8

“Stonewall Is Behind Them!”

AT DAYBREAK the next morning, June 24, along the Virginia Central tracks half a dozen miles north of the Fifth Corps lines, a young man stepped out of the woods in front of a troop of Federal cavalrymen on outpost duty and asked to be taken to their headquarters. There he eagerly told his story to Colonel John F. Farnsworth of the 8th Illinois cavalry. He gave his name as Charles Rean and his age as seventeen, and explained that despite his civilian clothes he was a Union soldier. A month before, he and most of his Maryland regiment had been captured by Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley. Later he escaped and wandered all across northern Virginia, and now he wanted to see General McClellan to tell him all he knew, which he said was a great deal, about Jackson’s army and where it was at that moment.

Colonel Farnsworth was suspicious, and sent the young man under guard to Fifth Corps headquarters with the suggestion that General Porter question him personally. Any number of rumors were circulating about Jackson’s whereabouts and Fitz John Porter had heard them all, and he gave Rean’s story a careful hearing. “The boy was bright, quick, intelligent and evidently confident in his show of honesty,” Porter recalled, but he did not believe he was who he said he was, and he sent him on to army headquarters at the Trent house, “asking that he be forced to tell the truth.” There Allan Pinkerton took over the interrogation.

As Rean told it, Jackson’s Army of the Valley was not in the Valley at all but as of June 21 was only some fifty miles away, at Fredericks Hall on the Virginia Central. Rean claimed to have seen units making up Jackson’s division and Ewell’s division; he described both Whiting’s division and a Georgia brigade recently sent to Jackson as reinforcements. He gave Jackson’s strength as fifteen brigades. Nor was that all. He reported that he heard “officers and also privates say, ‘Wish to God it was the 28th,’” and at Fredericks Hall a lieutenant told him the plan was for the army from Richmond to “attack in front on that day and for Jackson to co-operate simultaneously in the rear.”

Pinkerton had him searched and found concealed in his drawers a scrap of paper bearing the name of a local man Pinkerton described as “an active rebel.” With that the pressure was stepped up—no doubt by the threat to hang him summarily as a spy—and finally young Rean broke down and confessed. He admitted he was actually a Texan who had deserted from Jackson’s army three days earlier. Pinkerton thought him a special kind of deserter, one who “has been sent within our lines for the purposes of conveying to us the precise information which he has thus conveyed.” The confession got Rean his audience with General McClellan.

Detective Pinkerton had more reason than he knew to suspect Charles Rean of deception. He was another of those Confederate deserters who knew too much. A Texan in the Texas brigade in Whiting’s command could have known details about the reinforcements sent from Richmond, but hardly as much as he claimed to know about Jackson’s Valley army. Certainly no “officers and also privates” under the secretive Jackson had any knowledge of a proposed attack on the Yankees’ right flank on June 28. To mislead the Yankees into thinking that, however, and to make them think Jackson had fifteen brigades instead of his actual nine, might be all to the good.

That night a worried McClellan telegraphed Secretary Stanton in Washington that according to a “very peculiar case of desertion,” Jackson, Whiting, and Ewell with fifteen brigades “were moving to Frederickshall & that it was intended to attack my rear on the 28th.” He asked for all the information then available “as to the position and movements of Jackson. . . .” Stanton replied that every report reaching Washington put Jackson in a different place. The warning by the deserter might well be a blind, he said, yet perhaps it should “not safely be disregarded.”

Charles Rean probably was a blind, one of several deceptions intended by Jackson to plant doubts about his movements, but if so the plot went awry. His story proved ill-timed and too convincing. Had Jackson actually struck the next day, the twenty-fifth, as he originally intended, the Yankees would have had time enough to worry but not to prepare. Rean’s “confession” seemed to erase any doubts McClellan had about the story and decided him to act on it. (Pinkerton was sufficiently convinced to want the young man “liberated and well paid” and turned into a double agent.) The next day parties were ordered out to the north to reconnoiter and to obstruct the roads Jackson would have to use to reach Porter’s flank and rear. Porter prepared his lines for attack. So it happened that the Federals were neither misled by the story nor surprised by Jackson’s arrival on the field.

In spite of his concern about Jackson, McClellan determined to go ahead with his own plan. He had finally completed his lengthy preparations to open the campaign—the final campaign—against Richmond. His first step would be short and decisive, he told his wife, “& if I succeed will gain a couple of miles towards Richmond.” He was no longer predicting a single, great, war-winning battle, an American Waterloo. “It now looks to me as if the operations would resolve themselves into a series of partial attacks, rather than a general battle.” He set June 25 as the date for the first of these partial attacks. Unknowingly, he was setting the date for the first of the Seven Days’ Battles.

McClellan’s larger goal remained the seizure of Old Tavern, the high ground on the Nine Mile Road a mile and a half in advance of the Federal lines and the same distance south of the Chickahominy. From there he would be able to breach the enemy’s main defenses with his siege guns. To properly mount the attack on Old Tavern he wanted to strike it from the flank as well as the front, and thus his initial step would be to seize the woodland to the south, in the area of the Williamsburg Stage Road and the York River Railroad. Known locally as Oak Grove, for a particular stand of tall oaks, this was the ground from which D. H. Hill had launched the Confederates’ attack on Seven Pines on May 31, and it had been hotly disputed by the opposing pickets ever since. An advance here by Heintzelman would put his Third Corps and Sumner’s Second in position to take Old Tavern in flank at the same time that Franklin’s Sixth Corps advanced from the front. As McClellan scheduled it, that event would take place in a day or two, on the twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh. “If we gain that,” he said of Old Tavern, “the game is up for Secesh. . . .”

 

THE JUMPING-OFF place for the Oak Grove operation was to be General Casey’s old redoubt a thousand yards west of Seven Pines, now enlarged and strengthened and numbered Redoubt No. 3 in the long line of Federal fortifications. The advance would be due west, straight toward Richmond, along the axis of the Williamsburg Road. At this point both the Federal and Confederate lines fronted on open ground, but midway between them was a thick strip of dense forest some 1,200 yards wide. Bisecting this woodland was a swampy little creek, the headwaters of White Oak Swamp, which by tacit agreement had become the dividing line between the opposing pickets. The Third Corps divisions of Joe Hooker and Phil Kearny were to carry the main weight of the assault, as they had at Williamsburg, with a brigade each from the Second and Fourth corps serving as a reserve in case of need.

The stretch of Confederate line facing them was held by the three brigades of Benjamin Huger, the Charlestonian pilloried for his alleged inactivity at Seven Pines. Huger’s men did not appreciate their notoriety and were in no mood to back down from any fight that might come their way. On the night before the battle Private Thomas B. Leaver of the 2nd New Hampshire, Hooker’s division, wrote home to Concord that his regiment was under marching orders. “I hope the day of decision will soon come. . . . I believe the Rebels will skedaddle as they did at Yorktown and Corinth. Keep up good courage, dear Mother, ‘the end is near at hand.’”

