Frayser’s Farm (or Glendale)—June 30, 1862*
Jackson reached Magruder’s headquarters at about 3:30 a.m. on June 30, and managed to get an excited Magruder calmed down and off to bed. Magruder was still indignant that Jackson had not arrived in time to support his attack on Savage’s Station the day before, so Jackson may not have been the ideal person to attempt to calm him; in any case Magruder can hardly have had time to sleep off his “nervous anxiety,” before Lee himself arrived at dawn.
Lee’s impatience seems to have communicated itself to most of those around him. He was aware that this day was his best chance—possibly his only chance—to destroy McClellan’s army, and here was a clearly distraught Magruder trying to justify the botched attack he had made the previous day. Lee does not seem to have reproached Jackson, who had left most of his troops on the wrong side of the Chickahominy. His faith in Jackson was, and would remain, unshakable. Officers standing around the two men at a respectful distance remember Jackson nodding in agreement as he listened to Lee’s plans for the day and drawing a triangle in the dust with the toe of his boot—presumably the route he would take to attack McClellan’s army from the northeast as it retreated.
There is some doubt about the verisimilitude of this scene: Jackson’s uniform is described by one witness as dusty, when in fact it would have been soaking wet; and the ground he was standing on in front of Magruder’s headquarters would have been a muddy quagmire, not easy to draw a map in with the toe of a boot. Jackson may or may not have said to Lee, “We’ve got him,” before calling for his horse, but if he did say it he was optimistic. Also, if Lee’s order to Jackson was to continue “to pursue the enemy on the road he [has] taken,” it might have been helpful for Lee to be more precise. It was not a pursuit Lee wanted, but a decisive battle.
Lee cut short Magruder’s attempts to explain himself and ordered him to move his men to Derbytown Road—this involved a long loop curling back toward Richmond—to reinforce Longstreet’s division as it advanced eastward, a “countermarch” of nearly ten miles for men who had fought the previous day. Lee then provided Magruder with a guide, remounted, and rode there himself.
But Lee seems to have misjudged the amount of time it would take to get everyone in position for a decisive blow against McClellan’s retreating army, or perhaps he failed to convey his own sense of urgency. There was no word from Magruder and Huger, and it was 2:30 p.m. before Longstreet made contact with the Federal troops. More disturbingly still, there was no word from Jackson that he had crossed White Oak Swamp.
For the third time in four days Jackson was stalled. The retreating Federals had burned the one bridge over the White Oak Swamp Creek, and its charred debris made crossing even more difficult. Major Dabney describes the ground before Jackson as “soft and miry from recent rains,” and the far side as “covered by a belt of tall forest, in full leaf,” which effectively screened a Federal artillery battery and several “long lines” of infantry. Jackson “halted his army” and waited until twenty-eight guns had been brought forward, but the ensuing artillery duel did not inflict much damage on either side.
Jackson’s cavalry used the time to discover two practicable fords, but it was clear that he was facing an opposed crossing, during which his infantry would be exposed to heavy fire. Even the loyal Dabney seems surprised that Jackson “came short of that efficiency in action for which he was everywhere else noted.” He adds that “the remainder of the afternoon” was spent in failed attempts to rebuild the bridge, which were hampered by heavy fire, and regrets “the temporary eclipse of Jackson’s genius,” attributing it to fatigue and sleeplessness. Indeed, Jackson was so exhausted that on June 30 he fell asleep while eating his evening meal, “his supper between his teeth.” When he woke, he remarked that everybody should “rise with the dawn, and see if tomorrow we cannot do something!” Reams have been written to explain or justify Jackson’s curious failure to live up to his reputation during the Seven Days campaign, and it is in fact hard to imagine how any human being could have functioned on so little food and sleep from June 22 to the night of June 30. Still, Jackson was notably unforgiving of others who failed to comply with his own exacting orders, so there seems no reason why he should not be judged by the same standard he set for his own officers and men. By that standard, he failed.
More mysterious is why Lee, who was only three miles away, did not at least send somebody to find out what Jackson was doing, and to deliver a written message to get on with it. Even Dabney, who was there at White Oak Swamp Creek by Jackson’s side, thought Jackson could have crossed the swamp had he tried, and should have tried, given “the vast interests dependent on [his] co-operation with the proposed attack upon the centre [sic].” For once Major Dabney had it right: any hope Lee had on June 30 of crushing McClellan’s army like a nut in the jaws of a nutcracker was dependent on Jackson, whose men made up one of the jaws.
At this point, Lee was with Longstreet, overlooking the Union center from “a little clearing of broom straw and small pines,” when they were joined by President Davis. Longstreet had ordered one of his batteries to fire a few rounds in reply to what he supposed was Huger’s signal that he was in place. The Federals took this as the opening of an attack, and began to shell the clearing vigorously. As explosions went off all around them, Davis warned Lee that this was “no place for the commander of our army,” to which Lee replied courteously that it was also no place for “the commander-in-chief of all our armies.” At that point A. P. Hill rode up and ordered both men to retire, though he had to repeat his order before they obeyed him.
