the safety of Washington, and they had given him a figure. Lincoln had then stipulated to McClellan that that number of men needed to be in and around the capital. McClellan had agreed but had included in his count troops stationed in places like the Shenandoah Valley. They did perform a certain function for the protection of the capital, but they were not what Lincoln and the generals had had in mind. When Lincoln learned of McClellan’s creative bookkeeping with troop strengths, he had decided to detach McDowell so as to make up the necessary minimum protection for Washington.
McClellan was already bitter about what he conceived as Lincoln’s non-support and interference with his campaign, and this event made him more so. Ever afterward McClellan, along with his defenders down to the present day, argued that the loss of McDowell’s forty thousand men was the undoing of the Peninsula Campaign. If not for that, Little Mac would insist, Richmond would have fallen and the war ended. To be sure, Davis, Lee, and other top Confederates dreaded the possibility that McDowell’s command would join McClellan and rejoiced to see that it was staying in northern Virginia. Whether McClellan could actually have supplied an army as big as he would have had with McDowell’s troops on the peninsula is open to question. As the campaign developed, the little more than one hundred thousand men whom McClellan did have there taxed the ability of his supply personnel and the single-track Richmond & York River Railroad to the utmost. Aside from that, as Lincoln was to learn to his sorrow, McClellan’s invariable habit was to respond to reinforcements by claiming that his opponent had just received twice as many men and that he therefore was still unable to accomplish anything.
Two days later, on April 5, McClellan’s grand army arrived in front of Magruder’s Yorktown defenses. Johnston’s troops were still not in the lines, and McClellan had the opportunity by an aggressive assault to sweep the defenders aside and drive into Richmond before Johnston or anyone else could stop him. That was not McClellan’s way of doing things. He wanted to avoid bloodshed as much as possible—among his own troops because he seemed to love the army almost too much and among the enemy because he hoped to set up a compromise peace in which the Rebels would be assuaged, after their moderate military chastisement, and slavery would be saved. For him, avoiding casualties was also a matter of conceit. He would demonstrate his superior skill by deftly taking Richmond with negligible loss of life by means of the scientific methods of siegecraft. Therefore, with more than one hundred thousand men, he settled down to besiege Magruder’s fifteen thousand men at Yorktown, and while the siege went on, Johnston’s troops arrived from the Rappahannock and filed into the Confederate trenches, closing the possibility of a quick and easy victory.
Siegecraft was as close to a science as anything in warfare and seemed to offer a high probability of success if one had the material wherewithal to apply it. Its rules were well established and would not fail unless the besieged did something unexpected. It was an exercise in military engineering, and McClellan had been an engineer officer, second in his class at West Point, where engineering was the chief component of the curriculum. Thus, day after day McClellan’s troops labored on their siege works, building the entrenched batteries from which the siege guns would pound the Rebels into submission. His numerical superiority rendered an elaborate siege unnecessary. Speed and overwhelming force would have trumped pick and shovel and allowed him to overrun the Yorktown works. Yet the safety promised by the science of siegecraft suited McClellan perfectly.
McClellan’s progress was slow enough to stir serious discontent in Washington, where Lincoln wrote to his general assuring him of his continuing support but warning him of political realities. “You must act,” the president admonished. Yet if the fear that McClellan would not act in timely fashion weighed heavy in one capital, the fear that he would act raised even more alarm in the other, where the danger of the Confederate situation seemed to grow by the day. By late April Lincoln had become satisfied enough with the safety of Washington to send some of McDowell’s troops to McClellan via the Chesapeake and to allow McDowell with the rest of his force to advance directly south toward Richmond with a view to linking up with McClellan on the northeastern side of the Confederate capital. That would give McClellan a numerical superiority approaching three to one.