At 8:30 A.M. on Day One—Wednesday, June 25—Joe Hooker sent the brigades of Daniel Sickles and Cuvier Grover in line of battle through the woods toward Richmond. A Yankee soldier described the day as a “perfection of weather.” The New Yorkers of Sickles’s Excelsior Brigade made up the right wing, straddling the Williamsburg Road, while Grover’s Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island men were on the left. Extending the line farther to the left, or south, was a single brigade from Kearny’s division, under John C. Robinson.

Sickles advanced behind a conventionally light force of skirmishers, but Grover put out two full regiments, the 1st and 11th Massachusetts, as a skirmish line and had quick success pushing back the enemy pickets. Robinson’s brigade kept pace with him on the left. Sickles’s New Yorkers, however, were slowed getting through their own abatis of felled timber and the swampy streambed in the woods, and then they encountered a stubborn Rebel picket line, and gradually the entire right wing of the advance fell behind.

 

 

Grover’s brigade out ahead reached a considerable clearing in the woods where they found a little one-room schoolhouse and beyond that the fields and farmstead of a man named French. They also encountered a series of sudden, sharp counterattacks by Ambrose “Rans” Wright’s brigade of Huger’s division. One of these charges, by a Georgia regiment, momentarily confused the Yankees into thinking they were being attacked by their own men. The Georgians were wearing gaudy red Zouave uniforms, in imitation of the famous French colonial troops, and it was thought that only the Army of the Potomac had any Zouaves in its ranks. Then someone pointed out that only the enemy would be coming at them from the direction of Richmond, and the Federals quickly opened fire on the Zouaves.

More of Wright’s regiments joined the fight, and the battle lines swayed back and forth across the fields and into the woods, first one side and then the other gaining the advantage. It became hard to see targets in the spreading cloud of battle smoke. William Gay of the 4th Georgia picked up a Yankee rifle and turned it on the enemy. “We were very close to each other,” Gay wrote his parents, “and, when the balls would strike our men, I could hear them plain enough. And the next instant you would see him fall and hear him groan or holler, as the case may be.” The 1st Louisiana charged and charged again and took the highest number of casualties of any regiment on the field that day, losing 135 of the 355 men who began the fight.

Additional Federal regiments were drawn to the front as well, including the 2nd New Hampshire. Its Company B was sent out ahead of the first line to try to put down the fire of Rebel sharpshooters concealed in the French house and, as General Grover phrased it, “did signal service” in this dangerous posting. It was also costly service, and Company B lost a third of its men. One of those killed was Private Thomas B. Leaver of Concord, who in his last letter home had hoped the day of decision was at hand.

Providentially, Robert Ransom’s brigade of North Carolinians, newly arrived in Richmond, had been ordered out the Williamsburg Road early that morning for assignment to Huger’s division. The 25th North Carolina was marching toward the rising sound of gunfire when Rans Wright came riding back from the front at a gallop, his huge beard streaming back over his shoulders like the bow wave of a ship. “Move your men forward, colonel!” Wright shouted to the 25th’s commander. Unsheathing his sword, the colonel led his men forward at the run. When the Yankees came in sight he deployed in line of battle. “Steady!” came his command. “Front rank, kneel! Aim! Fire!” This was the North Carolinians’ first experience of battle, and they delivered a perfectly synchronized volley. One of the men remembered it as “the only fire our regiment ever made by command.”

The Yankees they faced were the New Yorkers of Sickles’s Excelsior Brigade, on the scene of action at last, and the North Carolina rookies had the good fortune to get their first fire in against another regiment of rookies, the 71st New York. The rest of the Excelsiors had experienced their baptism of fire at Williamsburg, but the 71st did not reach that field in time to go into action and then was only lightly engaged at Seven Pines, and now it had the misfortune to be surprised by this explosion of fire coming from an unexpected quarter. Someone in the regiment—Sickles never learned who—shouted out that they were flanked and must retreat, and a good part of the 71st panicked and ran for the rear in what Sickles described as “disgraceful confusion.” Eventually their flight was halted, but not before some men rushed all the way back through the woods to their original line. This was particularly mortifying to Sickles, for one of the witnesses to the flight was his division commander, Joe Hooker.

Hooker relayed reports back to corps commander Heintzelman of the opposition Sickles was encountering and estimated that he was outnumbered, and Heintzelman ordered reinforcements forward and dutifully relayed the reports to General McClellan at army headquarters. McClellan was attempting the novel tactic of managing a battle from three miles away at the Trent house by telegraph, and without any understanding of what was actually happening on the firing line he took sudden alarm. Heintzelman’s dispatches, he later wrote, “led me to believe Hooker was hard pressed and I then directed him to fall back quietly to his entrenchments. . . .” At 10:30 A.M., just two hours after the Oak Grove operation began, the Federal commanders at the front were baffled by an order to break off the action and withdraw. Hooker termed it a “misapprehension of my true condition. . . .” General McClellan sent word that he would come to the front himself to take command. An uneasy lull settled across the field.

It was one o’clock before General McClellan rode up to Redoubt No. 3, escorted by staff and the headquarters cavalry guard. He conferred with his generals and then ordered the advance renewed. The Federals pushed ahead over ground they had already won once that day. This was the kind of advance that was hardest to bear, Sergeant Edgar Newcomb of the 19th Massachusetts wrote home that night. “It is not the marching nor the firing that wears men, but the suspense of the slow advance and frequent halt . . . till finally when at once the storm of bullets whirs over and on each side, and men begin to fall, and orders come thick and fast, the sweat oozes from every pore. It is not fear but uncertainty, that makes men live days in every moment.”

The strain was magnified for anyone going into combat for the first time. Lieutenant Colonel Samuel H. Walkup of the 48th North Carolina of Ransom’s brigade gave a candid account of his regiment’s baptism of fire that day. The first thing they encountered as they neared the battlefield was a stream of wounded coming back, and Walkup noted that “some of our Regt. suddenly took sick and fell back to the rear.” They endured shelling from the enemy and errant shells from their own artillery that wounded two men. Ordered into action at French’s farm, the North Carolina rookies advanced at the double-quick, “fought under a most galling and murderous fire for 10 minutes,” saw men fall on every side, and then retreated. Colonel Walkup was trying to rally survivors sheltering behind a woodpile when General Ransom rode up and told him to shoot any man who refused to answer the colors. The flag bearer had lost his nerve but another man volunteered to carry the colors and he and Walkup led a hundred men back into the fight and regained the ground they had lost. It cost the regiment 88 men for the day, Walkup wrote, including “the best and most gallant boys. . . .”

