10

The Flight

WHEN THERE WAS time to make a count, Gaines’s Mill proved to be the largest and costliest battle of the Seven Days, and the largest and costliest of the entire Peninsula campaign. Including reinforcements, the two armies between them put 96,100 men on this field. For concentrated fury, only Shiloh among the war’s earlier battles even approached it; few later battles would exceed it.

Fitz John Porter’s command lost 894 killed, 3,114 wounded, and 2,829 captured, a total of 6,837. Lee suffered 1,156 more casualties: 1,483 killed, 6,402 wounded, and 108 missing, a total of 7,993. For the Federals the number of captured was very high, and there were as well the twenty-two pieces of artillery lost. For the Rebels the role of attacker on June 27 proved very costly, their toll of dead and wounded being nearly twice that of the defenders. For the day, and including Toombs’s fight south of the Chickahominy at dusk, the two armies lost altogether 15,223 men in less than nine hours of fighting. There would be veterans of four years’ fighting in both armies who insisted that the volume of fire at Gaines’s Mill was unmatched in all their wartime experience.

Gaines’s Mill was beyond any doubt a major defeat for General McClellan, yet in common with the fight at Seven Pines he was exceedingly fortunate that it was not a great deal worse—that he did not lose one-third of his army on June 27 rather than the 6.5 percent he did lose. Fitz John Porter, committed like his chief to the delusion that he was hugely outnumbered, fought the battle not to win but only in the hope of not losing, and only darkness and the last-minute arrival of the two Second Corps brigades saved his command from being driven against the Chickahominy and shot to pieces as it tried to escape across the narrow bridges. But for Stonewall Jackson’s mishaps—his misdirected march and his poor staff work—the full-blooded assault Lee mounted at 7:00 P.M. would have opened three or four hours earlier and left Porter in the gravest jeopardy and without any last-minute reinforcements. Porter Alexander put the case concisely: “Had Jackson attacked when he first arrived, or during A. P. Hill’s attack, we would have had an easy victory—comparatively, & would have captured most of Porter’s command.”

While the numbers were not yet known to McClellan, he did not doubt the dimensions of the defeat. As he put it to General Heintzelman that evening, “On the other side of the Chickahominy the day is lost.” In the hour before midnight he called together his generals to announce to them his decision to retreat to the James. The clearing at army headquarters was lit by a blazing fire of pine logs, next to which, in a bower of fir-tree branches, the high command gathered about the general commanding. Sentries patrolled the outskirts of the clearing, and the leaping flames cast dramatic lights and shadows on the surrounding trees. A newspaper correspondent watching the scene thought it a fitting subject for some great historical painter: the Young Napoleon and his ranking generals pondering the army’s fate, perhaps the country’s fate as well.

All the corps commanders were present except Erasmus Keyes, who had already been ordered to begin the retreat across White Oak Swamp. McClellan had also previously announced his decision to retreat to Flag Officer Goldsborough in making a request for the navy’s gunboats on the James to protect the army. To the present gathering, however, he offered the fiction that he had not yet decided to retreat—that in fact he was debating gambling everything on one dramatic cast of the dice and fighting to a final decision across the Chickahominy. Of course, he said, defeat in such a battle would mean the loss to the country of its principal army; of course this led his lieutenants to urge him not to risk such a calamity but instead to take the alternate course and preserve the army to fight another day. Feigning reluctance—Heintzelman reported the general commanding insisted he was still inclined to risk all on one great battle—McClellan agreed to do what he had privately decided to do some time since: the Army of the Potomac would abandon its campaign and seek a new base on the James River.

No matter how and when General McClellan arrived at this decision, it was clearly a wrenching experience for him. After he sent the generals back to their commands he remained alone by the fire, by its light composing a long telegram to Secretary of War Stanton in Wash ington. At this midnight hour he was physically and emotionally exhausted, and the composure he had affected through the long day abruptly crumbled. His demoralization, which had begun two days before with the report that Stonewall Jackson was approaching, was now complete. In an outburst composed equally of venom and self-pity, he charged the government with treason.

“I have lost this battle because my force was too small,” he insisted. “I again repeat that I am not responsible for this. . . .” He claimed he had brought his last reserves into action: a few thousand more men “would have changed this battle from a defeat to a victory.” He said nothing of the 64,000 men who sat by idly south of the Chickahominy while Porter’s lines were driven in. “I feel too earnestly tonight,” he told Stanton, “—I have seen too many dead & wounded comrades to feel otherwise than that the Govt has not sustained this Army.” He said nothing of the fact that he had not been within two miles of the battlefield and its dead and wounded that day. He concluded his dispatch with an indictment: “If I save this Army now I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons in Washington—you have done your best to sacrifice this Army.”

Neither Secretary Stanton nor President Lincoln ever reacted to McClellan’s charge of treason, which fact McClellan laid to their guilty consciences. What he did not know was that neither man even saw the charge. Colonel Edward S. Sanford, head of the War Department’s telegraph office, was so shocked by McClellan’s accusation that he simply deleted the closing sentence and had the dispatch recopied before showing it to Stanton. The result was to fix General McClellan’s delusions even more firmly in his mind.

The president’s response was forbearing. “Save your Army at all events,” he telegraphed McClellan. He would send what reinforcements he could. “Of course they can not reach you to-day, to-morrow, or next day. . . . If you have had a drawn battle, or a repulse, it is the price we pay for the enemy not being in Washington. We protected Washington and the enemy concentrated on you. . . .” General McClellan was spared replying to that interpretation when Rebel cavalry reached his telegraph line and cut it.

Writing to his fiancee that day, Lincoln’s secretary John Nicolay reported Washington “almost wild with rumors and suspense.” The loss of the telegraph meant no news at all from the Peninsula, official or unofficial. A crowd gathered at Willard’s Hotel to sift the latest rumors, which ranged from the capture of Richmond to the capture of the Army of the Potomac. “Of course the suspense is terrible,” Nicolay wrote.

In Richmond the news of Gaines’s Mill created a mood of optimism. In his diary for June 28 Edmund Ruffin wrote, “From so many different informants, I trust that at least half of this good tiding may be true—& that will be enough to ensure to us a signal victory.” John Graeme of the Richmond Whig, when asked if there was now any way for McClellan to reach his gunboats, was heard to reply, “None under heaven that he could see except with his balloon.” A Georgia soldier in Huger’s command shared the mood. “One thing is certain,” he told his wife; “we have now got them scattered and squandered, and all we have got to do is push the thing to an end. . . .”

 

THROUGH THE NIGHT most of the Federals north of the river made their way to and across the Chickahominy bridges. Theirs was a dismal night. “Sleep on the sand without any blanket,” John M. Bancroft of the 4th Michigan wrote in his journal. “Woke up about 1 o’clock and crossed the river. One of those awful marches—night marches where we move 150 or 100 ft. to rest ten minutes or one-half hour.” Few of the men had tents or even blankets, and many had lost their knapsacks as well. Like Sergeant Bancroft, once they were safely across the river and the column halted, they turned into the nearest field or woods and threw themselves down exhausted, without food or shelter. Sykes’s regulars were the last to cross, at daybreak, burning the bridges behind them.

