by John Keegan
Both men were troubled by attempting to alter the balance of forces in the northern Virginia theatre. Beside McClellan’s large concentration in the peninsula, part of his army, McDowell’s corps, had been held back by Lincoln to guard Washington. The other sizable Union forces within striking distance were the army of Nathaniel Banks in the Shenandoah Valley and that of Frémont beyond it in the west Virginia mountains. The Shenandoah Valley, like the Chesapeake, was a strategic corridor of the greatest importance, an easy avenue of advance up the Appalachian chain leading into the plains above Washington and near Baltimore. Control of the Shenandoah conferred great strategic advantage. In early 1862 it was on paper controlled by the Union, because of Banks’s occupation of its northern end near Harpers Ferry. Also in the valley, however, was a small Confederate army, 15,000 strong, commanded by a former professor of the Virginia Military Institute, Thomas Jackson, known since First Bull Run as Stonewall. Jackson was a member of the West Point class of 1846 and so a classmate of McClellan’s. Like most West Pointers of his generation, he also knew many other leading figures in the two Civil War armies. What distinguished Jackson was his deeply religious temperament, his very difficult character, and the fact that he was a military genius, the only truly original soldier, besides Grant, to emerge from the conflict. Jackson’s genius was of a sort, however, that was not transferable to others. His short, famous epigram of his operational method, “Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy,” though incontestable, required his gifts of command to be put into practice. Thus, although he rightly remains one of the most admired soldiers who ever fought, very few—perhaps only Erwin Rommel—have been able to replicate his technique, which works best with a small army in an environment suitable for rapid movement and unexpected manoeuvre.
The Shenandoah Valley is exactly such an environment. Its eastern edge is formed by the Blue Ridge Mountains, its western by the Shenandoah Mountains, behind which lies the great mass of the Appalachian chain. It is thus an isolated and self-contained pocket, its geography further complicated by its internal highlands and waterways. Dividing the Shenandoah Valley runs the central ridge of Massanutten Mountain, flanked on each side by the two forks of the Shenandoah River. The mountains are cut by numerous gaps, which provide quick ways through; the rivers in 1862 were frequently crossed by wooden bridges that burnt easily. There was one good all-weather road, the Valley Turnpike, while three railroads threw spurs into the valley which connected with bigger systems.
Had Lincoln had an inkling of how creatively Jackson would use the complex Shenandoah geography, he would have had serious cause to worry, if not about the safety of Washington, then certainly about Jackson’s ability to play upon McClellan’s anxieties.
At the outset, McClellan was too busily engaged in the peninsula and Lincoln too concerned with the general’s conduct of his expedition for either to feel serious concern about the events in the valley. Jackson quickly obliged them to pay attention. His strategy had a clear purpose: to prevent the Union forces in and near the valley from concentrating against him, while appearing to threaten to transfer his army rapidly to Richmond so as to reinforce Joseph E. Johnston opposite McClellan. Jackson began the campaign at the head of the valley, where he had spent the winter. His opponent was Nathaniel Banks, who slightly outnumbered him. Jackson accordingly withdrew to Strasburg, north of of Massanutten Mountain. In the weeks to come he sought, by manoeuvre and rapid marching, to maintain contact with Banks but to avoid a battle he might lose, while feinting westward to keep Frémont at a distance, yet at the same time maintaining the deception that he could withdraw swiftly to reinforce Johnston opposite McClellan outside Richmond. Jackson achieved all his objects, though not without fighting. He chose, or was forced, to fight at Front Royal and Winchester in late May and Cross Keys and Port Republic in early June. In between these engagements his columns covered great distances at high speed on foot up and down the valley, keeping ahead of Banks or enticing him forward. The valley army was severely tried by the demands Jackson made of it. Often short of food and suitable clothing, in bitter weather and without footwear, many of the soldiers regularly marched dozens of miles a day barefoot. Those who survived acquired a toughness that made them formidable opponents in battle. They were proud to call themselves “foot cavalry.” The valley army’s final march of seventy miles in three days brought Jackson to Front Royal, where he won an untidy little victory over Banks, whose retreat he followed towards Harpers Ferry. These actions so alarmed Lincoln that he ordered both Frémont and McDowell to leave their current positions in the Alleghenies and outside Washington, respectively, and to march to Banks’s assistance. The orders were given on May 24 and unwittingly contributed to the success of Jackson’s campaign of diversion and distraction in the valley, since they negated any effort to reinforce McClellan outside Richmond. All objects of the valley campaign had now been achieved. Jackson, however, knew what he was about and drew his campaign of march and counter-march to a brilliantly successful conclusion. One of his few setbacks was the loss of his cavalry leader, Turner Ashby, a buccaneer in the mould of Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was killed in action at Port Republic on June 6.
