Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  For the next three weeks, McClellan slowly felt his way up the peninsula, growing more and more convinced that Johnston had as many as 200,000 rebels defending Richmond (Johnston actually had only 60,000) and demanding that Lincoln send him more reinforcements, starting with McDowell’s troops, whom he wanted to move overland across the Rappahannock to join him around Richmond. By the last half of May, McClellan and the Army of the Potomac were beside the Chickahominy River, six miles from Richmond, with his right flank sitting to the northwest and expecting to be joined by McDowell. As he finally worked himself up to planning an assault on Richmond, he began feeding his army, corps by corps, across to the south side of the Chickahominy, closer to Richmond.

  Unfortunately for McClellan, torrential spring rains swept away the Chickahominy bridges after only two of his five army corps had crossed the Chickahominy. On May 31, hoping to crush these two isolated corps before the river subsided, Johnston wheeled out his entire army and struck the exposed Federals at the battle of Seven Pines.49

  For two days Johnston and the Confederates hammered at the two vulnerable Federal corps. The Federal generals handled their untested men well, and the Confederates drew off with the loss of more than 6,000 men, including Joe Johnston, who was severely wounded. Far from this putting spirit back into McClellan, however, the outcome of Seven Pines only operated against him. Frightened by Johnston’s unaccountable aggressiveness, McClellan cautiously slowed his advance across the Chickahominy. Far more ominous was the replacement of the wounded Johnston by an infinitely more skillful and aggressive Confederate general, Robert Edward Lee.

  In Lee, the Confederacy possessed one of the purest examples of American military culture. The consummate Virginia gentleman, the son of a Revolutionary War general and grandson-in-law of George Washington, Lee had enjoyed a spotless career in the old army in Mexico and on the western plains, and had even served briefly as superintendent of West Point. Despite his faultless aristocratic bloodlines, Lee had actually spent a lifetime living down the dissipated reputation established by his dashing but improvident father, “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, who had been the commandant of George Washington’s cavalry. Chronically in debt and chronically in flight from his creditors, Light-Horse Harry abandoned his family for refuge in the West Indies and died in 1818, leaving his wife, Anne Carter Lee, and family to the tender mercies of his wife’s relatives and the open-armed community of Alexandria, Virginia.

  Struggling to efface these stains on the family name, Robert Lee committed himself to the life of the army and to education at West Point. All of the Lees had a certain debonair wildness in their makeup, but Robert fought it back with a consciously cultivated aloofness and reserve that might almost have seemed arrogant had it not been wedded to a softness and gentility of manner. His four years at West Point were close to flawless—he had no behavioral demerits and was ranked second (by a fraction) in his class academically—and so he was commissioned in the army’s premier service, the Corps of Engineers.50

  Behind the shield of Virginia gentlemanliness, Lee could be as aggressive as the most Napoleonic of generals. He had become one of Winfield Scott’s most trusted subordinates in Mexico. By the beginning of 1861 Lee had risen to the post of lieutenant colonel of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry, and he was promoted to full colonel by Abraham Lincoln on March 30, 1861. Old General Scott had wanted to give Lee even more: the full command of the Federal armies, which eventually went to George McClellan.

  But Lee, unlike Scott, who was also a Virginian, could not tear himself away from his old family and state loyalties, especially when he owed so much of his boyhood redemption to them. He could not agree with Lincoln’s decision to “pin the States in the Union with the bayonet,” and on April 20, 1861, he resigned his commission. Lee had told Frank Blair, Lincoln’s personal emissary, that if it were up to him, he would free all the slaves in the South in order to avert civil war, but he could not “draw my sword… save in defense of my native State.” No Southerner went into rebellion with more professed reluctance. As he explained to his sister the same day, “With all my devotion to the Union, and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home.” He offered his services instead to Virginia, where he was made a major general of state volunteers; when Virginia was accepted into the Confederacy on May 7, Lee was commissioned a brigadier general in the Confederate forces, and for a year he served in a variety of capacities, especially as Jefferson Davis’s de facto chief of staff.51 With Johnston wounded, Davis would entrust the defense of Richmond to no one but Lee.

  Lee had already made more than enough trouble for McClellan even before taking the field. In March Lee prevailed upon Davis to allow Thomas Jonathan Jackson, a former Virginia Military Institute professor and minor hero of the Bull Run battle, to take command of the small Confederate force in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and make a threatening feint down the Valley toward Harpers Ferry and the poorly defended Federal capital. Jackson, who had acquired the nickname “Stonewall” for his courage at Bull Run, moved menacingly toward the Potomac River, confirming all of Lincoln’s and Stanton’s fears that McClellan’s Peninsula operation was going to lay Washington open to capture. Lincoln threw three separate Federal forces of about 40,000 men after Jackson’s 16,000 “foot cavalry,” but Jackson easily eluded or trounced all three, and left all the Federal soldiers in northern Virginia tied securely in knots and unavailable to the increasingly nervous McClellan—including McDowell’s troops, whom McClellan was still awaiting on the Chickahominy.52