To make matters worse for Davis, the Confederacy also faced the danger that its army would disintegrate at the moment the enemy campaign against Richmond began in earnest. One year ago when each president had called for troops, the Confederacy had enlisted its soldiers for one-year terms. That had been an advantage when Union troops enlisted for only ninety days, but now the Union army had been reborn, larger than ever, of three-year volunteers, while the terms of enlistment of the Confederates were quickly running out. Many of the troops had no intention of reenlisting, feeling that they had done their part and it was now someone else’s turn to serve in the army. Besides, war appeared less exciting from the Richmond defenses than it had at enlistment rallies back home or even in the army on the eve of First Manassas. It was an attitude that could have killed the Confederacy. Even if enough other men had been available to refill the ranks, the Confederacy could not afford to lose its experienced soldiers.
The government had seen this crisis coming months before and had tried to head it off in ways that were not always wise. One had been to offer to allow troops to reenlist in other branches of the service or to reorganize their companies, electing new officers. The result was at least the temporary disorganization of a number of regiments in exchange for an entirely inadequate number of reenlistments. By early April the Confederate congress was ready to take the final radical step. On April 9 it passed the first national conscription act in American history, a remarkable exercise of central power on the part of a government whose post hoc defenders would claim had been contending for state rights and limited government. One week after its passage, Davis signed the bill into law.
The Confederate conscription law required military service of every white man in the Confederacy between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five while allowing a drafted man to avoid service if he hired a non–draft-eligible substitute to go in his place. The following week the Confederate congress passed additional legislation providing exemption from the draft for various classes of persons—those necessary to the war effort, such as employees in iron foundries, and those necessary to civilian life at home, such as physicians, druggists, ministers, and teachers. The exemption of educators led to a sudden significant increase in the number of small schools throughout the South.
The draft would eventually reach into many southern homes to snatch away men who had not previously enlisted, but its real targets were the men who were already with the colors. They too were subject to mandatory military service, and the army knew just where to find them. In effect, the conscription law extended their terms of service for the duration of the war. Many expressed bitterness at this in their diaries and letters. They seethed at the unfairness and the loss of freedom, but most remained in the ranks and would continue to fight fiercely in every battle. The soldiers were not the only ones whom the new policy rankled. Some southern politicians raised the hew and cry of the infringement of state rights and civil liberties, but they were in the minority. Most Confederates, including most members of the Confederate congress, were willing to put up with whatever infringements of state rights or civil liberty might be necessary in order to win the war.
McClellan was nearly ready to open fire with his heavy siege guns when on May 3 Johnston quietly withdrew his army from the Yorktown entrenchments and took up his retreat toward Richmond. Union troops entered York-town the following day. Once again both commanders in chief were dissatisfied, Lincoln that McClellan had delayed for a month in front of Yorktown and then let Johnston escape, Davis that Johnston had abandoned Yorktown before he had to and done so precipitously enough to lose more supplies and valuable cannon.
On a rainy May 5, elements of the pursuing Army of the Potomac bumped up against a rear guard of Johnston’s army under Major General James Longstreet (West Point, 1842) near the old Virginia colonial capital at Williamsburg. The Confederates had previously built a chain of small forts across the peninsula there, though several of them remained incomplete, and the Confederate troops who were now to defend them were unfamiliar with their layout. In a confused battle fought partially in the woods; partially in plowed, muddy fields; and entirely in a steady drizzling rain, troops of two of McClellan’s most aggressive division commanders, Joseph Hooker (West Point, 1837) and Philip Kearny, clashed with Confederate divisions under Longstreet and his West Point classmate Daniel H. Hill, an irascible North Carolinian who happened to be Stonewall Jackson’s brother-in-law. Each side scored some small successes, and the Confederates withdrew at the end of the day, to the satisfaction of all concerned.
In the days that followed, Johnston, with his fifty-five thousand men, continued to retreat more rapidly than Davis would have liked, and McClellan, with just over one hundred thousand men, continued to follow more slowly than Lincoln would have liked. Much to Davis’s chagrin, Johnston’s retreat exposed the Confederate naval base at Norfolk. Much to Lincoln’s chagrin, McClellan made no move to take it. So Lincoln and Stanton took a steamer down to the peninsula and, acting behind the front lines where McClellan’s and Johnston’s armies confronted each other, directed troops to make the necessary movements to take Norfolk. It was the simplest of military operations but was perhaps as close as any sitting U.S. president has ever come to directing military operations in the field.
