There was somber, costly truth in what Pendleton said about the non-employment of divisional artillery. The tragic losses of the infantry attested the failure of the Confederates to bring up their guns through the woods. This did not alter the fact that the chief of artillery, on the final day of the operation, did not even reach general headquarters. Lee made no criticism of Pendleton in his report. Had he been dissatisfied, with whom would he have succeeded him? Who could boast even Pendleton’s limited experience in directing a large number of guns? Some of the younger artillery officers were not so philosophical; they laughed at Pendleton behind his back. More mature men felt that the reserve batteries had not been handled well. Lieutenant Colonel A. S. Cutts described the day at Malvern Hill: “… although I am sure that more artillery could have been used with advantage in this engagement, and also that my command could have done good service, yet I received no orders….“11
Would Pendleton learn? Outranged, the Confederate artillery was served with ammunition less good. Was it now to be outfought or better handled? Pendleton had not fulfilled his opportunities. That was the most charitable judgment. Would he justify Lee’s confidence, or would he at some new crisis follow Magruder and Huger into obscurity? Of stout fabric was Lee’s patience, but it might wear thin.
2
STRANGE PROBLEMS OF COMMAND
If Pendleton had not purged himself on June 29, he might have had the energy to reach headquarters on July 1. In Magruder’s case, his excitement and confusion, his reckless galloping to and fro, his attempts to perform the duties of half a dozen general officers undoubtedly were attributable, in part, to inappropriate medication and a lack of sleep. Huger had the look of a man prematurely aged, and his slowness may be explained by the despairing term “arteriosclerosis.” Other officers exhibited during the campaign a discontent, an arrogant or disdainful individualism, or an insubordinate spirit of criticism that raises a question: Were they physically ill or were they unsuited temperamentally for command?
Unhappily on this list of the disgruntled was Brigadier General W. H. C. Whiting. On the surface his record shone. Beneath there were ugly rumors—that he was jealous of Jackson, that he had been overcritical of the dispositions made by his superior, that he had been tipsy at Gaines’ Mill, that he had not personally shared there in the charge of his division, and that he had done less than his part at Malvern Hill. Of none of these alleged derelictions was there a hint in reports, but neither was there praise for the division commander. In his own account Whiting had no admiring words for his chief. In relating the disappointing events of July 1, he made it conspicuously plain that he had acted under Jackson’s direct orders. Common report had it that Whiting cried bitterly, “Great God! Won’t some ranking officer come and save us from this fool?”12
Although the campaign developed nothing tangibly to the discredit of Whiting, he did not distinguish himself either in leadership or cooperation. Doubtless at headquarters there was speculation over the reason. Perhaps, too, there was disappointment that a man of his intellectual endowment should not have risen in reputation. What was amiss? Was it a permanent defect, enslaving habit, or temporary eclipse? Lee left Whiting at the head of the division in a semi-autonomous command, as if he did not know under whom the abilities of Whiting effectively could be employed.