  Now Lee took personal command of the Richmond defenses, and, in complete contrast to McClellan, he at once advanced to the offensive and opened what became known as the Seven Days’ Battle. On June 26, finding the Federal army still straddling the Chickahominy, Lee decided to strike at Federal troops on the north side of the river at Mechanicsville. Lee’s attacks were repulsed and his forces suffered more than 1,400 casualties, but the next day Lee attacked the same Federal troops again at Gaines Mill, and this time the Confederate forces inflicted nearly 6,800 casualties on the Union troops and forced them to withdraw.53

  McClellan’s communications with his supply base at White House Landing on the York river were now bare, and McClellan, imagining himself to be outnumbered and endangered by untold hosts of rebel fiends, concluded that he had no choice but to fall back to a safe spot on the James River and set up a new base there. Lee, scenting blood, harried and snapped at McClellan’s retreating army at Allen’s Farm and Savage’s Station (on June 29) and Glendale, or Frayser’s Farm, and White Oak Swamp (both on June 30), hoping to pick off and crush isolated Federal brigades and divisions, until at last he was handed a bloody repulse by the Federal rear guard at Malvern Hill (July 1). All in all, the Seven Days’ Battle cost Lee’s army 3,494 men killed and 15,758 wounded—but he had saved Richmond.54 McClellan, still believing himself outnumbered and blaming his defeat on Lincoln’s unwillingness to send him McDowell, dug the Army of the Potomac into an impregnable defensive position at Harrison’s Landing, on the James River. The great Peninsula Campaign was over.

  And so, it seemed, was McClellan’s career. McClellan, of course, saw no blame in himself; in fact, he expected Lincoln to grant him reinforcements so that he could move from the new base at Harrison’s Landing along the south side of the James River and clamp Richmond into a siege from below. But on July 8, when Lincoln himself came down to Harrison’s Landing to speak with McClellan, the president was in no mood for petting the Young Napoleon. Even as McClellan was still struggling back to Harrison’s Landing, Lincoln had decided to appoint a new commander for the scattered Union forces that had been beaten black and blue by Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley. He selected a hard-fighting, no-compromise, anti-slavery westerner named John Pope and had the forlorn remnants of McDowell’s corps and the troops Jackson had led merrily up and down the Shenandoah reorganized as a new army, the Army
of Virginia. He then sent them off to launch a fresh invasion—an overland invasion, not one of McClellan’s fancy but fruitless combined land-and-sea operations.

  Under Pope, there would be no observances of polite niceties by Union troops in rebel territory. In a series of general orders, Pope freely authorized his troops to forage from the population at will, to shoot any civilians guilty of taking potshots at Federal soldiers while “not forming part of the organized forces of the enemy nor wearing the garb of soldiers” and confiscate their property, and to impress local civilians into military road work. There would be no more studious protection of Southern property: “Soldiers were called into the field to do battle against the enemy, and it is not expected that their force and energy shall be wasted in protecting private property of those most hostile to the Government.” When Pope’s men flooded into northern Virginia’s Culpeper County, Jefferson Davis was astounded to learn that the Yankees “are systematically destroying all the growing crops and everything the people have to live on”; on July 31 Davis ordered Lee to treat any of Pope’s officers he might capture as “robbers and murderers” rather than prisoners of war.55

  While Pope was spreading premeditated devastation into northern Virginia, McClellan remained motionless at Harrison’s Landing, demanding that Lincoln supply him with another 100,000 men for his new drive at Richmond. Even if Lincoln had wanted to give them to McClellan, the time it would take to reinforce and reequip McClellan for another campaign on the Peninsula would allow Lee and his victorious Confederates to slip northward and menace Washington in force. Lincoln could not risk another close call like the one Stonewall Jackson had given the capital in March. Yet Lincoln hesitated to cashier McClellan outright. Although Lincoln might have wanted to rid himself of “Little Mac” right on the dock at Harrison’s Landing, McClellan had become too clearly identified with Democratic political interests in the North. With critical state elections in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and with the 1862 congressional elections hanging over the horizon in November, Lincoln could not afford to alienate Northern Democratic sympathies. He was “tired” of McClellan’s “excuses [and] said he’d remove him at once but for the election.”56

  What was even more dangerous, McClellan still possessed the loyalty and admiration of the ordinary soldiers of the Army of the Potomac, and he had had fully a year to fill up the officer corps of the army with his friends and subordinates. Not only might those officers refuse to serve under a McClellan replacement, but Lincoln could not be certain that they might not attempt a political action of their own if McClellan was summarily relieved of command. Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, who accompanied Lincoln to Harrison’s Landing, was appalled to hear “mutterings of a march on Washington.”57 Hence Lincoln chose not to dismiss McClellan but to ease the Army of the Potomac out from under him. On August 3 McClellan was ordered to begin putting elements of the Army of the Potomac back onto their transports to return to Washington, where one by one McClellan’s proud formations were fed over to General Pope to become part of the Army of Virginia.