The fall of Norfolk left the Virginia without a home. She had made a couple of sorties since the great battle of March 8 but only to try to lure the Monitor into engaging her on the Confederate side of the water. She had not again ventured among the Union fleet, now well prepared and supported by Monitor. In that sense, the U.S. Navy had succeeded in containing her, but the Rebel ironclad had absorbed most of the navy’s attention within the Chesapeake area, depriving McClellan of the naval gunfire support he had wanted. The capture of Norfolk removed this thorn in the side of the Union effort on the peninsula.
Weighted down with armor and with her main deck almost flush with the surface of the water, Virginia was not at all seaworthy. Her captain’s choices were therefore to steam out into Hampton Roads again and fight to the finish, or else to abandon his ship and destroy her to prevent her falling into the hands of the enemy. James River pilots suggested a third possibility. If Virginia were divested of all her guns and much of her armor, she might be able to ascend the James to where Confederate forts just below Richmond offered at least temporary safety. He decided to try, but several miles up the river, the Virginia stuck fast, and it became clear that the James did not have enough water to float her even in her lightened condition. With Union forces approaching and no means of fighting them, the captain opted to abandon ship and set fire to the Virginia. Like her second victim, the Congress, she exploded when the flames reached her magazines, two months and three days after her combat debut.
Jackson and his division were still out in the Shenandoah Valley. Johnston, who theoretically commanded all Confederate troops in Virginia, wanted him to come to the peninsula at once. That was in keeping with Johnston’s overall concept that every available man should be concentrated in front of Richmond at the earliest possible day. In Richmond itself, Davis was letting Lee oversee the action in secondary areas like the Shenandoah Valley while he focused his own attention on the critical situation on the peninsula and his increasing frustration with Johnston’s unwillingness to stand his ground and give battle to the enemy. Lee had a somewhat different concept from that of Johnston with regard to the proper use of Jackson’s division. He would want it for the direct defense of Richmond eventually, but first he thought it might be of more service in the valley.
Jackson thought so too and had been arguing as much in his recent dispatches to Johnston and to the Richmond authorities. Because Johnston was busy on the peninsula and not always easy to contact, Richmond—and in this case that meant Lee—took a more active role in directing operations in the Shenandoah than would otherwise have been the case. In response to Jackson’s claim that if left in the valley and reinforced he could accomplish major results for the cause of the Confederacy, Lee persuaded Johnston to modify his orders. The large division of Major General Richard S. Ewell was soon on its way to the valley and Jackson’s command.
With Ewell’s division and his own, Jackson launched one of the war’s most famous campaigns of rapid maneuver. The Shenandoah Valley was threatened by Federals approaching from two directions. Jackson needed to remove those threats and then create a situation in the valley that would prompt Union authorities to divert troops away from the current offensive against Richmond. One threat was from a Union force under Brigadier General Robert Milroy, advancing through western Virginia and threatening to enter the valley through one of the gaps in the Allegheny escarpment. Milroy was the advance guard of the command of John C. Freémont. A powerful political general was not such an easy thing to get rid of, and often removing him from one theater of the war meant introducing him into another. After removing Freémont from Missouri, Lincoln had assigned him to the mountains of western Virginia, as perhaps the place he could do the least damage. Opposing the advance of Milroy’s six thousand Federals were about 2,800 Confederates under Brigadier General Edward Johnson.
The other threat to Confederate control of the Shenandoah Valley was from the Union force under the command of Major General Nathaniel P. Banks, a political general who was a former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and, more recently, governor of Massachusetts. He had been gingerly following Jackson’s retreat up the valley since the Battle of Kernstown but had completely lost contact with the Rebel force. Having reached Harrisonburg, he informed Washington that Jackson had left the valley for good and requested that his own force be ordered to march to join McClellan outside Richmond where the real action was going to take place. Washington ordered away one of his two divisions but left him with the other to guard the now apparently empty Shenandoah Valley.
