13

Richmond Delivered

FIRST LIGHT ON Wednesday, July 2, revealed Malvern Hill obscured by a ground fog, gray against a threatening gray sky. The sounds of wounded men with enough strength still to cry out echoed eerily through the fog. After a time the fog began to eddy and drift, gradually unveiling a nightmarish scene on the slopes. Colonel William W. Averell of the 3rd Pennsylvania cavalry, commanding the picket line left behind on Malvern Hill, remembered it as an “appalling spectacle.” Of the thousands of Rebel soldiers who had fallen the evening before, “enough were alive and moving to give the field a singular crawling effect.” Near the crest a row of bodies marked the final failure of the repeated assaults. Emerging from the woods below came men to aid those who might yet be saved.

In the middle of the night Stonewall Jackson’s lieutenants had come to him for directions for deploying their forces to meet a Federal attack in the morning. Jackson was awakened with difficulty and then listened patiently to their questions. “McClellan and his army will be gone by daylight,” he said, and went back to sleep. His generals thought him mad, Hunter McGuire, Jackson’s medical director, remembered, “but the prediction was true.” When Old Jack rose that morning, and before it was known that the Yankees had indeed gone, his first order was to remove all the bodies from in front of his lines. If the attack was renewed, he explained, “it won’t do to march the troops over their own dead . . .”

The Federals who had fought the day before at Malvern Hill, or who had watched that fighting, were to a man startled by McClellan’s order to take up the retreat once more. It had not always been easy to know who had won or lost in some of the earlier Seven Days’ fighting, but there was no doubt who had won on July 1. “The idea of stealing away in the night from such a position, after such a victory, was simply galling,” wrote Captain Biddle from the staff. A number of generals in addition to Fitz John Porter spoke out that giving up Malvern Hill was a terrible mistake. Phil Kearny was furious. To his fellow generals in the Third Corps he raged, “I, Philip Kearny, an old soldier, enter my solomn protest against this order for retreat.” Instead of retreating they should be launching an immediate counterstroke to capture Richmond. “I say to you all, such an order can only be prompted by cowardice or treason.”

General McClellan, back aboard the Galena and well out of range of any protest, had his mind fixed only on escape. From Malvern Hill to Harrison’s Landing by way of the River Road was eight miles, and by daylight the army was well embarked on the journey. Captain Auchmuty of the Fifth Corps termed it “a regular stampede, each man going off on his own hook, guns in the road at full gallop, teams on one side in the fields, infantry on the other in the woods.” Then it began to rain in torrents, and the rain continued for twenty-four hours.

Something about this downpour seemed the last straw, seemed to wash away the bonds that had held the army together during the week of fighting, and what began as a stampede ended as a rout. “The soldiers who had fought so magnificently for the last week, marching by night and fighting by day, were now a mob,” wrote General Darius Couch.

The River Road, like every Peninsula road when it rained, quickly became a river of mud. Entire wagon trains bogged down. Quartermaster William Le Due, trying to sort out one particular snarl, came on an ambulance blocking a narrow passage, its team and driver exhausted and helpless. Passing by on either side were streams of muddy, drenched infantrymen, hurrying along silently in the rain, paying no attention to the teamster’s pleas for help. Le Due himself unloaded the ambulance’s medical supplies so that it might be moved on.

Losses of materiel and equipment were enormous. The Potomac army suffered the loss of some 500 wagons and ambulances in the Seven Days, perhaps a third of them in this last retreat. Many men threw away their rifles, and straggling was heavy. The army would officially record 818 men missing as a result of Malvern Hill, and the Confederates captured virtually none of them in battle; they were taken as stragglers. A brigade in the Fourth Corps, for example, posted more than a mile from any fighting on July 1, recorded 121 men missing. The straggling toll would have been considerably higher but for the efforts of a provost guard of hardbitten cavalry regulars, which reported collaring 1,200 stragglers from the rear of the army.

Harrison’s Landing, selected personally by General McClellan as his safe haven, was the site of Berkeley Hundred, the historic seat of the Harrisons of Virginia, who had produced a signer of the Declaration of Independence and, in William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States. The Berkeley mansion overlooked the landing wharf; a mile downstream was Westover, the former seat of the Byrds of Virginia. The army’s new position, embracing Berkeley and Westover, was bounded on the west by Kimmage’s Creek; on the east, and curving around to the north, was the swamp and watercourse of Herring Creek.

Into this area bounded by the creeks, some four miles long and a mile or so deep, crowded the entire Army of the Potomac: 90,000 men, 288 guns, 3,000 wagons and ambulances, 2,500 beef cattle, 27,000 horses and mules. McClellan explained to President Lincoln, “I have not yielded an inch of ground unnecessarily but have retired to prevent the superior force of the Enemy from cutting me off—and to take a different base of operations.” Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory took a different view. “The Great McClelland the young Napoleon,” Mallory told his wife, “now like a whipped cur lies on the banks of the James River crouched under his Gun Boats. . . .”

