Terrible Swift Sword
Page 38
The Federal right flank consisted of Fitz John Porter’s corps, recently enlarged by the arrival of a good division of Pennsylvania infantry under Brigadier General George A. McCall, just brought down from McDowell’s corps. Porter had McCall posted behind Beaver Dam Creek, facing Mechanicsville, six or seven miles northeast of Richmond, with the rest of the corps drawn up behind it. There were detachments of cavalry roving out toward the right and rear, but there was nothing solid either to guard Porter’s flank or to protect the railway line. The right of the Army of the Potomac, in other words, was in the air, and the army’s connection with its source of supplies could be snipped with one stroke … just the spot for Stonewall Jackson.
Now it was necessary to do two things: strengthen Jackson, and befuddle the Yankees. Lee found a way to gain both ends at once. He sent reinforcements to Jackson—an infantry division under Brigadier General William H. C. Whiting, which included a brigade consisting largely of Texas troops led by a bearded young giant named John B. Hood; a brigade which would soon be one of the world’s most famous combat outfits—and he did it ostentatiously so that the news would be certain to reach McClellan. (It did reach him, and was passed on to Washington, where it caused a certain perplexity; leading Mr. Lincoln, at last, to remark that if 10,000 Confederates had left Richmond to join Jackson that was as good as a reinforcement of 10,000 for McClellan, and how about getting on with the offensive?5) And then, as he drew up the schedule for Jackson’s descent on Porter’s right and rear, Lee showed one of the qualities that made him such a deadly opponent—the readiness to risk everything in order to make a blow decisive.
McClellan had an effective force of approximately 105,000 men, of whom some 30,000 were with Porter, north of the Chickahominy, while all the rest were south of the river facing Lee’s new fieldworks. When Jackson and Whiting joined him, Lee would have between 80,000 and 85,000. He proposed now to use no more than 25,000 of these to hold the Richmond lines—25,000 against approximately three times their number—while he struck McClellan’s exposed right with all the rest. It was a battle plan which, if things went badly, could lose everything, for if McClellan caught on he could smash that thinly held trench line and go straight into Richmond; but it was also a plan which could win everything if it worked properly, because it contemplated nothing less than McClellan’s total destruction. Lee was not merely trying to make his enemy retreat; he wanted to annihilate him, cutting him off from his base, driving him into the muddy pocket between the Chickahominy and White Oak Swamp and beating him to death before the Federal commander had a chance to figure out what was going on. It might accomplish much less than that, to be sure, and much less would be acceptable, but basically it was a shot at winning the war in one stroke, taken with a cool understanding of the fact that what could be won at one stroke might also be lost the same way.
Even Mr. Davis, who had the stoical self-control of an Iroquois Indian, felt the strain, and he wrote to Mrs. Davis that “the stake is too high to permit the pulse to keep its even beat.” He took comfort in the thought that a total defeat of McClellan would solve the Confederacy’s problems in the east, “and then we must make a desperate effort to regain what Beauregard has abandoned in the West.” He would have had a certain grim amusement, perhaps, if he had known that a garbled version of Beauregard’s departure from Tupelo had reached McClellan’s desk in the form of a report that Beauregard and part of his army had just reached Richmond to help Lee in its defense.6
… Washington was a little harder to fool than it used to be. On the day Jackson turned back Frémont’s assault at Cross Keys, Mr. Lincoln told Stanton that Richmond after all was the focal point, that Confederate activities elsewhere in the east were nothing more than attempts to divert attention, and that hereafter it would be wise to stand on the defensive in the valley; Frémont and Banks could hold that area, and McDowell, once he got his command reassembled, should be sent down to McClellan. A week later the President wrote to Frémont that “Jackson’s game—his assigned work—now is to magnify the accounts of his numbers and reports of his movements, and thus by constant alarms keep three or four times as many of our troops away from Richmond as his own force amounts to.… Our game is not to allow this.”7 In the end, McDowell never did get down to join McClellan, yet by the time Lee opened his offensive McClellan had received, in reinforcements, rather more than the equivalent of what he had lost when McDowell’s corps was taken from him early in April. He had been sent Franklin’s and McCall’s divisions (both originally of McDowell’s corps) and the 11,500 men at Fort Monroe had recently been put under his command; in addition to which, seven regiments from Baltimore had been ordered to join him. Altogether, more than 35,000 men had gone to the Army of the Potomac since the day McClellan was informed that McDowell was no longer part of his command.8
McClellan was an emotional sort, ’way up one day and far down the next, but during the first few weeks of June he was rather consistently optimistic. A week after the fight at Seven Pines he notified Washington that he would be ready to advance and take Richmond as soon as McCall’s division came down and the roads got dry enough to move the guns. Three days later, after reporting that Beauregard was said to be in Richmond, McClellan said that he would attack “as soon as the weather and ground will permit.” McCall arrived on June 12, and on June 14 McClellan wired that the weather was “very favorable.” The country remained most difficult, and it was necessary to perfect the defensive works because of the Federal inferiority in numbers, but the general remained hopeful, and he found time to say that he would like to have permission to lay before the President, by letter or by telegraph, his views “as to the present state of military affairs throughout the whole country.”9 Whatever those views might be, his opinion of his own situation seemed clear: he was just about ready to advance.