Jackson left Ewell’s 8,500 men to watch the clueless Banks while with the rest of his command, now numbering 7,200 men, he marched into the Alleghenies to team up with Johnson against Milroy. They met the Yankees on May 8 near the village of McDowell, and though the Federals fought well and the Confederates took more casualties than their foes, Jackson was victorious. He pursued the retreating Federals a few miles and then turned back to deal with Banks, taking most of Johnson’s troops with him.
Banks, who now had only about six thousand troops in his own command, found himself facing Jackson, who, together with Ewell, now had seventeen thousand. The Union commander began a rapid retreat northward down the valley with Jackson in hot pursuit. Banks turned and prepared to make a stand at Strasburg, but on May 23 Jackson outmaneuvered him and captured the Union outpost at Front Royal a dozen miles to the east, capturing seven hundred Federals and abundant supplies. With his position turned, Banks resumed his retreat down the valley to Winchester, another eighteen miles north of Strasburg. The day after the mishap at Front Royal, Lincoln canceled McDowell’s orders to join McClellan and ordered him instead to march west for the Shenandoah.
With that, the most strategically important goal of Jackson’s Valley Campaign had been accomplished. A major formation of Union troops had been diverted from McClellan’s campaign on Richmond to the less strategically significant Shenandoah Valley. After the avalanche of Union victories in the West, the fall of Richmond might have been the additional push that was needed to topple the Confederacy by completing the demoralization of its people. The loss of the Shenandoah Valley would not have been helpful to the Confederacy, but the loss of Richmond could perhaps have been fatal.
Yet there were reasons why the capture of Richmond was very difficult to achieve. One was the Shenandoah Valley itself, which slanted from the remote hinterland of Virginia at its upper (southern) end to a place well within striking distance of Washington, Baltimore, and Harrisburg at its lower (northern) end. The valley was a vast granary for the Confederacy that could always provide supplies for Confederate armies passing through it or operating out of it and its eastern wall, the towering Blue Ridge, screened from easy observation of scouting Union cavalry on the piedmont whatever the Confederates might be up to inside it. Until something was done about it, the valley would provide an ever ready resource for skillful Confederate generals to overturn the best plans of their Union counterparts in Virginia.
Another reason why it was difficult to take Richmond was the proximity of Washington, which always had to be defended at all costs and where there were politicians, including the usually wise Lincoln, who might sometimes be baited into unwise interference in military operations in Virginia. And Jackson had baited Lincoln, not frightened him. The president was, as always, not prone to alarm about the safety of Washington, but he was enticed by the prospect of Jackson’s army just eighty miles west-northwest of the national capital. His orders to McDowell were aimed not at saving Washington but at getting behind Jackson and trapping him. At the same time Lincoln issued those orders, he also ordered Freémont to march east. If all went well, McDowell and Freémont would meet in the valley somewhere south of Jackson, who would then be trapped. It was a promising prospect for the Union, but capturing Richmond would have been better.
Back in the valley, Jackson was not yet finished with Banks. Pursuing him to Winchester, Jackson attacked on May 25, breaking Banks’s lines and driving his troops back through the town, where civilians, including a number of women, fired at them and pelted them with whatever objects they could lay their hands on. Losses in killed and wounded were about equal, three hundred Union to four hundred Confederate, but an additional 1,700 Federals were captured or missing. Jackson was in ecstasy, urging his men on to pursue the Yankees all the way to the Potomac.
They very nearly did. By May 29 advanced elements of Jackson’s command were threatening Harpers Ferry, twenty-five miles northeast of Winchester and within sight of the Potomac. By that time it was clear that Union forces were closing on Jackson as Lincoln’s trap threatened to snap shut. Jackson turned his troops south on May 30 and began a rapid march up the valley. His lead troops reached Winchester that night, but McDowell’s advance guard was already in Front Royal, only a dozen miles from where the Valley Pike, Jackson’s escape route, passed through Strasburg eighteen miles south of Winchester. Jackson’s reputation now began to work for him. The commander of McDowell’s lead division decided it would not be safe to advance any farther until the next division caught up and so called a halt at Front Royal while Jackson’s army, covering prodigious distances each day, marched by a few miles away. Freémont performed with his accustomed ineptness, moving slowly and allowing Jackson to get past him as well.