That morning, July 2, in the parlor of the Poindexter house east of the Quaker Road, Lee and his generals were pondering the disappearance of the Federals from Malvern Hill. All that was known for certain was that McClellan had marched to the east along the north bank of the James, toward an unknown destination and for an unknown purpose. As he had done following Gaines’s Mill, General Lee continued to credit his opponent with a certain degree of military acumen and a fighting spirit; he did not yet understand that some days since, the Young Napoleon had lost his nerve and thrown over his campaign and thought now of nothing but escape. Lee’s immediate need was intelligence on the enemy’s prospects.

Jeb Stuart, who had come across the Peninsula from White House on the Pamunkey, was sent off to the east with the cavalry to locate the Federals and determine if they were offering battle at some new location. An equally likely prospect, as Lee saw it, was for McClellan to cross the James and advance on Richmond, or on Petersburg, from the south bank of the river. The Federal navy’s recent activity on the James and up the Appomattox toward Petersburg seemed to suggest such a plan. To counter this, Theophilus Holmes and his division were ordered back to Drewry’s Bluff to defend that key spot. The two commands that had not fought the day before, Longstreet’s and Jack son’s (less D. H. Hill’s division), were to prepare to march in pursuit of the Yankee army.

Longstreet’s ride to the Poindexter house had taken him across the battlefield, and Lee invited his observations of the previous day’s fight. He had inspected the lines carefully, Longstreet said, and added, “I think you hurt them about as much as they hurt you.” That analysis had the sound of faint praise about it, and Lee observed dryly, “Then I am glad we punished them well, at any rate.” Jefferson Davis now made his appearance at headquarters, and Lee and the commander-in-chief discussed the situation at some length. The rain was coming down harder than ever now, greatly reducing the chances for effective pursuit over the boggy roads, particularly any road already cut up by the passage of the enemy’s army. They agreed they must wait for a day and more information. Jackson said little during these discussions, only observing pointedly, “They have not all got away if we go immediately after them.” It was finally the downpour that settled the question.

On July 3, when the rain stopped and they started their pursuit, the Confederates discovered that the direct route, the River Road, had been churned into impassable mud by the retreating Federals, who had also cut down bridges and obstructed the way with felled trees. The columns turned back to a more roundabout route leading off the Quaker Road to the north. Longstreet led the way, followed by Jackson. Jeb Stuart had meanwhile come on the Yankees at Harrison’s Landing, chasing their pickets off a ridgeline north of Herring Creek, called Evelington Heights, which commanded the Federal encampment. At about ten o’clock that morning, believing Longstreet to be nearly on the scene, Stuart loosed a few shells at the Yankees from his single piece of horse artillery.

Stuart’s bravado had the effect of kicking over a hornet’s nest. General McClellan himself galloped to the front to direct personally men and guns to occupy the heights. His was a bravado performance to rival Stuart’s. “I at once rode through the troops,” he told his wife, “clear in front of them—to let them see there was no danger—they began to cheer as usual, & called out that they were all right & would fall to the last man ‘for little Mac’!” Stuart and his outmanned troopers had to beat a hasty retreat.

Jeb Stuart would be criticized for tipping off the Yankees to the importance of Evelington Heights; it was said he should have stayed out of sight until his own army arrived. In fact the position would have been occupied shortly in any event. McClellan had seen the need on his inspection on July 1, and his chief engineer, John Barnard, warned him about it, and the necessary orders had been issued before Stuart opened fire. McClellan expressed anger at the slow response to the orders, and would soon have corrected matters on his inspection tour, which he had delayed that morning so as to see Chief of Staff Marcy off to Washington to plead for reinforcements. “I am ready for an attack now,” he told Ellen; “—give me 24 hours even & will defy all Secessia. . . .”

Late in the day Confederate infantry reached the scene, and early the next morning—it was July 4, Independence Day—General Lee came up to measure chances for an attack. He carefully reconnoitered the ground. The Federal troops and guns were in force on every approach. Their flanks were guarded by Herring and Kimmage’s creeks, and anchored offshore in the James were the menacing Yankee gunboats, their big guns trained on the Rebel lines. It had the look of another Malvern Hill. This time, and on this ground, Lee decided he would let McClellan alone. “As far as I can see,” he told President Davis, “there is no way to attack him to advantage, nor do I wish to expose the men to the destructive missiles of his gunboats.” So the battle for Richmond ended, and so Richmond was delivered.

 

JULY 4 was a bright, sunny day, and as the threat of battle receded men stood down from their posts and relaxed. Many on both sides took the occasion of Independence Day to record their impressions. “We have had hard work for several days,” Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote his mother, “—marched all night—lain on our arms every morn’g & fought every afternoon—eaten nothing—suffered the most intense anxiety and everything else possible—I’m safe though so far—but you can’t conceive the wear & tear. . . .” Georgian William Stillwell wrote his wife, “Molly, it would be folly for me to attempt to describe the hardships and danger that I have come through. . . . God save me from ever seeing the awful sight that I have seen for the last week.” Elisha Hunt Rhodes of the 2nd Rhode Island confided to his diary, “Well, the war must end some time, and the Union will be restored. I wonder what our next move will be. I hope it will be more successful than our last.”