South of the Chickahominy his line was compact, running from White Oak Swamp to the Chickahominy in a big crescent whose convex side was toward the enemy. Keyes’s corps held the left, by the swamp, with Heintzelman and Sumner next; at the right, Franklin was posted in a strong position on the Golding farm overlooking the river. On June 19, McClellan told Mr. Lincoln that his army was well over the river except for “the very considerable force necessary to protect our flanks and communications,” and said that his picket lines were within six miles of Richmond. The Rebels were alert, ready for a fight at every point; a general engagement might take place at any hour, and a Federal advance would involve “a battle more or less decisive.” The fact that the Confederates had sent upwards of 10,000 men to reinforce Jackson simply showed how strong and confident they were. Still, the Army of the Potomac was ready: “After tomorrow we shall fight the Rebel army as soon as Providence will permit. We shall await only a favorable condition of the earth and sky and the completion of some necessary preliminaries.”10
Along the front south of the Chickahominy the Federal line was a mile or more from the Confederate trenches—out of sight, most of the way, with a good deal of timber in between the opposing lines. Each army had skirmishers and pickets in this no-man’s land, and there was much sniping and sharpshooting—a wearisome, monotonous warfare, broken now and then by moments of fraternization between rival infantrymen. Like the Confederates, the Federals found this country hot and sickly. Typhoid fever was prevalent, scurvy had begun to appear in some units, good drinking water was hard to find, and McCall’s soldiers found the arrival at White House depressing. A number of undertakers had set up shop there—business was good, and it was certain to be a good deal better very soon—and their signs on the wharves were the first things the soldiers saw when they disembarked; “Undertakers & Embalmers of the Dead—Particular Attention paid to Deceased Soldiers.”11
On June 25, McClellan finally began his advance; a modest forward movement of Heintzelman’s skirmish line, with elements from Sumner’s and Keyes’s corps coming in on each flank, the object apparently being to clear the way for a more powerful advance a day or two
later by Franklin’s corps in the direction of Old Tavern, a crossroads a mile or so west of Golding’s farm. McClellan spoke of it as a preparatory move, and because of the prodigious fighting which took place during the week that followed it this affair has been more or less forgotten; it cost the Army of the Potomac some five hundred casualties, and it showed how this powerful host could inch forward in its quest for positions from which the great siege guns could operate.12 If General Lee proposed to make McClellan play a different game the time was getting short.
Although General McClellan spoke of this advance with confident satisfaction he had reason to be somewhat uneasy.
In the first place, Stuart’s ride had shown McClellan exactly what it showed Lee—that the Federal supply line, running back along the Richmond & York River Railroad to White House on the Pamunkey, was highly vulnerable—and McClellan had been giving thought to a possible change of base. The James River was perfectly safe, and a base at Harrison’s Landing, fifteen miles south of McClellan’s present position, would have been secure. Basing the army on the James had in fact been under consideration ever since the occupation of Yorktown, but during the leisurely pursuit of Johnston the Federal supply line had been anchored on the Pamunkey and the arrangements made then had never been changed. Now, however, it was necessary to prepare for an emergency, and McClellan ordered a temporary depot set up at Harrison’s Landing; if the Confederates did break the line to the Pamunkey, Harrison’s Landing could quickly be made the new base.
