by S. C. Gwynne
Jackson has been criticized through the years by generals on both sides and by historians for failing to arrive on time at Mechanicsville and then, when he got there, for failing to attack, even to the point of blaming him for the Confederate defeat. Most of this is unfair; he was in a subordinate position, doing what he believed Lee wanted him to do, and that did not include attacking any Union position. He was indeed late, but he assumed Lee knew that, and in any case his lateness had more to do with Lee’s timetable than with his own failure to move his army as quickly as possible. (Jackson himself had suggested at the generals’ meeting on June 23 that the advance should take place on June 25; but the ultimate responsibility for the decision lies with Lee.) Though he failed to reach his appointed destination on June 25, Jackson still had managed a twenty-five-mile march under horrendous conditions in terrain that no one, Lee included, understood. “The Confederate commanders knew no more about the topography of the country than they did about Central Africa,” wrote General Richard Taylor. “Here was a limited district, the whole of it within a day’s march of the city of Richmond . . . and yet we were profoundly ignorant of the country, were without maps, sketches, or proper guides.”25
Though Jackson cannot be held responsible for the shortcomings of General Orders No. 75, and certainly not for the loss at Mechanicsville, his actions that afternoon still seem both strange and out of character for one of the most aggressive military commanders America has ever produced. Like his fellow generals A. P. Hill and Lawrence Branch, he seems to have assumed that the job of communication belonged to someone else, perhaps to Lee’s staff. Thus he arrived at Hundley’s Corner, just down the road from the church, and did not dispatch a courier to Lee or to anyone else—an odd and uncharacteristic passivity that could be explained by lack of sleep and sickness. Then, too, he was unused to playing the role of subordinate. We will never know. Jackson does not offer any reasons in his official report and indeed seems to find it scarcely worth mentioning. During that day the only message he sent to anyone was the brief note to Branch saying he was late. Nor did he avail himself of the services of Jeb Stuart, the only Confederate officer who actually knew something about the local terrain. Lee scrupulously avoided placing blame on any of his generals, including Jackson, for the bloody disaster of June 26.26
Behind all of the blunders and miscommunications, staff failures and misunderstandings that swirled around the Confederate defeat at Mechanicsville, however, lay a single, very large truth: Lee’s plan actually worked. It did not work precisely when it was supposed to, and it did not work exactly as he had imagined, with his legions executing a perfectly sequenced rightward turn behind Jackson’s army, driving McClellan’s army south along the Chickahominy. But Lee’s calculation—that the presence of Jackson’s twenty-four thousand men along with his outsized reputation on the Union right flank would scare the Federals out of their entrenchments on both sides of the river—was correct. While McClellan’s wires to Washington after his army’s victory at Mechanicsville were jaunty and optimistic, claiming his near invincibility, as the evening progressed he began to feel weak and vulnerable. Any doubts in his mind that Jackson was there in force were now gone. He knew, moreover, that Jackson’s veteran army had not engaged at Beaver Dam Creek and was therefore the equivalent of a very large gun pointed at the rear of the 5th Corps and, beyond, at the railroad and Union supply base.
McClellan was not wrong. Jackson’s presence there made Porter’s position behind the creek instantly indefensible, precisely as Lee had envisioned it would. Perhaps a more courageous or resourceful general would have brought up reinforcements and fought the massed Confederate divisions north of the river while launching the main attack to the south. This was Porter’s suggestion. Other generals suggested variants of this plan. They all believed Richmond was vulnerable. They all thought the solution was to attack. McClellan disagreed. More convinced than ever that he was facing a two-hundred-thousand-man force, he began, in the wake of his victory, to think only of how he was going to save his army. Lee, after his defeat, was thinking only of how he was going to corner and destroy his adversary.
At about 1:00 a.m. on June 27, after the Battle of Mechanicsville, George McClellan made the breathtaking decision that he would abandon both his supply line and his grand plan to capture Richmond. He decided to retreat. He did not think of it this way, and did not describe it this way to his superiors. His own choice of words to describe the course he set for the Army of the Potomac was “change of base.” By this he meant that he was forsaking White House Landing and the railroad as conduits for his daily ration of supplies, and shifting those operations to a new supply base, at Harrison’s Landing on the James River, eighteen airline miles due south across the peninsula. Cutting the supply line meant that his army could no longer stay where it was. All of those men would march to the banks of the deeper James, where they could shelter under the massive guns of the US Navy’s ships.