The badly wounded had to be left behind, and they and a good many stragglers were collected by the Rebels. Stonewall Jackson, reconnoitering out front, personally captured a group of fifteen or twenty Yankee stragglers, who proclaimed themselves honored to be taken by the famous Rebel chieftain. But the biggest catch was a brigadier general, John F. Reynolds, commander of a brigade in McCall’s Pennsylvania division. Exhausted after two days of continuous duty, Reynolds had thought to catch some sleep in a supposedly secure place and was overlooked in the retreat, and the next morning was awakened by some of D. H. Hill’s men. Taken to Hill’s headquarters in the McGehee house, Reynolds admitted to being mortified by the circumstances of his capture. The two had served together in the old army, and Hill assured Reynolds that everyone knew him to be a good soldier and would think none the less of him. “Reynolds,” he said, “do not feel so bad about your capture, it is the fate of wars.”

Among thousands of weapons the Confederates gleaned from the battlefield were several of the coffee-mill guns favored by Governor Curtin for his Pennsylvania regiments. Private Norton of the 83rd Pennsylvania saw one of these machine gun—like contrivances in action and described it as making “a noise like the dogs of war let loose.” They were proving unreliable in battle, however, especially the cartridge-feed mechanism. This may have been the problem with those captured, for there is no record of their further use by the Confederates.

To the victors belonged the spoils, and to hungry, threadbare Rebels there seemed no end of good things to be found on the field. “Knapsacks were captured by thousands and rifled,” wrote Barry Benson of the 1st South Carolina, “while the whole Confed. army refitted itself with blankets, rubber clothes, tentflies, haversacks, and canteens.” Union beef, hardtack, and coffee were consumed in great quantities. In almost every respect the Yankee goods were found to be superior to Confederate issue, and the former were promptly substituted for the latter. W. A. Kenyon on Hampton’s Legion wrote home to South Carolina that day on stationery colorfully decorated with the state seal of New Jersey and the engraved figure of a Union soldier which he had found in a Jerseyman’s knapsack. “We have been living high,” Kenyon assured the people at home. He was no doubt but one of countless Confederate soldiers writing to the homefolks on liberated Yankee stationery.

Among the relics found on the battlefield were numerous steel breastplates that Yankee inventors had sold to safety-conscious soldiers. What they all had in common was considerable weight, and in the haste of the retreat most had been simply discarded by their owners. Some, however, were found still strapped in place on the dead. Porter Alexander later examined one such case. He counted the dents of six musket balls and what he took to be a piece of canister, all of which had failed to penetrate the plate. But a single shell fragment had sliced a hole an inch by two inches and killed the wearer. The Rebels observed that a breastplate faced the wrong way on a retreat and served only to slow up the wearer. Yankee soldiers apparently agreed, and the use of body armor fell off considerably thereafter.

The main activity on the battlefield that night and the next day, June 28, was caring for the wounded and disposing of the dead. “I never had a clear conception of the horrors of war untill that night and the morning,” Texan A. N. Erskine wrote home. “. . . Friends and foes all together. . . . Oh the awful scene witnessed on the battle field. May I never see any more such in life. . . .” Burial parties were everywhere at work. Dr. Gaines, who earlier had so vehemently resented the burial of a few Federal soldiers on his land, now witnessed far more interments on his property than he could have ever imagined. They were buried in mass graves, Lieutenant John W. Hinsdale noted, “without ceremony or decency even.” Virginian William G. Morris, assigned to one of the burial details, confided to his wife that of the Federal dead “a great many they throughed in the River & creeks when convenient.” Many others they simply left unburied.

Dr. James L. Boulware, a surgeon with the 6th South Carolina, remarked in his journal that “now came the busiest time for the surgeons. Ambulance after ambulance came up with its load until a two acre lot was filled completely.” Every house and outbuilding on the north bank of the Chickahominy from Mechanicsville to Old Cold Harbor held its quota of casualties, from both armies, and when the buildings were filled the yards around them became checkerboards of wounded, with narrow aisles left for the doctors and stretcher bearers. A Georgia cavalryman took notice of two men, apparently with mortal wounds, who were set aside to die while the doctors worked on those they might save. The two were in an attitude of prayer, one silent, the other intoning over and over, “Oh, my Jesus, sweet Jesus, come, take me home!” The cavalryman could only give them water and then turn away.

As they had after Seven Pines, the women of Richmond came forward to care for those wounded once again pouring into the city. Confederate gunner Henry Berkeley was at the Virginia Central depot, newly converted into a dressing station where casualties were brought for preliminary treatment. “The ladies of Richmond, may God ever bless them . . .,” he wrote in his diary, “moved like ministering angels among these sufferers. . . .”

The Yankee wounded from Gaines’s Mill who had been carried back across the Chickahominy were in worse straits, for with the White House base abandoned they could not be transported to Northern hospitals for advanced care. Instead they were crowded into a huge field hospital at Savage’s Station on the York River Railroad, where surgeons labored around the clock to treat them. A New Jersey man having his wound dressed there matter-of-factly noted in his diary, “Four tables amputating all day.”

 

SATURDAY, JUNE 28, would be remembered as the eye of the hurricane that was the Seven Days. For three days, with increasing fury, the storm had torn at the two armies. Three more days of such fury were yet to come. On Day Four, however, as if the eye at the center of the storm was passing over, it was quiet, almost serene. There was fighting, to be sure, but with a total of only 235 casualties it was hardly noticeable compared with what had passed and what was to come. June 28 was instead a day of intense calculation on the part of the two commanders.

Although he had succeeded in seizing the strategic initiative, General Lee found himself in the peculiar position of having to wait for General McClellan to make the first move. The Federals’ retreat back across the Chickahominy effectively broke contact between the two armies. Federal guns controlling the river crossing sites from the south bank made direct pursuit impossible. The two lines still faced one another closely in front of Richmond, yet there was no real way for the Confederates to discover what was happening behind those formidable entrenchments if the Yankees chose to keep their movements secret. Even the smallest of rear guards might hold there against a reconnaissance by Magruder or Huger, and a planned balloon ascension that day by Porter Alexander was frustrated by high winds. Lee calculated that McClellan would make one of three movements on June 28, and he did what he could to gain the necessary intelligence, yet the entire day would pass before he felt certain of his opponent’s decision.

The first possibility was that McClellan would remain on the Chickahominy and fight for his railroad supply line to White House—as Lee believed McClellan had done the previous day at Gaines’s Mill—thereby hoping still to put Richmond under siege. His second choice would be instead of fighting to fall back down the Peninsula, recrossing the Chickahominy farther downstream and regaining his link with the York River—in effect withdrawing along the way he had come and from there perhaps starting his campaign over again. The third possibility would be to give up the Chickahominy line entirely and retreat southward to a safe haven under the guns of the Federal navy on the James. (General Lee apparently concluded that since his opponent had not rushed straight for Richmond on the twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh, he was not going to attempt it now.)