The experience of the 20th Indiana of Robinson’s brigade, on the same part of the field, was strikingly similar. Here too were rookies under fire for the first time, and as they advanced through the woods, Private Joshua Lewis wrote, “once and awhile we got sight of a Johnnie as he dodged from tree to tree.” They were ordered to charge. “We so far had never made a charge, so some had blanched cheeks. . . .” In their attack a gap opened between them and their neighboring regiment, exposing them to a deadly flanking fire, and they stampeded. “So it was then, every man for himself. . . . So I ran as fast as I could, some ran for camp, but . . . stopped as soon as they were out of immediate danger.” Like Colonel Walkup’s North Carolinians, the Indiana boys were successfully rallied and returned to the front, but they lost 125 men that day, second only to the 1st Louisiana.

Like General McClellan, General Lee came to the front that afternoon to see for himself the turn of events. He was concerned about Ransom’s inexperienced brigade, but concluded that in their first battle the men performed better than their officers. He was especially concerned that this might be a spoiling attack, that McClellan had discovered his own plan to attack the next day across the river. Lee decided to take the risk. He told General Huger that he would have to hold the line here the next day “at all hazards.” He told President Davis, “I have determined to make no change in the plan.”

Charge and countercharge continued into the dusk. Lieutenant Haydon, whose 2nd Michigan was held in reserve, followed the action by sound. “The clear ringing Union cheers & the sharp wild yells of the rebels were every few minutes heard with great distinctness,” he wrote in his diary. Back at Redoubt No. 3 General McClellan had the unique experience of coming under enemy fire, as a Confederate solid shot ranged high over the infantry and buried itself in the parapet, scattering staff and onlookers.

Finally the Oak Grove fighting died out in the darkness. McClellan professed himself satisfied that Heintzelman had gained the required ground. “It will be a very important advantage gained,” he told Washington. The bill for advancing his picket line some 600 yards was costly, however: 68 dead, 503 wounded, and 55 missing, a total of 626. The Confederates’ loss was about a third less: 66 killed, 362 wounded, and 13 missing, a total of 441. For a fight over advanced picket lines to generate more than a thousand casualties suggested just how intense any fighting between these two armies was likely to be.

The night was miserable for the men in the ranks at Oak Grove. There were frequent alarms and bursts of firing along the new picket lines, and more than once friends fired on friends. Colonel Alexander Hays of the 63rd Pennsylvania reported that in one such exchange “every picket and regiment opened fire upon the 63rd. . . . Even our own pickets became bewildered and faced about to fire upon us.” He thought he was fortunate to escape with two dead and two wounded. Diarist Elisha Hunt Rhodes of the 2nd Rhode Island remarked that the rifle pits they were ordered to dig immediately filled with water. “We struck across a trench where the dead of Fair Oaks were buried, and the result was simply horrible.” A fellow diarist on picket duty that night made the heartfelt entry, “At daylight, we fell back to the rifle-pits & I never wish to pass another night such as that.”

 

SHORTLY BEFORE 5:30 on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth, while he was watching Heintzelman’s advance with satisfaction from Redoubt No. 3, General McClellan was handed a dispatch from Fitz John Porter. Porter reported that a contraband had just come into his lines from Richmond with important intelligence. The man claimed to have seen “a large portion” of Beauregard’s western army arrive in the capital the day before “and heard the cheering welcome to them.” He also heard that there were now 200,000 Confederate troops at hand, “and that Jackson is to attack in the rear.” Officers there “expected to fight today or tomorrow and fight all around. . . .” McClellan immediately called for his horse and rode hard for the Trent house.

The contraband’s fantastic story was just the latest of numerous fantastic stories reaching Army of the Potomac headquarters in these days. Rumors of Beauregard’s impending arrival from Mississippi had been circulating for weeks. (What the contraband saw in Richmond on June 24, if he saw anything, was the arrival of Robert Ransom’s brigade from Petersburg.) Rumor had Jackson threatening the Potomac army well before young Rean put him within striking distance; another contraband had described “an almighty lot of the enemy” somewhere north of Hanover Court House. Detective Pinkerton’s June “general estimates” of the enemy’s strength had ranged as high as 200,000 and beyond; the next day he would set the figure at 180,000 but warn that this was “probably short of the real strength of their army. . . .”

It was the consistency and the pattern of all these stories that gave weight to the contraband’s story and turned fantasy to reality in General McClellan’s mind. All the pieces now fitted together and fulfilled all his self-fulfilling prophecies, and he lost all composure. As soon as he reached his headquarters he sent a despairing telegram to Secretary Stanton in Washington.

“I shall have to contend against vastly superior odds,” he announced. The Rebels would attack him 200,000 strong, “including Jackson & Beauregard.” He had repeatedly warned Washington this would happen if he were not reinforced; if the consequence should be disaster, “the responsibility cannot be thrown on my shoulders—it must rest where it belongs.” He anticipated calamitous defeat and martyrdom. “I will do all that a General can do with the splendid Army I have the honor to command & if it is destroyed by overwhelming numbers can at least die with it & share its fate.” He then set to work frantically to try to save his splendid army. His first thought was not of seeking victory in the coming battle but of salvaging what he could from defeat.

He sent new orders to Ambrose Burnside on the North Carolina coast to march inland with his division and cut the railroad over which the rest of Beauregard’s phantom army would come to Richmond. “I wish you to understand that every minute in this crisis is of great importance,” he said. He pursued a second scheme to block Beauregard’s arrival, which had the navy pushing up the Appomattox River to destroy a bridge on the railroad from Petersburg to Richmond.

McClellan then alerted the four corps commanders south of the Chickahominy to prepare to fight for their entrenchments, for with 200,000 men Lee would surely attack at every point. “I wish to fight behind the lines if attacked in force,” he told them. He prepared a line of retreat, ordering his quartermaster to have a “good supply of assorted ammunition afloat on James River” in addition to the provisions and forage already stockpiled there for the Drewry’s Bluff operation. He hurried across the river to Porter’s headquarters to prepare for Jackson. He was certain now that the battle would begin the next day, June 26. “If I had another good Division I could laugh at Jackson,” he told Washington. He told his staff he “greatly doubted” his ability to hold position against an army so much stronger than his own.

 

GENERAL MCCLELLAN got at best two or three hours of sleep that night, but his nemesis, Stonewall Jackson, got even less. Jackson was encountering severe difficulty bringing his army to the field on time. His inflexible, highly individualistic style of command which had produced ruthlessly decisive results on the battlefields of the Shenandoah Valley was proving a failure on this march. An army that had gained fame as “Jackson’s foot cavalry,” marching great distances at great speeds, was advancing now by fits and starts.

Back on June 22, when as was his custom he called for a day’s halt for most of the army in observance of the Sabbath, Old Jack had men scattered along more than twenty-five miles of the Virginia Central at roughly the midpoint in their journey from the Valley. When he rode off early the next morning to attend Lee’s council of war in Richmond, he left Major Robert L. Dabney, his chief of staff, in charge of moving the troops along. The Reverend Dabney, who held his post more for the spiritual guidance he provided the general than for his military prowess, lacked the skill and authority to direct the complex road-and-rail movement. Then he fell ill and was unable to direct anything at all. To compound the problem, Jackson had taken with him to Richmond the best administrator on the staff, his strong-willed quartermaster, John Harmon. Since no one else, not even Jackson’s second-incommand, General Richard Ewell, was permitted to know where the army was going or when it was supposed to get there, not a great deal was accomplished that Monday.