Seventy-five miles southwest of Winchester, near the village of Port Republic, Jackson turned at bay and prepared to confront his pursuers. Freémont’s troops were advancing from the north, McDowell’s from the northeast. By controlling key bridges Jackson used two small rivers to keep his two enemies apart. On June 8 a portion of Ewell’s division met Freémont’s command in a blocking action at Cross Keys. Though Freémont outnumbered Ewell two to one, he advanced so tentatively that little serious fighting occurred. By nightfall Jackson felt confident that he had little to fear from Freémont and could bring all but a token force of Ewell’s division over to Port Republic for his planned showdown with McDowell’s lead division under Jackson’s old Kernstown nemesis Shields.
On June 8, one month to the day after the Battle of McDowell, Jackson and Shields fought the Battle of Port Republic. Though a wizard of operational maneuver as he had just demonstrated over the course of the preceding month, Jackson was not always adept in tactics. He certainly did poorly in this battle, committing his troops piecemeal and without adequate reconnaissance. Troops on both sides fought hard. In the end, Jackson had more men available than did Shields and was able to force the Federals back. In this narrow victory, Jackson lost eight hundred men and Shields about one thousand.
The Battle of Port Republic marked the end of what was to become famous as Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign, an operational masterpiece still studied by students of the art of war. Jackson’s eighteen thousand men had marched hundreds of miles. Through excellent knowledge of the terrain, good intelligence of enemy strength and movements, and Jackson’s ability to grasp quickly and accurately the operational situation and how he could make the most of it, his small army had defeated three separate enemy armies whose combined numbers totaled fifty-five thousand men. The strategic importance of the campaign lay in the fact that it had kept McDowell’s command and possibly additional Union troops away from McClellan for several vital weeks.
By the time Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign was at its height, McClellan’s troops had reached the outskirts of Richmond. Union soldiers could see the spires of the Confederate capital’s churches and hear its public clocks strike the hours. Davis seethed with anger at Johnston for his retreat into the very suburbs of the capital without giving battle to the enemy. To make matters worse, Johnston had not kept Davis apprised of his activities or plans. Like his old friend from prewar army days, George McClellan, he seemed to feel that the commander in chief had no right to know what the army was doing and what its commander planned. The president had ridden out to inspect the lines daily, much to Johnston’s annoyance, and on one occasion would have ridden inadvertently right into Union lines had not Confederate soldiers flagged him down and warned him that, because of a retreat the previous evening of which Johnston had given him no word before or after the fact, he was actually about to proceed beyond the new Confederate lines. Davis applied heavy pressure on Johnston to persuade him not to give up Richmond without a fight. According to one account, Davis threatened that if Johnston would not fight for Richmond, he, Davis, would find a general who would.
At any rate, Johnston planned a May 31 attack on McClellan in which he hoped to take advantage of an important terrain feature near Richmond. Cutting across McClellan’s position was a tributary of the James called the Chickahominy. Its valley amounted to a broad belt of swamp that troops, guns, caissons, and supply wagons could cross only with the utmost difficulty. The Chickahominy was particularly inconveniently located for McClellan since Richmond was on the south side of the Chickahominy but McClellan’s supply line ran back to his right rear, on the north side of the swampy little river. That meant that in order to protect his supply line the Union general had to maintain a substantial force north of the Chickahominy and that in order to attack Richmond he had to place a large force south of that stream. Johnston planned to take advantage of that division of force by massing his own troops against the half of the Army of the Potomac that was south of the Chickahominy, betting that the difficult crossing of the swampy Chickahominy bottoms would prevent the other half of McClellan’s army from coming to the aid of their comrades.
It was as good a plan as any he could have come up with, but its execution by the Confederate army was atrocious. Johnston assigned a key role in the assault to his senior division commander, James Longstreet, a man whose very demeanor seemed to inspire confidence among all those around him. Unfortunately Longstreet was headstrong and ambitious. Seeing that Johnston’s plan called for him to attack under Johnston’s direct supervision, he decided instead to shift his division to another part of the front where he could have independence. The movement threw the army into disarray and delayed the start of the attack for many hours. When it did go in, the attack was a confused mess. Late in the day Johnston rode to the front to try to sort it out and within the space of a few seconds was struck both by an enemy rifle bullet and by a shell fragment and carried off the field badly wounded. The Yankees would call this battle Fair Oaks after a location on the battlefield where their troops had done well. The Confederates would call it Seven Pines for similar reasons.
