4

A Fighting Retreat

GENERAL MCCLELLAN’S regular morning telegram to Washington on May 4, 1862, was dramatically brief: “Yorktown is in our possession.” It was as if he was too surprised to say more. In a later dispatch he announced, “Our success is brilliant,” and he was in pursuit and would “push the enemy to the wall.” Northern papers proclaimed the news with bulletins, and some put out extra editions. REBELS RAN AWAY LAST NIGHT—THE “LAST DITCH” FILLED, read the headline in the New York Tribune’s extra. “The beginning of the end is visible,” wrote the editor of the Journal of Commerce. In Albany, New York’s capital, the authorities fired 100 guns and rang church bells in celebration.

Others had second thoughts. This was the second time, a government official remarked to a friend, that General McClellan “has let the rat escape, after having it fairly in a hold; I agree with you, he is no great rat-dog.” Reflecting on the news from Yorktown, William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Evening Post, detected a note of the ridiculous. He recalled the numerous reports from McClellan’s headquarters “of the immense numbers of men which the rebels had congregated on the peninsula, of the impregnable nature of their defences, of the necessity of our slow and careful approach”—reports that had aroused “the universal expectation of some grand result when everything should have been prepared”—and was reminded of a metaphor used by the Roman poet Horace. The enemy’s “rapid retreat from the place,” Bryant told his readers, “is the mouse brought forth by the laboring mountain.”

There was no denying the disappointment in the Federal camp. “Our army would all much rather that they had stood a fight,” a New Jersey officer, Robert McAllister, told his family, “as we could have taken them all prisoners and ended the war.” In the opinion of General Joseph Hooker, “The retreat of the rebels I fear will play the devil with McClellan.” The Comte de Paris, the French nobleman serving on the headquarters staff, noted in his journal the particular disappointment among the artillery and engineering officers, who “have counted down the hours that separated them from the bombardment which promised them no end of pleasure.” After the prodigious effort that had gone into erecting fortifications and digging parallels and emplacing siege guns—only one of the fifteen siege batteries had gone into action, firing 141 rounds—once again, by a margin of just twenty-four hours, Joe Johnston had evaded giving battle on his opponent’s terms.

To be sure, Johnston had to leave behind at Yorktown and Gloucester Point seventy-seven pieces of artillery too heavy to carry away, yet nearly all were antiquated smoothbore ship’s guns of comparatively little military value which had been seized from the navy yard at Norfolk in 1861. Casualties for the two sides at Yorktown totaled fewer than 500, most of them occurring in the affair at Dam No. 1 on April 16. The siege ended on its thirtieth day, and that gain of a month’s time marked the Confederates’ profit for the operation. What the Federals’ profit might be was not yet clear.

Capturing almost as much attention as the evacuation itself was the discovery that the retreating Confederates had planted torpedoes—land mines in the parlance of later wars—in all manner of places in and around the fortifications. These “infernal machines” were devised by General Gabriel J. Rains, whose brigade had manned the main Yorktown redoubt and who was convinced of “the vast advantages to our country to be gained from this invention.” Rains had experimented with such devices as far back as 1840, during the army’s war with the Seminóles in Florida. His torpedoes were artillery shells buried in roads and pathways and rigged with pressure-sensitive percussion fuzes or hidden tripwires. Rains’s idea was simply to slow up the pursuing Federal columns, but some of his men became carried away with their assignment to hide the torpedoes and put them inside houses and around wells and in flour barrels, which struck the Yankees (and some Southerners as well) as a highly uncivilized kind of warfare. General McClellan adjudged the enemy “guilty of the most murderous & barbarous conduct” and made Confederate prisoners disarm the devices.

Yankee Richard Derby’s experience with a torpedo was typical. Lieutenant Derby wandered into the Yorktown fortifications to look at a big cannon that had burst during the siege just as a fellow soldier “on the same errand trod on a torpedo, and the shell exploded, throwing him ten feet into the air, tearing off one leg, and burning him black as a negro!” No one kept an accurate count of the casualties caused by the torpedoes and rumor greatly magnified their toll, but General McClellan was probably close to the truth when he listed four or five men killed and a dozen or so injured. Torpedoes that were discovered were marked by stakes tied with little strips of fluttering cloth, and sentries were posted to steer the marching columns clear of them. The ethics of the matter became the subject of debate in the Confederate high command, and eventually General Rains would be transferred to the James River defenses, where his particular talents could be applied to the more acceptable activity of blowing up Yankee warships.

McClellan was taken quite unawares by Johnston’s withdrawal. When the Comte de Paris awakened him at six o’clock that morning to report Yorktown evacuated, he refused to credit the news and went back to sleep. “The American mind is slow to grasp an idea to which it is not accustomed beforehand,” the Frenchman observed in his journal. McClellan’s subsequent pledge to Washington to “push the enemy to the wall” required him to improvise. He had made no plans for the occasion, and had no organized corps des chasseurs with standing orders to pursue.

He called out the available cavalry under George Stoneman, along with four batteries of horse artillery, to head the pursuit, backed by one infantry division each from the Third and Fourth corps. Most of the Yankees had anticipated nothing more arduous that day than the usual Sunday morning inspection, and it took them a good deal of time to get organized to march. The last of the enemy had been gone twelve hours before the first Federal infantry took up the chase.

The sudden opening of the York finally gave General McClellan the chance to pursue his cherished strategy of a turning movement by way of the river. Half the troops would follow on the heels of the enemy while the other half steamed upriver to the vicinity of West Point to try to cut off all or some part of the Rebel army.