Having ridden away from the front line, Lee now learned that the Federals were retreating across Malvern Hill, which was about three miles to the south and was the most prominent feature of the landscape. It is a low, broad, irregularly shaped hill, then partly cleared, partly woodlands, rising gently from its base to a rather steeper ridge around a plateau on the summit. The southern slope dips down more steeply, almost directly to the James River. Lee recognized immediately that once the bulk of the Federal army had crossed over the hill it would be beyond his reach. There was no time to waste.
Over President Davis’s objections, Lee rode forward to see for himself what was happening at the southwest salient of Malvern Hill; there, it extended within half a mile of the James River, from which Federal gunboats could give covering fire to the Union army. By now Lee had three divisions ready to attack, facing the extreme left and the center of the Union line; that of General Theophilus H. Holmes, which was deploying on New Market (or River) Road; and those of A. P. Hill and Longstreet, beginning to deploy about one and a half miles to the northeast, along Long Bridge Road. Of Magruder, who had been ordered to support Holmes, there was no word; nor was there word from Huger or Jackson.
The afternoon wore on and Lee, watching the enemy columns moving toward Malvern Hill, decided that he had no choice but to attack. Despite his sense of urgency the attack did not begin until after 4 p.m., under the overall command of Longstreet, who fed in brigade after brigade instead of concentrating his forces to split the enemy forces in two. Lee’s plan, which had called for a simultaneous assault on the left, center, and right of the improvised salient formed by the Federal forces as they halted their retreat and faced the enemy, never materialized. Lee did not know that Huger’s division was blocked by trees felled industriously in front of him by Union pioneers, or that Magruder’s division “spent the day countermarching” fruitlessly, while Jackson remained stuck behind White Oak Swamp. The battle itself degenerated into brutal hand-to-hand combat on the Federal left, in which soldiers clubbed each other with their musket butts and officers thrust at each other with their swords. At best only half of Lee’s forces got into action, and the chance to cut off and destroy the bulk of the Federal army was lost. The Federals were able to spend the night preparing well-thought-out defenses on Malvern Hill, a naturally strong position.
Casualties were about the same on both sides (3,797 Feder
als; 3,673 Confederates), although the number of Confederate dead and wounded was 40 percent higher than that of the Federals. The number of Federals “missing,” that is to say those who were captured or had deserted under fire, was an astounding 1,804, six times the number of those killed. Lee’s disappointment at being deprived of a decisive battle was intense and long-lived, but brought out his most impressive quality as a commander. He would give neither his troops nor the enemy an opportunity to rest—he would attack again next day.
It was not until ten o’clock at night that the sounds of battle ceased, to be replaced by the moans of the wounded and the dying. Jackson, who had at last retired on “a pallet” that had been prepared for him on the ground, was woken around one o’clock in the morning by his division commanders, who were concerned that McClellan might order his army to advance in the morning. Jackson heard them out politely; replied realistically, “No, I think he will clear out in the morning”; and then went back to sleep.
He was absolutely right. McClellan, who had spent the entire day safely on board the U.S.S. Galena in the James River—from which he nevertheless wired dramatically to the War Department, “If none of us escape we shall at least have done honor to the country”—had the good sense to order Fitz John Porter to dig his artillery in on Malvern Hill and let Lee attack him there.
Malvern Hill—July 1, 1862
At first light Jackson saw that the Federals in front of him were gone, and was able to cross White Oak Swamp unimpeded. Lee now had the concentration he had been seeking the day before—Magruder’s troops had arrived after an eighteen-mile march, much of it unnecessary; Huger’s troops had appeared at last; Jackson would soon be in position on the far left. As the sun rose and the early-morning mist dissipated, however, an ominous sight was revealed: “the enemy [was] most advantageously posted upon an elevated ridge in front of Malvern Hill, which was occupied by several lines of infantry partially fortified, and by a powerful artillery. In short, the whole army of McClellan, with three hundred pieces of field artillery,* was now, for the first time, assembled on one field, determined to stand at bay, and contend for its existence; while the whole Confederate army was also converging around it, under the immediate eye of the Commander-in-Chief and the President.”
To his credit Fitz John Porter had managed to extricate the bulk of the Union army, and its artillery from yesterday’s battlefield shambles, and place them overnight on high ground under the protection of a powerful force of artillery, as well as the powerful long-range cannons of the gunboats. The opportunity of catching the enemy on the move had slipped through Lee’s fingers on June 30, and he was now facing the most difficult of military situations, an attack against an enemy in a formidably concentrated position on higher ground with an excellent field of fire. The Federal infantry was drawn up, in some places as deep as three lines, in a semicircle about three-quarters of the way up the hill, facing several hundred yards of gently sloping open ground, at the base of which was a dense thicket of woods, brush, and marshland that would inevitably slow down the Confederates’ approach, and make it difficult, perhaps impossible, for them to deploy in line for an attack until they were in the open ground on the fields beyond it, where they would be heavily shelled. Porter had chosen “a natural fortress,” in Freeman’s words: “Had the Union engineers searched the whole countryside below Richmond, they could not have ground more ideally set for the slaughter of an attacking army.” The far left of the Union line was protected by a small stream, Turkey Run, as well as by the gunboats* in the James River, and the far right by Western Run, which meandered through marshy ground toward the James.