The rearmost division, Jackson’s own now under the command of Charles S. Winder, marched sixteen “very hot and dusty” miles but was still twenty miles behind the rest of the army at nightfall. Chase Whiting’s division marched only ten miles; “travel easy, stop frequently,” was how a soldier-diarist described its day. Ewell’s division experienced an adventurous rail journey at the hands of Virginia Central trainmen who during the Sunday layover had generously sampled a locally distilled apple brandy; somehow the trains stayed on the tracks and there were no collisions, but they gained just twenty miles. That night there was a driving rainstorm, described as “a perfect flood.” When Jackson returned from Richmond at midmorning on June 24, he found the vanguard of his drenched army at Beaver Dam Station, only ten miles in advance of where he had left it, with the rearmost elements a good twenty miles back. He now had two days to assemble his forces at the appointed place and at the appointed hour for the offensive.

Even though the Virginia Central was still open some distance to the east, Jackson determined to quit the railroad at Beaver Dam Station and march southward from there by road, to avoid detection by the enemy. Lee’s orders directed him to the village of Ashland and then southeast along the Ashcake Road five miles to a location known as Slash Church, due north of Mechanicsville. He was to reach that point by evening on June 25. “At 3 o’clock Thursday morning, 26th instant, Genl Jackson will advance,” Lee wrote in his general orders, opening the offensive that along with the commands of A. P. Hill, D. H. Hill, and Longstreet was to turn the Yankees out of their lines. The distance from Beaver Dam Station to Slash Church was twenty-four miles by road, seemingly not an unreasonable march over two days for the foot cavalry, yet Jackson would fail to reach his objective.

The first day went well enough. On June 24 the rearmost division, Winder’s, was carried to Beaver Dam Station in the cars and then marched five miles down the road toward Ashland. The rest of the army closed to within five miles of Ashland. The roads were muddy and the creeks high and the marching was hard; still, by nightfall the lead division was within ten miles of Slash Church and the trailing division within nineteen miles. That evening there was a rain shower that produced a spectacular rainbow, and optimists took it as a good omen for the future.

On June 25, the day of Heintzelman’s contest with Huger at Oak Grove and one day before Lee’s offensive was to open, Stonewall Jackson gave priority to closing up his column. His old division, under Charles Winder, still trailed well to the rear, but Old Jack was not with it to apply any driving urgency to its march that day. He had never before directed so large an army as this, and commands that were beyond his personal reach tended to move at their own pace. His staff was described by his medical director, Dr. Hunter McGuire, as “inexperienced and awkward.” The Reverend Dabney complained that it was an hour after sunrise before the movement started: “The brigade commanders would not or could not get rations cooked, their own breakfasts, and their men under orders earlier, probably because their supply trains were rarely in place, by reason of the indolence and carelessness of julep-drinking officers.” Diarist John Melhorn of Winder’s division was only slightly more generous toward the high command. “Left camp at sunrise,” he wrote that day, “without breakfast my rations having given out except one biscuit. . . .” Winder’s division would make only fourteen miles on June 25, bringing it only as far as Ashland.

As a consequence, those units of the Valley army in the advance did little more than mark time that day. The 2nd Mississippi’s Sergeant A. L. P. Vairin, in the vanguard, recorded in his diary, “June 25 Wednesday. Clear. 6 AM marched 3 miles & rested til 12 AM then marched 1 mi. to Ashland and filed off toward Richmond 1½ mi. & rested. . . . Camped for the night, drew 2 days rations of crackers. . . .” Another man reported reaching Ashland “by a circuitous route. . . .” Late that night Jackson sent off a courier to Lee to say that he had been held up by mud and high water and was only as far as Ashland. That was five miles short of his objective, Slash Church. He said he would move up the next day’s starting time to 2:30 A.M.

 

EVERY MAN in the Richmond army recognized that a battle was coming from the orders passed down the chain of command that evening: two days’ rations to be issued and cooked and put in haversacks. They had now been on campaign long enough to know that that signaled a fight the next day. Thomas Ware of the 15th Georgia complained that he and his mess mates were up until 1:00 A. M. baking a dozen biscuits each and frying their bacon. Between their cooking chores and their general nervousness, Ware wrote, “most of the boys were up all night.” Whether they had been able to sleep or not, the troops were up and moving toward their positions by 3:00 A.M. TO one of his lieutenants James Longstreet announced, “In thirty-six hours it will all be over.” It was Thursday, June 26, Day Two of the Seven Days.

At Ashland to the north, Jackson’s Army of the Valley had also been up late cooking rations. Reveille found James Dinwiddie of the Charlottesville Artillery “up at peep of dawn, in high spirits, expecting to meet the enemy by noon. . . .” Despite Jackson’s promise to Lee to be on the march by 2:30 A.M., however, it was nearly 5:00 A.M. before the columns started. Jackson’s usual iron grip seemed relaxed, and small, nagging things held them up, such as finding water for their canteens. Already Old Jack was beginning the day five miles in arrears; to that handicap was now added two and a half hours’ delay getting the march started. To turn Porter’s Federals out of their line behind Beaver Dam Creek, just east of Mechanicsville, would require of his three divisions a march, on the two roads assigned them, of between seventeen and nineteen miles. Even at the pace of their famous Valley marches, that was not going to leave them much time that day for either maneuvering or fighting.

General Lee’s orders for the day were designed more for maneuver than for fighting. Ideally, Jackson’s turning movement would force the Federals out of their lines without a fight; at worst, any fighting should only be against the enemy’s rear guard as it retreated. Lee was emphatic in not wanting to attack the Yankees in their entrenchments with infantry. That “experiment,” as he told Mr. Davis, had failed at Seven Pines and he was not going to repeat it. Furthermore, there was a definite respect for the Beaver Dam Creek position in the Confederate high command, for Joe Johnston’s engineers had intended it as an anchor for their own line had they taken a stand north of the Chickahominy in May. When Johnston elected instead to fall back behind the river, Porter Alexander remarked, “the enemy took the beautiful Beaver Dam position for his own right.”

Coordinating the movements of several columns out of sight of one another—the problem that plagued Joe Johnston at Seven Pines—promised to be Lee’s greatest challenge on June 26. The most difficult linkage was sure to be between Jackson and A. P. Hill; Hill was to spearhead the threat to Porter’s front while Jackson threatened Porter’s flank and rear. The link-up depended on one of Hill’s brigadiers—Lawrence O’Bryan Branch, Porter’s opponent at Hanover Court House back in May—who was sent with his brigade upstream to an unguarded Chickahominy crossing called Half Sink. Jackson was to communicate the progress of his march to Branch, who would then cross the Chickahominy and take the road leading downriver eight miles to Mechanicsville.