Had the Rebels evacuated Yorktown twenty-four hours earlier, he would have had at hand the ideal spearhead for this flanking movement: General Franklin’s 11,300-man division, riding at anchor aboard its transports at the mouth of the York. On May 3, however, driven by his delusion of vast enemy numbers, McClellan had abandoned his original plan to put Franklin ashore on the north bank of the river to attack Gloucester Point and instead had him disembark his division to support Heintzelman’s proposed attack on Yorktown. Now, after hardly a day ashore, Franklin’s men were ordered to re-embark. The army, they complained, always found a way to do everything the hard way. Getting the troops aboard their transports again was slow enough work, but loading the artillery back aboard seemed to take forever. Franklin termed it “a tedious and exasperatingly slow process.” General McClellan was determined to supervise the start of this flanking operation personally, but even so it would take him two days to get the flotilla under way.    .

The Yorktown evacuation gave Joe Johnston the opportunity to pursue his own cherished strategy, which was to retreat rapidly to the immediate vicinity of Richmond. Johnston was alert to the danger of being cut off by a Yankee force advancing up the York, and he had no thought of making a stand until that particular danger was past. Once in front of Richmond, he reasoned, he need no longer worry about being outmaneuvered by an opponent taking advantage of his command of the waters around the lower Peninsula. The prospect “that the Federal army might pass us by water” (as Johnston phrased it) acted as a powerful stimulus to putting as much distance as possible between the Army of Northern Virginia and Yorktown.

 

GENERAL JOHNSTON took his army back along two roads, one from Yorktown that angled westward and then turned northwest up the center of the Peninsula, and one that crossed the Warwick at Lee’s Mill and then ran parallel to the Yorktown Road and a mile or so from the James River. The two roads came together eleven miles beyond Yorktown and two miles short of Williamsburg, Virginia’s old colonial capital. For his retreat Johnston had his forces organized in four commands, under James Longstreet, D. H. Hill, G. W. Smith, and David R. Jones, who was replacing the ailing Prince John Magruder. Jeb Stuart’s cavalry formed the rear guard.

The marching was tedious and frequently slowed by boggy stretches in the roads, and it progressed at hardly one mile an hour. “And so it went on all night,” Major Porter Alexander remembered, “—march or wade two minutes and halt ten or longer.” At one point an artillery piece became so deeply mired in the mud that a troop of Stuart’s cavalry was called on to assist the gunners. Among the cavalrymen was a monocled Englishman come to witness the war in the colonies, and as he observed the struggle to free the gun he noticed Yankee cavalry coming into sight on the road behind them. Turning to his captain, he asked why they were bothering with “that damned thing.” “We can’t afford to leave it,” he was told. “Pardon me again,” said the Englishman, “if I ask how much it is worth.” The captain said he supposed the gun was worth about a thousand dollars. The Englishman glanced again at the approaching enemy, who were now close enough to loose a few shots at the party. “Well then, Captain, let’s move on,” he said briskly. “I’ll give you my check for it at once.”

They did manage to move on, with the gun in tow, and the army as a whole had a sufficient head start over the pursuers that by afternoon on May 4 all four commands were at or beyond Williamsburg. Private John Tucker of the 5th Alabama recorded in his diary that as they marched through the town “all the eligible places in the buildings were crowded with men women & children all of whom wore a countenance of Sadness & deep regret.” He felt sorry for them beyond measure. “They knew we were on the retreat and . . . burning with a feeling of humiliation at the prospect of their quiet firesides soon being visited by a set of ‘yankee Mauraders’ & made desolate.”

Only Stoneman’s cavalry managed to close with Stuart’s rear guard, and late in the afternoon there was sharp skirmishing between the opposing troopers. As the sound of this musketry echoed through Williamsburg, a woman rushed up to a passing column of Mississippians and pleaded with them to turn back and repel the Yankee invaders. They must defend this cradle of liberty just as their forefathers had defended it against the redcoats, she cried. “If your captain won’t lead you, I will be your captain!” Just then, from the head of the column, the order came back to about-face and double-quick. The radiant Joan of Arc, as one of the Mississippians described her, inspired by the seeming success of her appeal, was preparing to lead the men into battle until one of them cautioned her, “Oh no, sis, don’t go—you might tear your dress!”

Once his sorties began to draw fire from Confederate infantry, General Stoneman prudently withdrew until his own infantry could come up. In the process he lost forty-four of his men and one of his guns. A South Carolinian described his repulse with phonetic economy: “The bauls whisld and bums busted over us but God was with us and we pushed on them and they gave back.” The stand-off between pursued and pursuer seemed likely to continue. Then that evening it began to rain, and it continued to rain for thirty straight hours.

Monday, May 5, dawned gray and bleak in a cold, hard downpour, and it was soon apparent to General Johnston that his supply trains and artillery would be a long time moving any distance on the single muddy road leading out of Williamsburg toward Richmond. He would have to buy time for them to escape. The commands of Jones and Smith and D. H. Hill were set in motion; Longstreet’s division would act as a rear guard to block pursuit. It was Longstreet’s good fortune that at Williamsburg he had a good place to make a defensive fight.

The Peninsula here is only seven miles wide, and the area Longstreet had to defend was further narrowed by the courses of two streams, Queen’s Creek and College Creek. The area between them was barely three miles wide. Indeed, in General Magruder’s original plan for defending the Peninsula Williamsburg was designated his fallback position should he not obtain enough men to hold the Warwick River line or if the Yankees broke through there. To that end, during the winter he had constructed a large earthen redoubt—which he pridefully named Fort Magruder—which commanded the junction of the Yorktown and Lee’s Mill roads in front of Williamsburg, and thirteen small redoubts and redans to cover the rest of the shallow V of open ground that ran west to College Creek and east-southeast to Queen’s Creek. To enlarge the defenders’ field of fire and hamper an attacking force, a wide belt of timber was felled to form a tangled slashing—in military terminology, an abatis—along the face of the woodland fronting this line. Major Wainwright, the Union artillerist, was not alone in calling it a very ugly place to have to attack.