In a far lower bracket of military knowledge than Whiting, but enjoying a political reputation that made his discontent a subject of much gossip, was Brigadier General Robert Toombs. When his native Georgia seceded, Senator Toombs was in his fifty-first year and was in general estimation among the half-dozen leading public men of the South. Portly but pale, with a face half-studious, half-contemptuous, he had a frowning senatorial air. Limitless confidence in the rightness of his views, skill in dramatic phrase-making, and a plausible if superficial logic made his oratorical deliverances as convincing to his followers as they were provoking to his opponents. Had he been less entrenched as a member of the ruling class, he would have been a demagogue. Had he been more patiently tolerant, he would have been a statesmen. As he was, he was neither. Nor was he politically consistent. “Bob Toombs,” it was said, “disagrees with himself between meals.” Howell Cobb remarked of him, “Toombs had altogether the best mind of any statesman in the United States but lacked balance.” Wrote Major Raphael J. Moses, who saw him at close range, “[Toombs’s] impulses were generous and noble, his faults were bluster and a vivid imagination not always hampered by facts.”13
When the Confederate government was organized, Toombs was disappointed in not being elected to the presidency, and was not placated by the tender of the first position in the Cabinet. He accepted and labored, furiously if sullenly, for about five months. Then he resigned to accept command of a Georgia brigade. He did not believe the war would be long, and did not intend that it should stop his political career, but he felt that more of service was to be rendered and more of honor won in the field than in the forum.14
During his service in the winter of 1861-62, Toombs indulged in a correspondence that was a succession of growls. Johnston, he wrote, “is a poor devil, small, arbitrary and inefficient.” Again of Johnston he wrote: “As he had been at West Point, tho’, I suppose he necessarily knows everything about it…. The army is dying…. Set this down in your book, and set down opposite to it its epitaph, ‘died of West Point.’” Still, he enjoyed martial pomp. One observer laughed at the memory of Toombs’s performance in the march through Richmond to the Peninsula: “He put himself at the head of one regiment and moved it out of sight amid hurrahs, then galloping back he brought on another, ready himself for cheers, until the brigade was down the street and near the embarkation.”15
On the retreat from Yorktown Toombs lost the temporary rating as a divisional chief awarded him by Magruder, and he reached Richmond in deep discontent. “We had a rough time in the Peninsula,” he wrote Vice President Stephens. “…This army will not fight until McClellan attacks it. Science will do anything but fight. It will burn, retreat, curse, swear, get drunk, strip soldiers—anything but fight.” It was in that mood that Toombs entered the battles of the Seven Days. He cheerfully promised his surgeon that during the operations he would not indulge in strong liquor, and there is no evidence that he failed to keep his pledge; but neither is there evidence that he progressed toward the military fame he coveted.16
His best opportunity came at Malvern Hill, but there his force, though resolute, was mishandled inexcusably. Toombs virtually lost control of it. During the confusion, D. H. Hill came upon the bewildered Toombs and hotly demanded to know why, after pretending to want to fight, Toombs had not done so, though the enemy was in plain sight. “For shame! Rally your troops! Where were you when I was riding up and down your line, rallying your troops?” Toombs’s reply is not on record, but after the battle he demanded an explanation and, when it proved “unsatisfactory,” he challenged Hill. Scornfully Hill rejected the demand as contrary to his religion and his duty and “the laws which we have mutually sworn to serve,” and the Confederacy was not made ridiculous by a battle behind the battle line. Apparently, in short order, Hill and Toombs were reconciled.
In appraising the Seven Days’ Battles, Toombs was violent: “They were fought without skill or judgment and were victorious by dint of dead hard fighting…. Longstreet has won more reputation, and I think deservedly, than all of our major generals put together. Stonewall Jackson and his troops did little or nothing in these battles of the Chickahominy and Lee was far below the occasion. If we had a general in command we could easily have taken McClellan’s whole command….” He did not seem to have considered that he had failed in any particular, but he was disgusted. He told Stephens, “I shall leave the army the instant I can do so without dishonor.”17
These opinions on the part of a man habitually outspoken doubtless were known in the army, but nothing was done to silence or to discipline Toombs. Presumably Davis and Lee did not wish to arouse resentments among Toombs’s supporters. Probabl
y the feeling was that he would do less harm if kept closely under the eye of a vigilant division commander than he would if he became an anti-administration leader in Georgia or in the Confederate Congress.
In a category different from that of Toombs, save in one troublesome particular, stood D. H. Hill at the close of the campaign. His leadership had been courageous and skillful. General Lee, who abhorred adjectives and used adverbs sparingly, employed both in his report describing Harvey Hill’s advance at Gaines’ Mill. Jackson, himself scoring obstacles, was at pains to explain those Hill had overcome on June 27. For failure to drive home his attack on July 1, Hill was not and could not have been blamed by his superiors.