Davis and Lee had made the disturbingly short ride from Richmond to see the day’s fighting. After Johnston’s wounding, Davis looked up the army’s second in command, Major General Gustavus W. Smith (West Point, 1842), but was dismayed to find him not at all posted on Johnston’s plans and completely unequal to the occasion. As Davis and Lee rode together back into Richmond that evening, the president apparently reflected on the fact that the army would need a new commander. Its second in command was inadequate, and its third-ranking officer, Longstreet, had just turned in a dismal performance. Yet the commander would have to be someone then present in the Richmond area since the army, with its back to the capital and a victorious enemy in front, would need his direction immediately. Turning to his companion, Davis announced that he would assign Lee to command of the army.
Lee took command the following day. Over the weeks that followed he went to work to get it back into fighting shape and put his stamp on it. He encouraged officers not to count battles as already lost on the basis of their inferior numbers but to apply themselves to overcoming such difficulties. In an apparent hint at where he planned to take the war, he named his new command the Army of Northern Virginia. By late June he was ready to launch an offensive of his own—and none too soon since McClellan had been edging ever deeper into the outskirts of Richmond and had to be turned back if the capital was to be saved.
Lee’s plan was even more daring than Johnston’s. McClellan had by this time increased the number of corps in his army to six by taking divisions from the Second, Third, and Fourth corps and using them to form the Fifth and Sixth corps for two of his personal favorites, Major General Fitz John Porter (West Point, 1845), who got the Fifth Corps, and Major General William B. Franklin (West Point, 1843), who got the Sixth. As the Army of the Potomac had edged closer to Richmond over the past month, more and more of the army had moved over to the south bank until only a single corps, the Fifth, remained on the north bank to cover the army’s supply line, the Richmond & York River Railroad. That corps was Lee’s target. He planned to reduce the Confederate defenders immediately in front of Richmond, facing McClellan’s other four corps, to a bare minimum and mass almost all of his army, which would be reinforced by the addition of Jackson’s command hastily summoned from the Shenandoah Valley immediately after the completion of its dramatic campaign there, against Porter’s Fifth Corps near the hamlet of Mechanicsville. Davis was skeptical, but Lee won him over.
He planned to launch his attack at Mechanicsville on June 26. He got a scare when McClellan made a relatively minor push against the Richmond defenses on the twenty-fifth, but McClellan’s push was a small affair aimed merely at seizing a few more yards of ground. Right on schedule, Lee opened his grand offensive the following day, with Davis and his staff on hand to observe. It was almost as bad a fiasco as Seven Pines. Jackson was supposed to open the offensive with an attack on Porter’s exposed right flank, but the hero of Manassas and the valley inexplicably failed to get his troops into position. In Lee’s center, division commander Ambrose Powell Hill, West Point classmate of McClellan and unsuccessful suitor for the hand of the present Mrs. McClellan, got tired of waiting and launched his division straight against the entrenched Union defenders. This was the signal for the rest of Lee’s army to join the assault, which it did. The result was a bloody repulse. Confederate losses were almost 1,500, while the Federals lost fewer than four hundred.
If Lee had chanced to take a stray bullet and had died at Mechanicsville, he would have been counted as great a failure as Albert Sidney Johnston, but he survived and took up the offensive again the next day. Despite the Union victory on the twenty-sixth, McClellan was thoroughly cowed, convinced as usual that he was outnumbered at least two to one no matter how many men he had. He decided it would be impossible to defend the Richmond & York River Railroad and that his only chance was to abandon it, march his army back and across the peninsula, and take up a new base of supplies at Harrison’s Landing on the James River, now available since the Virginia’s demise. McClellan called the resulting movement, which took his army thirty miles farther away from Richmond, a “change of base.” The rest of the world called it a retreat. McClellan ordered Porter to fall back five miles to a position at Gaines’ Mill and there hold the Rebels one more day before retiring to the south bank of the Chickahominy and joining the rest of the army in its movement southeastward across the peninsula.