The two Federal infantry divisions ordered to pursue on May 4—Joe Hooker’s and Baldy Smith’s—had labored slowly through the bad stretches of road cut up by the guns and wagons of the retreating Confederates and only caught up with Stoneman after dark. Hooker on the Lee’s Mill Road and Smith on the Yorktown Road were not within mutual supporting distance, however. Rather than coming together at a narrow angle, the two roads turned sharply toward each other and met at a virtual 90-degree angle, and with the junction under the Rebels’ guns Hooker and Smith at their closest were still a good mile apart and separated by swampy, impenetrable woods. They might as well have been on different battlefields, as would soon become evident.

The Federal command at Williamsburg that day was top-heavy with general officers. Electing to remain behind at Yorktown to launch his flanking expedition, General McClellan had placed the pursuing half of his army under Edwin V. Sumner, who by seniority was his second-in-command. Sumner had none of his own Second Corps troops with him; McClellan was holding them all for the York River operation. With Sumner, and under his orders, were the army’s two other corps commanders, Erasmus Keyes and Samuel Heintzelman. Keyes’s Fourth Corps was represented at the front that morning only by Baldy Smith’s division, with Keyes’s other two divisions somewhere off to the rear in the mud. Heintzelman’s Third Corps command consisted solely of Hooker’s division; his second division, under Phil Kearny, was some miles to the rear, and his third division was at Yorktown under McClellan’s orders. Thus the Army of the Potomac opened the Battle of Williamsburg with three corps commanders in command of two divisions, totaling just 18,500 men. Three other divisions might or might not reach the battlefield in time to take part in the fighting.

Brigadier General Edwin Vose Sumner was sixty-five years old and had been in the army longer than many of his fellow generals (including General McClellan) had been alive. He had led the 1st Dragoons in countless frontier battles with Indians and had performed gallantly in the Mexican War, and he was called “Bull” for his great booming voice, loud enough to be heard over the thunder of a cavalry charge, and for his bravery under fire. No one in the Union army was more admired as a leader of men in the heat of battle; no one had risen in rank further beyond his capacity. McClellan was diplomatic in describing Sumner as “in many respects . . . a model soldier, but unfortunately nature had limited his capacity to a very narrow extent.” The Comte de Paris was less kind but expressed the more common opinion when he wrote in his journal that the Bull Sumner he saw at Williamsburg, “the grand old man, wizened, white-bearded, has an air of stupidity that perfectly expresses his mental state.” From first to last that day General Sumner would be unable to grasp the battle unfolding in front of him.

Joe Hooker was hard-living and intensely ambitious, and he had little patience with the caution that seemed to mark everything about the Army of the Potomac. He was ordered to pursue a retreating foe, he said, and “deemed it my duty to engage him without regard to numbers and almost without regard to position” so as to hold him until the rest of the army came up.

At seven o’clock that morning Hooker and his artillery chief, Major Wainwright, went on foot up the road to the edge of the forest to reconnoiter and to locate a position for the divisional artillery. The only open space they could find was the road itself and an old cornfield on their right that faced the junction of the Lee’s Mill and Yorktown roads and beyond that Fort Magruder. Hooker believed his lead brigade already skirmishing in and behind the slashing of felled trees could protect the guns, and Wainwright ordered up the six pieces of Battery H, 1st United States Artillery. As the regulars splashed forward in the mud and rain and unlimbered, the Confederate gunners in Fort Magruder and the adjoining redoubts opened on them. The Battle of Williamsburg was joined. The first General Sumner knew of it was the sound of the guns off to his left beyond the thick forest.

Battery H had been under fire before, at Fort Sumter in the war’s first hours, but that experience had been bloodless. This was more its true baptism of fire, and very different. Even as the battery was taking position men and horses were shot down, and suddenly the gun crews were seized by an unreasoning panic and dived for cover. It was a miserable beginning to his first battle, Major Wainwright thought. “Never in my life was I so mortified, never so excited, never so mad.” He raged at the cowering gunners and whacked them with the flat of his saber and even drove some of them back to the guns at sword’s point. But nothing could keep them there. Reflecting on it later, Wainwright decided “it was a very hot place for men . . . and they were a wretched lot of men.” In desperation he spurred back to his reserve, a New York battery that had been his first command, and pleaded with the gunners to save him from disgrace. “I have no doubt all heard me, for I was very much excited, and don’t know now what I said,” he later wrote in his journal. He was rewarded by a rush of volunteers, and in minutes the guns of Battery H were manned and pouring shot and shell into Fort Magruder. The enemy’s fire slackened.

As the rest of his infantry arrived at the front, Hooker pushed most of it into the woods and the abatis west of the Lee’s Mill Road, and Major Wainwright ordered up reinforcements until he had ten guns posted in the road and in the old cornfield to the east. Although greatly increasing their volume of fire, the Federals did not attempt to storm Fort Magruder or its supporting redoubts. Hooker was waiting for a joint advance by the Fourth Corps troops on his right. There was no movement there, however. As the stand-off lengthened, General Longstreet and his lieutenants seized the initiative.