There was general agreement that it was a special day. Private E. O. Hicks, 1st Massachusetts Sharpshooters, noted in his diary, “Salute was fired & Gen. McClelland was cheered by the troops. We got some pork & that was all the fourth we had.” Diarist Charles Haydon of the 2nd Michigan was more effusive. “All our banners were flung to wind,” he wrote. “A national salute was fired. The music played most gloriously. Gen. McClellan came around to see us & we all cheered most heartily for country, cause & leader.” Over on the Confederate side, Lieutenant Shepherd Pryor of the 12th Georgia told his wife, “I write you a few lines today to let you know that I am yet alive,” and he added, “the yanks have a splendid band they have just finished playing Dixy, it cheered me up some to hear it even if it was the yankeys. . . . .”

July 4 was also witness to the demise of the Confederacy’s aeronautical corps. Attempting to locate McClellan’s army, Porter Alexander had again filled his colorful dress-silk balloon at the Richmond gas works, affixed it to the little armed tug Teaser, and steamed down the James to Malvern Hill. Alexander made an early morning Independence Day ascension to look for the Yankees, but the wind came up and so the balloon was reeled down, deflated, and stored aboard for future use. Then the Teaser ran aground on a mudbank. The tide was ebbing and she stuck fast; only the afternoon flood tide would refloat her. The hours passed with agonizing slowness, and just as the tide was turning a prowling Yankee gunboat, the Maratanza, came steaming around the bend from downriver.

The little Teaser was heavily outgunned and helpless as a sitting duck, and after firing one round and tying down the boiler’s safety valve, captain and crew abandoned ship and waded across the mudbank to shore. The Maratanza secured her prize before she blew up and triumphantly carried her off, dress-silk balloon and all. That, Alexander said sadly, “ended my ballooning.” As Albert Myer, a Union signal officer and a friend of Alexander’s from the old army, told the story, Major Alexander “wept on reaching shore & exclaimed ‘What will the ladies say?’”

Lee pulled his army back toward Richmond and set a watch on the Federals, and people began to look on the Seven Days’ battles as one great battle, an undoubted turning point in the Peninsula campaign. Hardly a week earlier McClellan’s grand army was in sight of Richmond’s spires and listening to the city’s clock bells chime the hours. Now it was thirty-five miles distant by way of the James and twenty miles away as the crow flies. The Confederacy’s capital had truly been delivered.

The Richmond newspapers were filled with praise for the deliverer, General Lee. “No captain that ever lived could have planned or executed a better plan,” said the Dispatch. The general “has amazed and confounded his detractors”—this was a reference to the “King of Spades” label applied to Lee only a month earlier—“by the brilliancy of his genius, the fertility of his resources, his energy and daring,” said the Whig. The correspondent of the Enquirer remarked the results “achieved in so short a time and with so small cost to the victors. I do not believe the records of modern warfare can produce a parallel. . . .”

The correspondent’s judgment of “so small cost to the victors,” however, was far off the mark. The cost had been brutally high. In the Seven Days, from Oak Grove on June 25 to Malvern Hill on July 1, the toll for the Army of Northern Virginia came to 3,494 dead, 15,758 wounded, and 952 missing, a total of 20,204. This was 22 percent of the force with which Lee began the Seven Days. Some commands suffered considerably higher percentage losses. A. P. Hill’s Light Division, fighting at Mechanicsville, Gaines’s Mill, and Glendale, lost 4,191 men, 32 percent of the number it began the week with. At Mechanicsville, Gaines’s Mill, and Malvern Hill, D. H. Hill had 3,781 casualties, a 37 percent loss. Longstreet’s division, engaged at Gaines’s Mill and Glendale, had the highest loss, 4,439, or 40 percent.

Lee was deeply disappointed with an outcome that left McClellan’s army, if no longer besieging the capital, still in being and still dangerous. “Our success has not been as great as I could have desired,” he told his wife. In his official report on the campaign, prepared some months later, he wrote, “Under ordinary circumstances the Federal Army should have been destroyed.” Robert E. Lee was perfectly confident that his strategy ought to have produced that result.

He did not parcel out blame for this failure, but he had no doubt where some of it lay. Of the six major commands with which he opened the Seven Days, he would remove the commanders of three of them, and would do so without undue delay. Benjamin Huger was quietly shifted to a staff position, inspector of artillery, his specialty in the old army. In his time with the Army of Northern Virginia, Huger contributed not a single accomplishment; as with G. W. Smith, exercising a command in the field was beyond him. Much the same had proved true of Theophilus Holmes, and Holmes was sent west to a command in the trans-Mississippi theater.

Prince John Magruder also went to a command in the West. At Savage’s Station and afterward he had demonstrated a temperament unsuited to the battlefield, but he had already put his mark on the Peninsula campaign. Probably none other of the army’s generals had his peculiar talent for accomplishing what he did in the trench lines at Yorktown and before Richmond. If Prince John contributed little to the outcome of the Seven Days, he contributed greatly to making that outcome possible. This was not widely known or understood at the time, however. “Public opinion is hot against Huger and Magruder for McClellan’s escape,” noted the Charleston diarist Mary Chesnut.