Moving partly by rail and partly on foot, the valley army arrived at Richmond in time to take part in the final battles opposing McClellan’s effort to capture the Confederate capital, and also to escape from the ponderous trap Lincoln had set to capture Jackson by coordinating the movements of Frémont, Banks, and McDowell. Jackson’s arrival outside Richmond coincided with an important change of Confederate command. During the battle of Seven Pines, one of the defensive battles fought outside Richmond during McClellan’s offensive, Johnston was wounded by shell splinters and had to be replaced as chief of the Army of Northern Virginia by Robert E. Lee, who had thitherto been acting as Jefferson Davis’s chief of staff. Lee had unfairly acquired a poor reputation during the early fighting in the West. Yet he had been the outstanding cadet of his year at West Point and distinguished himself in the Mexican War. He came from one of the oldest and most distinguished families of Virginia, and his decision to “go with his state” in 1861 was reckoned a serious blow in the North, where he had been offered command of the Union army. He was to prove a master of war and now, assuming control in the midst of McClellan’s efforts to break into Richmond, he began at once to demonstrate his powers.
McClellan had started his offensive against Richmond on April 7 by laying siege to Magruder’s defences outside Yorktown, seventy miles to the southwest. A siege was quite unnecessary. McClellan had enough troops under his command to walk over the position, but his neurosis about being outnumbered was intensifying and he was to take nearly a month, and the deployment of a great deal of artillery, before he could force Magruder to leave. Then he followed the Confederate retreat achingly slowly, finally catching up outside Williamsburg, the first English town in Virginia and the original state capital. The battle which followed was a Union success, but not complete enough to prevent the Confederate army’s withdrawal into Richmond, which was now heavily garrisoned and disappearing behind a sturdy line of earthworks. As McClellan edged forward in its aftermath, Johnston decided to inflict a spoiling attack on McClellan’s advance guard, which had got on the wrong side of the Chickahominy River. McClellan had allowed this mistake to happen because the Confederates had succeeded in blocking the most obvious approach to Richmond from the southeast by barricading the James River with tangled trees and ship hulks. However, McClellan was spared the consequence of the mishap because James Longstreet, Johnston’s subordinate, also mishandled the spoiling attack. At Seven Pines, as the battle became known, he succeeded in committing his troops piecemeal instead of concentrated, and so in getting himself defeated in detail.
McClellan, though now convinced that he was outnumbered 200,000 to his own 105,000 (the real Confederate strength was 90,000) and that Jackson was about to arrive from the valley (when he was still heavily engaged within it), uncharacteristically decided to
persist in the offensive. What followed became known as the Seven Days’ Battles, a series of engagements fought around the perimeter of Richmond, the Union troops pivoting on the right, the Confederates wheeling backwards on their left, until the outskirts of the city were left behind and McClellan found himself once again out in open country, Richmond to his north and the estuary of the James River at his back. The battlefields, which lie very close together, are known as Oak Grove (June 25); Mechanicsville (June 26); Gaines’s Mill (June 27); Savage’s Station—White Oak Swamp (June 28-29); Glendale (also known as White Oak Swamp or Frayser’s Farm, June 30); and Malvern Hill (July 1).