When the pitch of battle that day grew loud enough to draw Joe Johnston back to the scene, he observed matters for a time at Long street’s side and then left everything in his hands. James Longstreet was big and rough-hewn and radiated self-assured competence the way other men radiated charm or high fervor. He commanded without hesitations or false moves. Earlier, while the army was still at Manassas, his aide Thomas J. Goree wrote of “Old Pete” that he “seems to manage a division of eight or ten thousand men with as much ease as he would a company of fifty men.” In notable contrast to his opposite number, Bull Sumner, Longstreet would manage the fighting at Williamsburg without a misstep.

Beginning the day with just two of his brigades in the Fort Magruder line, Longstreet soon brought three more brigades into action and a fourth into close reserve. He put his senior brigadier, Richard H. Anderson, in immediate command of his offensive. Anderson sent Cadmus Wilcox’s brigade—9th and 10th Alabama and 19th Mississippi—advancing through a sheltered ravine and into the thick woods off to the west. The lead Mississippians loped through the trees in loose skirmishing formation, looking for Yankee’s under Wilcox’s order “to advance until forced to halt & find out what is in front.” Soon enough they found Yankees in front. More troops came up and before midday the fighting was general along this entire western flank, 10,350 Confederates matched against 9,000 Federals. The Rebels had the initiative and the advantage of position, and Hooker was in growing danger of having his flank turned.

As the fighting quickened, Hooker called for reinforcements to “take post by the side of mine to whip the enemy.” General Sumner refused to part with any of the forces with him, however; Hooker would have to rely instead on the other Third Corps division, under Phil Kearny, coming up from the rear. At his headquarters well back on the Yorktown Road, Sumner was blind to the battlefield. At any event, just then he was distracted by another development requiring his decision. Earlier that morning, a contraband had come in to report that off to the right, on the opposite side of the field from Hooker, there was a woods road that crossed a branch of Queen’s Creek called Cub Creek on a dam and went on to outflank the Confederate defenses. The Rebels had a redoubt covering the dam, he said, but there was no one in it. An engineer officer sent out to confirm the Negro’s story came back to say the man was being entirely truthful—the eastern flank of the enemy’s line was unguarded.

Baldy Smith urged Sumner to let him take his division in that direction “and do some good work.” Too dangerous, Sumner replied: here was the center of the Federal position, and here he expected the enemy to attack him. Smith complained to the Prince de Joinville, another of the French noblemen traveling with the army, that there was simply no reasoning with old Sumner. Finally Sumner unbent enough to let Smith send a single brigade to the right, but his approval was hedged about with cautions. Smith chose his best brigadier, Winfield Scott Hancock, and quietly reinforced Hancock’s command to five regiments and two batteries;

As Hancock’s column set off on a circuitous two-mile march through the woods toward the dam on the right, on the left the sounds of battle intensified and drew closer. Unable to budge Sumner into giving him reinforcements, a disgusted General Heintzelman rode off to support Hooker with at least his own presence. General Keyes could think of nothing better to do than to ride back toward Yorktown to see what had happened to his other two Fourth Corps divisions. Bull Sumner resolutely faced ahead, ready to repel any assault.

The rain had slackened but continued to fall steadily in a misty curtain. On Hooker’s front the battle smoke hung in the windless air like broad streaks of white fog among the trees, making it hard to tell friend from foe and indeed making it hard to see anything at all. Battle flags became targets simply because they alone were visible; the men of the 7th Virginia counted twenty-three holes in their flag at day’s end. Private Francis P. Fleming of the 2nd Florida complained that his regiment fired volley after volley at a range of twenty or thirty paces into what they took to be a Yankee battle line in the timber slashing and had no idea whether they hit anyone or not. Lieutenant David Steele of the 2nd New Hampshire stumbled blindly into a knot of Wilcox’s men in the slashing, yelled, “Surrender, you damned cusses or I’ll blow you to hell!” and despite the fact that he had nothing but his sword to back up his threat the surprised Rebels threw down their rifles. In the slashing and the woods men on both sides made use of tree trunks as shelter against the hail of bullets. When a Yankee urged a comrade to find a tree to get behind, the reply came back, “Confound it, there ain’t enough for the officers!”

Hooker’s battle line west of the Lee’s Mill Road, its outer flank overlapped by Anderson’s reinforcements, was bent sharply back and pushed steadily toward the road. Four New York City regiments of the Excelsior Brigade—70th, 72nd, 73rd, and 74th New York—were hit the hardest, with the 70th losing very nearly half its men and the brigade as a whole taking 772 casualties, almost a third of them marked down as missing. “Alas the field is literally covered with our dead,” one of the Excelsiors wrote. Ammunition ran short, and men scrambled among the cartridge boxes of the dead and wounded.

With a triumphant yell the Rebels broke through to the road. Major Wainwright’s guns at the front had to be abandoned, the gunners escaping into the woods to the east. They told everyone they encountered that it was another Bull Run. The 19th Mississippi’s Lieutenant Columbus Jones leaped atop the barrel of one of the captured pieces and waved the regimental flag to signal the gunners in Fort Magruder to hold their fire. The Confederates carried off four of the guns and an ammunition limber; the other six were so deeply bogged in the mud they could not be dragged out. “We took their ammunition and shot it back at them,” a Confederate gunner in Fort Magruder said with satisfaction.

A half mile to the rear Major Wainwright positioned his remaining battery right across the road where there was a little clearing, ordered canister loaded, and when the charging Rebels were 150 yards away opened fire and blew away the head of the column. The survivors took cover from the guns in the woods. Joe Hooker spurred his big white horse in among his retreating men to rally them. At the discharge of one of Wainwright’s guns the horse reared and threw him into a ditch, but he came up muddy and blowing and continued to shout at the fugitives. “Don’t fall back—the rebels are whipped!” he told them. “Reinforcements will be here in a few minutes.” A cavalry detail from the 3rd Pennsylvania took more direct action, opening fire on the fugitives to hold them.

