Lee's Lieutenants

by Douglas Southall Freeman

  Disappointment was general among the commanding officers scattered through the woods and over the fields. Five hours the army had waited. Nothing had happened except the uneven artillery duel, which now was drawing to a humiliating end. D. H. Hill waited at his post with his five brigadiers. Armistead and Wright held to their ground. Mahone, Cobb, and Barksdale were moving to their support. The divisions of D. R. Jones and McLaws, of Magruder’s command, were being formed and directed by Longstreet.26

  Now, suddenly, everything changed. Galloping Magruder came on the scene after his long, wasted march. He was all ardor, all excitement, altogether ignorant of the situation on his immediate front. He undertook a reconnaissance with officers supplied by Armistead. He sent back word to bring up thirty rifled pieces from the divisional artillery. Wheeling then, before any of his troops were in position, he dashed to the rear to hurry forward D. R. Jones’s division. While he was attempting to speed the advance, Magruder received for the first time the circular Lee had dispatched to the division commanders, some three hours previously, for a general advance when Armistead raised a shout. In a short time there also was handed Magruder a note from a staff officer he had sent Lee. This was brief and mystifying, but behind it was a new situation.

  Lee had ridden far to the left, after he had concluded that the bombardment would be a failure, and found favorable ground for launching an attack. He discussed with Longstreet how the reserve divisions could be moved up for an assault. Riding back toward the center, he had word from Whiting that heavy infantry columns were moving to the Federal left, and that wagons and troops in retreat could be seen in the Federal rear. He heard too from Magruder that Armistead had won advantage. Lee promptly abandoned his design for an attack on the left and reverted to his earlier plan for a general assault. The note he sent back with Magruder’s staff officer was to the effect that, as the Federals were said to be getting off, Lee expected him to advance rapidly and follow up Armistead’s success.27

  Once more Prince John put spurs to his horse and galloped to the front, directing Armistead and Wright to prepare for the assault. Magruder’s plan, as he subsequently stated in his report, was “to hurl about 15,000 men against the enemy’s batteries and supporting infantry; to follow up any successes they might obtain….” Because Magruder acted on assumption and did not get in touch with his support, execution fell murderously short of the plan.

  When Wright was ordered to begin his advance, no other troops were in position to go forward with him. Less than 1,000 men stepped out into the open to storm the hill. Mahone suffered delay because Magruder took time to “address a few words” to the brigade. Armistead, told to move up his three rear regiments, replied that they were raw troops. In their place, Magruder sent in three regiments of Cobb’s brigade. When Ransom was called on to charge, he replied that he could not move without orders from Huger, to whom he was submitting Magruder’s request. Magruder thereupon rode back to Barksdale’s brigade, of his own division, and undertook personally to deploy it.28

  The result of all these orders, messages, and gallops forward and back was that now, by 6 o’clock, Magruder had put into action two of Huger’s brigades besides the three regiments of Armistead on the hillside. Only one brigade and part of another had been brought to the front, and these were in support rather than in the front line of attack. Not more than 5,000 men were challenging the stronghold of the Crew House Hill, and they had little artillery behind them.

  Hopeless and ill-handled as was Magruder’s partial attack, it precipitated a slaughter of D. H. Hill’s troops, who had been waiting for the charge of Armistead’s men. When troops rushed out of the woods to the right with a shout, reported Samuel Garland, Hill exclaimed, “That must be the general advance! Bring up your brigades as soon as possible and join in it.” The well-trained officers of Hill’s division hurried to their commands and, between 6:30 and 7:00, led them, cheering, straight up the low, cleared hill on either side of the Willis Church Road. It was not war; it was mass murder. As in every action of the campaign, the men in the ranks did all they could to make good the blunders and delays of their leaders; but this time they were sent to achieve the impossible. Valor could not conquer those batteries on the crest, nor could fortitude long endure the fire that seemed to sweep every foot of the open ground. Some of Gordon’s regiments got within 200 yards of the Federal guns, though they lost half their numbers; Ripley’s troops reached level ground, where they were mown by canister. In the end, the shattered, bloody wreckage of D. H. Hill’s division slipped back down the hill. Ewell gallantly attempted to lend support, but it was futile.29

