5

March to the Chickahominy

“IT IS DISTRESSING to see how many persons are leaving Richmond, apprehending that it is in danger,” Judith White McGuire noted in her diary for May 3. Four days later she recorded the exodus continuing, with wagonloads of furniture and family belongings rumbling through the streets even in the small hours of the morning. Refugees filled the railroad depots and hurried aboard westbound packets on the James River Canal. At the same time, other refugees from the Peninsula crowded into the city from the east, fleeing the advancing Yankees. President Davis sent Mrs. Davis and the children to safety in North Carolina. The Confederate Congress had already adjourned, and its members rushed off to their homes with what the newspapers considered unseemly haste. Secretary George Randolph ordered the War Department’s archives to be boxed for shipment in case of emergency. Secretary Christopher Memminger had the Treasury’s gold reserves readied for evacuation. The Richmond press might describe the engagements at Williamsburg and Eltham’s Landing as Confederate victories, but it was evident that the victories did not signal an end to the retreat of Joe Johnston’s army. McClellan’s grand army came on relentlessly, growing in menace each day.

These developments were only the latest in a month-long rush of bad news washing over Richmonders. Simultaneously with the report that McClellan was laying siege to Yorktown had come word from western Tennessee that Albert Sidney Johnston’s army had failed to turn back the Yankees on the Tennessee River at a country church called Shiloh, and that General Johnston himself was dead on the field. At the same time, the Mississippi River fortress of Island No. 10 was lost to the enemy. Fort Pulaski at Savannah and Fort Macon in North Carolina were next to fall. But worst of all was the news that on April 25 New Orleans, the largest city in the South, had been captured by the Federals. When she came to write her memoir of life in wartime Richmond, Sallie Putnam would title this chapter in the story “Accumulating Disasters.”

On May 7 Joe Johnston told General Lee that the presence of the Yankee gunboats on the York made it impossible for him to attack the enemy’s landing ground at Eltham’s. “The sight of the iron-clad boats makes me apprehensive for Richmond, too,” he wrote, “so I move on. . . .” Yet knowing he must move on did not make the going any easier, and abruptly General Johnston’s temper boiled over. Mounting his charger Sam Patch and without a word to anyone, he set off at a gallop right through his marching army. His staff tried desperately to keep up. When an ambulance blocked his way, Johnston cursed the terrified driver and threatened to shoot him. It was the only occasion his aide Porter Alexander ever saw him in such a fury. “I will remember that ride as long as I live,” Alexander wrote. Finally reaching the day’s stopping place, the general reined in both his horse and his temper and was his usual calm self again. The episode suggested, however, that the Fabian strategy of retreat was wearing Joe Johnston’s toleration very thin.

The retreat after Williamsburg was an experience not soon forgotten by Johnston’s troops. “Proceed on march hungry as wolves,” North Carolinian Henry C. Wall began his diary entry for May 7, and his complaint was echoed by virtually every diarist and letter-writer in the army. The Confederate commissary, inefficient enough to begin with, was thrown into a shambles by the condition of the roads. “We had very little to eat, our commissary wagons being stuck in the mud and many being compelled to throw out rations in order to get along,” Private Henry R. Berkeley of the Hanover Artillery explained. When the Georgians of Cobb’s Legion ran out of provisions, ten men from each company were ordered out into the countryside “to buy and, if not to be bought, to press and give receipt.” Other foragers showed less concern for such niceties. “We were for days together without a morsel of food, excepting occasionally a meal of parched corn,” Mississippian Ruffin Thomson wrote, and he watched men descend on farmers’ gardens and smokehouses like clouds of locusts. “Whenever a cow or hog were found it was shot down & soon dispatched.” Alabamian John Tucker reported his company “so hungary that they ate corn, collard stalks, Turnips, Beets or any thing they could get hands on.” Getting only half enough to eat at least made them mad enough to fight, another man remarked, and there was a certain grim satisfaction in knowing that when the Yankees reached this part of the Peninsula there would be nothing left for them to steal.

At Barhamsville Johnston divided his army to continue the march back toward Richmond. Longstreet’s and D. H. Hill’s divisions followed a road paralleling the Chickahominy River to a crossing of that stream called Long Bridge. Farther to the north, paralleling the Pamunkey River, G. W. Smith’s and David Jones’s divisions took the old Williamsburg Stage Road as far as the junction known as Baltimore Cross Roads. The Federals offered no pursuit, and the movement was completed by May 9. The commissary, now able to make use of the York River Railroad, began issuing rations once again.

The stragglers and the skulkers did not stop there, however. They always brought up the rear of any army on attack but led the way in retreat. During the week after Williamsburg the Richmond observer Thomas C. DeLeon watched them trickle into the capital, “muddy—dispirited—exhausted; and throwing themselves on cellar doors and sidewalks, slept heavily, regardless of curious starers. . . . Never had the Southern Army appeared half so demoralized. . . .” From his camp at Baltimore Cross Roads, Georgian Joel Barnett wrote his wife, “Some say there must have been 10,000 of these sick men who could not march but could beat anybody to Richmond!” General Johnston called on the provost marshal to round up this division of stragglers for return to the army.

He had the army now less than twenty miles from Richmond, but at last it was out of reach of the Yankee gunboats on the York and the Pamunkey. On May 12 President Davis and General Lee rode out from the capital to confer with Johnston at his headquarters. Johnston could provide them little satisfaction. The enemy was still in superior force and still held the initiative, he said; he could do no more than await the next movement and look for an opening for a counterstroke. The president had no better suggestion. General Johnston’s policy seemed to be, Davis later wrote, to “improve his position as far as practicable, and wait for the enemy to leave his gun-boats, so that an opportunity might be offered to meet him on land.”

 

ON THE EVENING of May 6 the Treasury Department’s revenue cutter Miami tied up at Fort Monroe with a distinguished passenger list: President Abraham Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase. Spurred by the news of the fall of Yorktown, the president and his Cabinet officers were determined to see if vigorous personal intervention might speed the war along. General McClellan explained that he was too busy at the front just then to see them, so they turned to the local commanders, General Wool and Flag Officer Goldsborough. As he studied the map, it appeared to Mr. Lincoln that Norfolk was now quite isolated and ripe for capture, and that it was time to challenge the Confederates for control of the James River. With General McClellan apparently indifferent to the matter and taking no action, the president, commander-in-chief of the nation’s armed forces, took matters into his own hands.