Corps commander Heintzelman joined the desperate struggle to close the broken ranks. He hit on the novel idea of rallying them with music. Finding several regimental bands standing by bewildered as the battle closed in, Heintzelman ordered them to take up their instruments. “Play! Play! It’s all you’re good for,” he shouted. “Play, damn it! Play some marching tune! Play ‘Yankee Doodle,’ or any doodle you can think of, only play something!” Before long, over the roar of the guns, came the incongruous sound of “Yankee Doodle” and then “Three Cheers for the Red, White, and Blue.” One of Hooker’s men thought the music worth a thousand men. “It saved the battle,” he wrote.

What in fact saved the battle for the Federals was the arrival at that moment of Kearny’s division. Phil Kearny was the general most experienced in war on the field, and the most colorful as well. An inheritance allowed him to indulge himself as a soldier of fortune, and he had traveled to France to learn the advanced arts of war at the cavalry school at Saumur. In a cavalry charge at Churubusco in Mexico in 1847 he had lost his left arm, but he proved no less of a warrior for it. In Italy in 1859 he fought with Napoleon III’s Imperial Guard at Solferino and Magenta and won the Legion of Honor. Winfield Scott once called him “the bravest man I ever saw, and a perfect soldier.”

 

 

 

On this day at Williamsburg Kearny drove his men through the quagmires of mud toward the sound of the guns, pushing past or through other troops less driven. Coming up behind Hooker’s lines, he encountered a battered company from the New Jersey brigade he had earlier commanded. Where were their officers, he demanded. They had none. “Well, I am a one-armed Jersey son-of-a-gun, follow me!” Kearny cried. “Three cheers!” One of Hooker’s men saw the reinforcements coming up at the double-quick and “at their head was General Kearny flourishing a sword in his only arm. Never was our eyes more gladdened than at this sight.”

Kearny had only been a division commander a few days and most of his men had never seen him, but now he made sure they knew who was in command. To reconnoiter the field he rode right out in front with the skirmishers to draw the enemy’s fire and locate their positions. Two staff aides with him were killed, but he was unharmed and rode back to his troops and pointed out where they should fire. As each unit came up he coolly directed it into position. “Men, I want you to drive those blackguards to hell at once,” he told the 2nd Michigan, and Lieutenant Haydon reported that the general “was answered with a yell which reached the enemies line above the roar of battle.” Haydon also recorded his amazement at seeing his corps commander, Samuel Heintzelman, standing by the roadside haranguing the men as they passed. “He swung his hat, hurrahed for Michigan most lustily & swore as hard as ever saying, ‘Give them hell God damn them, give the steel, dont wait to shoot,’” Haydon wrote in his diary. “He was more enthusiastic than I ever supposed he could be.”

The Rebels were pushed off the Lee’s Mill Road and back into the woods and the abatis to the west, but they held on there stubbornly, and in the late hours of the afternoon there was a series of sharp and bloody firefights in the gloomy, dripping thickets. Williamsburg was the first battle for the large majority of the men who fought there, and like many others Joseph B. Laughton, a color bearer in the 38th New York in Kearny’s division, had wondered how he would react under fire for the first time. “To tell the truth John,” he wrote his brother a few days later, “when I first came on the field at a double quick tramping over the dead of the whole day & hearing the cries of the wounded & dying . . . & surrounded on all sides by the enemy I came near fainting but . . . as soon as our line came to the ‘charge’ & I saw the enemy retreat back it filled me with new courage & I thought no more of fear. . . .” What inspired Corporal Laughton and thousands like him on both sides who were seeing battle for the first time was inspiring leadership. “General, I can make men follow me to hell,” Kearny confided to Heintzelman that afternoon, and so it seemed.

At 3:00 P.M., as Kearny led his men into the fight, at the opposite end of the battlefield General Hancock was posting himself squarely athwart the Confederates’ left flank. Hancock had led his column through the woods and across the Cub Creek dam without event, and advanced past the empty redoubt there and ahead to a second empty redoubt, taking a position just over a mile from Fort Magruder. He arranged his batteries and his 3,400 men on a low rise overlooking a field of early wheat and sent back to Baldy Smith for reinforcements so that he might exploit his good fortune and turn the enemy out of Fort Magruder.

Smith responded by sending him a brigade, only to have General Sumner recall it. In the grip of one of his frequent alarms, Sumner husbanded his forces and ordered Hancock back to the redoubt overlooking Cub Creek; whatever he may have originally expected of Hancock’s expedition, his idea now was simply to guard his own flank. The disbelieving Hancock sent one of his staff to argue the matter directly with Sumner, and meanwhile opened fire at long range with his artillery.

Earlier in the day, as the fighting intensified, Longstreet had taken the precaution of calling on D. H. Hill, the rearmost command in the order of march, to furnish him a reserve force in case of trouble. Hill sent the brigade of Jubal A. Early, which marched back to Williamsburg and stacked arms on the green of the College of William and Mary and awaited orders under whatever cover could be found from the rain. The wait was not a long one. The two Confederate redoubts on the far left were unguarded that day because they went unnoticed in the rain and mist that was making everything difficult to see. General Magruder’s old Army of the Peninsula had built the Williamsburg defenses and knew all about them, but it was at the head of the retreating column that day and somehow a full description of the defensive line never filtered back down to the rear guard. The shells from Hancock’s guns came as a surprise and raised a considerable alarm. Early’s brigade was called up from the college green and marched toward the left, and Hill ordered back the rest of his division to take up a supporting position behind it.