Of his other lieutenants Lee revealed no similar mistrust of their competence to command in battle. Stonewall Jackson, to be sure, had signally failed to exhibit the initiative expected of him from his record in the Shenandoah Valley, yet Lee would display no lack of confidence in Old Jack because of it. Perhaps he recognized that Jackson, like Lee himself, had taken certain lessons from the experience of the Seven Days. For Lee’s part, never again would he attempt such elegant chessboard maneuvers as the converging movements of Mechanicsville and Glendale; never again would he command with the indirection and deference he showed during this week of battle. Thereafter he would tailor his tactics to better fit his army and hold more tightly to the reins of command. As by an annealing process, Lee—and Jackson—emerged from the fire of the Seven Days stronger generals than before.

In Richmond there was relief at the outcome of the fighting, but no celebration. “There were no noisy jubilations over this succession of victories,” Sallie Putnam wrote. “There were no bells rung, no cannon fire, no illuminations. . . .” Instead there was the sight of a seemingly endless procession of ambulances and “dead wagons” in the streets, bringing back the human wreckage from the battlefields. David Winn of the 4th Georgia, in Richmond looking for a wounded comrade, told his wife, “The whole city is a hospital and the very atmosphere is poisoned & loathsome.” In addition to nearly 15,800 of its own wounded, Richmond had to care for the sick and wounded the retreating Federals had left behind on every field. All of these were either very sick or severely wounded, or they would not have been left. Lee’s medical director Lafayette Guild estimated their number at 4,900. Many Richmonders would remember this hot July of 1862 for one sound. “Day by day,” wrote Constance Cary Harrison, “we were called to our windows by the wailing dirge of a military band preceding a soldier’s funeral. One could not number those sad pageants. . . .”

 

THE COST OF the Seven Days was also being reckoned by the Federals. The Army of the Potomac lost 1,734 dead, 8,066 wounded, and 6,055 missing, a total of 15,855, or 4,349 fewer than the Confederates. On the defensive in every battle but the first one at Oak Grove, the Federals suffered losses in dead and wounded of just over half those of the Rebels; on the retreat after every battle but that first one, they experienced losses in prisoners more than six times as great. The Federals’ materiel loss was enormous, most of it never calculated and beyond calculation. Forty pieces of artillery were taken by the Rebels in the Seven Days, and they also gleaned from the battlefields no fewer than 31,000 small arms. Wagons and ambulances by the hundreds, ordnance stores and ammunition, and equipment of every sort and variety were salvaged by thrifty Confederate quartermasters. The Army of Northern Virginia would re-equip itself at General McClellan’s expense. “We had a great swapping around both in infantry & artillery, after the battles,” Porter Alexander remembered.

McClellan’s practice of haphazard, absentee command produced an imbalanced casualty list in his army. The weight of the fighting—very nearly half the army’s total Seven Days’ casualties—had fallen most heavily on Fitz John Porter’s Fifth Corps, particularly on George Morell’s division and George McCall’s Pennsylvania Reserves. At Gaines’s Mill and Malvern Hill Morell lost 3,136 men, the most in any of the divisions. At Mechanicsville, Gaines’s Mill, and Glendale McCall lost just 36 fewer men, and very nearly a third of those he had started the week with. The Fifth Corps as a whole suffered 7,575 casualties, 28 percent of its numbers.

By contrast, Erasmus Keyes’s Fourth Corps was called on to fight but once, at Malvern Hill, and with but one of its divisions; the week’s loss in the Fourth Corps came to 800 men. Franklin’s Sixth Corps also watched much of the time from the sidelines, except for the fierce engagement of Slocum’s division at Gaines’s Mill. The other Sixth Corps division, under Baldy Smith, lost only 803 men. Some of the army’s hardest fighters saw only limited action. Joe Hooker and Phil Kearny were assigned to fight only at Oak Grove on Day One and at Glendale on Day Six; Hooker’s loss for the week was 746 men.

One piece of equipment carefully saved on the retreat was General McClellan’s portable printing press, and on July 4 the general produced an address to his army. He first explained the events of the Seven Days: “Attacked by vastly superior forces, and without hope of reinforcements, you have succeeded in changing your base of operations by a flank movement, always regarded as the most hazardous of military expedients.” He explained further: “You have saved all your material, all your guns, except a few lost in battle. . . . ; and under every disadvantage of numbers, and necessarily of position also, you have in every conflict beaten back your foes with enormous slaughter. Your conduct ranks you among the celebrated armies of history.” In his peroration he promised the army would yet “enter the Capital of their so-called Confederacy . . . cost what it may in time, treasure and blood.”

This remarkable document was a claim of victory not over the enemy but over adversity—adversity not of the making of the general commanding. Like all General McClellan’s commentaries on events of his Civil War career, it rested on his long-standing and well-established foundation of “vastly superior” enemy forces. He would insist to everyone—the authorities in Washington, his political allies at home, newspapers friendly to his cause—that he had been attacked in the Seven Days by a Confederate army of 200,000. Consequently, as he told President Lincoln, his movement to the James “will be acknowledged by all competent judges . . . unparalleled in the annals of war.” He had preserved, he said, “above all our honor.”