The Confederate authorities had no illusions about holding out for very long in Norfolk once Johnston announced his intention of giving up the Yorktown line, and General Benjamin Huger had begun the intricate task of quietly evacuating men and guns and munitions and as many of the vessels and as much of the machinery from the nearby navy yard as possible. The Merrimack continued to serve as his shield. “Of course everything is in confusion . . .,” one of Huger’s men wrote home on May 6; “the cars are full of troops, provisions, and ammunition every day.” For more than a week Huger’s bluff held and the Federals made no move against him. Then on May 8 a Norfolk tugboat captain, a Northerner by birth, deserted to the Yankees and reported all the details of the evacuation. Lincoln had already ordered Flag Officer Goldsborough to dispatch a gunboat squadron up the James; now he pressed General Wool to move rapidly against Norfolk.

The navy took the batteries defending Norfolk under fire, and the president and Secretaries Chase and Stanton boarded small craft and set out across Hampton Roads on a personal reconnaissance to find a suitable landing place. Lincoln went ashore himself to inspect one likely spot. On May 10 Wool’s troops landed on an outlying beach and began their march on the town. A squabble soon developed among the officers over who was supposed to do what, but “General” Chase, who took as much interest in military affairs as in money matters, untangled things, and in due course the warlike Treasury secretary and the elderly General Wool, in joint command, had the column headed right toward Norfolk. Mr. Lincoln was meanwhile hurrying reinforcements to them. A soldier aboard one of the transports watched in amusement as the commander-in-chief went into action: “Abe was rushing about, hollering to someone on the wharf—dressed in a black suit with a very seedy crepe on his hat, and hanging over the railing, he looked like some hoosier just starting for home from California, with store clothes and a biled shirt on.”

The Yankees encountered hardly even token resistance, for General Huger had by now evacuated nearly all his troops and their equipment. A partially completed ironclad and two unfinished gunboats had been towed up the James to Richmond and what remained in the navy yard was set on fire. As Norfolk’s mayor with ornate ceremony surrendered the keys to the city to the invaders, Huger’s rear guard boarded the last train out of town. The victors ran up the Stars and Stripes and appointed a military governor and then returned to Fort Monroe. The report of their bloodless conquest delighted everyone, particularly Secretary Stanton. “He fairly hugged General Wool,” Chase wrote. “. . . So ended a brilliant week’s campaign of the President. . . .”

The most lasting effect of the president’s campaign was to hasten the Merrimack to her fate. In the event he lost his base at Norfolk, Flag Officer Tattnall had intended taking the big ironclad far up the James to a new base at Harrison’s Landing, some thirty-five miles from Richmond, where he might obtain the coal and other supplies he needed and once again block off the river to the Federals. To negotiate the shallows and sandbars in the river he would have to lighten ship substantially, reducing her draft from twenty-two and a half feet to eighteen feet. The river pilots assured him that such a reduction would be enough to make good his escape.

The sudden haste of General Huger’s evacuation gave Tattnall only a few hours to carry out his plan, however, and no choice at all on its timing, and on the night of May 10 his crew worked frantically to remove the ship’s ballast and everything else that could be spared and still allow her to fight. After five hours’ labor they had her raised three feet when the river pilots came again to Tattnall and said the prevailing wind was wrong—high tide at daylight would not be high enough to carry the Merrimack, even with an eighteen-foot draft, over the first bar in the river.

Tattnall already mistrusted the pilots and would later accuse them of “palpable deception” and cowardice, yet his real dilemma in these dark early morning hours stemmed from his overwhelming premonition of disaster. Cautious by instinct, he knew entirely too much of the Merrimack’s frailties—her wretched engines that had already failed him twice; her vulnerability to damage when lightened, which exposed her thinnest armor; her poor prospect of survival should the Yankees press an attack relentlessly—and entirely too little of the advantage given him by the Merrimack’s fearsome reputation among his enemies. Flag Officer Goldsborough confessed he passed that night sleepless in his anxiety at the prospect of a fight at dawn against the dreaded Rebel ironclad. Tattnall could not bring himself to finish the lightening and then force the frightened pilots, at gunpoint if need be, to guide him upriver toward Richmond, challenging hell and high tide to save his ship. That would risk his crew as well as his ship, and he found the risk too great. He ran the Merrimack aground near the mouth of the Elizabeth River, took off the crew, and set her afire. Early Sunday morning, May 11, just before dawn, the flames reached the magazine and the Merrimack blew to pieces with a thunderclap.

Yankee ships were soon on the scene, confirming the death of the ironclad and collecting trophies for the president and others from the huge circle of floating debris. At last the James was open to the Federal navy, perhaps as far as Richmond itself. “The hasty evacuation of the defences below and the destruction of the Virginia hastens the coming of the enemy’s gun-boats,” Jefferson Davis wrote his wife on May 13. “I know not what to expect when so many failures are to be remembered, yet will try to make a successful resistance. . . .” Diarist Judith White McGuire called the news “a dreadful shock to the community. We can only hope it was wisely done.” Weeks later, as the Peninsula campaign ran its course, Richmonders would speculate on the direction events might have taken had the Merrimack been posted during these weeks as a mighty floating battery in the James at Harrison’s Landing.