McClellan ordered Fitz John Porter to fall back during the night, though he would not have enough time to move his entire corps across the Chickahominy. He would instead move a few miles south and set up along another swamp to protect the bridges, which were his only avenue of escape. As Porter remembered later, McClellan impressed upon him “the absolute necessity of holding the ground, until arrangements over the river can be completed.”27 Porter saw this as a sort of code. He believed McClellan was telling him that the 5th Corps was going to be sacrificed so the rest of the army could assault and take Richmond. Porter, always the good soldier, replied, “I shall hold it to the last extremity.”28 What he was really doing, though he did not yet know it, was covering a retreat. The rest of the army would have to move soon, and quickly. For the moment it was frozen in front of Richmond in contemplation of another Confederate attack.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
VICTORY BY ANY OTHER NAME
Thus began the chase across the York-James Peninsula that became the centerpiece of the Seven Days battles. Because of McClellan’s choice of strategy, the question was not whether the Union army would be defeated but how badly it would be defeated. It was in many ways the oddest sequence of the war: a large army retreating from a smaller one, as though it could not possibly, with the resources of an industrializing nation behind it, just stand and fight. Mechanicsville and its aftermath established the model for the campaign: the Union army would wage a defensive battle by day, always on the ground of its choosing, and then retreat south toward the new base on the James River under cover of darkness. As at Mechanicsville, the rebel advance was marked by incompetence, shoddy staff work, inefficiency, miscommunication, and an almost shocking failure to take advantage of the openings McClellan gave them. In spite of this, the Seven Days was a thrilling, war-changing Confederate triumph. Lee’s, Jackson’s, and everyone else’s mistakes were debated and hashed over ad infinitum in the years following the war. But the indisputable fact was that the Army of Northern Virginia, under its brilliant new commander, had driven off the invader. It had saved Richmond. That was all anyone in the South needed to know. The Seven Days made Robert E. Lee famous. His generals, who did well enough, basked in borrowed light.
But the details were ugly. They got uglier as the two armies plunged southward, locked in their bloody embrace. In the Confederate camps, the fog of war was thick and deep on the morning after Mechanicsville. Though McClellan had decided to shift his base of operations the night before, Lee did not know that yet. He would not know it for certain for several days. The immense Army of the Potomac was out there, amorphous and moving through a densely wooded landscape, and because of its very immensity its contours and destination were hard to fathom. Lee’s assumption was that the Union would try to protect its supplies and would move large numbers of troops north across the Chickahominy toward White House Landing to do that. He was therefore surprised to find that Porter’s victorious 5th Corps had vanished from its camps, and had quietly fallen back three miles to a new defensive position alo
ng Boatswain’s Swamp, about half a mile from Chickahominy and two miles above the bridges they would have to use to cross the river.
While Lee remained ignorant of McClellan’s intention to change his base, he knew that he still had a Union corps in front of him and he knew that he wanted to destroy it. And he believed, incorrectly, that the railroad was still the larger army’s Achilles’ heel. Lee thought that Porter had moved eastward behind a small stream called Powhite Creek, three and a half miles east of Beaver Dam Creek, and was waiting in a north-to-south line for him there. His plan for the next day was thus in many ways like the first. Jackson and D. H. Hill would be sent on a flanking march around the Union left to the village of Old Cold Harbor, thus forcing them from their breastworks. If all went according to plan, divisions under generals A. P. Hill and James Longstreet would then drive the Yankees eastward into Jackson’s and D. H. Hill’s clutches. Jackson would also be just a few miles from the railroad—still Lee’s main target. It was a sound, if unimaginative plan. The trouble was that it bore no resemblance to the reality on the ground. And Jackson, once again in the role of the instant legend who was supposed to save the day, would be the principal victim of the confusion.