Reaction in the North to the events on the Peninsula was both mixed and predictable. Initially, press reporting on the Seven Days, dependent as it was on McClellan’s headquarters, put the best possible face on the retreat, OUR ARMY ON THE JAMES RIVER headed the story in the New York Tribune on July 4; MAGRUDER PRISONER, JACKSON KILLED . . . 185,000 REBELS AGAINST 95,000 UNION TROOPS. Reflection on the matter produced more realistic appraisals. Secretary of the Treasury Chase spoke of the “shameful defeat at Richmond, thinly covered from the world’s contempt by the pretense of a change of base of operations.” His Cabinet colleague Edward Bates, writing on July 8, thought that if the Army of the Potomac “only had a little activity & enterprise, in the governing head, it would not fail to win all desirable success.”

Not everyone was that forbearing. General McClellan’s radical Republican critics renewed their demands for his dismissal. In the Senate Zachariah Chandler charged him with every military failing imaginable; rather than seeking victory at Richmond the general sought only “another big swamp, and we sat down in the center of it, and went to digging.” Republican newspapers lined up against McClellan and Democatic ones lined up behind him. His defenders named Secretary of War Stanton responsible for the failure to take Richmond, by his intrigues against the general and by his refusal to support him, and called for Stanton’s dismissal. As had come to be true of anything to do with George McClellan, the debate was loud and heated.

There was growing debate within the army as well. Although probably a majority of the men shared New Yorker Alfred Davenport’s view—the general’s Fourth of July address to the army, Davenport wrote, “is very eloquent and about true”—a considerable number expressed doubts. What they shared was a sense that something had gone very wrong in the “big skedaddle” from the Chickahominy, and that calling it a change of base was not the answer.

“We are at a loss to imagine whether this is strategy or defeat,” Sergeant Edgar Newcomb of the 19th Massachusetts said. Lieutenant William Folwell of the engineers wondered why “they deify a General whose greatest feat has been a masterly retreat.” Felix Brannigan of Joe Hooker’s division expressed perhaps the most common view among the men in the ranks—that this had been a serious defeat, no matter how it was sugar-coated, and that there was blame enough to go around. “Who is to blame for all this?” Brannigan asked. “Some say ‘the War Department,’ others ‘the President,’ and not a few ‘Our General.’ “

General McClellan knew precisely where to lay the blame. The authors of his defeat, he told his mentor Samuel Barlow, were the “heartless villains” in Washington who “have done their best to sacrifice as noble an Army as ever marched to battle.” From the first, he said, Stanton and his cohorts had wanted him defeated and overthrown, so that disunion would prevail and they might be free to rule unhampered in the North. They recognized him as their paramount enemy who must be destroyed: “They are aware that I have seen through their villainous schemes, & that if I succeed my foot will be on their necks.”

The general found solace in his conviction that everything that had happened to him on the Peninsula was God’s will, and that consequently nothing was his fault and everything was for the best. The hand of God had dictated the outcome of the Seven Days; his defeat there was actually a blessing in disguise. “I think I begin to see his wise purpose in all this . . .,” McClellan told his wife. “If I had succeeded in taking Richmond now the fanatics of the North might have been too powerful & reunion impossible.”

While Harrison’s Landing was now guarded by extensive fortifications and by the gunboats and was safe enough, it was a miserable encampment. In these July weeks the James River bottomland was steamy and endlessly hot. On July 15 Lieutenant Haydon recorded in his journal a temperature of 103 degrees in the shade. Everyone and everything were crowded together, the water was bad and the sanita tion worse, and plagues of flies drove men and animals to distraction. The list of the sick lengthened, especially those with dysentery, and Chickahominy fever was renamed the James River fever. Private E. O. Hicks noted in his diary on July 19, “A good many of our boys are sick & every where around the hospitals we can see the dead laid out almost every morn.” The Potomac army had 42,911 reported cases of illness during July, almost twice that of any other month of the campaign. There were issues of new uniforms and equipment, and the men were kept occupied with drills and work on the fortifications, and reinforcements arrived, yet even so the army grew weaker each day.

On one of these hot July evenings Brigadier Daniel Butterfield of the Fifth Corps called in his brigade bugler, Private Oliver Norton, and, showing him the notes of a melody he had penciled on the back of an envelope, asked Norton to sound them out for him. He had never been happy with the standard lights-out call, Butterfield explained. It was not musical enough, and seemed somehow inappropriate as the last call of the soldier’s day. Private Norton dutifully sounded out the melody and Butterfield made a few changes, lengthening some notes and shortening others, until they agreed it was just right. That night at lights-out the haunting strain of “Taps” echoed across the army’s encampment for the first time.

 

GENERAL MCCLELLAN’S July 4 address to his army was greeted in Richmond with derision. His change of base evasion became a byword among Lee’s soldiers. As Captain William Blackwell of the cavalry explained, any time that rain flooded out a campsite, the men would pick up their traps and announce they were changing their base. If two dogs got into a fight in camp and the loser was seen running away, it was remarked sagely that he was merely changing his base. In his military correspondence General D. H. Hill took to calling McClellan “the great Mover of his Base,” and Jeb Stuart’s cavalry pickets watching Harrison’s Landing subjected their opposite numbers to frequent banter on the subject.