Within a mile of Mechanicsville, Branch would uncover the Mead ow Bridge crossing and drive off any Federal guard there, allowing the rest of Powell Hill’s division to cross and join him. In due course the Light Division’s advance would uncover the Mechanicsville Bridge crossing for the divisions of D. H. Hill and Longstreet. After that, the four commands would sweep southeastward down the north bank of the Chickahominy in a steplike echelon formation, with Jackson on the left in the lead. It was a complicated plan, but one beautiful in concept.

Like Joe Johnston at Seven Pines, Lee lacked detailed intelligence on the numbers in the Federal force he would face, but like Johnston he determined to make his turning movement strong enough to overwhelm whatever it might encounter. Against Porter’s Fifth Corps—which in fact numbered 28,100—he massed 55,800 men in the combined forces of Jackson, A. P. Hill, D. H. Hill, Longstreet, and a part of Jeb Stuart’s cavalry brigade. To achieve this margin, Lee was risking a counterstroke directly on Richmond by the four corps of McClellan’s army—76,000 men—posted south of the Chickahominy. The Yankees there were less than six miles from Capitol Square.

Such a counterstroke greatly worried President Davis, for Lee would be marching most of the army well away from the city’s defenses. “The stake is too high to permit the pulse to keep its even beat . . .,” Davis told his wife in describing the plan. (Joe Johnston also worried. He was still disabled by his Seven Pines wounds, and when he learned of Lee’s turning movement he had a special train readied to take him south to safety should McClellan storm the city.) Left to defend Richmond would be only the 28,900 men in the commands of Magruder and Huger. Holding the James River flank, and serving as a general reserve, was another 7,300, under Theophilus Holmes.

Lee had surely thought of Austerlitz, where in 1805 an ill-conceived turning movement by the Allies opened the way for Napoleon’s most brilliant victory. However, he did not believe the Young Napoleon a bold enough general to seize that sort of opportunity (the word Lee used for his opponent was timid); McClellan would only think of defense, not offense. Indeed, Robert E. Lee’s entire scheme for capturing the initiative was based squarely on that reading of his opponent.

As Lee had originally scheduled it—Jackson beginning his march on June 26 from Slash Church at 3:00 A.M.—the Army of the Valley should arrive in position to turn the Federal flank between eight and nine o’clock that morning. Before eight o’clock the Richmond army was in position. Harvey Hill and Longstreet had their men concealed in the woods alongside the Mechanicsville Turnpike running northeast out of Richmond toward Mechanicsville Bridge. Powell Hill was a mile and three-quarters farther up the Chickahominy, waiting to cross at Meadow Bridge with five brigades. His sixth brigade, under Lawrence Branch, was farther upriver at Half Sink. The lines in front of Richmond were fully manned. “We are looking for them every moment,” one of Prince John Magruder’s men wrote home that morning. “Batteries, breast-works, entrenchments, and redoubts are as thick here as fences at home.” Everyone waited on Jackson’s signal.

It was about this time that Lee learned from Jackson’s courier that the signal would be later than expected. Lee could calculate that starting out from Ashland rather than from Slash Church would delay Jackson by two to three hours. He left the Dabb house and rode out the Mechanicsville Turnpike to an observation post on a bluff overlooking the Chickahominy crossing, and waited. He was not unduly worried. There should still be at least half a day in which to carry out his scheme.

The Yankees too were waiting. The general commanding had gone to bed at dawn, having been up all night conferring with Fitz John Porter about the defenses north of the river and afterward riding the lines south of the river to coordinate those defenses as well. Porter had manned the Beaver Dam Creek position with George McCall’s recently arrived division of Pennsylvania Reserves. His advanced outposts of observation at Meadow Bridge and Mechanicsville were under orders to fall back to the main line if attacked; Porter was going to offer battle only from behind Beaver Dam Creek.

His two other Fifth Corps divisions were held farther back in reserve. Porter’s line faced west; his worry was Jackson on his open flank to the north. He had cavalry patrolling the roads north and west, with details of axmen felling trees across every narrow defile. While Porter anticipated an attack, he gained no advance notice that morning on the direction of the enemy’s approach. Repeating his Seven Pines failure, Professor Lowe did not have an observation balloon in the air that morning, and contributed no useful sightings all that day.

In the Sixth Corps, south of the Chickahominy, there was a sense or routine and quiet confidence on June 26. “McClellan has ordered that there must be no more skirmishing and picket firing,” the 1st New Jersey’s Lieutenant Colonel Robert McAllister confided to his wife. “He evidently intends to invest the city, starve them out, complete the surrender, and save life. If so, we may not have to do much fighting. . . .”

 

IT WAS 9:00 A.M. before Stonewall Jackson’s Valley army reached Slash Church on the Ashcake Road, where his march that day was to have begun. He was now running six hours behind Lee’s schedule. He dutifully sent a courier with his position to General Branch. At 10:00 A.M. he notified Branch that he had advanced two more miles and turned off to the south on the road toward Mechanicsville. That proved to be the sum total of his communications with anyone in Lee’s army that day. Jackson had in fact turned southward toward the enemy on two roughly parallel roads, Ewell’s division on the direct road to Mechanicsville, and Jackson, with Winder’s division and Whiting’s, on the Pole Green Church Road farther to the east.

Their pace was far from typical of the Valley campaign. Captain Melhorn of Winder’s division noted in his diary, “We advance very slowly . . . we turn toward Richmond & find where the Enemy has been . . . & tried to blockade the road.” Later the column was held up nearly an hour at a stream crossing where Yankee cavalry burned the bridge and obstructed the road. One of Dick Ewell’s staff remembered the march as “strange & dreary,” with dense woods on every side and “no extended views,” and apparently Jackson felt the same sense of uneasiness. He proceeded cautiously, halting and deploying skirmishers to drive off each cavalry picket they encountered, bringing up a battery to shell the woods when he suspected ambush.

That day there was little about him of the great captain marching resolutely to battle. When the column passed the birthplace of Henry Clay, he was moved to discuss the high qualities of that statesman. When General Evander Law sought him out to deliver a report, he found Jackson leaning carelessly against a roadside fence with Chase Whiting. “They were both perfectly silent, not a word passing between them,” Law wrote, “and, so far as I could judge from their attitudes, had been so from the time I came in sight.” Law made his report, Jackson asked a question or two, “and again relapsed into silence, which was unbroken by a word until I left them.”

Stonewall Jackson’s puzzling behavior on June 26 suggests that he did not really understand what Lee expected him to accomplish that day. He seemed unaware that time was the critical factor in the plan. Possibly he did not realize that the entire plan hinged on his movements; Lee’s orders, except for a starting time, had included no timetable. Furthermore, not knowing the ground troubled Jackson. He seemed uncomfortable with the guide Lee sent him and with what Jeb Stuart, furnishing him flank protection, told him of the countryside. Certainly he had no clear notion of where or when he might meet the enemy in force; he seemed to expect a major confrontation around every bend in the road.