On May 14 the Virginia General Assembly, meeting in Richmond, called for the capital to be defended “to the last extremity,” and assured President Davis that any destruction or loss of property this might entail “will be cheerfully submitted to.” In a Cabinet discussion that day General Lee announced, with a vehemence that startled his colleagues, “Richmond must not be given up; it shall not be given up!” The Dispatch echoed his thought: “To lose Richmond is to lose Virginia, and to lose Virginia is to lose the key to the Southern Confederacy.” The next day the governor, John Letcher, led a mass meeting in front of City Hall to enroll citizens’ committees for defense. Richmond’s mayor, Joseph Mayo, told the crowd that if he was ever asked to surrender his city to the Yankees, as the mayor of Norfolk had done, they would have to get another mayor. “So help me God, I’ll never do it,” he cried. In spite of his three score and ten years, he would take up a musket and man the barricades. His audience responded with three rousing cheers. In counterpoint to the day’s excitement, the dull booming of cannon could be heard off to the south, coming from somewhere down the James. The enemy was nearing the gates.

This particular enemy was a squadron of Union warships—ironclads Monitor, Galena, and Naugatuck, and wooden gunboats Aroostook and Port Royal—under Commander John Rodgers. “Let loose from all fear & constraint by the destruction of the Virginia,” the diarist Edmund Ruffin wrote bitterly, the squadron had been steaming slowly up the James, methodically pounding Confederate shore batteries, clearing the way for a naval coup de main—bombarding Richmond into surrender. Now just one obstacle remained, but it promised to be the greatest challenge to the navy since the Merrimack. At 6:30 A.M. on May 15 Rodgers’s squadron came in sight of the battery on Drewry’s Bluff.

The bluff, on the south or right bank, overlooks a sharp bend in the river seven miles downstream from Richmond. The spot, on property owned by Augustus H. Drewry, had always been considered both the city’s last line of defense on the James and its strongest one. A redoubt built atop the bluff that winter and mounting three heavy cannon had recently been reinforced by five naval guns removed from the Rebels’ James River gunboat squadron. From their position 110 feet above the water these guns—four rifles and four smoothbores—commanded a straight, mile-long stretch of the river below the bend. As important defensively as the battery was the obstruction of the river below the bluff by pilings and sunken cribs of stone and other debris, supplemented by the hulks of several vessels scuttled in the channel. The James here was too narrow for the Union warships to maneuver, and the obstructions prevented them from forcing their way past the battery. Commander Rodgers would have to challenge Drewry’s Bluff head-on and overwhelm it by gunfire. It would be the first real test for his flagship Galena, he said, “and I resolved to give the matter a fair trial.”

Leading the army cannoneers on the bluff was Augustus Drewry himself, defending his own property as captain of the Southside Heavy Artillery. Equally appropriate, the gunners manning the navy pieces included crewmen from the Merrimack, preparing to duel once more with the Monitor. Sharpshooters were posted along the riverbanks, and the gunboat Patrick Henry took position behind the river obstructions to add her 8-inch smoothbore to the defenses. The majority of the defenders being navy men, Commander Ebenezer Ferrand, a veteran of service in the old navy, held the command at Drewry’s Bluff. At 7:45 A.M. Rodgers boldly steered the Galena to within 600 yards of the bluff and anchored broadside to the channel to bring his guns to bear. Before he could even complete the maneuver, Ferrand sent his first two shots straight into the ironclad’s port bow.

The Galena was something of a makeshift, a conventional wooden gunboat with layered armor made of iron bars and plates bolted to the sides. She looked to a Union nurse “like a great fish with iron scales.” Flag Officer Goldsborough was appalled when he first saw the Galena, calling her “a most miserable contrivance” and refusing to send her into action until shields of boilerplate were installed inside the bulwarks to prevent the armor-securing nuts from flying off from the concussion of a hit and decimating the gun crews. Even with that improvement, Goldsborough said, “She is a sad affair.”

In three and a half hours of battle that day the Galena was hit forty-four times and damaged severely. Her armor was repeatedly penetrated or knocked loose; her timbers and frames were splintered and broken. Shells exploded in the below-decks spaces and a solid shot went completely through one bulwark and embedded itself in the other. She began to take on water and was briefly set afire. Rodgers finally had to slip his cables and fall back out of range. He counted fourteen dead or mortally wounded and ten injured.

While the Monitor suffered no damage and the Confederate gunners soon stopped wasting shot and shell on her, she proved wholly ineffective when it was found that her guns would not elevate sufficiently to reach the battery on the bluff. The Naugatuck went out of action midway in the fight when her 100-pounder Parrott rifle burst. The two unarmored gunboats had to remain at extreme range and contributed little to the attack; to add injury to insult, the Port Royal’s captain was wounded by a sharpshooter. When Rodgers turned his squadron back downriver, the Drewry’s Bluff gunners saw them off with three cheers. The losses on the bluff were seven killed and eight wounded. As the Monitor steamed away, a Rebel sharpshooter on the bank called out to her pilot, “Tell the captain that is not the way to Richmond!”

 

“THE FOLLY of sending this army down the Peninsula,” Joe Johnston told one of his staff, “is only equalled by our good fortune in getting away from there.” His new position between Long Bridge and Baltimore Cross Roads, facing east, seemed proof against his left flank being turned by the enemy advancing up the York. He had hardly settled into this new line when he learned of the Merrimack’s destruction and of the Yankee warships on the James, and he took alarm for his other flank. With both rivers under Union control, General McClellan might now advance along either one or along both.

It was Johnston’s best guess that his opponent would shift his line of advance over to the James, simply because the James led straight into Richmond, and he acted quickly. On May 15 the order went out to fall back across the Chickahominy River so as to bring the army’s right closer to the James. Wearily his men took up the march once more. “Out of provisions & make a draw of rations—1 cracker & a slice of meat to each man, to march 11 miles,” Henry C. Wall of the 23rd North Carolina wrote in his diary. “Take up march in the evening in a slight shower of rain, march back a mile or so to the main Richmond road, have a laborious march of 11 miles thro’ mud, swamp, & water. . . .” It was two o’clock in the morning when they finally bivouacked in a pine thicket. Two more marches brought them nearly to the outskirts of Richmond. Sergeant Wall confessed that in the two weeks since he left Yorktown “I have gone thro’ an extent of suffering as regards hunger, hardship & exhaustion, that I might once have considered surpassing my powers of endurance. . . .”