Jubal Early was a caustic, harsh-spoken West Pointer who years before had given up the army for the law and who displayed on his return to the military the aggressiveness of the prosecuting attorney he had been in civilian life. His first action on reaching the battlefield was to go to D. H. Hill and propose to outflank and capture those Yankee guns that could be heard firing from behind a concealing strip of woodland. Hill concurred and took the plan to Longstreet and Joe Johnston. They too approved, so long as Hill went along with Early and they proceeded with appropriate caution against an enemy whose exact position and strength were not yet known. Like Jubal Early, however, Daniel Harvey Hill was not one to look carefully before he leaped. “Genl Hill made us a slight address,” one of Early’s men recounted, “telling us not to fire a shot but give them the cold steel.” It was nearing five o’clock and growing darker in the rain and mist when Early’s brigade marched to the left and then turned into the woodland opposite the point where the sound of the Yankee guns seemed to be coming from.

Early’s four regiments entered the woods side by side in line of battle, 24th Virginia on the left, then the 38th Virginia, 23rd North Carolina, and 5th North Carolina. Early led the two left-hand regiments, Hill the two on the right. The strip of woodland was half a mile deep and swampy and thickly tangled by undergrowth and very dark, and the alignment of the regiments was soon lost and never regained. The 24th Virginia, which Early had led as its colonel at Bull Run back in 1861, emerged first from the woods to face an unexpected sight. Rather than encountering the rear or the flank of the Federal battery as planned, the guns were a quarter of a mile farther to the left. The Confederates had badly miscalculated their direction and come out into the open well in front of their target.

Without waiting for the rest of the brigade, shouting “Follow me!” Early rashly wheeled the Virginians to the left and straight toward the guns. At just this moment, a disgusted General Hancock was starting his command back in obedience to Bull Sumner’s repeated order to withdraw to Cub Creek. The Confederate attack came as a reprieve. His skirmishers and gunners were heading for the rear as Early’s charge began, and the Virginians, seeing this and remembering their last encounter with Yankees on a battlefield, began shouting “Bull Run! Bull Run!” as they pushed across the soggy wheatfield. The cry died in their throats as it became clear that the Yankees were not running away but instead taking up a strong position. The volume of their fire made it equally clear that they were there in strength. Casualties mounted rapidly among the Virginians and included General Early himself, shot through the shoulder by a rifle bullet. Losing blood and in severe shock, he had to go to the rear.

As the 24th Virginia was making its charge, a second Confederate regiment, the 5th North Carolina, emerged from the woods, and D. H. Hill had his first, shocked look at the battlefield. Posted as the right-hand regiment in the line of attack, the Carolinians were 800 to 900 yards from the Federal guns off to their left; to make matters worse, there was a huge gap between them and Early’s Virginians. The two intervening regiments, the 38th Virginia and the 23rd North Carolina, were nowhere to be seen. They were still deep in the woods, tangled in the thickets and marshes.

With Early under heavy fire and clearly in need of help, Hill could not wait for the laggards. “If you attack,” he said, “attack quickly.” The 5th North Carolina made a left wheel and started through the wheatfield. It seemed to Major Peter Sinclair that they were advancing through “the valley of death—our line as perfect and unbroken as if on parade, at each step our gallant boys would fall. . . .” He was certain he had “never read of anything that surpassed it in bravery.”

It was doomed bravery, however. Hancock had his forces marshaled in line along the crest of the rise: 3,400 rifles and eight artillery pieces to oppose the assault by the two regiments, not quite 1,200 men, mounted without any artillery support at all. As the strength of the Federal line became increasingly evident, General Hill realized to his horror that the situation was about to become, as one of his officers put it, “fatally destructive.” He ordered the assault broken off.

The attacking spearheads had reached as far as a rail fence a hundred yards in front of the Federal line when Hill’s order reached them. They were starting to fall back when Hancock ordered a counterattack. The newspapers later had him make the cool announcement, “Charge, gentlemen, charge,” but as Major Thomas W. Hyde of the 7th Maine recalled, no one who knew Winfield Scott Hancock would ever believe that. “He was more emphatic than that,” Hyde wrote; “the air was blue all around him.” Another Maine soldier, Selden Connor, wrote that he and his fellow Yankees charged over the crest “with a terrible yell . . . and poured in a volley following it up with a steady fire. . . . The enemy, who doubtless thought we sprung from the earth, halted with terror and amazement, their dead were dropping like tenpins, one after another. . . .”

Harper’s Weekly artist Alfred R. Waud, making a quick sketch of the scene, wrote on his drawing, “Line of infantry all broken and running . . . enemy dead and wounded covering the field.” The 24th Virginia had the shortest distance to cover to reach the woods and escaped without many additional casualties, but the 5th North Carolina, which had slanted well out into the wheatfield so as to come in on the right of the Virginians, had a murderous gauntlet to run to reach safety. “The slaughter of the 5th N.C. regiment was one of the most awful things I ever saw,” D. H. Hill would say. It lost 302 dead, wounded, and captured, a casualty rate of 68 percent. Early’s brigade as a whole lost 508 men in the disastrous assault. Hancock’s loss was an even 100.

At about the time Hancock was repulsing the attack of Early’s brigade, there was an outburst of cheering at General Sumner’s headquarters back on the Yorktown Road. The commanding general had reached the battlefield. An admiring Comte de Paris marveled at the impression created by General McClellan’s arrival. “As they recognize him the troops welcome him with heart-felt cries,” he wrote in his journal. McClellan would tell his wife that the moment he came on the field “the men cheered like fiends & I saw at once that I could save the day.” In truth the day no longer needed saving and soon enough the firing died out of its own accord without the general seeing any of it, but he was not to be deterred from claiming his triumph.