At 9:30 a.m. on June 27 Lee and Jackson sat on a tree stump while Lee described Jackson’s flanking march to Old Cold Harbor. By 11:00 a.m. Jackson had his command moving. This time he had orders directly from the mouth of Lee himself. Lee then sent A. P. Hill and Longstreet forward, expecting to clash with Union forces at about noon. But the Federals were not at all where Lee thought they were. What happened next amounted to blind groping in a tangled wilderness: one army searching for another. It wasn’t until Confederate general Maxcy Gregg stumbled into the center of the Union line that Lee understood what had happened. Porter’s 5th Corps army was strung out in a big, convex arc for a mile and three-quarters along the steep banks of a sluggish body of water known as Boatswain’s Swamp, facing north and west.1 The troops were ranged along a high bluff in three stacked lines of breastworks, with cannons behind them, all fronted by a swamp of varying widths. Like Beaver Dam Creek, it was a formidable defensive position, one of the strongest of the war. Sometime after 2:00 p.m. Lee sent A. P. Hill’s men forward in a series of bloody assaults that accomplished nothing. Lee was committing the same old tactical sin that everybody else committed: piecemeal attacks against a strong position. The Battle of Gaines’s Mill had begun.
Where, again, was Jackson? This time on a wild-goose chase into the peninsula’s knotty backcountry that had no purpose at all. He was turning a nonexistent flank, headed for a nonexistent supply line, following a Confederate battle plan that was no longer relevant. But Jackson knew none of this. So he marched. He also suffered, as all the commanders did, from the lack of accurate maps and place names. Anticipating this problem (and without his great terrain-and-map man, Hotchkiss), he had engaged the services of a twenty-five-year-old private, John Henry Timberlake, whose family farm was nearby. Jackson told Timberlake he wanted to go to Cold Harbor, and Timberlake took him on the shortest and fastest route in that direction. Suddenly the sound of gunfire was heard—and as on the previous day, gunfire was something Jackson was supposed to bear away from.
“Where is that firing?” Jackson asked, astonished, standing up in his saddle.
“From over at Gaines’s Mill,” replied Timberlake.
“Does this road lead there?”
“Yes,” Timberlake replied, “it passes the mill en route to Cold Harbor.”
“But I do not wish to go to Gaines’s Mill,” replied Jackson impatiently. “I wish to go to Cold Harbor, leaving that place on the right.”
“Then the left hand road was the one you should have taken. Had you let me know what you desired, I could have directed you in the right direction at first.”2
Part of the confusion was that Jackson did not know there were two towns named Cold Harbor, old and new, more than a mile apart. He wanted Old Cold Harbor. Now he had to backtrack to the north and resume his eastward march. It would cost him at least ninety minutes. When one of his officers asked him if the delay would ruin the day’s plan, Jackson replied, “No, let us trust that the providence of our God will so overrule it, that no mischief shall result.”3 His entire march was already irrelevant. But no one had told him that.
As the Confederate assaults on the Union lines behind Boatswain’s Swamp were repulsed, one after another, Lee concluded that the only way to break them was to launch a massive, concerted assault across the nearly two-mile front. He spent the afternoon working furiously to make that happen. He finally sent a messenger to order Jackson into the fight. In the meantime he marshalled the trailing divisions of Jackson’s command under Generals Richard Ewell and Chase Whiting, and inserted them on the center and right of his line. He ordered Longstreet, on the far left, forward. By 5:00 p.m. Lee’s effort was starting to coalesce—so much so that General Porter, who had sent an optimistic message to McClellan at 4:00 p.m. saying “our men have behaved nobly and driven the enemy back many times,” now sent an urgent call for help, saying that he was being pressed hard and that without reinforcements, “I am afraid I shall be driven from my position.”4
McClellan was alarmed by Porter’s SOS but did nothing more than send a few brigades that would arrive too late to be of much use. (One was commanded by Jackson’s old nemesis from his army days in Florida, Brigadier General William H. French.) McClellan had remained far from both fronts and seemed convinced that he was going to be attacked that day at all points. He had sent an 8,500-man division to Porter earlier that day and seemed to think that was enough. The only help Porter got later came in the form of patronizing encouragement. “If the enemy are retiring, and you are a chasseur, pitch in,” McClellan told him.5 Later, still clueless about what was happening, he urged Porter, “Try to drive the rascals and take some prisoners and guns.” McClellan, closeted at headquarters and out of touch with both fronts, had apparently lost the will to command. He would no longer consider launching an attack of any sort. He simply awaited whatever Lee had in store for him and dreamed only of getting his army safely to Harrison’s Landing.