The Confederates were recruiting their strength in conditions considerably superior to those of the Yankees at Harrison’s Landing. Their encampments were on better ground and had better water, and their closeness to Richmond meant better food. The sick and the recovering wounded were taken into private homes, where recuperation was faster than in the hospitals. While they mourned their many dead, the men accepted it as the price of victory, and morale was high. A popular story ran through the ranks. As William White of the 18th Georgia told it, the reason the Yankees had been defeated before Richmond was that “first, they had to climb two damned steep Hills, then came a Longstreet, and next a Stonewall, which was impregnable.” Thomas Verdery’s one regret was that the battle for Richmond would likely have to be fought over again, “and it is fearful to contemplate even if we are again successful.”

After the casualty lists were published, friends and relatives hurried to Richmond to nurse the injured and grieve for the dead. W. A. Dardan of Jackson’s command met the father of a comrade who had been killed in the Seven Days’ fighting, and took him to the battlefield where his son was buried. He had come from Georgia to see the spot. “The old man seemed like he was astonished to look at the place where our Regt. fought,” Dardan wrote home. “He says that he doesn’t see how any of us ever escaped, and it looked much worse than I thought it would, myself. All the small timber on the field is dead and it looks like there had been a big fire.”

In these days General Lee occupied himself trying to fathom what the enemy would do next. It was the same situation he had confronted after his victory at Gaines’s Mill, when he had held the strategic initiative but could not act until McClellan revealed his hand. Now too Lee would have to grant the enemy the first move, but instead of just one Federal force to watch there were four of them.

The most obvious threat, and the nearest, was McClellan’s main army at Harrison’s Landing, under observation by Stuart’s cavalry. At Newport News, on the tip of the Peninsula, was Ambrose Burnside’s command, brought up by transports from the North Carolina coast. To the north, at Fredericksburg and in the Shenandoah Valley, were the two Federal commands that Stonewall Jackson had evaded when he came to the Peninsula in June. It was reported in the Northern papers that they were now incorporated in a new army commanded by General John Pope, from the western theater.

McClellan, commanding the largest of the four, remained the greatest danger to Richmond and claimed the largest share of Lee’s attention. Burnside, at Newport News, might be intended as reinforcement for McClellan in a renewed campaign against Richmond; or, supported by McClellan, Burnside might advance on Petersburg and Richmond by way of the south bank of the James. General Pope might revive McDowell’s earlier threat by marching on Richmond from the north, from Fredericksburg. Or Pope might attempt to sever the Confederacy’s railroad lifeline to the Shenandoah, the Virginia Central, by taking the key junction of Gordonsville. For either of these two purposes Pope might be reinforced by Burnside or even by McClellan. Lee’s singular advantage in all this, whatever the Federals might finally do, was his central location, allowing him to move swiftly against any threat as it was discovered.

Lee watched and patiently waited. As soon as Pope was reported moving southward toward the Virginia Central, he sent Jackson with the divisions of Ewell and Winder northward to meet the threat. When Jackson announced that Pope had too much strength to be attacked with profit, Lee sent him the reinforcement of A. P. Hill’s Light Division. On the Peninsula, meanwhile, McClellan and Burnside remained quiet. By way of threatening the Young Napoleon, on the last day of July Lee sent a force of artillery down the south bank of the James to a point opposite Harrison’s Landing, and that night it opened a surprise bombardment on the Federal encampment. Damage was slight, but General McClellan was given one more thing to think about.

As early as July 19 McClellan’s confidant Fitz John Porter observed that the enemy appeared to be “working his way with some parties” northward in the direction of Washington, “but I think he is threatening all around and keeping his forces where he can bring them easily to Richmond. He is feeling everywhere in order to keep reinforcements away from us and Washington.” Like Porter, McClellan believed it was only the enemy’s vast numbers that allowed him to be “threatening all around,” and it was this delusion that gave unwitting credence to General Lee’s deadly game.

 

ON JULY 8 Mr. Lincoln had arrived at Harrison’s Landing to judge matters for himself. He reviewed the troops and closely questioned General McClellan about their condition. Matters of war strategy were very much on the president’s mind. In the wake of the fiasco in the Shenandoah and the conflict over the defense of Washington, Lincoln had gathered together the scattered commands to form the new Army of Virginia and brought John Pope from the western theater to command it. The question now to be addressed was cooperation between the Army of Virginia and the Army of the Potomac. One possibility was withdrawing McClellan’s army from the Peninsula to link it with Pope’s in a new overland offensive.

Lincoln already knew McClellan’s opinion of the matter well enough. The campaign against Richmond should only be renewed from his base at Harrison’s Landing, McClellan insisted, and “reinforcements should be sent to me rather much over than much less than 100,000 men.” The president posed the question of withdrawal to the army’s five corps commanders. Keyes and Franklin said the army should be withdrawn. Porter, Heintzelman, and Sumner said it was secure where it was, and to leave the Peninsula would invite the troops’ demoralization. “To withdraw the Army would be the ruin of the country,” Heintzelman thought.

General McClellan took advantage of the president’s visit to hand him what became famous as the Harrison’s Landing letter. It was his broad-ranging outline for conducting the war “upon the highest principles known to Christian Civilization.”