The only way to discover whether McClellan was making for the James, however, was to discover that he was not adopting either of the two other alternatives. To find this out, Lee sent Dick Ewell’s division and Jeb Stuart’s cavalry downstream to try to seize both White House and the railroad and to observe the lower Chickahominy crossings. With the rest of his main striking force he would remain on the north bank of the river, so as to be in a commanding position against either of the first two movements. He could only then wait for answers as the hours ticked away.

The network of roads south of the Chickahominy and east of Richmond did not favor the Federals in their retreat. Most travel in the region was east and west, and there were comparatively few north-south roads. Consequently, to reach the James from their lines in front of Richmond they had first to fall back southeasterly some six miles, then at the crossings of White Oak Swamp turn south. For most of the Yankee troops the march over these roads would be no more than fifteen miles, yet better than three days would be required for the army to cover that distance.

This slow pace was due in part to the limited number of roads and bridges, and in part to the sheer size of the Army of the Potomac: over 99,000 men, 281 pieces of field artillery and 26 heavy guns of the siege train, something over 3,800 wagons and ambulances, and 2,500 head of beef on the hoof. But the primary reason for the deliberateness of the movement proved to be General McClellan’s obsessive caution in disengaging his forces from what he took to be overwhelming numbers of Confederates on every hand. Withdrawal from in front of a superior foe, he would explain, is “always regarded as the most hazardous of military expedients.” As a consequence of his misguided caution—the Young Napoleon was in fact fleeing from an army four-fifths the size of his own—Lee was granted the opportunity to catch McClellan on the march and destroy him.

By dawn on June 28 Yankee engineers were in White Oak Swamp to construct crossings. Before this the swamp had served to anchor the left flank of the Federal line before Richmond, and the bridges there had been cut down; now they had to be reconstructed to permit the army to make good its escape. Lieutenant William Folwell’s 50th New York engineer regiment was assigned to rebuild White Oak Bridge. “What the Bridge was for,” Folwell wrote his wife, “we did not know but some of us had our guess. At 20 min. to 5 our bridge was begun, 20 min. to 7 the word done was passed, and the head of Gen. Peck’s (Casey’s old) Division filed on to the bridge. So the stream began to flow and so poured in steady tide. . . .”

A mile and a half upstream, at Brackett’s Ford, engineers built a second bridge. By noon that day the head of Keyes’s Fourth Corps was across the swamp, and the supply trains began crossing. During the afternoon Porter’s battered Fifth Corps began moving through the corridor. The word that it was a retreat swept through the ranks. In his diary that day a Rhode Island artillerist wrote, “A deep gloom is prevailing over the whole army.” Lieutenant Haydon of Phil Kearny’s division, who expected to be in the rear guard and who believed “our situation is one of uncommon danger,” used his diary entry for June 28 to settle accounts and make his testament to the members of his family “if I fall.”

Understanding so little of the point or purpose of the movement was unsettling to the men and heightened their fears. In a marching column of McCall’s Pennsylvanians a sudden noise of approaching horses raised the alarm that Rebel cavalry was attacking, sending the men tumbling into the woods on either side and emptying the road in a matter of moments. A few moments more brought the cause of the panic into view—a sutler’s wagon proceeding along peacefully enough at a trot. Sheepishly, shaking their heads, the men resumed their places in the column.

In his defense of his change of base, General McClellan would claim much for the efficiency of the march to the James. The movement, he told President Lincoln afterward, was without a parallel “in the annals of war.” It was in truth managed with much inefficiency. The route was so poorly reconnoitered that for much of the time the entire army was unnecessarily crowded onto a single road, the Quaker Road; a second nearby woods road was only discovered by accident, then went unused until it was finally rediscovered, again quite by accident. Two roads farther to the east were never found at all. Baldy Smith would remember the march as “without much except accident to direct it.” Giving priority to a slow-moving, mile-long herd of beef cattle also contributed to the lagging pace. Having started with a twenty-four-hour lead, the Federals soon enough squandered that advantage and were forced to fight for their lives.

Over the previous three days the sun had baked the roads hard and dry, and as that Saturday wore on the Confederates began seeing slow-rising clouds of dust south of the Chickahominy. The Yankee army was moving. The dust clouds suggested a movement to the east, which was little help to General Lee in deciphering the Federals’ intentions; a shift eastward fitted any of McClellan’s alternatives. In midafternoon, however, a courier from Jeb Stuart arrived with more certain news. Stuart and Dick Ewell had reached the York River Railroad at Dispatch Station and reported it undefended. After tearing up track and cutting the telegraph line, the Rebels pushed on to the nearby Chickahominy crossings, and at their approach the enemy fired both the railroad bridge and the Willamsburg Stage Road crossing at Bottom’s Bridge. This was conclusive—beyond any doubt General McClellan was abandoning his railroad supply line.

In due course Stuart reached White House and found it evacuated and great piles of stores and forage ablaze. A Federal straggler had fired the plantation house that Mrs. General Lee earlier persuaded McClellan to safeguard, and soon nothing remained standing of the building but its chimneys. Stuart’s troopers would manage to rescue sufficient sutlers’ stock from the wreck to enjoy a memorable feast that included iced lemonade, pickled oysters, canned ham, French rolls, and cake, concluding with fresh-ground coffee and fine Havana cigars. A trooper in the Jeff Davis Mississippi Legion described the scene at White House as “an awfull destruction,” but added that the entire brigade dined well and “filled their haversacks with good things. . . .” Jeb Stuart and the cavalry experienced few of war’s hardships on the Peninsula.

High-tempered Bob Toombs, a Georgian with a long career in politics, was outspoken in his contempt for professional soldiers—he described his superior as “that old ass Magruder”—and on June 28, as on the day before, his overaggressiveness entangled him in an unhappy clash with the Yankees. It again took place at the James Garnett farm, three-quarters of a mile from Old Tavern and the same distance from the Chickahominy. David R. Jones, commanding a division under Magruder, suspected that the Federals might be pulling back that morning, and he initiated a reconnaissance in force to test his theory. Taking it upon himself to order his fellow brigade commander, George T. Anderson, to advance along with him, Toombs converted Jones’s reconnaissance into an attack. Before higher command could countermand the move, two Georgia regiments were badly cut up. The repulse, as on the twenty-seventh, was delivered by Baldy Smith’s command.

Ironically Toombs’s brigade escaped with minimal casualties, but “Tige” Anderson’s 7th and 8th Georgia lost between them 156 men. The Georgians managed to drive into the outer Yankee works, but the farther they advanced the more fire they drew. They faced at least one of the coffee-mill guns, in the lines of the 49th Pennsylvania. “It seemed impossible for a man to escape,” a private in the 7th Georgia wrote his wife. “The bullets fell just like hail.” When the order finally came to withdraw it was little better. “We could not form under such a fire, so every man had to look out for himself.” The outcome left him embittered: “I hope our generals are now satisfied that the 7th and 8th regiments cannot whip the whole Yankee nation. . . .” Over two days political general Toombs’s ill-starred adventuring had cost the Confederacy 438 men, against a Federal loss of 189.