At about 5:00 p.m. Lee caught up with Jackson, who was dutifully following Lee’s morning instructions and who in obeying his orders to move to Old Cold Harbor—supposedly well behind the Union lines—had in fact landed not far from the Union right. Lee, who must have understood that Jackson’s pointless march was a result of his own mistake, nonetheless seemed impatient. Jackson was commanding more than half of his army. Lee needed all of that army in the fight, and he needed it right away. The two generals met on Telegraph Road, less than a mile from the fight at Boatswain’s Swamp. Jackson, as usual, looked nothing like a general. According to one of Jeb Stuart’s soldiers who saw Jackson a bit earlier in the afternoon, his coat “was positively scorched by the sun. . . . The cap of the general matched the coat. . . . The sun had turned it quite yellow indeed, and it tilted over the wearer’s forehead, so far as to make it necessary for him to raise his chin, in looking at you. He rode in his peculiar forward-leaning fashion, his old rawboned sorrel, gaunt and grim. Moving about slowly, and sucking a lemon [one of the few recorded instances of this] . . . he had rather the air of a spectator.”6 Lee greeted Jackson warmly, while soldiers around them erupted into loud cheers and rebel yells and then offered what has sounded to many historians like a mild rebuke.
“Ah, General, I am glad to see you! I had hoped to be with you before.”
Jackson mumbled something in reply that bystanders could not hear. Lee then turned for a moment toward the sounds of the battle.
“That fire is very heavy,” he said. “Do you think your men can stand it?”
“They can stand almost anything,” Jackson replied. “They can stand that.” Lee gave him new orders. Jackson then saluted and galloped away, his eyes alight with the prospect of battle after so much dreary marching. Jackson, who had seemed bleary-eyed and lethargic all day, was now full of fire and resolve.
Robert Dabney commented that he had only seen this sort of “tempest of passion” on his face three times in his Civil War career. He issued orders to his commander to press the attack. Finally he was engaged.
With Jackson in hand, Lee was now ready to launch the massive attack he had been working on all afternoon, during which time the fighting had raged on and he had taken heavy losses. It was very likely his largest single attack of the war.7 There was nothing piecemeal about it this time. He had managed to bring roughly thirty-two thousand men forward along a curving, two-mile front against Porter’s entrenched thirty-four thousand. At 7:00 p.m. Lee sent them forward. What followed was some of the roughest fighting of the war, as long rolls of musket fire and billows of white smoke swept across the long bluff, and Union cannon pounded canister into the graybacks as they came forward. The butchery was shocking, even for men who were getting used to it. “Never before did I see so many dead men,” wrote one soldier, “such a scene of carnage, men with no arms, some without legs, others with part of their heads off, some with their bowels out.”8 The smell of blood mingled with the smell of black powder.
Just before dark Porter’s lines, exhausted after repelling attacks for eight hours, broke in two places. Perhaps the most spectacular drive was that of a thirty-two-year-old Kentuckian and former Indian fighter named John Bell Hood, commanding the 4th Texas Brigade (containing Georgians and some South Carolinians) in Chase Whiting’s division under Jackson’s command. Just before the final attack, Lee rode up to Hood and asked, “Can you break this line?” Hood said he would try. “May God be with you!” Lee shouted, lifting his hat as he rode away. Hood’s men then moved forward at the quickstep, without pausing to fire, through what Confederate colonel Evander Law called “a withering storm of lead and iron.” They passed through and over dead and wounded men, mangled horses, and busted wagons. They fell by the score, victims of canister and enfilading fire from most of the left side of the Union lines. Hood took a thousand casualties. At one hundred yards they broke into a run, erupting into the full, high-pitched, whirring scream of the rebel yell, which sounded to Longstreet’s men like the noise made by “forty-thousand wildcats.”9 Across the swamp they came, and up the rise, and suddenly they had broken through to the artillery. Just as suddenly the Union defenses, which had held solidly through attack after attack, began to break. Though Hood became the battle’s most visible hero, it would turn out later that brigades from James Longstreet’s divisions had broken through at about the same time. But that didn’t matter anymore. The Union retreat had begun.