All today are beautifully preserved by the National Park Service, and few give any sense of having been places of bloodshed. With one exception: the fighting at Mechanicsville drifted away from the original scene of encounter and came to focus at Beaver Dam Creek, where the Chickahominy flows invisibly through an open space in the surrounding trees. The creek bottom is fordable at this point, but the place is waterlogged and overgrown with sedge and weed. It was completely unsuitable for a military action. Yet Northerners and Southerners fought across it with a will on June 26, 1862, the Southerners attacking the Northerners, who had hastily constructed timber stockades on their side of the creek. They had also brought up artillery to fire from the higher east bank. A Confederate gunner thought the Union position “absolutely impregnable to front attack.” By any rational judgement he was right. Even today Beaver Dam Creek retains a sinister atmosphere. In 1862, when the surrounding trees were thick with riflemen determined to defend their positions, it must have been a terrifying place. It is the closest of the Seven Days’ battlefields to the city, which perhaps lent a particular force to the Confederates’ determination to drive the Union troops away. In the process 1,475 Southerners were killed or wounded. The 1st North Carolina lost its colonel, lieutenant colonel, major, and six captains. The 44th Georgia lost 335 men, 65 percent of its strength. Mechanicsville should have counted as a Northern victory, had McClellan been willing to profit from it. As was becoming increasingly usual, he was not. When Stonewall Jackson had appeared at Mechanicsville but, uncharacteristically, declined to act, McClellan decided that the battle had been a reverse, that Jackson posed a grave danger, and he ordered the local corps commander, Fitz-John Porter, to fall back to the Gaines’s Mill position.
When the Confederates began their attack, on the morning of June 27, 1862, at Gaines’s Mill, they found Porter’s corps emplaced on top of a steep plateau with forested slopes. It numbered about 27,000, but was stronger in artillery, with about a hundred guns to the South’s fifty. Tactically, however, the Confederates were in the stronger position, fielding six divisions to the Union’s two. The only advantage the Union enjoyed was the higher ground.
Fitz-John Porter felt that his corps was vulnerable to a Confederate offensive, and begged McClellan for reinforcements; ironically, it was McClellan who was always begging reinforcements from Washington. He also asked for axes, to fell timber to barricade his front. The axes proved useless, but with others borrowed from the artillery he managed to cover part of his front with rails, stuffed with knapsacks. During the afternoon, Porter’s men were able to to repel a succession of attacks mounted by the troops of Longstreet, A. P. Hill, D. H. Hill, and Stonewall Jackson. As his defence succeeded, Porter considered shifting forces to his right to take the enemy in flank, but recognition that he was too heavily outnumbered to move from his defended position dissuaded him.
As the afternoon drew on, Confederate attacks on Porter’s left grew in intensity and panicked the horses of the artillery deployed there. Twenty-two guns were lost in the confusion. After nightfall Porter was asked to McClellan’s headquarters, where he was ordered to retreat across the Chickahominy River, which ran along his rear, and then to retreat to the James River, on which McClellan had decided to concentrate his army. In the concluding stages of the battle, Porter was much concerned for the safety of some volunteer aides-de-camp, the comte de Paris and the duc de Chartres, members of the French royal family who had offered themselves to his staff. As the comte de Paris was pretender to the French throne, it was put to Porter than he should order them to safety. This wholly irrelevant distraction troubled him when he should have been giving his full attention to fighting the battle.
During the retreat from Gaines’s Mill, Jackson left his corps to make a reconnaissance of the Union lines. He did so without asking permission of his superior or explaining his intentions to his subordinates. The man he left in charge while he was away was not a soldier, but a professor from a theological seminary, the Reverend R. L. Dabney. Such was the respect in which Jackson was held that none of his subordinates questioned the theologian’s authority. Another incident of the retreat was the “charge” of a Union commissary who, driving his wagon loaded with such delicacies as canned pineapple, ran into a Confederate column on the road and, hoping to save his stock-in-trade, drove into the Confederate ranks. After causing some disruption he and his delicacies were captured, to the ordinary Confederate soldiers’ delight.