 

 

It was five o’clock in the afternoon when Jackson’s column reached Hundley’s Corner, where the Pole Green Church Road intersected the Shady Grove Church Road. Supposedly here A. P. Hill’s division would take position on his right and D. H. Hill’s division would come up in support. Ewell rejoined Jackson at Hundley’s Corner as arranged, but there was no one else there and no word of anyone, either. There was only the sound of heavy musketry and artillery fire off to the southwest, in the direction of Mechanicsville.

By the account of the Reverend Dabney, Stonewall Jackson was perplexed and disturbed by this turn of events. He might be late by half a day and more in reaching this point, but now he was isolated well behind enemy lines without orders and without anyone to tell him what was going on. So far as he knew, he had carried out his part of the plan, but something about the plan must have gone wrong.

Conflicting orders and a poor map contributed to Jackson’s dilemma. At the council of war on June 23, it was agreed that Jackson would “endeavor to come into the Mechanicsville Turnpike in rear of Mechanicsville”—the turnpike at that point, east of the village, also being called the Old Church Road. Yet in Lee’s plan of battle issued the next day, Jackson was directed only to “the road leading to Pole Green Church.” Although not reflected on his map, that particular road ended at Hundley’s Corner and left him, in effect, one road short—at Hundley’s Corner he was two and a half miles north of the Old Church Road and that much short of turning the Federals’ flank. He seemed not to realize that fact. As for the battle going on, whatever and wherever it might be, Jackson apparently reasoned that it would be late before he could reach the scene and to move there blindly would be dangerous in any event. He elected to put his army in bivouac for the night and await the new day to set matters straight.

Some hours earlier Fitz John Porter’s cavalry pickets had reported on all three Confederate columns then on the march—Jackson’s, Ewell’s, and Branch’s—but the reports were fragmentary and failed to identify the columns and estimate their numbers. As late as 3:00 P.M. General Porter was complaining to headquarters, “I cannot judge where the enemy will strike, so conflicting are the reports.” On this second day of the Seven Days General McClellan would entirely misread the whereabouts of Jackson’s Valley army. Throughout the subsequent attack at Beaver Dam Creek he would be convinced that Jackson was the attacker, and so failed to react to Jackson’s threat to Porter’s flank. Ironically, the whole premise of Lee’s plan went unrecognized by his opponent.

 

ALONG THE Chickahominy events moved in slow motion. The sun climbed and the day warmed and then turned hot, and on both sides of the river men waited and tensions rose. At noon General McClellan telegraphed Washington that it was unnaturally quiet on all fronts, and he added, “I would prefer more noise.” In the Richmond lines Prince John Magruder took a hurried noontime meal and paced impatiently, and finally sent his aide Major Joseph Brent out the Mechanicsville Turnpike to try to discover what was going on. Brent found the woods along both sides of the turnpike crowded with troops as far as he could see. In a grove near the river was a knot of civilians that included President Davis, Secretary of War Randolph, and Secretary of the Navy Mallory. “I have never in my life seen more gloomy faces,” Brent recalled. Everyone wore “an expression of weary waiting and anxiety.”

In a second group was the army’s high command. Outwardly General Lee, dressed in full uniform, appeared as calm and self-possessed as usual, but then Brent saw that unnoticed the general’s cravat had slipped around under his collar and “his eyes were restless with the look of a man with fever.” It was nearly four o’clock now and Lee had been waiting in suspense for eight hours for his offensive to begin, and still there was no word from Jackson. General Branch, the intended link with Jackson, had failed to forward even Jackson’s two morning dispatches, and then there were no more dispatches. Branch, on Jackson’s first signal, had crossed the river at Half Sink and started his march toward Mechanicsville, but he made slow progress and was still some distance from his objective.

Suddenly there was a scattering of rifle fire from across the river and through their glasses the generals could see men in blue coming tumbling out of an orchard, followed closely by a line of skirmishers in gray. “Those are Hill’s men,” General Lee said quietly. Turning to Longstreet, he said, “General, you may now cross over.” The plan was at last in operation, and the battle joined.

The plan was not at all operating as Lee assumed, however. Without notice, A. P. Hill had taken matters into his own hands. Powell Hill was ambitious and high-tempered and anxious to pass his first test of high command. For the occasion he wore a shirt of red calico, soon to be celebrated as his “battle shirt.” As the hours passed Hill had heard nothing from Branch either, and at three o’clock he decided he must act. As he put it in his report, he determined to cross Meadow Bridge without reference to either Branch or Jackson—or Lee—“rather than hazard the failure of the whole plan. . . .” He felt sure that by the time he was in position to confront the Yankees, Jackson would be on their flank. He sent the Light Division across Meadow Bridge on the run, scattering the Yankee pickets there, and formed up for the march on Mechanicsville.

Mechanicsville was a modest crossroads village on the turnpike not quite a mile north of the river, consisting of half a dozen shops and stables and two blacksmiths (this “superiority in mechanic arts,” a Yankee soldier decided, explained the village’s inflated name) and an equal number of houses. In a grove of oaks nearby was a beer garden where in better times Richmonders enjoyed bucolic outings. In occupying the place in May the Federals had shelled the Confederates out, damaging most of the buildings and frightening the residents into leaving for Richmond.

A regiment of Federal infantry and a battery were posted at Mechanicsville and, farther west at Meadow Bridge, six companies of the 13th Pennsylvania, the Bucktails. The Bucktails took their nickname from the tails of bucks they pinned to their hats to proclaim their marksmanship. As ordered, they fell back when Powell Hill’s men approached, but not before getting in a volley or two. “We took a rest from the fence and trees and fired,” Private Cordello Collins wrote home. “Oh! you ought to have seen them jump up and fall. . . .” Someone missed an order, however, and an entire company of Bucktails, seventy-five men, was trapped and surrounded and forced to surrender. The rest of the Yankees did not linger at Mechanicsville but ran for their lines behind Beaver Dam Creek.

Flowing southward past Mechanicsville and within easy artillery range to the east, Beaver Dam Creek traversed a valley some 200 yards wide before emptying into the Chickahominy. The bottomland along much of the stream was swampy, and half a mile from the creek mouth was the gristmill and millrace of a man named Ellerson. Bluffs rose irregularly sixty feet on both sides of the valley. It was approached from Mechanicsville by two roads, the Old Church Road and the Old Cold Harbor Road, which crossed Beaver Dam Creek on bridges that the retreating Federal pickets destroyed.

George McCall had his division of Pennsylvania Reserves, 9,500 strong, posted on the high ground east of the creek, dug in securely in a mile and a half of rifle pits and field fortifications. The Reserves had been recruited by Pennsylvania’s Governor Andrew G. Curtin during the first flush of patriotism back in 1861, and when Washington found itself unable to arm or equip so many new men Governor Curtin performed the task at state expense. The Reserves were in the Federal service now, to be sure, but they still displayed a spirit and a sense of being special from the early days. They had not seen combat before, but were well trained and their morale was good and they had promise of being formidable fighters.