Once again, getting the Confederate troops into position for the assault was a slow and faltering process, consuming most of the day. Lee met with his principal commanders shortly after dawn. A good night’s sleep had apparently restored Jackson’s vigor. It was now Lee, despite his usual calm demeanor, who showed the effects of fatigue, nervous strain, and an unspecified illness—none of it surprising in a man of fifty-five who had been fighting without interruption for a week. “His temper,” Freeman notes, “was not of the best,” an occurrence rare enough to be noticed. He was sufficiently aware of his state of mind to ask General Longstreet to accompany him as a kind of ad hoc second in command and chief of staff. Longstreet was bluffly optimistic, but except for him the general feeling was that an attack would be “well nigh hopeless.” D. H. Hill had discovered a chaplain in his command whose home was in the vicinity. The chaplain’s opinion on the wisdom of attacking Malvern Hill was: “If General McClellan is there in strength, we had better leave him alone.” But this opinion carried no weight with Lee, who was determined to destroy the Federal army before it was out of his reach, let alone with Longstreet, who told D. H. Hill, “Don’t get scared, now that we have got him whipped,” a daring thing to have said to a fellow general (and brother-in-law of Stonewall Jackson).
When Brigadier General Jubal A. Early “expressed his concern lest McClellan escape, Lee answered grimly, ‘Yes, he will get away because I cannot have my orders carried out!’” Although Early himself was famous for his bad temper, so much so that Lee called him “my bad old man,” this morning he was tactful enough not to point out that Lee’s orders of the day before had been contradictory.
Lee’s temper remained frayed all day, perhaps because the more closely he looked at Malvern Hill, the greater the difficulties of carrying it seemed to be. Not only was it a textbook example of a strong defensive position; there were only two halfway decent roads toward it, which joined about three miles from the summit—the rest were all rough farm tracks. This meant that he would have to push most of his divisions down a single narrow road to approach in full view of the enemy on the summit.
The issue of incorrect or misleading maps arose again almost at once. Lee had ordered Magruder to proceed down what he called “the Quaker road,” by which he meant Willis Church Road, which was sometimes known as the Quaker road to locals,* but Magruder’s guide had chosen another road known by the name “Willis” farther to the right—where Longstreet at last found him moving in the wrong direction. Magruder’s division now had to countermarch, a problem similar to the one that had faced Jackson at Gaines’s Mill.
12. Lines of advance by the Army of Northern Virginia, morning of July 1, 1862.
{Robert E. Lee, Volumes 1, 2, and 3, by Douglas Southall Freeman, copyright © 1934, 1935, by Charles Scribner’s Sons, copyright renewed 1962, 1963, by Inez Godden Freeman. All rights reserved.}
While searching for Magruder, Longstreet discovered a bare ridge on the extreme Confederate right, with an open field of fire, from which massed Confederate artillery could rake the Union artillery. If advantage could be taken of a similar position on the far left, Confederate fire would be converged from two directions against the Federal guns. “Converging fire” is the beau ideal of gunnery, rarely achieved, in which artillery fire from separate points comes together against a single point of the enemy’s line with devastating effect. To accomplish this at Malvern Hill would take time, however. On the right, pioneers had to be deployed to fell trees and “cut a road,” while on the left, heavy woods and swampy ground had slowed down the arrival of the guns. It is a well-known fact of war that “the speed of deployment by artillery . . . decides the outcome of the battle,” and by this standard, Lee’s deployment was slow; nor was he able to assemble the number of guns needed to produce the effect he wanted. The idea of “neutralizing” the enemy’s superior artillery power by carefully aimed cross fire was brilliant, but it needed at least fifty guns on each side, and in the end not more than twenty were pushed, pulled, and hauled into place.
Magruder’s division still had to be brought forward, and the Confederate line had to be formed up across a front stretching nearly 2,400 yards from Crewe’s Run to the wooded hills overlooking Western Run, where Jackson’s left flank—consisting of Hood’s predominantly Texan brigade and Isaac Trimble’s brigade of Georgian, Mississippian,
Alabaman, and North Carolinian regiments—overlapped and flanked the Union line, but they still faced nearly 400 yards of heavy woods and boggy marshland.
In the nineteenth century, signaling the exact moment to attack was a significant military problem—the relatively open, carefully cultivated fields of eighteenth-century European warfare were not present here. Lee’s intention was that his entire army should advance together when the converging bombardment from Confederate artillery had destroyed the line of Union guns; but who was to decide when that moment had arrived, and how was he to signal it to the rest of the army? From the summit of Malvern Hill Fitz John Porter (and briefly in the early morning, George McClellan) could look down with a good view of the Confederate army, but from Willis Church Road to Crewe’s Run the ground was broken by wooded hills and ridges—most of Lee’s troops as they formed could see neither the slope of Malvern Hill nor the brigade or regiment on either side of them. They would not be able to form a cohesive line of battle until they emerged from the woods onto open ground, at which point they would be within 300 yards of the Federal guns.
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