However, there was an immense catch to this. To transfer the base to the James would be to ruin the whole campaign, because if the army’s supply line went by dirt road to Harrison’s Landing, McClellan would never be able to use his big guns. Once he let go of the Richmond & York River Railroad it would be impossible for him to conduct siege operations. He could fight the kind of fight he wanted to fight—the kind at which the Confederates could not beat him—only if he operated from the Pamunkey.
This was so, simply because the most powerful weapons in his siege train could not be moved any appreciable distance except by rail or water.
McClellan’s siege train at this time consisted of 101 pieces of ordnance.
Slightly more than half of these were weapons which, although they were too cumbersome to be used as ordinary field artillery, could nevertheless move slowly by road provided the roads were reasonably solid. These were the four-and-one-half-inch Rodman rifles, the 30-pounder Parrotts, the rifled Whitworths from England, and a few eight-inch howitzers and eight-inch mortars. They were good weapons and Lee had little to match them, but they were not the guns that made McClellan’s siege train genuinely awesome.
The real rock-crushers, the huge weapons which could pulverize any defensive works they could reach—the equalizers, in short—were irresistible but hard to move. There were forty-eight of them: eleven 100-pounder Parrotts, two 200-pounder Parrotts, ten 13-inch sea-coast mortars and twenty-five 10-inch mortars. These could be transported by barge or they could be transported by rail, but they could not be transported any distance by road. (Lee had remarked, as early as June 4, in a discussion of McClellan’s base at White House: “I think the only way the enemy can get his heavy guns up that way is by the railroad.”) To move them at all, from wharf or from railroad siding, involved building special ramps and using derricks, sling carts, rollers and a prodigious amount of pully-hauly business; the lightest of them weighed four and one half tons and the biggest weighed twice that much. McClellan had been able to use some of them at Yorktown because of a convenient creek, deep enough to carry barges, and he would be able to use them in front of Richmond—once he had gained ground for suitable emplacements—because of the railroad; but at Harrison’s Landing there were neither creeks nor railroads. To send this heavy ordnance to Harrison’s Landing would be about as bad as sending it back to Washington.”13
Thus McClellan had excellent reason for being sensitive about any threat to the railroad line which ran back to the Pamunkey; and to increase his unease he got news, on June 24—the day before he made his preparatory advance south of the Chickahominy—that Stonewall Jackson was coming his way. A Confederate deserter, picked up by Federal cavalry, asserted that Jackson’s troops were moving to Frederick’s Hall, on the Virginia Central Railroad, and would come on from there to attack the Yankee flank north of the river. McClellan passed this on to Stanton, asking if the War Department had any news regarding Jackson. Stanton could only tell him that all sorts of rumors, some of them obviously planted, were in circulation; the deserter’s story might also be a plant, he said, but at the same time it would not be safe to disregard it entirely. It may be that McClellan considered the story unreliable; at any rate he went ahead with the movement the next day, and after the firing had stopped on June 25 he sent Stanton a confident telegram saying “we have gained our point fully and with but little loss” and adding that the whole front was quiet.14
The confident mood quickly died. At 6:15 that evening McClellan sent the Secretary another telegram in which he foresaw the worst. He was convinced, he said, that Jackson was about to attack his flank, that Beauregard had checked in with reinforcements and that the enemy’s force was at least 200,000 men, and he went on in strange vein:
“I shall have to contend against vastly superior odds if these reports be true; but this army will do all in the power of men to hold their position and repulse any attack. I regret my great inferiority in numbers, but feel that I am in no way responsible for it, as I have not failed to represent repeatedly the necessity of reinforcements; that this was the decisive point, and that all the available means of the Government should be concentrated here. I will do all that a general can do with the splendid army I have the honor to command, and if it is destroyed by overwhelming numbers, can at least die with it and share its fate. But if the result of the action, which will probably occur tomorrow, or within a short time, is disaster, the responsibility cannot be thrown on my shoulders; it must rest where it belongs.