McCall put the brigades of John F. Reynolds and Truman Seymour in the main line and George G. Meade’s brigade in close support. The line was braced, in position or in reserve, by thirty-two guns in six batteries, and the woodland in front cleared for fields of fire. Timber was felled on the west bank of the creek to form an abatis. It was a position, said the Confederate engineer and artilleryman Porter Alexander, “absolutely impregnable to a front attack.”

Nevertheless, it would be attacked, for General Lee believed he had no alternative. A. P. Hill had advanced four of his brigades beyond Mechanicsville as a threatening demonstration while waiting for Jackson’s turning movement to take effect. There was no sign of Jackson, however, and Hill’s men were being severely pounded by the Yankee guns. Hill’s artillery responded, and Willie Pegram’s Purcell Battery rushed up to within 800 yards of the Yankee line. Pegram’s recklessness pinned the battery in a deadly crossfire and it was shot to pieces. “A solid shot bowled past me, killed one of our men, tore a leg and arm from another, and threw three horses into a bloody, struggling heap,” gunner Francis Dawson wrote of these moments. Four of Pegram’s six guns were disabled, and 47 of his 75 men killed or wounded. It was stark evidence of how poorly the Confederates were still managing artillery tactics.

Lee crossed the bridge into Mechanicsville to confer with Powell Hill and only then discovered that Hill knew nothing more of Jackson than anyone else and instead had acted entirely on his own. Lee faced a Hobson’s choice; as he later put it, he “was obliged to do something.” If he did nothing, halting the operation where it was for the day, the initiative would pass to his opponent. Recognizing Lee’s turning movement for what it was, McClellan might strike directly for Richmond through the thinned defenses before the city. Or he might elect to take the offensive north of the river, bringing troops across to hold off Lee with one hand while with the other falling on Jackson’s now isolated Valley army. The hunter would become the hunted. In order for Lee to retain the initiative the Young Napoleon must be distracted and his attention captured. To do that Powell Hill’s demonstration must become an attack.

At that moment the Young Napoleon was debating just the sort of counterstrokes Lee feared. At 4:30 P.M. at his headquarters at the Trent house south of the Chickahominy, listening to the rising sound of gunfire from Mechanicsville, General McClellan composed a telegram to his wife. He had somewhat recovered from his despairing mood of the evening before. The battle was joined, he told her, but she must not worry, for the Rebels were “making a great mistake. . . . I give you my word that I believe we will surely win & that the enemy is falling into a trap. I shall allow the enemy to cut off our communications in order to ensure success.” He had his corps commanders south of the river on alert “to be ready to move in any direction called for,” and asked them what reinforcements they could spare for Porter if called upon. Entrapping his foe and storming Richmond were very much in McClellan’s thoughts, and when he consulted with them, Generals William Franklin and Baldy Smith encouraged him in that direction.

Yet for all that, these designs of General McClellan’s were only tentative, to be dictated by the course of events. Rather than seizing the moment he would march to his opponent’s pace, waiting always for a clearer picture before acting. Nothing said or done that day lessened his conviction of the “great odds” arrayed against him.

Powell Hill made his first attempt against the Federal right, the northern flank that Jackson was to have turned, advancing along the Old Church Road with the brigades of Joseph R. Anderson, James J. Archer, and Charles W. Field. Manning this section of the defenses was John Reynolds’s brigade, well positioned and supported by eighteen guns and abundant reserves. The Rebels came on, one of the Federals wrote, “from the woods, out of the swamps, down the roads, along the entire front, with shriek and yell. . . .” There was some cover for them at first in the woods and thickets along the western bluffs, but coming down the slope toward the creek there was no cover at all. Secure behind works of logs and earth the Pennsylvanians had little trouble repulsing this initial assault, and every subsequent assault.

A Rebel color bearer in Archer’s brigade remembered how difficult it was just to get through the abatis to reach the creek bank. He had to wind the flag tightly around the staff before he could crawl through the tangle. Afterward he counted ten bullet holes in the flag and an eleventh in the staff. Beaver Dam Creek was more swamp than stream here, and only the 35th Georgia, on the extreme left of the battle line, could find a way across to the Yankees’ side. They could go no farther, however, as Captain Mark Kerns’s battery of Napoleons opened on them with double rounds of canister. When it was dark the Georgians would fall back from their hard-won beachhead.

The infantrymen of the 5th Pennsylvania fired so fast that they soon exhausted all their ammunition, and a regiment from George Morell’s Fifth Corps division had to move in to spell them. McCall inserted Meade’s regiments and others of Morell’s into the line wherever they were needed. Powell Hill went himself to the front to cheer his men on, and from that perspective could see that his prospects were hopeless. The Yankee position here, he admitted, “was too strong to be carried by direct attack,” and he ended the effort. The Light Division lost 553 men in these fruitless assaults on the Federal right. The Federals opposite them lost less than a third of that number.

 

GENERAL LEE had positioned himself on a rise of open ground outside Mechanicsville for a view of the fighting. Shells from long-range Federal guns were bursting in the immediate area when he noticed that President Davis and his entourage had arrived on the scene and were standing nearby. He rode up to Davis, bowed from the saddle, and inquired politely, “Mr. President, am I in command here?” Davis acknowledged that he was. “Then I forbid you to stand here under the enemy’s guns. Any exposure of a life like yours is wrong. And this is useless exposure. You must go back.” According to James Chesnut of the presidential party, who recorded this exchange, Mr. Davis agreed to Lee’s request, but only went far enough away to be out of the general’s sight—but not out of the enemy’s range—and from there continued to watch the fighting.

 

 

The hills of Richmond were crowded with citizens watching and listening. The earlier troop movements had alerted them to expect a battle, and that morning’s Dispatch seemed a confirmation: “It is generally expected that operations of great moment will take place today.” Rumors circulated everywhere, but when the rumble of the guns began off to the north across the river and clouds of battle smoke rose over the trees, one rumor dominated all others: “Stonewall is behind them!” As twilight deepened, the gunfire intensified and the flashes lit the smoke clouds with pulsating light. A newspaperman on a hilltop wrote of “children gambolling upon the grass and crying out with delight as the sudden, fitful explosion of the shells strewed the horizon with meteors. . . .”

In the twilight the Battle of Mechanicsville took on a life of its own that seemed independent of logic. Like a whirlpool, it drew more and more men into its vortex. A. P. Hill had ordered a fourth brigade, under Dorsey Pender, to form on the right of his other three brigades, and Pender recklessly embroiled himself in what was soon a hopeless attack. His advance followed the Old Cold Harbor Road from Mechanicsville, which approached Beaver Dam Creek a half mile or so south of the Old Church Road, then turned to the right and paralleled the creek for 400 yards before turning again to cross at Ellerson’s mill. Pender’s approach led him straight into the crossfire of fourteen guns and then the musketry of Truman Seymour’s Pennsylvania brigade.