  This delicate outmaneuvering might have gone off smoothly if it had not been for the ferocious aggressiveness of Robert E. Lee and the simple inadequacy of John Pope. Even before taking command of the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee had become convinced of the necessity of moving the center of campaigning north of the Potomac, into Maryland and Pennsylvania. The thin-soiled dispersion of agriculture everywhere in Virginia except the Shenandoah Valley could not feed his army indefinitely, and as soon as he was installed at the head of the Army of Northern Virginia, he began pressing Jefferson Davis to allow him to strike northward, through Maryland, to the Susquehanna, where he could “change the character of the war.”

  First, though, he would have to deal with John Pope’s Army of Virginia. After the Malvern Hill fight, Lee decided to gamble on the likelihood of McClellan’s inactivity and catch Pope before he could be further reinforced. “I want Pope to be suppressed,” Lee wrote in a rare burst of contempt. “The course indicated in his orders … cannot be permitted.” Lee and Stonewall Jackson bounded back up into northern Virginia, and on August 30, 1862, Jackson and Lee trapped the hapless Pope between them on the old Bull Run battlefield. The second battle of Bull Run was an even greater disaster for the Union than the first one: Pope’s army of 60,000 men suffered 16,000 casualties and was left a hopeless wreck. Meanwhile, the triumphant Lee was now free to lunge across the Potomac into Maryland, hoping to parlay his victories into a massive pro-secession uprising among slaveholding Marylanders and perhaps reach far enough across the Mason-Dixon Line into Pennsylvania to disrupt the North’s vital east-west railroad junction on the Susquehanna River at Harrisburg.58

  With Pope utterly discredited and the now defunct Army of Virginia in pieces, Lincoln had no choice but to put McClellan back in charge, transfer Pope’s command back into the structure of the Army of the Potomac, and order them to pursue Lee into Maryland. The soldiers in the ranks were elated, and the unhappy Pope had to listen as “tired fellows, as the news passed down the column, jumped to their feet, and sent up such a hurrah as the Army of the Potomac had never heard before. Shout upon shout went out into the stillness of the night; and as it was taken up along the road and repeated by regiment, brigade, division and corps, we could hear the roar dying away in the distance.”59

  Few generals ever get a second chance to redeem themselves, and McClellan’s gratitude to Lincoln spurred him on after Lee with unaccustomed vigor—gratitude, that is, plus the unlooked-for gift of a copy of Lee’s campaign orders (Special Orders No. 191) for the Maryland campaign, which a private and a corporal in the 27th Indiana discovered in the grass near Frederick, Maryland, on September 13, 1862. The lost orders were in McClellan’s hands by noon that day, and he was elated: “Now I know what to do!” They revealed that Lee’s army was actually dangerously dispersed along Maryland’s roads and could easily be destroyed piece by piece if McClellan hopped to it. For once, McClellan did just that. The Federals surprised Confederate screening forces at South Mountain on September 14, and three days later McClellan had pinned Lee’s army in between the Potomac and one of the Potomac’s little tributary streams, the Antietam Creek, near the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland.60

  The subsequent battle of Antietam ought to have been McClellan’s win-it-all opportunity to redeem his reputation. Once again, his slowness and his discomfort with the headlong offensive were his undoing. In a terrible, bitter all-day battle on September 17—a battle that cost a total of 23,000 casualties from both armies—McClellan launched a series of poorly coordinated attacks on Lee’s army that not only failed to deliver the sledgehammer blow that might have flattened the Confederates but even failed to prevent Confederate reinforcements from arriving from Harpers Ferry. At the end of the day, Lee’s men were only barely holding on to their positions, but McClellan showed no disposition to send in a final knockout assault, even though he had at least 15,000 fresh troops in reserve. Instead, Lee was allowed to creep back across the Potomac into Virginia. A Confederate band that tried to cheer up Lee’s troops at the river crossings by playing “Maryland, My Maryland” was hooted down until they struck up “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.”61 McClellan, meanwhile, went into camp to lick his wounds, and there he stayed, through September and into October. Lincoln tried in vain to move him, even visiting McClellan personally to urge him to pursue Lee. McClellan waited until the end of October before putting his columns back onto the roads southward. By then, Lincoln had already nerved himself to fire his truculent general. The president waited until the day after the New York and New Jersey congressional elections, to mute the political damage, and then on November 5, 1862, Lincoln dismissed McClellan.

  The reactions were bad, especially in the Army of the Potomac, where loyal McClellanite officers whispered plots for a coup into the general’s ear. “Nay, there was considerable swearing indulged in, and threats of marching on Washington, should McClellan but take the l
ead,” remembered Captain Amos Judson of the 83rd Pennsylvania.62 But whatever else McClellan was, he was not a traitor, and even if he had once talked foolishly about dictatorships, he silenced the gossip in his headquarters and rode away from the army he had built, never to return.

  The slaughter at Antietam had not been without its merits. Although in military terms the battle had been something of a draw, Lincoln was prepared to treat Lee’s withdrawal afterward as evidence of a Union victory. On the strength of that victory, just six days after Antietam, Lincoln issued the preliminary announcement of a dramatic shift in war policy: as of January 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State… in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free,” and the United States military forces “will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons… in any efforts that may make for their actual freedom.”63