McClellan had been formulating these thoughts for some weeks, and now with the war at a critical stage, he told his wife, his conscience dictated that he try to shape war policy in his own image. In the paper he told the president that confiscation of Southerners’ property or forced emancipation of Southerners’ slaves or any other such “radical views” must not “be contemplated for a moment.” Abolitionist sentiment as government policy, he said, “will rapidly disintegrate our present Armies.” Lincoln read the letter without comment, leaving General McClellan disappointed. The president, he told Ellen, “really seems quite incapable of rising to the heights of the merits of the question & the magnitude of the crisis.”

Concluding he needed better professional military advice than he had been getting, on his return to Washington the president called Henry W. Halleck from the West to become general-in-chief of the Union armies, filling the post vacant since McClellan was relieved of that command on March 11. Upon his arrival Halleck was immediately sent to Harrison’s Landing to formulate some strategy to get the war moving again. Halleck even had the president’s leave to change the commander of the Army of the Potomac. According to Senator Orville H. Browning, Lincoln said “he was satisfied McClellan would not fight and he had told Halleck so, and that he could keep him in command or not as he pleased.” Only a few days before, Lincoln had offered command of the Potomac army to General Burnside, who refused on the grounds that he was not competent for the job. Clearly, however it could be done, Mr. Lincoln would be glad to be rid of General McClellan.

On July 25, under questioning by Halleck at headquarters at Harri son’s Landing, McClellan finally revealed a plan for resuming his march on Richmond. At some convenient point, he said, he would cross the James and advance up the south bank and seize Petersburg and entrench himself securely there. This would give him control of all but one of the rail lines entering Richmond from the south. Lee would be forced to abandon Richmond or be starved out, or to attack the Army of the Potomac at Petersburg on ground of McClellan’s choosing. At last the Young Napoleon would have his great war-winning, Waterloo-style battle.

General Halleck thought this a highly dangerous idea. On McClellan’s word, he said, here was General Lee with 200,000 men (McClellan was sure that by now Lee had made good his Seven Days’ losses), and General Lee would surely take advantage of his great numbers and central position to conquer first one and then the other of the two widely separated Union armies. Leaving sufficient force to mask McClellan, Lee might march north to overwhelm John Pope’s army, then return and dispose of McClellan; or he might reverse the order. In any event, this separation of armies would be the epitaph of the Union.

McClellan was less impressed with this argument than by a bit of news Halleck imparted to him. It seemed that in the western theater General Don Carlos Buell would not, after all, be able to march on Chattanooga to cut the Confederacy’s only direct east-west railroad. This by itself, by McClellan’s imaginative reasoning, was enough to doom his Petersburg plan. Now, should he shift his army to Petersburg, he was liable to be trapped between Lee’s masses in his front and Rebel masses sent by rail from the West to fall on his rear. In his diary for July 26, General Heintzelman, an advocate of the Petersburg movement, recorded the untimely death of his cherished idea: “There will be no advance on Chattanooga by Buell for some time & in view of this Gen. McClellan opposes taking Petersburg.”

Thus Halleck left McClellan with an unpalatable choice: advance on Richmond from Harrison’s Landing by way of the north bank of the James, or abandon the Peninsula entirely. In place of the York River Railroad he would have to take the James as his line of supply, overcoming on the way imposing enemy defenses at Malvern Hill and Drewry’s Bluff. Still, McClellan had his siege train and the navy’s gunboats, and together they might be used to pulverize the Rebel fortifications and the Rebel masses along the river.

This would be his course, he told Halleck—so long as he was reinforced. Halleck said that 20,000 reinforcements were available for him—that part of Burnside’s command then at Newport News, and part of David Hunter’s command on the South Atlantic coast. Grudgingly McClellan agreed to that number; it would give him, he said, “some chance” of success. Believing this signaled an agreement, Halleck returned to Washington. Thus the Peninsula campaign was saved—for twenty-four hours.

In one of his intuitive leaps of logic that were invariably self-destructive, George McClellan now proceeded once and finally to destroy his grand campaign. Richmond had recently paroled to him a number of Federal sick and wounded, and from their observations McClellan deduced that “reinforcements are pouring into Richmond from the South.” Included in this flood he thought he detected troops from his favorite source of Rebel reinforcements, General Beauregard’s western army. A new plan must be devised.

Because of this enemy influx, McClellan demanded of Halleck not the agreed-upon 20,000 reinforcements, but more than two and a half times that number. He wanted not just part of Burnside’s and Hunter’s troops but all of them, to the number of 35,000. He wanted an additional 15,000 or 20,000 men from the West, apparently to counter those westerners of Beauregard’s. He was confident, he said, that General Halleck agreed with him that the true defense of Washington “consists in a rapid & heavy blow given by this Army upon Richmond.”

Henry Halleck was a pedant and a military bureaucrat, but he was not an easy man to fool, and when he arrived back in Washington to find this dispatch of McClellan’s waiting for him, he threw up his hands. Just come from the West himself, he knew very well the whereabouts of the Confederacy’s western forces, and McClellan’s absurd (and repeated) attempts to put them by the thousands in front of him at Richmond must have amazed him. It was now all too clear to him, Halleck told his wife, that General McClellan “does not understand strategy and should never plan a campaign,” and he made up his mind to follow his first instinct and withdraw the Army of the Potomac from the Peninsula. On July 30 he telegraphed to begin evacuating the sick from Harrison’s Landing, and on August 3 he made it official: General McClellan was immediately to bring his army north to unite it with Pope’s and open a new campaign.