On another front, however, there was reason for Richmonders to rejoice that day. From Petersburg, twenty miles to the south, came a dispatch announcing that the Yankees “have suddenly and unexpectedly left the Appomattox.” Over the past several days the Rebels had watched apprehensively as a Union flotilla came up the James and turned into the Appomattox River, obviously intent on a mission of some sort. Abruptly, giving up whatever was intended, the flotilla steamed away.

The whole affair had a comic-opera flavor to it that was entirely appropriate to its origins. A few days before, General McClellan had called on the navy to mount an expedition to destroy the Swift Creek Bridge on the railroad between Richmond and Petersburg, over which he supposed Beauregard’s thousands were pouring in from the West to reinforce Richmond. Dutifully the navy assembled a flotilla that included the Monitor, the Galena, and an odd sort of submarine propelled by oars called the Alligator to run up the Appomattox to Swift Creek. The water proved too shallow for the Alligator to submerge, however, and she was sent back in disgrace. The other vessels were also hampered by the shallows and obstructions in the Appomattox and harassed by Rebel sharpshooters and artillerists, and finally the commander gave up in disgust, having to set fire to one vessel that was hard aground as he left. Richmond’s southern flank was once again secure.

McClellan had shifted army headquarters two miles southeast to Savage’s Station on the railroad, and the order went out that after dark the three corps still holding the lines in front of Richmond must start pulling back down the railroad to a new position well behind the old Seven Pines battlefield and in front of Savage’s. They would compose a rear guard of half the army to cover the White Oak Swamp crossings. McClellan also called on Ambrose Burnside to abandon all operations on the North Carolina coast and instead bring his division as reinforcement for the Potomac army on the Peninsula. Finally, the general commanding issued a circular to all commands ordering that every thing “not indispensable to the safety or maintenance of the troops must be abandoned and destroyed.” This sacrifice, he said, is “for the short season only, it is hoped. . . .”

Lieutenant Colonel Barton Alexander of the engineers went to McClellan and urged him to rescind the order. It would demoralize both officers and men, he said, telling them in no uncertain terms “that they were a defeated army, running for their lives.” Alexander testified that he was successful in getting the recision, yet even so a good many units had already gotten the circular and carried out its provisions. No fires were permitted for fear of tipping off the enemy, so the destruction was carried out with knives, bayonets, axes, and anything else that came to hand. Tents and clothing were slashed to ribbons, officers’ baggage destroyed, and camp equipage of every kind wrecked. Then the troops were marched to the commissary stores and told to help themselves to all they could carry. As had been the case with the Rebel troops at Manassas back in March, it was evident to everyone that what they could not eat on the spot or carry away was going to be destroyed.

At 2:00 A.M. Sunday morning, in a rain shower, McClellan’s shortlived field headquarters at Savage’s Station was broken up and the headquarters train marched five and a half miles east and then south, crossing White Oak Bridge and setting up again on the south edge of the swamp. The general commanding snatched an hour or two of sleep, but no more than that, so intent was he on supervising the smallest detail of the saving of his army. By contrast, the previous evening General Lee, certain now that the James River was his opponent’s objective, issued orders for pursuit in the morning and by 11:00 P.M. was asleep in his latest field headquarters, at Dr. Gaines’s house. Robert E. Lee’s principles of command included the determination to be well rested and fully alert for the battle, so that he might properly exercise the command.

 

THE ROAD NETWORK the Federals found awkward to use in their retreat to the James was, on the other hand, nicely suited to their Confederate pursuers. Fanning out east and south from Richmond were four main roads that might be used to intercept McClellan’s march. Interception was General Lee’s objective—not simply to lift the siege of Richmond, which he had now accomplished, but to bring the Army of the Potomac to battle away from its entrenchments and crush it. Lee believed that taking the North’s principal army in front of Richmond would mean independence for the Confederacy. General McClellan believed precisely the same thing.

Lee assigned the direct and immediate pursuit to Prince John Magruder, who was to push ahead with his command due east along the Williamsburg Road and the York River Railroad against the Federal rear guard, his purpose to force the Yankees to turn and fight. Benjamin Huger, guarding Richmond on Magruder’s right, would take the next road to the right, the Charles City Road, to intercept the enemy’s line of march south of White Oak Swamp at the hamlet of Glendale, on the Quaker Road.

The divisions of Longstreet and A. P. Hill had the longest march. From the Gaines’s Mill battlefield they were to turn back to the New Bridge crossing of the Chickahominy, follow that to the Nine Mile Road and from there to a north-south lateral road behind Magruder and Huger, then turn back to the southeast on the next road beyond Huger, the Darbytown Road. This would bring them to the Long Bridge Road that led to Glendale. The last of the roads fanning out from Richmond, the River Road, the southernmost of the four, reached the James at an eminence known as Malvern Hill. It was assigned to the division of Theophilus Holmes.

Stonewall Jackson, with D. H. Hill still attached to his command, had orders to join the pursuit by the shortest route, due south. Rebuilding the Grapevine Bridge and crossing the Chickahominy there, he would take position to close with the Yankee rear guard in the area of Savage’s Station, to Magruder’s left. In thus attempting to bring the enemy to bay, Lee’s plan was much like Joe Johnston’s three-pronged plan for opening the Seven Pines battle. This time it would be Prince John Magruder in the center, with Huger on the right and Jackson on the left.

Meanwhile, Dick Ewell’s division and Jeb Stuart’s cavalry were to remain north of the Chickahominy, at Bottom’s Bridge and to the east, to make sure McClellan was not shamming a move to the James while escaping across the Chickahominy downstream and retreating down the Peninsula. This struck General Lee as unlikely, however. “His only course seemed to me was to make for James River . . .,” he told President Davis that day; “the whole army has been put in motion upon this supposition.”

Lee’s plan for the pursuit of the Army of the Potomac on June 29 was as aggressive as his earlier plan for attacking Porter’s Fifth Corps north of the Chickahominy. It involved the same kinds of movements. To catch the enemy at the difficult White Oak Swamp crossings would require coordinating the marches of three separate, widely dispersed columns—those of Magruder, Huger, and Jackson—so that they would fall simultaneously on an enemy whose actual position was not yet precisely known. The movements of the divisions of Longstreet and A. P. Hill, and of Holmes, were less critical to the events of June 29, for they had the longest marches and Lee anticipated their crucial roles in the pursuit being played the next day, June 30. As it was on the days of Mechanicsville and Gaines’s Mill, much would depend this Sunday on Stonewall Jackson’s arriving at the right place in good season.

Considering that the Grapevine Bridge had yet to be rebuilt while New Bridge was already back in service, Lee might have arranged his maneuvers differently on June 29. He might have put Jackson’s command, as well as Longstreet’s and A. P. Hill’s, across the Chickahominy at New Bridge. He had to question, however, whether New Bridge (and the small infantry bridge nearby the engineers had repaired) had the capacity to cross that many troops within a reasonable period of time. Furthermore, the New Bridge route would increase Jackson’s march from two miles to eleven miles, and leave him poorly positioned to strike the enemy’s rear guard. The experienced engineer in General Lee concluded that rebuilding the Grapevine Bridge would be the least of problems that day. It turned out to be the largest of problems.