Personally, too, Hill had been recklessly and obstinately contemptuous of danger. Colonel John B. Gordon, at Malvern Hill, found his divisional commander busy drafting an order on the exposed side of a large tree. To Gordons warnings he said only, “I am not going to be killed until my time comes.” Almost at the sound of the word, a shell crashed close by. The concussion rolled Hill over on the ground; a fragment of the iron tore the breast of his coat. He got up without a word, shook the dirt from his uniform, and sat down again—on the far side of the tree. That was the maximum he would concede in self-protection.
Hill’s strategic sense had been excellent, his tactics sound. No complaints of clumsiness or of negligence in administration are in the records. Professionally, then, at the close of the Seven Days D. H. Hill was among the first of Lee’s lieutenants, but he was not generally popular. “I don’t like Hill, much to my surprise,” confided cavalryman Thomas Cobb, “for I was ready to love him for his Christian character.” Cobb went on regretfully, “There is much bad blood among these high officers, jealousies and backbitings.”18
Backbiting was not the word to describe Hill’s habit of mind, but critical he was, ceaselessly critical. For his dead officers he usually had laudation; the living, high or low, he seldom spared when he thought them derelict. Nor would he stop at the line of his own division. Adjoining units and their commanders, if they did what he considered to be less than their part, would receive the arrows of his wrath. More often than not, Hill was sound in his adverse military judgment, though apt to disregard practical difficulties; but his insistence on pointing out the errors of others, at the same time that he dwelt on the accomplishments of his own men, irritated some of his comrades.
There is every reason to believe that Harvey Hill’s criticisms sprang from his chronic dyspepsia and not from jealousy or any sense of superiority. Whether this was recognized at the time is unclear, but at army headquarters there was no disposition to overlook the abilities of the man because his tongue was sharp. Beyond question, Hill would have remained with the Army of Northern Virginia after the Seven Days had not the transfer of Holmes to the Department of the Trans-Mississippi created a vacancy in North Carolina that seemed to demand the appointment of Hill. As he was at the time the outstanding North Carolinian in Confederate service, it seemed best to name him to command in his own state, which had been stripped of troops.
He was assigned accordingly. In his place, because of uncertainty regarding the permissible number and seniority of major generals, no successor was named. His troops continued to be known as “D. H. Hill’s Division” and, in some minor operations undertaken by him south of the James after the Seven Days, were under his direction. Strange and unpredicted was the fate that awaited him.19
3
STUART MAKES A SECOND “RAID”
When reports of the Seven Days were filed and the service of the different arms was given its proper valuation, how stood the cavalry? Had Jeb Stuart added to the reputation he had won in the ride around McClellan?
In covering the left of Jackson’s advance on June 26, Stuart executed his orders literally, but without imagination. Like Jackson, he failed to see the importance of liaison on the right. On the twenty-seventh, at Gaines’ Mill, he gained no new laurels; his troopers were well-nigh helpless in the blinding underbrush and enveloping forests of the Chickahominy. On the twenty-eighth he was sent to cut the York River Railroad and thereby sever McClellan’s communications with the shipping on the Pamunkey. The task was performed easily in the face of trivial opposition.
Ere the end of the day, Stuart observed immense clouds of smoke billowing upward from the direction of the Federal base at White House. Dawn of June 29 found the troopers advancing on the smoking ruins, and what soon held Stuart’s gaze was a Federal gunboat at the landing. Cavalry against a navy—there was a chance for an encounter that would make the entire army talk! Stuart sent in a line of skirmishers and a howitzer, “a few shells from which,” he reported with gusto, “fired with great accuracy and bursting directly over her decks, caused an instantaneous … and precipitate flight under full headway of steam down the river.” He added that the howitzer “gave chase at a gallop,” and the gunboat—she was U.S.S. Marblehead—never returned.