Francis W. Palfrey fought in the 20th Massachusetts on the Peninsula and was an early historian of the campaign, and he concluded that the commanding general’s belated arrival at Williamsburg signaled a pattern of behavior. “Curiously enough,” Palfrey wrote, “there was almost always something for McClellan to do more important than to fight his own battles.”

In this instance the general had considered the loading of Franklin’s division aboard its transports at Yorktown—a task General Franklin himself was eminently qualified to handle—more important than investigating the unmistakable sound of pitched battle heard clearly throughout the day. As early as 9:00 A.M. McClellan was reporting “heavy firing” from Williamsburg in telegrams to Washington and to his wife. He was not easily persuaded to hurry toward the sound of the guns, however. Baldy Smith remembered sending messages “all day long . . . to General McClellan begging him to come to the front,” and Smith was not alone in making this appeal, but McClellan only acknowledged learning “that everything was not progressing favorably” at about one o’clock in the afternoon. Even then he cannot have set out for Williamsburg “without delay” on his big, fast bay, Dan Webster—and then required four hours to ride eleven miles, even in the rain and mud. (A staff aide reported making the same journey that afternoon in an hour and a half.) Clearly the Young Napoleon did not relish the prospect of commanding in battle, and on this day—and on other days to come—he would demonstrate his reluctance to do so.

 

TUESDAY, MAY 6, dawned clear and pleasant, and the scene of two days earlier was repeated: Yankee pickets edging forward at first light discovered the Rebel lines deserted. Longstreet and D. H. Hill had quietly slipped away through Williamsburg and taken the road to Richmond. General McClellan boasted of another “brilliant victory” gained by his outmanned army. “My entire force,” he announced to Secretary Stanton, “is undoubtedly considerably inferior to that of the Rebels. . . .” (Seeing this dispatch, General Wool at Fort Monroe expressed his “surprise” that an enemy in such numbers should ever have abandoned Yorktown in the first place.)

If any victory was to be awarded at Williamsburg, however, the Confederates had by far the better claim. Joe Johnston’s rear guard had beaten back the Federal pursuit, as he intended, and the Army of Northern Virginia was able to continue its retreat unmolested. Confederate casualties in the fighting, including the cavalry skirmishing on May 4, came to 1,682. Federal casualties, at 2,283, were considerably greater, and Federal management of the fighting considerably worse. The Union’s high command at Williamsburg, Baldy Smith summed up with blunt candor, was “a beastly exhibition of stupidity and ignorance.”

Some 13,750 Confederates in the divisions of Longstreet and D. H. Hill saw action at Williamsburg, with another 8,750 at hand in reserve, most of those to counter the threat of Hancock’s flanking operation—a threat that never materialized. At every stage of the fighting the Federals had more men at the front, but only at day’s end did they gain anything by it. During most of the day-long battle against Joe Hooker west of the Lee’s Mill Road, the five brigades under Richard Anderson enjoyed a better than 1,300-man advantage over Hooker’s unsupported division. Only late in the afternoon, after the arrival of Kearny’s troops and then a brigade of Keyes’s Fourth Corps, did the Federals finally gain a manpower advantage there. Meanwhile, in the center on the Yorktown Road, two of Baldy Smith’s brigades—6,100 men—idled away the hours virtually without event, having just twelve men wounded by stray shots. Off to the rear, six other Yankee brigades never reached the field at all or were too late to have any effect on the fighting. Indeed, Silas Casey’s division was discovered at midday halted a mile or so from the fighting with arms stacked and the men boiling coffee over smoky little fires in the rain. Hooker’s angry complaint that while his division was nearly bled to death (he lost 1,575 men, almost 70 percent of the day’s Union casualties) there were 30,000 Yankee soldiers standing idle within supporting distance was an exaggeration, but not a very great one. The actual figure was 25,000.

For the Federals the one note worth cheering was the repulse of Early’s brigade by General Hancock, which McClellan quickly seized upon to support his claim of brilliant victory at Williamsburg. He described the incident as “a real charge with the bayonet,” and that bit of inflation and his comment that “Hancock was superb” were released to the press. Thereafter Hancock was “Hancock the Superb,” and his bayonet charge became for Northerners the single memorable feature of the Battle of Williamsburg.

Joe Hooker and Phil Kearny were infuriated by this “puffing and blowing.” They bombarded influential acquaintances with tirades against the general commanding and contrived to get their own repons into print, and eventually McClellan issued a revised account that mentioned others besides Hancock, but the two generals never forgave him for the slight. “The blazoning about the bayonet charge of Hancock is all stuff,” Hooker told one senator, and to another he confessed he was unsure whether McClellan’s lapse “arises from his ignorance of soldiership . . . or whether it results from a consciousness of his own negligence. . . .”

The newspapers’ expansive coverage of Hancock’s part in the battle was balanced by highly negative accounts of Sumner’s role. “Genl. Sumner seems troubled by the newspaper attacks,” one of his subordinates wrote. “Some of them are virulent,” he added, so that the tough old warrior “often profanes the name of God.” Behind the false front of victory he erected for public consumption, General McClellan was himself coldly furious at the way Williamsburg had been managed. He claimed it as his first battle as head of the Army of the Potomac, and told his wife he was appalled by “the utter stupidity & worthlessness of the Corps Corndrs. . . . Heaven alone can help a General with such commanders under him.” He was particularly unsparing of old Sumner, who had “proved that he was even a greater fool than I had supposed & had come within an ace of having us defeated.” The one silver lining he detected in the otherwise dismal picture was the army’s morale. Perhaps it was just as well that he arrived on the field the way he had, McClellan said, “for the officers & men feel that I saved the day. . . .”