During the night Longstreet had dispatched two of his engineer officers to scout across the Chickahominy, and at first light on Sunday morning they sent back word that the Federal entrenchments were empty. Here finally was direct testimony to the Yankees’ retreat. Soon afterward a report to the same effect arrived from General Magruder, along with the dramatic announcement that he was preparing to advance to battle. Magruder’s grandiloquence brought from Lee the caution that he take care during his assault not to injure Longstreet’s engineers, who now occupied the works. Lee then crossed the river himself at New Bridge and sent word to Prince John to meet him to confer; the general commanding wanted no misunderstanding of his intentions that day.

The two generals met on the Nine Mile Road and as they rode together toward Fair Oaks Station Lee outlined his plan and the disposition of his forces. Magruder was in a nervous, agitated state and did not grasp everything Lee said; he thought, for example, that Huger’s division would be close by on the Williamsburg Road instead of several miles farther to the right on the Charles City Road. Prince John had been up all the previous night and furthermore was suffering from acute indigestion, and his surgeon had treated him with a mixture that included morphine, which was acting on him as an irritant. What Lee did manage to impress on him was that he had primary responsibility for the pursuit of the Federals that day. What Lee did not realize was that Magruder was not in condition for such responsibility. At Fair Oaks Station they parted, and Lee rode on to consult with Benjamin Huger. Magruder was left to face the test alone.

It was soon evident on this clear and very hot Sunday just where General Magruder would find the enemy. Roiling black clouds of smoke rose high over Orchard Station and Savage’s Station on the railroad as the Yankees began destroying everything they could not carry away. Witnesses groped for words to describe the immensity of the destruction. Chaplain J. J. Marks of the 63rd Pennsylvania watched as troops and teamsters hurled articles of every description into the spreading flames and termed the scene “altogether unearthly and demoniac.” One particularly huge stack of blazing hardtack boxes and provision barrels attracted everyone’s attention. A farmer in the ranks compared it in size to several large barns pushed together. A Philadelphian thought it the size of a city block of two-story houses; a Bostonian considered it as large as Faneuil Hall. They all agreed it made a spectacular bonfire.

Whiskey from stove-in barrels intensified the fires and flowed in flaming rivers in every direction, and men burned themselves trying to salvage a canteen-full. Rifles were destroyed by smashing the stocks against trees and throwing the barrels into the fires. Medicines were poured into springs and down wells. Beef and pork and coffee and vinegar were thrown into lakes of molasses. “The flames roared and snapped, and its vicinity was exceedingly hot,” Lieutenant Thomas Livermore wrote, “and we had a sort of savage joy in seeing the destruction which would keep our rations from the enemy.”

One of the last trains to come up from White House and not yet unloaded was set afire on a siding at Savage’s Station, and soon the flames and smoke were punctuated by the rapid-fire explosions of artillery shells which produced a rain of flaming debris. Yankee ingenuity was applied to a second train loaded with ammunition. The cars were set afire and the locomotive, with a full head of steam and the throttle tied down, was sent rushing down the tracks toward the Chickahominy with its lethal cargo. On the other side of the river Campbell Brown, General Ewell’s aide, saw the train coming, the boxcars flashing and exploding like a bizarre fireworks display, and told his men to run for it when it looked as if the train would jump the stream. Instead it plunged off the broken bridge and into the river in a cataclysmic explosion that shook the ground and broke windows three-quarters of a mile away. An enormous mushroom-shaped cloud of smoke surged upward, whitish gray on top and dark gray underneath, reaching more than a thousand feet. Major Brown would remember it as “one of the grandest sights I ever looked at.”

As the wagon trains started south and east and the reserve artillery and the columns of infantry joined the stream, it became obvious to those in the Savage’s Station field hospital that they were going to be left behind in the retreat. To be sure, there was no official announcement from headquarters, but they saw many of the surgeons being called back to their regiments and the army’s ambulances going with them—going empty so as to be available for the next battle.

Before long Chaplain Marks saw a “long, scattered line of the patients staggering away, some carrying their guns, and supporting a companion on an arm. . . . They retired one by one across the fields, and were lost in the forest. . . .” Corporal John S. Judd, wounded in the arm at Gaines’s Mill, spoke for hundreds when he wrote in his diary that day, “Ordered to leave in morning or be taken prisoner. . . . Walked 8 miles.” Judd and his comrades were the lucky ones. Some 3,000 men in the field hospital, too ill or too badly wounded to move, would be made prisoners by the Rebels. Leaving them to their fate, Major Thomas Hyde of the 7th Maine wrote home, made his blood boil: “Their cries are yet ringing in my ears.”

Like the slow current of a sluggish river, the wagon trains and artillery batteries made their way southward. “The halting of a single wagon for any purpose checked the entire movement,” wrote William Le Due, quartermaster of the Second Corps. “There was no such thing as passing unless a new road was cut around the obstruction.” Whenever a wagon or a caisson or a team broke down, it was pushed off to the side so that the march might continue. At such times, wrote Sergeant Thomas Evans of the U.S. 12th Infantry, “a convocation of teamsters assembles, and we have as much blasphemy—horrid, outlandish, and newly-invented oaths—as can be heard anywhere this side of hell.” Even so, the head of any column leaving Savage’s Station reached White Oak Swamp five miles distant before the rear of the column had even started. Hour after hour, without pause, the labored movement continued.

As yet it was a movement untroubled by the enemy. General Keyes had pushed ahead a mixed picket of infantry and cavalry to hold the Quaker Road, beyond the swamp, and at 9:00 A.M. a reconnoitering force of Confederate cavalry collided with this picket, with unhappy consequences. The Rebels, led by the 1st North Carolina cavalry, incautiously rode right into an ambush. “With the help of two guns with us we about ruined this Cavalry Regiment . . .,” Elisha Hunt Rhodes of the 2nd Rhode Island reported in his diary. “As we were concealed in the woods the enemy rode right up to us and did not hit even one of our men.” The cost to the Rebels was 62 troopers, 48 of them taken prisoners; the Federals lost just 6 men, all from the 3rd Pennsylvania cavalry. The clash demonstrated to General Lee that the Yankees were well on their way to the James, and that it would take more than cavalry to block their escape.

 

IN SHIFTING army headquarters from Savage’s Station to the far side of White Oak Swamp, General McClellan was once again leaving any fighting that might take place that day to his lieutenants. He left orders for the rear guard’s retreat but appointed no one to command it in his absence. This was no doubt deliberate; Bull Sumner, the senior general, was the last general McClellan wanted in command of anything. As he told his wife, Sumner in charge “would be utter destruction to the army. . . .”

Consequently, the three corps commanders in the rear guard—Sumner, Franklin, and Heintzelman—acted according to their own best lights. The first to go his own way was Sumner, who opposed even the idea of a retreat. Early on June 29 he took his Second Corps back from the fortifications as ordered, but only as far as Allen’s farm on the railroad near Orchard Station, two miles short of Savage’s Station where the rest of the rear guard was headed. At 9:00 A.M. Magruder’s advance found him there, and Sumner promptly made a sharp fight of it in Mr. Allen’s peach orchard.