Prisoners were taken in the concluding stages of the Gaines’s Mill battle. Among those captured by the Confederates were some of D. H. Hill’s West Point contemporaries. One was General John Reynolds, who on being brought before his captor put his face in his hands. They had been messmates in the old army and for six months had shared a tent. Reynolds said, “Hill, we ought not to be enemies.” He had gone to sleep during a pause in the battle and been captured when found separated from his troops. Hill assured him that there was no hard feeling and that his downfall was just the fortune of war, notoriously fickle. Reynolds, who had then been exchanged, was killed at Gettysburg.
The retreat from Gaines’s Mill brought the fighting on June 29 to Savage’s Station, where a large hospital had been set up by the Union. The struggle at Savage’s Station was altogether less severe than at Gaines’s Mill, since the point of it was not offensive, to attack Richmond, but to secure a line of retreat to Malvern Hill, on which McClellan had fixed as a point of departure and disengagement from the theatre of the Seven Days’ Battles. Most of the fighting was between artillery batteries. It led on to the battle of Glendale’s or Frayser’s Farm, again a Union thrust to get away from Richmond down to the James River at Malvern Hill. Glendale was counted a Union success because the Confederates were repulsed at all points, the army’s artillery and supply train was evacuated safely to Malvern Hill, and the infantry were enabled to concentrate at Malvern Hill, fresh for the battle of July 1.
The Union had positioned thirty-six guns, of six batteries, together with a Connecticut siege battery, on the high ground, able to fire over the heads of their own infantry at the attacking enemy lines. During the fighting of June 30, the Union artillery caused heavy loss and destruction among the Confederate batteries deployed opposite. It was not until late afternoon of July 1 that the Confederates began to press infantry attacks against the Union line, where the Northern infantry lay interspersed between the gun positions. The Confederates suffered very heavily and were everywhere driven back. As darkness fell, the Union began its withdrawal to the banks of the James River at Harrison’s Landing. Union losses in the seven days totalled 15,855, those of the Army of Northern Virginia 20,204.
Lincoln despatched Halleck, newly appointed as general in chief, to see McClellan, view his army, and advise on its next moves. In conversation in Washington, Lincoln stated that he was certain McClellan would not fight again during the campaign. He said that if he was able to send McClellan 100,000 men, he would be in ecstasy and would announce that he was about to capture Richmond. The next day, however, he would report that the Confederates numbered 400,000 and that he could not advance unless he was sent yet more men. Halleck arrived at Harrison’s Landing, where an entrenched camp had been dug, and asked McClellan his intentions. McClellan insisted that he would advance on Richmond, along the line of the James River, taking Petersburg on the way. Halleck asked him to cons
ult his officers, which he did. They voted to advance on Richmond if reinforced by 20,000. McClellan also continued to estimate the size of the opposed armies as 90,000 to 200,000, making his plans for the attack nonsense. On Halleck’s return to Washington, moreover, he telegraphed to Lincoln to say that on reflection, he would need not 20,000 but 40,000 more troops. No such numbers were available, and Lincoln therefore instructed Halleck to order McClellan to withdraw. Ships were sent, and in the last days of August the Army of the Potomac was embarked and taken back to Washington.
So ended the best chance the Union was to enjoy throughout the conflict of ending the war quickly. Lee had conducted the Seven Days’ Battles with great skill. McClellan had muffed every chance. His position at Mechanicsville-Beaver Dam Creek was unfavourable. He might, however, have gained an advantage at any of the intermediate engagements, of which only Glendale-Frayser’s Farm and Gaines’s Mill were really hard-fought. At Malvern Hill he enjoyed every advantage, a strong and dominating position, superiority of artillery strength, and enough infantry numbers. Malvern Hill was a Union victory, but McClellan did not squeeze its results to yield an outcome which could have been transformed into a turning point on a subsequent day. The whole campaign confirms his critics’ view that McClellan was psychologically deterred from pushing action to the point of result. Fearing failure, he did not try to win.