When word came of the repulse of the Federal squadron at Drewry’s Bluff, Johnston took that spot as his right-flank outpost. The Army of Northern Virginia still faced eastward, but now it was behind the Chickahominy and directly in front of Richmond; at their closest the lines were just three miles from the city. This was where Joe Johnston had always wanted to take his stand, to be sure, but in taking it he drastically reduced his military options. He could retreat no farther without giving up Richmond.

His second reason for the hurried withdrawal was to put the Chickahominy in front of him rather than behind him. It was not considered good military form for a general to give battle with a river at his back, where it might impede his retreat if beaten, and in any event Johnston much preferred seeing the Chickahominy a barrier to his opponent rather than a potential problem to himself. Indeed, the Chickahominy was not the sort of river that any general would relish having anywhere near him.

Taking its rise some ten miles northwest of Richmond, the Chickahominy makes its way in a generally east-by-southeast direction around and in front of the city—coming as close as three and a half miles at one point—before stretching away down the center of the Peninsula to empty into the James thirty-six straight-line miles away. One of McClellan’s men described it feelingly as “a narrow, sluggish stream flowing through swamp land . . . covered with a rank, dense, tangled growth of trees, reeds, grasses and water plants. Vines climb and mosses festoon the trees;. . . its stagnant water is poisonous; moccasins and malaria abound; flies and mosquitoes swarm. . . .” In dry weather the Chickahominy did not seem unduly imposing to the military eye, but in the rainy season its bottomlands quickly flooded and what had been a river became a broad lake as much as a mile across. “It was hard to say at the best of times where its banks were,” wrote Francis Palfrey of the 20th Massachusetts, “and . . . no man could say to-day where its banks would be tomorrow.” The Federals would soon enough come to call it the cursed Chickahominy, and worse.

General Johnston had always coupled his argument for making the fight for Richmond right at Richmond itself with a demand for substantial reinforcements. Concentration of force was his invariable strategic design. “My general idea,” he explained, “is to gather here all the troops who do not keep away from McClellan greatly superior forces.” He was certain his army would be the underdog in any battle for the capital; the only question was how much of an underdog.

Johnston’s view of the army opposed to his was a great deal more clear-headed than General McClellan’s. He had originally calculated McClellan’s numbers by the simple expedient of having scouts along the Virginia shore of the Potomac count the Federal transports passing on their way to Fort Monroe and estimate the troop-carrying capacity of each. By late April, when he decided he must evacuate Yorktown, he believed he was outnumbered five to two. (This overstated the Federals’ manpower advantage by 20 percent; at the same time, McClellan was overstating the Confederate numbers by 112 percent.) President Davis and General Lee promised him a sizable increase in numbers: Huger’s force from Norfolk and three brigades from the Carolinas, plus two contingents then posted to the north to watch the Yankees on the Rappahannock and guard important railroads. When they all finally reached him, Johnston would have better than 75,000 men at his command. With the exception of Stonewall Jackson’s forces in the Shenandoah Valley, this would represent virtually every armed Confederate soldier in northern and eastern Virginia.

So far as Robert E. Lee was concerned, one of the major dividends earned by holding the Yankees at Yorktown through the month of April was the time it gave him to assemble further combinations to confound the enemy. During the siege Confederate intelligence reported that the Federal army corps under General McDowell was not with McClellan on the Peninsula but was instead some fifty miles due north of Richmond, on the Rappahannock opposite Fredericksburg. Other Federal forces, in addition to the Washington garrison, were identified as two divisions with General Banks in the Shenandoah Valley, and the troops of General Fremont’s Mountain Department in the Allegheny range west of the Valley.

As Lee viewed the strategic situation, the most immediate and most dangerous threat posed by this combination of enemy forces was an advance southward from Fredericksburg by McDowell’s corps to join McClellan before Richmond. Possibly Banks might join this advance, or at least reinforce it. Should this happen, the odds against Joe Johnston would lengthen alarmingly and the chances of holding Richmond would diminish accordingly. Lee’s sole weapon to prevent this from happening was Stonewall Jackson’s little Army of the Valley.

Since his repulse at Kemstown on March 23, Jackson had been withdrawing slowly up the Valley so as to keep good position against the advancing Banks while at the same time staying out of harm’s way. Under his command and within his reach were three separate columns: his own, composed of 8,000 infantry, another 8,000 men under Richard S. Ewell, and 3,000 under Edward Johnson. It now became General Lee’s thought to turn Jackson back to the offense. If he could seize the initiative in the Shenandoah, Lee wrote him on April 21, “it will prove a great relief to the pressure on Fredericksburg.” On April 25 Lee made note of the wide dispersal of the enemy forces and suggested that by “a rapid combination of our troops” Jackson might deal a blow to the Yankees’ strategic plans. He granted him wide latitude as to target, and added a significant proviso: “The blow wherever struck, must, to be successful, be sudden and heavy.”

Jackson welcomed the change. “Now, it appears to me, is the golden opportunity,” he said, and proposed to strike first at Fremont’s advance guard under Robert Milroy posted on the western edge of the upper Valley. Lee’s endorsement was prompt. It appeared to him, he telegraphed, that the Federals were preparing to reinforce McDowell for a push southward from Fredericksburg. “If you can strike at Milroy do it quickly. . . .”

 

LARGE QUESTIONS of strategy were crowding in on General McClellan as well. His high hopes for Franklin’s flanking movement by way of the York had turned to ashes when Franklin was rudely pushed back into the landing ground at Eltham’s. Only on May 10, when the vanguard of the main army advanced beyond Williamsburg and linked up with Franklin, did McClellan breathe easy once more. “The dangerous moment has passed,” he telegraphed Secretary Stanton. He told his wife, “We are now again united and Joe has lost his best chance of catching us in detail.” His own best chance of catching his old friend in detail was gone as well, although he was silent on that point.

McClellan had gained West Point and the terminus of the Richmond and York River Railroad, the first objective of his original plan back in March for basing his campaign at Urbanna, but gaining it had required a long and costly detour by way of Fort Monroe, Yorktown, and Williamsburg. The climax of his grand campaign also seemed bound to proceed differently from the way he had planned it. Joe Johnston’s army was squarely blocking his path to Richmond, and his dream of fighting an American Waterloo on his own terms and on ground of his own choosing now seemed unlikely to occur in just that way.