For the men in the ranks Williamsburg had been marked by the hardest kind of fighting they could imagine. Veterans of Bull Run insisted that that fight did not compare in intensity with this one. Far fewer had run; most stayed and fought, and died where they stood. Men wandering over the silent, sunny battlefield that Tuesday had an irresistible urge to inspect the dead. They lay in all postures, Lieutenant Haydon recorded in his diary, “but most of them on their backs, their heads thrown back, mouth slightly open, elbows on the ground by the sides, with the hands up, folded . . . or frequently one of them placed over the wound. . . . One I saw on his hands & knees with his head shot off. Two men were found lying opposite each other with each his bayonet through the other’s body.” Burial details interred the dead in rough graves and the wounded were collected in field hospitals. Virtually every building in Williamsburg flew a yellow hospital flag. Four hundred Confederates, too badly wounded to move, were left behind to be cared for by the Federals.

 

AMONG THE ARMY of the Potomac’s general officers William B. Franklin was considered one of the most accomplished. He had graduated first in his class from the Military Academy in 1843 and had directed major engineering projects in the prewar army, and he was highly skilled in all the arts of military administration. He was careful and cautious and George McClellan’s friend of twenty years’ standing, making him in General McClellan’s eyes the perfect subordinate. Franklin had trained and equipped his division for an amphibious landing, and when he set off on his flanking movement up the York early on May 6, the day after the fight at Williamsburg, every factor seemed to be in his favor—but one. The missing ingredient—as was so often the case with McClellan’s Army of the Potomac—was timing. General Franklin was starting his expedition forty-eight hours too late.

 

West Point, the terminus of the Richmond and York River Railroad, occupied the narrow tongue of land between the Pamunkey and Mattapony rivers where they join to form the York. Opposite West Point, on the south bank of the York was the open ground of Eltham plantation, where Franklin was to put his division ashore. To negotiate the shallows off Eltham’s Landing the lead infantry came ashore in light pontoon boats, under the guard of five gunboats. A 400-foot-long floating wharf was then assembled from pontoons, canal boats, and planking, and by working through the night by torchlight Franklin was able to land all his artillery and supplies and the rest of his infantry. Had it been the morning of May 5, he might then have set out for Barhamsville, five miles away on the main road and eighteen miles beyond Williamsburg, to block the Rebels’ escape route.

But it was the morning of May 7, and Franklin chose caution as the better part of valor. He set up picket lines in the woodland fringing the plantation and gave thought simply to holding his landing ground until the three other divisions still at Yorktown joined him. “We were told to act on the defensive and contest every tree and every inch of ground,” said a man in the 96th Pennsylvania. Franklin’s caution was well advised. Joe Johnston’s entire army was then at or near Barhamsville, and there was no longer any real opportunity for Franklin to get across its path.

It was not Johnston’s intention to bring on a new fight with this Yankee force but only to hold it at bay until the army and its trains were safely past. His instruction to John Bell Hood’s Texas brigade that morning was “to feel the enemy gently and fall back.” General Hood was a giant of a man, blond-bearded and looking like a Viking warrior of yore, and he genuinely liked to fight. His brigade—1st, 4th, and 5th Texas, plus the 18th Georgia, which the Texans had adopted as the “3rd Texas”—appeared perfectly willing to follow Hood wherever he might lead. With Hood as support went half a dozen other regiments from Chase Whiting’s division.

Although the fighting on May 7 ranks as a heavy skirmish rather than a full-fledged battle, it was marked by the same aggressive Southern tactics that characterized Williamsburg. The penchant of officers for leading from up front at Williamsburg had cost the Confederacy one brigade commander (Jubal Early) wounded, and three regimental commanders killed and three others wounded. At Eltham’s Landing Hood’s notion of personally leading his men to feel the enemy very nearly cost him his life.

To avoid the chance of accidents from friendly fire in the thick woods, Hood had his men advancing with guns unloaded when abruptly they stumbled on a squad of Yankee pickets in a clearing. Hardly fifteen paces away, Hood wrote, “a corporal of the enemy drew down his musket upon me as I stood in front of my line.” Fortunately for him, Private John Deal of the 4th Texas had disobeyed orders and loaded his rifle, and Deal shot down the Yankee corporal before he could fire.

The Texans pushed on through the woods, driving the pickets ahead of them until they collided with a solid line of Federal infantry in brigade strength. The firing became general and there was great confusion. A Maine soldier familiar with the wilderness forests of his native state remarked on the difficulty of keeping anything straight when “proceeding through one of the closest growths of pine trees and underbrush I ever saw.” After charges and countercharges, fearing their flanks were being turned, several of the Federal regiments broke for the rear. North Carolinian Bartlett Malone, serving in a regiment in support of Hood, summed up this turn of events in his diary: “And from that time untell 12 oclock we was a scurmishing and a running from one place to another hunting the scamps.” After falling back more than a mile to the open ground above the landing, the Yankee line was reinforced and held there. Seeing no further opportunity for gain and having more than carried out General Johnston’s instructions, Hood broke off the action. His casualties came to 48 men. The Federals lost 186. “I congratulate myself that we have maintained our position,” Franklin told McClellan.

In the wake of the Eltham’s Landing fight the Army of Northern Virginia continued its retreat toward Richmond, not in the least troubled by McClellan’s attempt to outflank it. The manner in which this came about, however, was not as Johnston had expected. “General Hood, have you given an illustration of the Texas idea of feeling an enemy gently and falling back?” he asked. “What would your Texans have done, sir, if I had ordered them to charge and drive back the enemy?”

Hood considered the question soberly before answering. “I suppose, General,” he said, “they would have driven them into the river, and tried to swim out and capture the gunboats.”