McClellan made bitter and prolonged protest against the decision, but Halleck was adamant. What more than anything else had doomed General McClellan’s grand campaign from the first—his hallucina tions about the enemy he faced—now came full circle finally to seal its fate. Halleck simply pointed to the numbers: McClellan had 90,000 men, and Pope had 40,000, and squarely between them, by McClellan’s insistent count, Lee had 200,000. Even with their two armies united the Federals would be at risk; individually the two would stand little chance. In explaining his decision Halleck wrote, “There was to my mind no alternative,” and against that unblinking logic McClellan’s arguments crumbled.

Nevertheless, McClellan would make one final, convulsive effort to turn back the tide of events. On August 5 he assembled an expedition of infantry and cavalry, 17,000 men in all, and sent it under Joe Hooker to retake Malvern Hill. Officially his purpose was to appraise a rumor that the Confederates were giving up Richmond; privately his motivation was to embroil himself in a contest that would forestall Halleck’s evacuation order. He would attempt a coup, he told Ellen—lure the Rebels into a misstep, “& follow them up to Richmond. . . .” But when Lee reacted aggressively to the threat, McClellan’s resolution evaporated; should he commit to battle and lose, he risked losing even his haven at Harrison’s Landing. Hooker was told to abandon the expedition and return, and McClellan said nothing more of a coup.

On the morning of August 7 Lee was surprised to see the Federals for the second time give up Malvern Hill and retreat. In a dispatch to Jackson that day he passed judgment on McClellan: “I have no idea that he will advance on Richmond now.” This flight from Malvern Hill served to confirm something Lee already suspected. Several days previously, John Singleton Mosby, Jeb Stuart’s scout who had been captured in July by the Yankees, arrived at Fort Monroe as part of a prisoner exchange. From his own spying efforts, and those of a Southern sympathizer there, Mosby learned that Burnside’s command at Newport News had been ordered north to the Rappahannock. As soon as he was exchanged, Mosby took this intelligence to Lee.

If Burnside was not to reinforce McClellan or to operate up the James, Lee reasoned, that was certain evidence the enemy was opening a new campaign by land from the north. Furthermore, if McClellan’s army was not being reinforced, the design must be for him too to join that new campaign. McClellan’s thrust at Malvern Hill must have been a deception to cover the withdrawal from the Peninsula. General Lee now felt free to turn his attention to the new campaign taking shape in northern Virginia.

So a new campaign began and the Peninsula campaign came to an end. For Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia it ended with victory and Richmond delivered. For George B. McClellan and the Army of the Potomac it ended with defeat and ignominious retreat. From the first arrival of the Federals at Fort Monroe on March 20 to their final evacuation on August 26, the campaign lasted 160 days, or five months and one week. In that time some 250,000 men participated in it, on land and at sea (and in the air), more than in any other single campaign of the Civil War. In volume of war materiel too it was unmatched.

In pitched battles and skirmishes, from Yorktown to Malvern Hill, some 25,370 Federals and 30,450 Confederates were killed, wounded, or missing. Of that total of 55,820 for the two armies, at least 8,670 died in battle. Perhaps another 5,000 died of disease in these months, raising the death toll to an estimated 13,670. Even that total is no doubt an undercount, for statistics on disease on the Peninsula were incomplete, and many men reported as missing were surely dead. Better than 24 percent—almost one in four—of the quarter-million men who took part in the Peninsula campaign were counted wounded or missing or dead of battle or disease.

On the Peninsula in these months more even than these men had been lost. General McClellan’s grand campaign had always carried within it the dream of ending this civil war while it was still a rebellion and before it became a revolution. He envisioned fighting at Richmond his American Waterloo, so that afterward the contestants might sit down together at the peace table, in the manner of wars of the past. There statesmen would offer certain adjustments and make certain concessions, and the Union would be restored in peace and amity. But the dream died in smoke and fire in the swamps at Gaines’s Mill and in the deep woods at Glendale and on Malvern’s bloody slopes. No statesmen would meet in the wake of the Seven Days to write an end to “this sad war” and to heal the breach. The war would go on for three more years, and from a rebellion become a revolution.

 

ON THE AFTERNOON of Saturday, August 16, the last units of the Army of the Potomac left Harrison’s Landing for the march down the Peninsula to Fort Monroe and embarkation for new fields. The great encampment was empty except for straw-filled dummy sentinels standing guard in the lines and wooden cannon—Yankee Quaker guns—in the embrasures. General McClellan told his wife that he “took a savage satisfaction” in being the last man to leave. He stood on the parapet and figuratively shook his fist at the enemy host he imagined even then was beginning to crowd forward and pursue him and his wrecked campaign. But except for a brigade of Rebel cavalry there was no one there to appreciate his brave gesture. General Lee had left the day before to take command of the new campaign to the north. The war was turning in a new direction, toward the battlefield at Manassas and after that to Antietam Creek in Maryland, far from the gates of Richmond.