By every indication, from every source, he announced to President Lincoln on May 14, it would be “the fixed purpose” of the Rebels to defend their capital to the last ditch, “offering us battle with all the troops they can collect from East, West, and South. . . .” In numbers this was certain to be a host: “I must attack in position, probably entrenched, a much larger force, perhaps double my numbers.” He said it would be insane to count on anything less than a desperate resistance by the enemy before Richmond, and he begged to be reinforced “without delay by all the disposable troops of the Government. I ask for every man the War Department can send me.” While the general was entirely earnest in his plea, his measurement of the task he faced was entirely illusionary.

To be sure, this was hardly a new state of affairs. George McClellan’s conviction that he was forever outnumbered was the one constant of his military character. Ten months earlier, soon after taking command of the Army of the Potomac, he began issuing estimates of the Confederate army confronting him that showed him capable (as one disbelieving observer put it) of “realizing hallucinations.” Having started off the Rebel army at 100,000 men—almost three times its actual strength at the time—he could never retreat from that figure; by logical progression it would only increase in size. Detective Pinkerton subsequently attempted to document the great Rebel army his chief had invented, but poor Pinkerton was unable to match the general’s imaginings and grew less and less scientific and more and more desperate in his estimating methods. By the time he reached the Peninsula, Pinkerton was reduced simply to guessing, giving headquarters “medium estimates” and “general estimates,” sometimes without any supporting evidence at all. Like his chief, he too was realizing hallucinations.

The estimates of Johnston’s strength that McClellan endorsed and passed on to Washington during May came from Pinkerton’s interrogation of Virginia civilians at Yorktown and Williamsburg who had served in the state militia and who seemed perfectly happy to tell the Yankees all they knew, or said they knew. None of these Sunday soldiers had the slightest claim to being authoritative. Their estimates for the Army of Northern Virginia ranged up to 150,000 men, and all agreed that the Rebels had 400 to 500 pieces of artillery. In this fashion General McClellan reached the conclusion that he was facing “perhaps double my numbers.”

Against these daunting odds, he told the president, “I cannot bring into actual battle against the enemy more than eighty thousand men at the utmost. . . .” McClellan’s recital of the weakness of his own army was nothing new either, and it left Mr. Lincoln bemused. It struck him as a “curious mystery,” he said, that so many of the troops sent to the Peninsula by the War Department were taking no part in the fighting. It indeed seemed a mystery. According to the latest return, there should have been 102,236 fighting men armed and present for duty with the Army of the Potomac on the Peninsula, yet here was the general saying that one out of five of those men would not fire a shot in the next battle.

One explanation for the mystery was slack organization. There were any number of able-bodied soldiers in this army who were customarily detailed to duty as orderlies and servants and guards and a score of other noncombatant jobs; the equivalent of two regiments did nothing more than serve as escort for the general commanding. Another explanation lay in General McClellan’s exceedingly conservative method of troop-counting. His 80,000 figure referred only to enlisted men, and only to those with rifles in their hands assigned to the firing line on the day of battle. He never troubled to explain to his superiors how this differed from “present for duty” on the returns; more important, he never applied the same strict accounting to his opponent’s army. By this manipulation of the numbers he made the odds against him—which were entirely imaginary to begin with—seem even longer.

While the president did not directly challenge McClellan on these odds, there can be little doubt that he viewed them with skepticism; certainly they were a topic discussed with a skeptical Cabinet. After Secretary of the Treasury Chase returned from his expedition to the Peninsula -with the president, he wrote to a friend that he was convinced “McClellan has a force which, properly handled, is vastly superior to any that can be brought against him.” In his diary Secretary of the Navy Welles would remark, on the subject of numbers, “the talk of McClellan, which none of us have believed.” (McClellan’s generals were similarly skeptical. Corps commander Heintzelman, told the enemy had 130,000 men, believed the figure inflated and much swollen by conscripts likely to be unreliable in battle. Many of his fellow generals agreed, Heintzelman said, that the general commanding “was in the habit of overestimating the Rebel forces.”) Yet despite whatever he may have thought of his general’s view of the enemy, Lincoln did not waver in his support for the campaign. Indeed, he decided to furnish General McClellan with even more reinforcements then he had called for.

Late in April, as Stonewall Jackson withdrew up the Shenandoah ahead of him, General Banks announced to Washington that his task was done. Jackson would surely be called in momentarily by the Confederate authorities to help defend Richmond, he said. “There is nothing more to be done by us in the valley.” This news was exceedingly welcome to the president, who with the aid of Secretary Stanton had been acting as his own general-in-chief since he removed McClellan from the post in March. It appeared that the capital was safe from an attack or a raid, and General McDowell’s First Corps might now be released to join McClellan as originally intended.

Following the dispatch of Franklin’s division to the Peninsula in mid-April, McDowell’s corps was brought back up to strength by the addition of a newly organized division. Had the First Corps thus reconstituted and 30,000 strong been promptly marched south from Fredericksburg, it might have joined hands with McClellan’s army on the Pamunkey as early as mid-May. McDowell anticipated its taking him no more than four days of easy marching. The greatly outnumbered Confederate force keeping watch on Fredericksburg would have been helpless even to delay the link-up. In such an event, armed with thirteen divisions and more than 130,000 men—just as he had planned it all back in March—General McClellan might have continued his grand campaign with confidence restored.

 

 

Mr. Lincoln, however, was determined to go a large step further for his general. He would make McDowell’s corps a full-fledged army for the march to the Peninsula. On May 1 James Shields’s division was detached from Banks’s corps in the Valley and ordered to join McDowell at Fredericksburg. This would raise the count of the First Corps to 41,000. The president’s one stipulation was that McDowell advance overland so as not to leave Washington uncovered and to enable him to return quickly should the capital be threatened. (Lincoln pointed out that it had recently taken two weeks to carry Franklin’s single division to the Peninsula by water; McDowell could march his entire army corps overland in considerably less than half that time.) On the face of it, it seemed a plan of considerable foresight. Jackson was credited with 20,000 men; thus when Jackson joined the Army of Northern Virginia at Richmond, McDowell’s countermove would bring twice that number to the Army of the Potomac in front of Richmond. All that was required now was for Stonewall Jackson to follow the script the Federals had drawn up for him.