  Magruder ere this completely had lost his grip on his troops. The first attackers were pinned down almost under the mouths of the guns. Cobb and Barksdale, first in support, were beaten back with heavy casualties. D. R. Jones’s division, split into three parts, had little power to strike. McLaws’s two brigades were put in so far apart that one could not see the other. As night fell the opposing forces could be distinguished only by their lines of musketry. On the field and in the woods lay 5,000 dead and wounded boys.30

  During the night General McClellan retreated, as he had after every battle of the campaign. This time he took a position at Harrison’s Landing, where he was sheltered by the fire of gunboats in the James River. His weary men left more rifles and equipment along their route than on any previous march of the retreat. No pursuit was attempted.

  The strategic aim of the campaign had been achieved despite bad coordination, worse tactics, and the worst imaginable staff work: Richmond had been relieved. McClellan was no longer at the city’s gates. In the brief period of rest that followed, the command of the army could be appraised, the men who had failed in action could be relieved, and a reorganization, historic in all its aspects, could be effected.

  CHAPTER 13

  Lessons of the Seven Days

  1

  THE END OF MAGRUDER AND OF HUGER

  First to be reckoned were the casualties. Including those of Huger’s affair of June 25, on the first of the Seven Days, the final computation was 20,141 killed, wounded, and missing. These were most unevenly divided. Those of thirteen brigades, one third of the army, were 10,506, more than half the total. Eight of these thirteen were in Longstreet’s and A. P. Hill’s divisions. In Jack-sons and Ewell’s divisions, casualties numbered 1,195, less than 6 per cent of the whole; the three brigades of the old Army of the Valley, Jackson’s own division, accounted for only 208 of these. Magruder’s three divisions, six brigades, lost 2,491. Heaviest losses in a single brigade were those of Cadmus Wilcox, Longstreet’s division—1,055. Of regiments, the worst toll in a single battle was the 335 paid at Mechanicsville by the 44th Georgia, D. H. Hill’s division. Whatever the explanation of these figures, they showed that the Army of the Valley had not contributed heavily in blood to the direct defense of Richmond. Lee’s men, not Jackson’s, had borne the brunt.1

  Fatalities in the high command had not been numerous. Only one brigadier general, Richard Griffith, had been killed. Of the seven who had been wounded or injured, Arnold Elzey alone was disabled permanently for field duty, though Pickett and Featherston were listed as “severely wounded.” Far more numerous had been the fatalities among regimental commanders—fourteen colonels killed or mortally wounded. Two others had received hurts that were to keep them from ever serving again with their regiments.

  Some of the brigades had been crippled by the loss of officers. A. R Hill had two colonels killed, and two brigadier generals, eleven colonels, and six lieutenant colonels wounded. Hood lost eighteen officers in his brigade at Gaines’ Mill; at Glendale, all of Wilcox’s regimental commanders were wounded; in the fighting around Malvern Hill, Ransom had three colonels wounded and one lieutenant colonel killed. Ripley had to report three of his four colonels killed during the campaign. In some instances, the heavy casualties among both officers and enlisted men were due to bad positions, to unavoidable assaults, or to circumstances unpreventable. Ot
her casualty lists, laden with hundreds of names, could be explained in terms of poor leading only.