“Since I commenced this I have received additional intelligence confirming the supposition in regard to Jackson’s movements and Beauregard’s arrival. I shall probably be attacked tomorrow, and now go to the other side of the Chickahominy” (his headquarters were on the Trent farm, south of the river) “to arrange for the defense on that side. I feel that there is no use in again asking for reinforcements.”15
But this hour of gloom also passed, and at 10:40 that night McClellan wrote the Secretary still another dispatch, from Fitz John Porter’s headquarters:
“The information I received on this side tends to confirm impressions that Jackson will soon attack our right and rear. Every possible precaution is being taken. If I had another good division I could laugh at Jackson. The task is difficult, but this army will do its best, and will never disgrace the country. Nothing but overwhelming forces can defeat us. Indications are of attack on our front tomorrow. Have made all possible arrangements.”16
5: Seven Days
Ever after, men spoke of the last week in June simply as The Seven Days; aptly enough, because during those days a pattern emerged from chaos, much after the manner described in the Book of Genesis. They were days of bitter fighting among wooded hills and ravines, of confused flight and pursuit past broken bridges in impassable swamps, with a final climax on a blazing slope where the great ranks of guns proved stronger than the great ranks of men who tried to take the guns by storm; one battle, seven days long and infinitely deep, changing the war and compelling the nation in the end to find new definitions for itself. The hope that the war could be something less than a revolutionary struggle died somewhere between Mechanicsville and Malvern Hill. And so, for the matter of that, did thousands of young men.
General Lee’s battle plan was admirable, but there was a good deal of slippage when it was put into effect. Many things went wrong, and the Confederacy might have come to disaster except that all of its mistakes were balanced by the mistakes of its enemies. If, at last, Lee w
on less than he had hoped to win, he nevertheless won much more than had seemed possible three weeks earlier, and his victory kept the war alive for more than two and one half years. It was a dazzling achievement, even though it did not always go according to the script.
The left of Lee’s line was held by an impetuous, hard-fighting officer who would become one of the Confederacy’s most famous combat soldiers, a bearded young major general named Ambrose Powell Hill, who commanded an oversized division of six brigades massed south of the Chickahominy to the north of Richmond. Next to Hill on the east, drawn up by the turnpike that ran to Mechanicsville, the modest village on the far side of the river where Porter’s patrols guarded the Federal right flank, were two more large divisions also led by men who would win much fame in combat—James Longstreet, dogged, unbreakable, and opinionated, and D. H. Hill, sharp-tongued, dyspeptic (as used in the 1860s, the word apparently meant that he was plagued by ulcers), and distinguished, in an army where personal valor was commonplace, by his extreme bravery under fire.
Stonewall Jackson, with three divisions—his own, Ewell’s, and Whiting’s—was coming down from the valley by way of Gordonsville. The plan called for him to move southeast several miles north of the Chickahominy, following a route which would put him squarely behind Porter’s corps. He was due to reach the scene on June 26. As soon as his outriders made contact with A. P. Hill’s pickets, Hill would move to the north side of the Chickahominy at the Meadow Bridge, a mile or so above the place where the Mechanicsville turnpike crossed, would drive the Federals out of Mechanicsville, and move on to menace Porter’s main line, which was solidly established, facing west, behind Beaver Dam Creek. Once Hill had cleared Mechanicsville, Longstreet and D. H. Hill would cross and form in his rear. The Federal position on the creek was exceedingly strong, but it would hardly need to be attacked frontally because Jackson’s powerful force would be cutting in behind it, and Porter would be obliged to retreat to escape destruction. Then the entire force—Jackson, the Hills, and Longstreet, upwards of 55,000 men altogether—would sweep down the north bank of the river, breaking the railroad line once and for all, cutting McClellan off from his base and compelling him to pull his army together south of the Chickahominy with an aggressive foe in his immediate rear.1