Once assured that matters were nicely under control in the Shenandoah, Washington ordered General Banks to fall back from his advanced position there and take a posting at the town of Strasburg, where he might simply act as a guard for the lower end of the Valley. At the same time he made this withdrawal, Banks was to release Shields’s division to begin its march to join McDowell’s First Corps. From one cause or another, however, neither Banks nor Shields seemed able to get himself or his men properly organized for these movements. Twelve days would pass before Shields even started his march, and then it would take him eleven more days to reach Fredericksburg. No sense of urgency marked the operation. In the meantime, it developed that General Banks had been somewhat hasty to assume that there was nothing more to be done in the Valley.

On May 8 came word of a sudden stir in John Charles Fremont’s Mountain Department. A few days earlier Stonewall Jackson had abruptly disappeared from the Federals’ sight; now he just as abruptly reappeared, in front of General Milroy at the town of McDowell in the far reaches of the upper Valley. (First reports of the encounter were garbled, and for a time Washington believed Confederate Joe Johnston and Federal Irvin McDowell were involved. Finally it was straightened out: the Confederate officer in question was Edward Johnson, Jackson’s lieutenant, and McDowell was a place rather than a general.) Sharp fighting was reported at McDowell, and General Fremont tele- graphed that Milroy and the advance guard were rapidly falling back into the mountains to evade the enemy’s pursuit. Finally, with an almost audible sigh of relief, Fremont reported Jackson “now in full retreat” from his front.

Just what this might portend was not yet clear, but after Shields and his men took their leave on May 12, General Banks began to cast nervous glances over his shoulder as he fell back down the Valley. He now had only a single division with him, and his closest support, Fremont’s command, was not actually anywhere nearby, and somewhere in that silent Valley to the south might well be Stonewall Jackson and 20,000 soldiers.

The Federal high command in Washington did not blink and went ahead with its plans for McDowell’s movement to the Peninsula. On May 17 McDowell received his instructions to march for the Pamunkey as soon as Shields’s division reached him. General McClellan was notified to expect the First Corps to appear on his right flank in due course.

 

IN COMMON with just about everyone else in the Army of Northern Virginia, General D. H. Hill anticipated a battle for Richmond “on the grandest scale and of the most desperate character in the war.” He told his wife that the Confederacy’s best defense might turn out to be the offense. “I do not feel sure that McClellan will venture to attack at all. His movements have been characterized by great prudence, not to say great timidity.”

In the three weeks following Williamsburg and Eltham’s Landing General McClellan did indeed move with glacial deliberation. He spent the time organizing his supply line, reorganizing his army, and trying to refine his strategy. “Tomorrow I will get up supplies—reorganize—arrange details & get ready for the great fight . . .,” he explained to his wife at one point. “Secesh is gathering all he can in front of me—so much the better—I will finish the matter by one desperate blow. I have implicit confidence in my men & they in me! What more can I ask. . . .”

After its link-up with Franklin at West Point, the Army of the Potomac pushed slowly up the winding Pamunkey, taking successive supply bases at Eltham’s Landing, Cumberland Landing, and finally at White House Landing, the point at which the York River Railroad from West Point crossed the Pamunkey to run eastward twenty-three miles straight into Richmond. McClellan designated White House as his base of operations for the final advance on the Confederate capital.

White House was the plantation of William H. F. “Rooney” Lee, General Lee’s son, and a hundred years or so earlier it had been the site of George Washington’s courtship of the widow Martha Custis. General Lee’s wife was a Custis and had been staying at White House until just a few days before the Yankees came. Their advance guard found a note from her pinned to the front door: “Northern soldiers who profess to reverence Washington, forbear to desecrate the home of his first married life,—the property of his wife, now owned by her descendants.—A Grand-daughter of Mrs. Washington.” General McClellan obligingly posted a guard on the house and prohibited its use by the army.

Before the army came, a nurse with the U.S. Sanitary Commission wrote, White House “must have been a very pretty place—a green lawn sloping to the river with trees, locusts, I think, and on the north of the house along the shore a line of tall cedars, under which are the tents of our soldiers. Forward from this fringe of trees is an immense plain trampled dead by the feet of McClellan’s army.”

Overnight the landing became an enormous depot. A newspaper correspondent found the Pamunkey “marked for leagues by sails, smoke-stacks, and masts. The landings and wharves were besieged by flat-boats and sloops. . . .” The shallows between riverbank and deep water were bridged by floating docks constructed of planked-over barges and canal boats. Acres of boxes and barrels and crates holding rations and ammunition and supplies and equipment of every sort covered the landing. There were wagon parks and artillery parks and great piles of baled forage. Vessels freighted with locomotives, boxcars, and flatcars soon arrived from Baltimore, and in a matter of days as much of the railroad as the Yankees controlled was in operation. Except for burning a few bridges, the retreating Confederates had left the line intact, much to the disgust of Jefferson Davis. “The York River Railroad which not being useful to our Army nor paid for by our treasury was of course not destroyed,” he observed bitterly. This failure went into Mr. Davis’s book as one more black mark against Joe Johnston.

In the months and years ahead, General McClellan would roundly condemn President Lincoln’s insistence on dispatching McDowell’s First Corps to the Peninsula by the overland route. Just as the president’s decision in April to hold back McDowell was “a fatal error,” this decision in May “incurred great risk . . . and frustrated the plan of campaign.” It tied his hands, he said; he was forced to base his campaign on the York and Pamunkey and approach Richmond from the north and east across the Chickahominy because of the need to position his army to extend a welcoming hand to McDowell marching south from Fredericksburg. Had the First Corps instead been ordered to him by water, as he wanted, he would have been free to approach Richmond by way of the James River and so avoid all the problems that in time would plague his operations. He might even have crossed the James and made his approach to Richmond from the south, by way of Petersburg—as General Grant did successfully in 1864–65—and thereby shortened the war by two years.