  All of the division commanders had escaped physical injury, but several of them had suffered in reputation. Magruder was the most conspicuous of these men, and figured in a curious dispute. He had been irked for weeks by his loss of independent command, and was most anxious to accept transfer to the Department of the Trans-Mississippi, promised him in May but suspended until the contest for Richmond was settled. The day after Malvern Hill Magruder applied for orders. Without hesitation, Lee relieved him on July 3 and broke up his cumbersome command: Jones’s half division was put under Longstreet; Magruder’s own division, made up of Toombs’s and Barksdale’s brigades, was consolidated with McLaws’s.2

  As soon as these arrangements were made, Magruder ceremoniously bade farewell to his troops and started on July 12 for his new post. Rumor, by that time, was wagging a vicious tongue concerning him. He was accused of gross recklessness, of wild excitement and intoxication at Malvern Hill. “Old Magruder,” wrote Colonel T R. R. Cobb to his wife, “made no reputation in this battle. He lost rather than gained. He was depressed, and I fear was drinking.” Still darker, in the eyes of many, was the wholly unjust charge that the general had shown the white feather and had sought to screen himself from the enemy’s fire. These allegations were not long in reaching the ears of the President. To ignore them was unjust alike to the army and to Magruder. While en route to his new post he was recalled to Richmond for an explanation. In his place, General Holmes temporarily was assigned to the Trans-Mississippi.3

  Back in the capital, Magruder did not bluster publicly but took the charges seriously and undertook to meet them with meticulous regard for military usage. Two days after Malvern Hill he had written a report of some 200 words. This he proceeded to elaborate into a document of forty times that length. He assiduously collected field dispatches, and from his guides affidavits to prove that the road he had taken on July 1 was the true and only Quaker Road. To clinch his case, he included a statement by the surgeon of the 16th Georgia, who duly denied that the general was excited or drunk or showed “disposition … to screen himself from the enemy’s fire.” In certain respects his report was not altogether frank; inferentially, the enemy’s retreat on the night of July 1 was attributed to the attack Magruder had delivered. He was the hero of his narrative and, apparently in his own mind, of the Battle of Malvern Hill.

  When the report was finished, on August 12, he transmitted it to Lee. After setting right in seven “remarks” Magruder’s “misapprehensions” concerning events of the campaign, Lee sent it to the secretary of war. His covering letter was at once candid and reserved. Magruder “had many difficulties to contend with, I know,” Lee wrote. “I regretted … that they could not have been more readily overcome. I feel assured, however, that General Magruder intentionally omitted nothing that he could do to insure success.” That was both just and generous. With it was coupled not a hint, even the faintest, that Lee desired Magruder to remain with the Army of Northern Virginia.4

  It was not until October 10 that Magruder received orders, and then he did not get the entire Trans-Mississippi command. Instead he was given the District of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. He arranged at his own cost for the separate printing of his report, announcing with a flourish that his explanation of his part in the battles had been made “to the satisfaction of the War Department as well as of General Lee.” New and curious adventures awaited Prince John in Texas, but with these words he verbally galloped off for the last time from the Army of Northern Virginia.5

  General Benjamin Huger, next to Magruder, was the officer most criticized for his part in the Seven Days. To his slow march on June 30, more than to any other miscarriage of the day, was attributed the failure of Lee’s plan. When Lee wrote his report of the campaign, he distinguished between Huger’s failure and that of Jackson by a delicate choice of words: “Huger not coming up, and Jackson having been unable to force the passage of White Oak Swamp,” Longstreet and A. P. Hill lacked support at Glendale.

  Huger’s own report failed to change the impression that he was what press and army styled a “do-nothing general.” What he recorded and what others remarked of him then and thereafter constitute a singular exhibit of the opportunities of good and evil—by doing foolish things and of doing nothing—that an “independent” division commander may have in battle. At 3:00 A.M. on June 30 he sent the brigades of Armistead and Wright off at a right angle to his line of advance to “take the enemy in flank.” He neither notified the commanding general of this decision, nor joined or attempted to direct his lieutenants’ movements after they began their march. Armistead and Wright, advancing aimlessly, were eventually directed toward the front by General Lee. Ere that, at his leisure, Huger had directed Mahone and Ransom to advance, but found other troops in the way and “I had no one to show us what road to take.” Although Huger, in effect, had lost his brigades during the morning, he insisted in his report that his troops had been taken from him. “As I was treated in the same manner at Seven Pines,” he said, “I can only hope this course was accidental and required by the necessities of the service.”6

  Previously Lee had suggested that Huger might be sent to South Carolina. Now, quietly and without an explanatory word in newspapers or in army orders, General Huger was relieved of duty with his division and assigned as inspector of artillery and ordnance, the type of work that had been his before the war. There is no record of any protest by Huger. A singular, silent, and proud figure he dimly appears through the years. He had been too long habituated to the slow peacetime routine of the ordnance service to adjust himself to field command, for which he had no aptitude.