Tige Anderson’s Georgia brigade bore the brunt of this fight, as it had the day before at the Garnett farm, but this time it had better fortune. For nearly two hours two Georgia regiments fought it out with two Pennsylvania regiments, and when it was over the Georgians had lost 28 men and the Pennsylvanians 119. Then, wrote a Second Corps diarist, “the enemy skeddadled one way & we went the opposite.”

There was one additional Confederate casualty that morning: Brigadier General Richard Griffith, commanding a brigade of Mississippians well to the rear in reserve, who was mortally wounded by a stray Federal shell. Major Brent of Magruder’s staff described the Federal artillery fire as entirely harmless but for that one shell, and wondered at the fate that had singled out the general for death.

The rest of the Federal rear guard was meanwhile falling into what Baldy Smith described as “a muddle.” It presented nothing like a continuous front to the enemy. Sumner in the center was well out ahead of Heintzelman on the left. Baldy Smith on the right discovered his division had no protection on either flank. Franklin discovered that his other Sixth Corps division, under Henry Slocum, had without notice been ordered away to White Oak Swamp by General McClellan. Confederates were reported across the river and as close as the Trent house, McClellan’s old headquarters. When Franklin sent a dispatch to Sumner pointing all this out and suggesting they take up a more unified position, old Sumner sent back to say he was in battle and would not turn his back to the foe.

Franklin and Smith and Heintzelman met together and (Smith recalled) “it was agreed to try and inveigle General Sumner back. . . .” Franklin made it a personal effort, going to Sumner at Allen’s farm and explaining that Baldy Smith was in grave danger of being cut off unless the Second Corps fell back to support him. A plea to help a fellow general was always enough for Bull Sumner, and by midafternoon the entire Federal rear guard was reassembled at Savage’s Station.

In a muddle himself, General Magruder was persuaded by the clash at Allen’s farm that rather than retreating the Yankees were preparing to attack him. This was in fact a common enough concern with Prince John. At Yorktown in early April and in the Richmond lines a few days before, the conviction that he was on the verge of being overwhelmed had inspired him to heights of bluff and deception so as to forestall the enemy. He hurried Major Brent to General Lee to plead for reinforcements. He instructed Brent to say that he had “found the enemy in numbers far exceeding him . . .,” and in addition to Jackson’s command already promised him he wanted help from Benjamin Huger.

Lee received the message in disbelief; surely an army in retreat would not want to bring on battle deliberately. Nevertheless, he agreed to have Huger send two brigades around to the Williamsburg Road to support Magruder, but if they were not engaged by two o’clock that afternoon they would be ordered back; Huger had “important duty” that must not be unduly delayed. This did little to calm the agitated Magruder. He had since learned from Jackson that his bridge building was going slowly and would not be completed for another two hours. Prince John therefore determined to wait for Huger’s men to come up on his right and Jackson’s on his left before resuming the movement. That prospect ought to have reassured him. If all these troops did indeed come together as promised, it would throw 46,600 men—well over half the army—against the Federal rear guard. And that would surely be enough to contend with the counterattack Prince John feared.

General Heintzelman was the next of the Yankee generals to go his own way. Sam Heintzelman was a grizzled veteran of thirty-six years’ service who viewed events with calm calculation. He observed that in front of Savage’s Station and extending from the Williamsburg Road to and across the railroad was a clearing half a mile wide, and that Sumner’s two divisions and Baldy Smith’s one—26,600 men—were more than adequate to hold this ground against whatever force Sumner had fended off earlier at Allen’s farm. He saw no space and no need for his Third Corps troops there. In any event, he regarded Sumner as an alarmist; in his diary in these weeks Heintzelman often remarked how the old soldier called out the troops to meet attacks that invariably proved to be the mildest of threats or no threats at all. Having discovered an open road south from the station and with McClellan’s retreat orders in mind, Heintzelman proceeded to march the Third Corps toward the White Oak Swamp crossings. He neglected to tell anyone of his departure, however, and in the concealing woods south of the Williamsburg Road no one saw him go.

Meanwhile, Prince John’s agitation had if anything increased. Two o’clock came and with it General Huger, who noted the quiet that prevailed on Magruder’s front and said he was honoring the order to reclaim his two brigades and resume his march down the Charles City Road. On the heels of that came a fresh message from Stonewall Jackson, in which that general announced he would be unable to cooperate with Magruder after all, “as he has other important duty to perform.”

This left Prince John to contemplate Lee’s order to pursue and attack the enemy, but now with none but his own troops to do so. That morning the prospect had been for a battle along the railroad perhaps as large as Gaines’s Mill, involving more than 90,000 men. Now, after the various defections on both sides, it promised only to pit Magruder’s 14,000 against Sumner’s 26,600. He sensed these odds. It was close to five o’clock in the afternoon when Magruder, with understandable caution, made contact with the Yankees at Savage’s Station.

Neither then nor later did the secretive Jackson reveal the “important duty” that prevented him from intercepting the Federals’ retreat that day. In fact, that duty was the consequence of a poorly drawn order sent out that morning by General Lee’s chief of staff, Colonel Robert H. Chilton. In the event McClellan might yet try to escape to the east the way he had come, crossing the Chickahominy downstream, Lee wanted Jeb Stuart to picket those crossing points, “advising Gen’l Jackson, who will resist their passage untill reinforced.” At 3:05 P.M. Jackson received Chilton’s dispatch, forwarded to him by Stuart. Writing on it “Genl. Ewell will remain near Dispatch Station & myself near my present position. T.J.J.,” he sent it back with Stuart’s courier. His important duty, then, was to stay where he was north of the river, ready to defend the Chickahominy crossings and prevent the enemy from escaping down the Peninsula.

Since later that day General Lee assured Magruder that “General Jackson has been ordered . . . to push the pursuit vigorously”—any other view of that order, he said later, was a “mistake”—Lee had obviously intended in the earlier dispatch for Jackson to continue as originally planned, crossing the river and advancing on the enemy. Then, if Stuart should signal him, he could move downriver on the south bank to resist a Yankee crossing. It was, in short, a contingency plan. Colonel Chilton’s dispatch failed to make this distinction clear, however, and since by three o’clock Jackson’s forces had not yet crossed the river (although Old Jack himself did cross and with a scouting party reconnoiter as far as the Trent house, thereby alarming the Federals), Jackson saw it as his duty to hold the Valley army right where it was.

As it happened, this mixup in orders made no real difference in Jackson’s progress that Sunday. Once again, he was plagued by unexpected delay in moving his command. Porter Alexander would blame this on Jackson’s rigid observance of the Sabbath, and initially at least Jackson’s fervid Sunday morning devotions may have distracted him from personally pressing his bridge building. However that may be, about midday he made the discovery that he was going to need more than one bridge to put his entire force across the Chickahominy in good season.