This construction of unerring logic was entirely an afterthought, however. General McClellan’s decision in May 1862 to base his campaign at White House Landing and to march on Richmond by way of the York River Railroad was entirely his own doing, made without compulsion from Washington and without reference to the First Corps and how it might reach him. It was only hindsight that furnished him with second thoughts and a scapegoat on which to lay the blame.

The James River route, to be sure, had always been one of the options in McClellan’s planning. In his February 3 paper for the forthcoming campaign he had listed as one possibility to “cross the James & throw ourselves in rear of Richmond, thus forcing the enemy to come out & attack us. . . .” On May 10, when it appeared that Norfolk would be taken and with it the Merrimack, he told Secretary Stanton that in that event “I can change my line to the James River & dispense with the Railroad.” This assumed, however, that the Federals would gain control of the entire James, right to Richmond, a presumption quickly put to rest by the navy’s repulse at Drewry’s Bluff.

“Without the Army the Navy can make no real headway towards Richmond,” Flag Officer Goldsborough explained. “This is as clear as the sun at noonday to my mind.” The flag officer went to White House on May 19 to consult with the general on what might be done about Drewry’s Bluff. McClellan could not promise any troops for an attack on the fort there for some time to come. Goldsborough said that even after the fort was taken it would require considerable time to clear all the obstructions from the river to allow passage. There seemed no chance any time soon of coming closer to Richmond than seven miles by way of the James.

So far as General McClellan was concerned, that stark fact made the James useless to him as an avenue of advance. To win the battle for Richmond he must have his siege train right at the front with him. It was the equalizer, the one way to counter his great disadvantage in numbers. His strategy was now to lay siege to Richmond, just as he had laid siege to Yorktown. With sufficient labor the smaller pieces in the siege train could be moved to the front by road, but not so the larger pieces, the huge 10-inch and 13-inch mortars and the 100-pounder and 200-pounder Parrott rifles. At Yorktown he had been able to float these great guns to their battery sites by way of Wormley’s Creek. In operating below Drewry’s Bluff on the James, however, there was no corresponding waterway to bring them within besieging range of the enemy lines.

Possession of the York River Railroad, on the other hand, enabled McClellan to carry his heavy ordnance right to the gates of Richmond. The order went out to have the big guns at Yorktown placed aboard barges and canal boats for passage up the York and Pamunkey to the railroad. Not once in these weeks—neither before he knew the First Corps was to come overland, nor after its subsequent recall—did he propose to change his base to the James. The possibility was not even seriously discussed. As for crossing the James and moving on Petersburg, through which passed all but one of the rail lines serving Richmond, he was silent on that possibility as well. This would have required of General McClellan a stroke so bold, with an army so outnumbered, that the idea of it simply did not then cross his mind. His thoughts were focused instead on a siege. If the enemy stood and fought, he wrote his wife on May 22, “he must do so in the very outskirts of Richmond, which must in that event suffer terribly, & perhaps be destroyed.” He prayed that in the aftermath of a victorious siege he would not have to witness outrage and pillage in the Rebel capital.

However that might be, General McClellan did not doubt that what lay ahead would rank as “one of the great historic battles of the world.” God had called him to lead in this battle to save the Union, and “I pray for God’s blessing on our arms. . . . I can almost think myself a chosen instrument to carry out his schemes.” He would strive to do his best, but with the awareness of “the uncertainty of all human events—I know that God may even now deem best to crush all the high hopes of the nation & this army. . . .” With all human events thus ordered by the Creator, he could hardly be blamed for their outcome.

As if to demonstrate his commitment, McClellan substantially reorganized his army for the final struggle. In his anger at the conduct of affairs at Williamsburg, he demanded of Washington “full & complete authority” to alter the corps organization and to relieve incompetent corps commanders. From the moment the corps system was forced on him back in March, he later wrote, “many of my difficulties & delays grew out of the fact that I could not trust any of the Corps Corndrs.” His solution to this problem did not include any dramatic dismissals from high command, however. Instead, he diluted the authority of the present corps commanders—Sumner, Heintzelman, and Keyes—by restricting them to the control of only two divisions each. He then organized new two-division corps for his two favorite generals: the Fifth Corps, under Fitz John Porter, and the Sixth, under William B. Franklin. The reorganization went into effect on May 18, just as the army began to close in on the line of the Chickahominy.

 

THE MEN OF these two armies were now in their second month of campaigning, and in that time many of them had experienced their first taste of combat, and collectively they were developing a rough code of soldiering. It dealt with what they believed was fair (and not fair) in making war. The unofficial truces during the Yorktown siege were carefully honored by both sides, for example, but great indignation was expressed at the Rebels’ “inhuman” use of torpedoes there. At Williamsburg men in both armies complained of being cruelly ambushed after opponents signaled surrender, and both sides condemned the practice. After the fight at Eltham’s Landing a Federal soldier was found on the field with his throat cut, which was widely reported as an atrocity. Hood’s Texans had a different view of the matter. As they told it, the Yankee had been wounded and his position overrun, and therefore they considered him out of the action. But he had pulled out a pistol and opened fire at the Texans who had advanced past him, hitting several, and for that unsoldierly act he was dispatched with a bowie knife. In a later skirmish the same sort of harsh justice was meted out to a Confederate picket who surrendered to the Irish Brigade and then opened fire on his captors. The man was summarily hanged from the nearest tree. The general rule in such cases, one man said, was quite simple: “No quarter will be given.”

The Federals, being deep in enemy territory, faced the additional problem of dealing with enemy civilians. General McClellan issued strict orders regarding the respect due Southern civilians and their property. As Fitz John Porter explained it to a Northern newspaper editor, “This army moves as a disciplined body—not an armed mob—compelled to respect private rights and to win the respect of the people we will mingle with. . . .” Yet the men in the ranks were not sure it was quite as simple as General Porter would have it. A New York cavalryman, for example, fairly bristled at being ordered “to guard the property, women, and children of the rebels, because their husbands and fathers have left to fight against us. . . . Oh Lord, how long. How long shall we sacrifice our lives to save those of our enemies?”