  General Holmes, in the judgment of some critics of the campaign, had been as remiss as either Magruder or Huger. The probability is that those who criticized him knew neither the weakness of his troops nor the strength of the position against which he was sent. At the moment, resentfully they wrote him down as a failure, but they soon forgot him. He was the commander of a separate department, he did not associate long with the Army of Northern Virginia, and within a few weeks he went west to command the department previously assigned Magruder.7

  If Holmes be regarded as scarcely an active participant in the campaign and consequently be not adjudged responsible for serious failure, there was a question concerning the performance of a fourth prominent officer—the chief of Lee’s artillery, Brigadier General W. N. Pendleton, who will appear often and curiously in these pages.

  At age twenty-one Pendleton had been graduated at West Point, No. 8 in the class of 1830. After three years in the artillery he had resigned, and had taught in Pennsylvania and at Delaware College. Having entered the ministry in 1837, he had accepted the rectorate of the small Episcopal church in Lexington, Virginia. In 1860 some of the young men of the community organized a battery and asked him to drill them. This he undertook. After secession the command enlisted as the Rockbridge Artillery and elected Pendleton, then fifty-one, as its captain. At Manassas, on July 21, 1861, the gunners under Pendleton did such fine service that he was commended by Jackson and mentioned in Johnston’s report as the army’s “one educated artillerist … that model of a Christian soldier.”

  Pendleton had acted during part of the autumn as Johnston’s chief of artillery and, on March 26, 1862, had been made a brigadier general. Picturesque in person, he somewhat resembled General Lee. With gray beard and with mien half martial, half clerical, he had preached fervently when he was not drilling. At the end of April 1862 he had been listed as in command of the reserve artillery. He wrote letters as long, though not so numerous, as those of Magruder, and he had definite aptitude for organization.8

  On June 21 he had submitted to Lee the first of many proposals for the regrouping of the batteries under an “army chief of artillery.” Lee approved, but in the haste of preparation for battle it was not made operative in its entirety. The result was that General Pendleton did not e
nter the campaign with all his guns wisely apportioned, nor could he or any other single officer exercise authority over all the batteries scattered among the brigades and divisions. His specific charge was the reserve artillery, a fifth of all the artillery in the army. Pendleton had cooperated on the south side of the Chickahominy June 26-27, while Lee was fighting at Mechanicsville and Gaines’ Mill. On the twenty-eighth he had worked to put heavy guns in position to cover Magruder’s position.9

  Thereafter, Pendleton’s own curious account of his movements is a sufficient commentary on his conduct. Officially he wrote: “Fever supervening disabled me on the 29th, so that the day was necessarily passed by me as a quiet Sabbath.” Privately he told his wife, “I am lying on a lounge under a shady tree in the yard of my headquarters…. I feel better already, and hope a day’s rest, a blue pill, etc. may have me quite well again tomorrow.” The next day, as he predicted, he was well enough for field duty: “On Monday, 30th, I was again able to be in the field, and employed the forenoon in ascertaining movements in progress and adjusting to them the arrangements of my own command.”

  “Tuesday morning, July 1”—the day of the Battle of Malvern Hill—“was spent by me in seeking for some time the commanding general, that I might get orders, and by reason of the intricacy of routes failing in this…. No occasion was presented for bringing up the reserve artillery—indeed, it seemed that not one-half of the division batteries were brought into action on either Monday or Tuesday. To remain near by, therefore, and await events and orders … was all that I could do.”10