The Grapevine Bridge put up by Bull Sumner’s troops back in May was a narrow, ramshackle, amateurish affair that was rarely used by the Yankees after Lieutenant Colonel Barton Alexander of the engineers completed the far superior military bridge 400 yards upstream that bore his name. On the testimony of Confederate general Wade Hampton, Sumner’s Grapevine Bridge was repaired by noon on June 29, but it was soon evident that it would take far too many hours to cross all five divisions then under Jackson’s command by this tortuous route. Jackson had put the Reverend Dabney in charge of rebuilding Alexander’s Bridge (which Jackson and Dabney, among others, insisted on calling Grapevine Bridge, after the prewar crossing site of that name nearby). Engineering was not one of Dabney’s skills, however, and he had no idea how to direct the detail of soldiers assigned to the task; he remembered it only as a “shilly-shally” operation.

Finally recognizing the futility of Dabney’s efforts, Jackson replaced him with an experienced engineer, Captain C. R. Mason, who directed an equally experienced squad of slave laborers. Progress on Alexander’s Bridge became more rapid. Shortly before receiving Chilton’s dispatch from Stuart, Jackson reported the bridge “will from appearances be completed in less than 2 hours. . . .” It was night when it was finished, but even so it was considered an accomplishment. Note was made of a sign the Yankees had nailed to a tree announcing that Lieutenant Colonel Alexander, U.S. Engineers, had constructed this bridge in five days. In due course both bridges were used to cross Jackson’s command.

 

PRINCE JOHN MAGRUDER announced his arrival before Savage’s Station with a characteristic flourish. Advancing slowly from Richmond over the York River Railroad at the pace of the infantry was a locomotive pushing ahead of it history’s first armored railroad battery. Early in June, when he decided his opponent would try to carry his siege guns to Richmond by way of the railroad, General Lee sought to blockade the route with a siege weapon on his own. Since mounting a heavy gun capable of traverse on a railroad flatcar was not unlike mounting a pivot gun on a warship, he turned to the navy. The result, ready for use on the eve of the Seven Days, was a big 32-pounder Brooke naval rifle, shielded by a sloping casemate of railroad iron and nicknamed the “Land Merrimack.” It easily outranged any gun the Yankees had on the field that day, and, as a Rebel soldier told his wife, “during our progress . . . would be turned loose on the enemy to their great dismay.”

General Franklin was making a personal reconnaissance out in front of Savage’s Station with one of Sumner’s division commanders, John Sedgwick, when they sighted what they took to be a column of Heintzelman’s troops coming out of the woods ahead. Then Sedgwick took a closer look and exclaimed, “Why, those men are rebels!” “We then turned back in as dignified a manner as the circumstances would permit,” Franklin wrote, and thus the high command at Savage’s Station learned that Heintzelman’s Third Corps was nowhere to be found. When he was told this Sumner was particularly outraged, and seeing Heintzelman the next day he refused to speak to him. For old Sumner, one general leaving another’s flank uncovered was not easily forgiven. The Federal batteries opened fire and skirmishers went forward to locate the Rebels.

The Confederate force spotted so fortuitously by Franklin and Sedgwick was the South Carolina brigade of Joseph B. Kershaw, of Lafayette McLaws’s division leading Magruder’s march. Kershaw established his battle line in the woods along the western edge of the cleared ground in front of the station and opened a fierce firefight with one of Sedgwick’s brigades, led by William W. Burns, posted out in advance in the middle of the field.

Before long McLaws’s other brigade, under Paul J. Semmes, came up on Kershaw’s right, extending the Confederate battle line to and across the Williamsburg Road. As he advanced, Colonel Alfred Cumming of the 10th Georgia in Semmes’s brigade could see a Federal skirmish line moving toward him on the far side of a strip of trees separating two fields. “Forward double quick! March!” Colonel Cumming shouted, then decided that the situation required something stronger. “Run, men, run! Get into that wood before the enemy does.” The Georgians gained the woods but it was a close-run race, so close that the two lines opened fire just thirty paces apart. “I was surprised that all were not killed on both sides,” one of the Georgians remembered.

General Burns’s Philadelphia Brigade was now stretched dangerously thin in order to match this widening enemy front. The larger force was in danger of being outflanked by the smaller one. Burns sent back “in haste” for help. As it was of most engagements in which Bull Sumner played a leading role, the Federal management of the Battle of Savage’s Station was erratic.

In response to his call, two of Burns’s own regiments were sent forward, and then the 1st Minnesota from another brigade in Sedgwick’s division, and finally one regiment each from two different brigades in Israel Richardson’s division. Sumner’s way was to send in the first regiment that came under his eye. The Irishmen of the 88th New York rushed up to Burns’s position primed for a charge by old Sumner himself, who waved his hat and shouted out the order in his booming voice. Burns got them aimed in the right direction, down the Williamsburg Road, which was being swept by the fire of a Virginia battery. “They went in with a hurrah,” Burns said, “and the enemy’s battery fell back.”

The arrival of the Federal reinforcements put the two sides in rough equality, two brigades apiece, and the fighting in front of Savage’s Station settled down to a bloody stalemate as the daylight faded. “Water was awful scarce,” wrote a diarist in the 1st Minnesota. “I had to drink slough water as the weather was fairly scorching hot.” With measured, thundering regularity, the railroad battery dropped its heavy shells into the woods and fields on the Yankee front. Before its aim was corrected, several reached as far as the field hospital. With each firing the locomotive engineer released his brakes, and the train rolled backward to absorb the recoil of the big gun. In the dusk, wrote the historian of Kershaw’s brigade, only “the long line of fire flashing from the enemy’s guns revealed their position.”

Of his twenty-six Second Corps regiments General Sumner engaged but ten at Savage’s Station, and General Magruder was equally cautious. Of his six brigades he engaged only Kershaw’s and Semmes’s and half of Griffith’s Mississippi brigade, now commanded by William Barksdale. It was clear enough to Prince John that to attempt anything more would be essentially pointless. Lee’s purpose of forcing the Federal rear guard to fight had been achieved, and Magruder could see enough of the Union forces in front of him to know that he was substantially outnumbered. He was satisfied just to maintain the fight and the position.

Barksdale’s Mississippians and part of Semmes’s brigade were in the thick woods south of the Williamsburg Road where simply locating the enemy was difficult enough. The 5th Louisiana came on a body of troops in the woods some forty yards away but could not tell who they were. Private John Maddox was sent out ahead to find out. “Who are you?” he called out. “Friends,” was the reply. That was not assurance enough for Private Maddox, and he asked, “What regiment?” The reply came back, “Third Vermont,” and with that the battle was joined.

The 53rd Georgia was one of the new regiments inserted into Lee’s ranks just before the Seven Days, and Savage’s Station was its first fight. During the day-long advance the 53rd seemed always to be crossing muddy swamps or briary thickets. “You may know that it was tough working,” John Wood wrote home, “charging through such a place, with a knap sack, and it crammed chug full, and also my gun and other equipments.” Finally the 53rd went into action, but to its dismay, its first experience of war proved to be against friend rather than foe. It delivered a volley into the ranks of the 10th Georgia, which made a hasty march by the flank to escape. Then the rookies of the 53rd exchanged fire with a Mississippi regiment on the right. “The only damage we done, I believe, was that of killing our Major’s horse,” Private Wood reported. That at least seemed to settle them down, and afterward, Wood said, “I fired as coolly as if I had been shooting a squirrel.”