Here again a rough code of conduct began to emerge. Those civilians who stayed on their property and in their homes when the Yankee army came were generally not molested much beyond the loss of a stray chicken or two or perhaps a raid on their kitchen garden when army rations were late. If owners abandoned their property and fled to the Confederate lines, however, the men took it as a sign of their hopelessly secessionist spirit, in which case their property did not deserve respect. It was under such an unofficial edict that the Governor John Page mansion in Williamsburg was wantonly vandalized of its many colonial-era treasures and manuscripts for no better reason than the presumed disloyalty of its absentee owner.

Pennsylvanian Luther C. Furst remarked in his diary on how few civilians were to be seen as they advanced. “Nearly everybody has left, leaving house & home with niggers, horses & furniture. . . . The cattle, hogs & colts are running at large & our men confiscate all they want. . . .” Slaves not carried off by their masters flocked to the Union lines. “The niggers all want to be free,” Furst reported, “& ask me if they had to go to work or not.” With those civilians who remained informal truces became common. Lieutenant Haydon of the 2nd Michigan found a “very amiable Secession lady” who sold him a rooster for a dollar and for a quarter more consented to cook it for him. She admitted, Hayden wrote, that “Lincolnite Yankees” were not as bad as she had first supposed.

The topic of most consuming interest to these Yankee soldiers, however, was how incredibly difficult it was to get from one place to another on this Virginia Peninsula. “Our marches since the battle have been very monotonous,” one of Phil Kearny’s men wrote on May 17, “only varied by changes from heat and dust to rain and mud, and viceversa.” After two or three days of hot sun the roads would dry and turn to thick powdery dust; after an hour’s rain they turned back to bottomless mud. A Massachusetts man explained to his family that the mud here was nothing at all like the mud back home. “It is a light yellow and as sticky as wax,” he wrote, and it was deep beyond all belief. General McClellan reported on May 16 that one division’s supply train had required thirty-six hours to move exactly five miles.

Tales were told of Peninsula mud which lost nothing in the telling and retelling—the time, for example, that an army mule (not, admittedly, a very large army mule) sank so far into a mudhole that finally only its ears were visible—but often enough truth matched exaggeration. The day following Williamsburg Major Wainwright returned to his batteries that had been overrun during the fighting and found a pair of wheel horses still harnessed to the traces of a limber. Both were dead. One had been killed in the battle and it sank down into the mud, dragging its mate down with it to suffocation. Men groped for words to describe these conditions. One old regular who thought he had seen it all in his travels was reduced to a simple admission in a letter to his wife. The roads of the Virginia Peninsula, he wrote, “have been very bad in fact I never saw a ‘bad road’ until I came here. . . .”

Major Thomas Hyde of the 7th Maine took note one day of a weathered signpost at a crossroads pointing west and reading RICHMOND 21 MILES. Beneath it, pointing north, was a brand-new sign, put up by a homesick Yankee, reading GORHAM, MAINE 647 MILES. In the two weeks after Williamsburg, the Yankee soldiers marched on average a total of only forty to fifty miles, but all too often they were wearying, exasperating miles.

Lieutenant Haydon described the routine in his diary for May 19: “It seems some times of late as if the whole object was to see how much trouble and vexation can be given us. We usually pull up at daylight, march a mile, lie on our arms in rain or hot sun till dark, then go 4 or 5 miles at double quick & halt for supper when it is too late to find either wood or water.” Was the illogic of this General McClellan’s fault, he wondered, “or that of some one under him or is it really unavoidable?” To ward off the effects of exposure the men were given a quarter-pint of whiskey a day. The whiskey ration was issued at the end of the day’s march, and was found to be the most effective deterrent to straggling yet found.

On May 20 Silas Casey’s division of Keyes’s Fourth Corps, advancing along the Williamsburg Stage Road, reached the Chickahominy at Bottom’s Bridge, a dozen miles due east of Richmond. The retreating Confederates had burned the bridge, and also the railroad bridge three-quarters of a mile upstream, but they made no attempt to contest the crossing, and Casey’s men easily forded the stream. The next day General McClellan crossed at Bottom’s Bridge and made a personal reconnaissance. He expressed himself puzzled. Unless the enemy “has some deep laid scheme that I do not fathom,” he told Ellen, “he is giving up a great advantage in not opposing me on the line of the Chickahominy. . . .”

Accepting what he was given, he pushed additional troops from Keyes’s corps across the river and ahead six miles to the crossroads of Seven Pines, where he anchored his left flank. On May 24 the lead elements of Baldy Smith’s division chased the Rebels out of Mechanicsville, on the Chickahominy five miles north-northeast of Richmond, and established the army’s right flank at that point. From these advanced positions the spires of Richmond were clearly visible and church bells and clock bells clearly heard.

May 24 was also the day that disturbing news reached General McClellan from Washington. It had been arranged that McDowell’s First Corps, reinforced at last by James Shields’s division, would set out for the Peninsula on the twenty-sixth; by the end of the month McDowell was expected to be united with the Army of the Potomac. Now, however, the president telegraphed, “In consequence of Gen. Banks’ critical position I have been compelled to suspend Gen. McDowell’s movement to join you.” Although it was not clear just where he had come from, it seemed that Stonewall Jackson had surprised and routed a part of Banks’s force at a place called Front Royal and was now hot on the trail of Banks’s main body in the lower Valley. The president said that he was attempting to bring Fremont’s troops and at least a part of McDowell’s to the rescue.

During the next twenty-four hours the situation in the Valley worsened rapidly. Word came that General Banks had attempted a stand at Winchester but was beaten badly and was now in flight down the Valley toward the Potomac, with Jackson close on his heels. “The enemy is moving North in sufficient force to drive Banks before him . . .,” Lincoln told McClellan. “I think the movement is a general and concerted one. . . . I think the time is near when you must either attack Richmond or give up the job and come to the defence of Washington. Let me hear from you instantly.”