On the morning of June 27, Lee followed up the retreating Fifth Corps and found it in a stronger defensive position at Gaines’ Mill. Again Jackson failed to come up to scratch, and again the rest of Lee’s army hurled itself against the Union defenses. The result was even bloodier than the day before, but Lee had most of his army on hand, giving him a heavy numerical advantage over Porter. Late in the day a brigade of Texans led by John Bell Hood (West Point, 1853) finally broke through the Union line, which then collapsed like a breached levee. A division of the Sixth Corps and one of the Second moved across the Chickahominy to help cover Porter’s retreat, aided by approaching darkness, but the rest of McClellan’s army remained idle on the south bank of the Chickahominy, convinced by Confederate bluffing that the small screen of Rebels between them and Richmond was in fact a mighty host about to fall on them. Confederate casualties at Gaines’ Mill numbered almost eight thousand. Union losses in killed and wounded numbered scarcely half that many, though another 2,800 Federals were captured or missing in the confused twilight retreat.
For the next four days, Lee, with an army only slightly smaller than McClellan’s, tried again and again to cut off the Federals’ path of retreat across and down the peninsula. Had he succeeded, he might have bagged the Army of the Potomac almost entirely, but he was plagued by poor or nonexistent staff work and had great difficulty getting his orders transmitted and carried out. Jackson continued in some strange sort of funk, and historians still argue about the nature and cause of his dysfunction that week. Extreme fatigue is as good a guess as any. Forced marches throughout the Shenandoah Valley and then on the way to Richmond probably exhausted Jackson. McClellan provided almost no instructions for his retreating army, busying himself with affairs well to the rear, preparation of the new supply base, and the like. His corps commanders coordinated the rearguard actions as best they could, and the troops fought stoutly on each occasion. Every day saw another battle. June 30 brought the climatic Battle of Glendale, as Lee’s troops contended for a key crossroads whose possession would allow them to cut off the retreat of a major portion of the Army of the Potomac. Once again the combat was intense and lasted into the dusk. Casualties were about four thousand on each side, and the Federals succeeded in holding the vital crossroads.
Frustrated at his inability to trap McClellan in nearly a week of fighting, Lee on July 1 launched his army in another all-out frontal assault. This time the Army of the Potomac was arrayed along the military crest of gently sloping Malvern Hill, where massed Union artillery commanded a splendid field of fire. Again deficient staff work impaired Lee’s control of his army. A Confederate attempt at a preliminary artillery barrage was a disaster, as well-aimed Union salvos silenced the Rebel batteries almost as quickly as they wheeled into position and opened fire. The infantry assault should have been canceled but went in anyway, with predictable results. When it was over more than five thousand Confederates lay scattered across the gentle, grassy slope. A Union officer surveying the field the next morning noted that “enough of them were alive and moving to give the field a singular crawling effect.”1
The fighting that began with McClellan’s minor push on June 25 and continued every day through the bloody finale at Malvern Hill came to be known as the Seven Days’ Battles or just the Seven Days. They had produced bloodshed on a scale of which the nation had scarcely dreamed before. The Army of the Potomac, out of its total strength of 104,000 men, lost ten thousand killed and wounded and another six thousand captured. The Army of Northern Virginia, which started the battles with a strength of ninety-two thousand, suffered more than twenty thousand casualties, almost all of them killed and wounded, losses the Confederacy could not afford on a regular basis. Lee had failed in his effort to trap and annihilate McClellan’s army, which was now securely ensconced around its base of supplies on the James River with naval vessels standing by to provide gunfire support. Yet in one week the scene of the fighting had shifted from the outskirts of Richmond to a point about thirty miles away. Additionally, Lee, though at a ruinous cost to his army, had established a towering reputation that would henceforth haunt the minds and inhibit the plans of every army commander he would meet—except the last one.