Before the battle began Baldy Smith had started his division on the road to White Oak Swamp but was soon recalled by Sumner. It was Smith’s Vermont brigade, under command of William T. H. Brooks, that made the fight in the dark woods to hold the flank south of the Williamsburg Road. The Vermonters charged into the woods only to be met by a withering fire, and suffered by far the most casualties of any brigade on the field that day. The 5th Vermont was hit particularly hard, losing nearly half its men—209 of 428, with one company having 25 of its 59 men killed—and the brigade as a whole taking 439 casualties.

Much of this loss was inflicted by Rebel soldiers equipped with old smoothbore muskets firing “buck and ball”—a cartridge containing a ball and three buckshot—which proved deadly at the short ranges of so much of the fighting here. At times it was hand-to-hand. General McLaws made note in his report that a Federal soldier attempted to wrench the flag away from the 10th Georgia’s color bearer “but was immediately knocked down and killed.”

When darkness ended the Battle of Savage’s Station about 9:00 P.M. the two sides were holding the same ground they had held at 5:00 p.m. Federal casualties were considerably greater, 919 against 444 for the Rebels. Including the morning’s clash on the Allen farm, Magruder inflicted a loss on the enemy that day of 1,038, against his own loss of just 473.

 

 

Even so, Day Five proved a considerable disappointment to General Lee. The pursuit had showed hardly any profit; the enemy had not been brought to bay against White Oak Swamp. To Magruder he sent an uncharacteristically sharply worded dispatch. “I regret much that you have made so little progress today in the pursuit of the enemy,” he told him. “In order to reap the fruits of our victory the pursuit should be most vigorous. . . . We must lose no more time or he will escape us entirely.”

There was considerable injustice in his rebuke. If Prince John had been wrong to announce earlier that he was about to be attacked by the Yankees, he had been right to point out that he was considerably outnumbered—by better than two to one, in fact. Without Jackson on the scene there was little chance that June 29 of inflicting any serious damage on the Federal rear guard. The true failings of the day’s pursuit were to be found in poor staff work at Lee’s headquarters and in Stonewall Jackson’s failure to put a driving force into the matter of bridge building.

 

PHIL KEARNY sardonically informed his men they were “the rear guard of all God’s creation.” On the Charles City Road late in the day Benjamin Huger halted his pursuing column three miles short of Glendale, his objective, when he encountered Kearny’s Yankees on his left in White Oak Swamp. Fearing he would be outflanked, cautious Huger quit his march for the day. Kearny, also fearing being outflanked, pulled back and took another crossing of the swamp.

The retreat went on. “I did not expect this would be the result of our campaign,” Elisha Hunt Rhodes wrote in his diary that day, “but I suppose it is all right.” “Have drawn back most of our forces and hope for the best,” a Massachusetts diarist wrote. “Perhaps all will come out in strategy. . . .”

During the day and into the night Federal columns were halted for hours in miles-long traffic jams. Men fell asleep where they stood or sat. “Officers nodded and swung this way and that in their saddles,” wrote a regimental surgeon. “The stillness of death prevailed.” The New York Tribune’s Charles Page thought it must have looked like this when Napoleon retreated from Moscow—“this herd of men and mules, wagons and wounded, men on horse, men on foot, men by the roadside, men perched on wagons, men searching for water, men famished for food, men lame and bleeding, men with ghostly eyes, looking out between bloody bandages. . . .”

By day the heat and dust were suffocating. Night compounded the confusion. Quartermaster Le Due of the Second Corps found a stalled supply train piled up behind a single wagon blocked by some obstruction or other and its driver fast asleep. Le Due kindled a roadside fire to locate and clear the obstruction and drove the mules ahead with his sword’s point. Keep moving, forget proper march order, he kept repeating; they must get to the James or be taken.

General Keyes, interrogating a local farmer “under fine of death,” learned of an old unused woods road east of the Quaker Road and used it to carry his Fourth Corps trains to the river. The Fifth Corps, by contrast, lost its way entirely in the darkness and took a heading straight for Richmond. It was General Meade, able to navigate by the stars, who realized they had turned in the wrong direction and got the column stopped before it stumbled into the enemy lines. “March and wait and march and wait and then countermarch,” was how a Fifth Corps soldier summed up the night. “May you never experience how tired we were.” It would be remembered as the “blind march.”

No one knew when Rebels might be encountered in the blackness, and the columns moved in enforced silence. “Nothing was heard but the steady tramp, tramp of the men, and the creaking of the wheels of the artillery and the ammunition train,” wrote the historian of the 10th Massachusetts. “. . . Hour after hour this march was kept up in the narrow, forest-lined road leading to the river. Streams were forded by the light of pitch-pine torches held on either bank.” In the cavalry escort troopers were seen to give up their saddles to wounded and sick from the Savage’s Station field hospital. A sudden thunderstorm drenched everyone, but at least the way was revealed by the flashes of lightning. “No one who participated in the march that Sunday night,” the regimental historian wrote, “will ever forget it.”

The last scheduled to take up the retreat on June 29 was the rear guard that had fought at Savage’s Station, and once again Bull Sumner balked. General McClellan’s orders were shown to him, but Sumner’s blood was up and he said the general commanding did not know how circumstances had changed since he issued those orders. He had stopped the enemy that day and could do it again, Sumner told General Franklin. “I never leave a victorious field. Why! if I had twenty thousand more men, I would crush this rebellion.”

Franklin could do nothing with him, and finally he sent an aide to find McClellan and report the old soldier’s intransigence. Back to Savage’s Station came McClellan’s inspector general, Colonel Delos Sacket, with written orders for Sumner to take up the retreat. Sacket had his own orders as well: “If he fails to comply with the order you will place him in close arrest and give the necessary orders to Genl Richardson & Sedgwick and tell them that the orders must be complied with at once.” Sumner’s new orders were read to him, and that was enough. With a sigh he turned to his staff. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you hear the orders; we have nothing to do but obey.” The Second Corps promptly took up the march for White Oak Swamp.

Captain George W. Hazzard’s battery of the 4th U.S. Artillery had seen hot action during all the fighting that day, and immediately afterward the captain and his gun crews bedded down for the night. When the corps pulled out no one thought to look for Hazzard’s battery. At first light the artillerymen were awakened by reveille sounding from an unexpected direction, where no Yankee troops were supposed to be. Clearly they were the only Yankees on the field. Hazzard had the guns and caissons limbered up as silently as possible. Just as silently, they slipped off the field at a walk. As soon as the road entered the forest the pace was advanced to a trot. “We bowled along in fine style,” reported one of the relieved officers. Soon they began encountering numerous stragglers, to whom they announced that there was no one behind them but Rebels. That advanced the stragglers’ pace.

As the sun came up Hazzard’s battery reached White Oak Bridge, which the trailing brigade of Richardson’s division was just then preparing to fire. The moment the guns had clattered across and as many of the stragglers as were in sight, the bridge was set ablaze. The Army of the Potomac was safely across White Oak Swamp.