To the deserted base the cavalrymen trotted and found evidences of prodigal destruction that made them marvel at the resources of their foe. “The accumulation of commissary supplies,” wrote one officer, “seemed endless.” Sutlers’ stores, the prize most desired by hungry soldiers, had been set out, as if a Union column had been expected. “Provisions and delicacies of every description lay in heaps,” Stuart reported with a smack of his lips, “and the men regaled themselves on the fruits of the tropics as well as the substantial of the land.” To feasting and to destruction of what could not be removed, Stuart devoted the day. Otherwise the Federals might return, he reasoned, and carry off anything he left.20
From Lee came a question on which the strategy of the campaign hung: What movements of the enemy had Stuart observed; what did he think McClellan intended to do? The answer in this instance was not difficult, but it involved sound military reasoning from evidence a cavalry commander on outpost duty always should seek to collect. Promptly Stuart sent back word to Lee that he saw no indications of any retreat down the Peninsula, and that he had no doubt McClellan, having lost communication with the York, was moving toward the James.
Reveille on the morning of June 30 presented Stuart with the cavalryman’s usual problem—what next? His decision was prudent if simple: The column must proceed to the Chickahominy. If McClellan intended to recross that river, Stuart would be in position to ascertain that fact; if the Federals were making for the James, Stuart could pass over the Chickahominy and close on them. He found the Forge Bridge and Long Bridge crossings picketed by the enemy. “I tried in vain,” Stuart reported, “to ascertain by scouts the force beyond, and it being now nearly dark we bivouacked again.” There had come meanwhile from the direction of White Oak Swamp the disturbing sound of heavy fire. A battle manifestly was on—and Stuart was not there to share its dangers and its honors! While others were winning fame he could do nothing but wait and sleep.21
Next morning at 3:30 brought a courier with orders to cross the Chickahominy to cooperate with Jackson. This proved to be a day-long march. Stuart decided that the point toward which he should direct the last stage of his march was Haxall’s Landing, south of Malvern Hill, but distance, darkness, and the proximity of the Federals compelled him to halt before he could join Jackson. About an hour after he bivouacked, the roar of the battle at Malvern Hill died out. His men were then about a mile and a half east of the Confederate left flank, and had covered forty-two miles that day.22
July 2 was spent by Stuart in reconnoitering, rounding up Federal stragglers, and collecting abandoned arms. That night he reasoned that the Federals were close to the James River and that a bit of artillery fire might keep McClellan’s tired army where it was. Young Captain John Pelham of the horse artillery was sent off through the darkness to find a position from which he could sweep the River Road. Before morning Pelham had in Stuart’s hands a report that the enemy was near the famous old Byrd mansion of Westover, on low ground dominated by a long ridge known as Evelington Heights. Much might be gained, Captain Pelham suggeste
d, by planting artillery on those heights.
It was a prospect that appealed to Stuart. Early on July 3 his force was hurrying eastward, then southward. The march was swift and easy. Evelington Heights was reached and a Federal squadron on guard there sent ascampering. Below the heights the enemy’s camps and wagon trains could be seen. Pelham, who had been waiting quietly near-by, was told to “let ’em have it.” Soon the bark of his little howitzer, his one and only serviceable gun, was heard. The fall of his shell on the flats set teamsters to running and horses to rearing, but did no other damage.
While the gun kept up its fire, Stuart collected stragglers and questioned residents, and their information was all to the same effect—the whole of the Federal army was in far-spreading camps under the heights and adjacent to the river. This important news he sent forthwith to General Lee and, in reply, learned that Jackson and Longstreet were on the march eastward. Yet by 2 o’clock Stuart’s game was up. Federal pressure forced back the troopers; Pelham rapidly exhausted his ammunition. Stuart learned that Longstreet, leading the advance, was then on the Charles City Road six or seven miles distant. The heights could not be held, by any possibility, long enough for the infantry to arrive. Reluctantly he fell back two miles and went into camp. The next morning, July 4, when both Longstreet and Jackson were near enough to strike, the Federal grip on Evelington Heights was too strong to be challenged.23
In this manner ended Stuart’s part in the campaign of the Seven Days. Had it been a full part, the maximum that could have been expected of the cavalry commander in an offensive on which the life of the Confederacy depended?
Lee's Lieutenants Page 34