“I never saw such a storm of shot and shells before,” Lieutenant John Hinsdale, Pender’s aide, noted in his diary that night. “Fragments of shells literally hailed around me. I thought that my life was worth very little. . . . The noise was deafening.” In a rifle pit on the opposite bank, with the Federal guns firing right over his head, diarist Robert Taggart of the 9th Pennsylvania had the same impression. “The artillery firing was heavy beyond description,” he wrote. Under this fire, and entangled in the abatis by the creek bank, the 38th North Carolina would lose well over a third of its men—152 of 420—in a matter of minutes. One of its officers summed up its plight: “To take the works was impossible.”

Yet there seemed no choice but to go to Pender’s rescue. The only reinforcement immediately available was the first of D. H. Hill’s brigades, Roswell Ripley’s, which had crossed at Mechanicsville Bridge. Orders sending Ripley to the front came from Harvey Hill and from General Lee and even from President Davis, who could not resist the call of battle. Ripley’s men had come up from garrison duty in Charles ton and this was their first fight. They followed the same route as Pender’s men, and faced the same murderous fire. Looking back on the battle in later years, Harvey Hill would write ruefully, “We were lavish of blood in those days, and it was thought to be a great thing to charge a battery of artillery or an earth-work lined with infantry.”

Seventeen-year-old Edgar Allan Jackson of the 1st North Carolina, Ripley’s brigade, would write home describing his first battle. “As we approached nearer the bullets flew by us in torrents,” he wrote. The officers dismounted and led them on foot, then had them lie down to shelter from the fire. Then the order to charge: “Col. Stokes soon orders us to rise up and charge and at it we go with a yell; we proceed half way down the hill, halt and exchange shot for shot with the yankees, who had the very best of covering.” They were stopped there short of the creek and stranded, unable to go forward or back, “firing by the light of the enemys guns.” Only after it became fully dark could they withdraw.

That charge cost the 1st North Carolina 142 casualties, including its colonel and major dead, its lieutenant colonel wounded, and six company captains dead or wounded. The toll in the 44th Georgia fighting alongside came to 335, by far the heaviest loss of the day and a casualty rate of 65 percent. Between them, Pender and Ripley lost 851 men. “I have passed through a fiery ordeal of grape, canister shells, round-shot and musket balls,” Private Jackson summed up, “and was permitted by the All Wise Being to pass through unscathed. . . .”

Late in the day General McClellan crossed the Chickahominy to Porter’s headquarters and watched the last of the fighting from there. He was exultant. “We have again whipped secesh badly . . .,” he telegraphed his wife. “Stonewall Jackson is the victim this time.” He told Secretary Stanton, “Victory of today complete & against great odds. I almost begin to think we are invincible.” To Chief of Staff Marcy back at headquarters south of the river he boasted, “We have completely gained the day—not lost a single foot of ground. McCall has done splendidly as well as Morell. Tell our men on your side they are put to their trumps & that with such men disaster is impossible.” When these tidings were announced to the troops, great bursts of cheering traveled along the lines, and regimental bands struck up impromptu concerts of national airs. On the battlefield there was no cheering and no music. “Nothing could be heard in the black darkness of that night save the ghastly moans of the wounded and dying,” one of Dorsey Pender’s men remembered.

General Lee met that night with his division commanders at the house of a Dr. Lumpkin in Mechanicsville. (In a twist of irony, Dr. Lumpkin was the “active rebel” whose name was found on the planted deserter Charles Rean two days before, leading the Federals to anticipate Lee’s offensive.) Lee’s plan of battle had gone as far off track as Joe Johnston’s at Seven Pines. Even yet there was no word of Stonewall Jackson’s whereabouts; Lee knew only that Jackson, for whatever reason, had failed to carry out his part of the plan.

All the day’s other failures stemmed from that. Instead of 55,800 men bearing down on the enemy’s flank, only five brigades, hardly 11,000 men, had gotten into action. Their loss was 1,475 and they failed even to dent Porter’s defenses. (The Federals engaged more men at Mechanicsville, 14,000, and lost but 361 of them.) The plan designed with such care had utterly fallen apart.

Lee said nothing of it at the time, but his staff, Porter Alexander recalled, recognized that he was “deeply, bitterly disappointed” by Jackson’s performance. Lee himself would admit after the war that he was “disappointed” at not finding Jackson that day. The cause of most of what went wrong at Mechanicsville on June 26, however, was simply a breakdown in communications among virtually everyone involved.

Jackson surely misunderstood his role as explained at the council of war in Richmond, and Lee’s subsequent written orders were not drawn precisely enough to clarify matters. Too many questions about the time and place and route of Jackson’s march, and its objectives, went unanswered. However late he was on June 26, Jackson did not even then actually turn the Beaver Dam Creek position, nor did he make his presence known so as to alarm the Yankees into retreating; it is likely he did not know where their position was. After his two morning messages to Branch he made no further effort to communicate with Lee’s army.

For his part, Lee counted too much on Branch as the link with Jackson, and when the delay lengthened he sent no one of his own to discover its cause and set it right. Branch was seriously derelict in not communicating with A. P. Hill and through him with Lee. Powell Hill set events in motion without communicating with anyone at all, although his (and Ripley’s) subsequent assaults on the Beaver Dam position were made on Lee’s orders and under his eye.

Mechanicsville was General Lee’s first battle in command of the Army of Northern Virginia, and the course of the day demonstrated that neither he nor his lieutenants were masters of so complicated a battle plan. Like all generals in this war, Lee was having to learn his trade while practicing it. Nothing in his experience and training had sufficiently prepared him to manage so large an army in so complex an operation.

The same can be said of his lieutenants, even of Stonewall Jackson. Much debate would be generated as to why Jackson was “not himself” in these days on the Peninsula. It was suggested that his exertions of the previous weeks in the Valley and since had exhausted him both physically and mentally, and it is true enough that during the Seven Days his health troubled him. “During the past week,” he would tell his wife, “I have not been well, have suffered from fever and debility. . . .”

However that may be, it is closer to the truth to suggest that Jackson simply found making war in the Shenandoah Valley and on the Peninsula as different as day and night. In the Valley he had studied every foot of ground beforehand and prepared carefully every movement, and had benefited immensely from the fumbling and incompetence of his opponents. On the Peninsula he lacked these advantages and the assurance they provided him, and like Lee he had now to learn in the hard school of experience.

Yet however grim the failures of the day, General Lee had succeeded in one vitally important respect: he had captured the initiative. Equally important, he had indelibly impressed that fact on the mind of his opponent. Just five hours after the fighting at Mechanicsville ended, General McClellan determined he must retreat from Richmond. In losing his first battle, Robert E. Lee had dressed the stage for winning the campaign.