by Bruce Catton
10. Letter of Benjamin Stark to Barlow dated April 13, 1862, in the Barlow Papers.
11. Basler, Vol. V, 222–23.
12. McClellan to Mrs. McClellan dated May 23, 1862, in the McClellan Letterbook.
13. O.R., Vol. XI, Part Three, 153–54.
14. William M. Robinson, Naval Defense of Richmond, in Civil War History, Vol. VII, No. Two, 167–75; N.O.R., Vol. VII, 356–71.
15. O.R., Vol. XI, Part Three, 150–51; Part One, 26–27.
16. O.R., Vol. XII, Part Three, 66.
17. O.R., Vol. XI, Part One, 27.
18. McClellan to Mrs. McClellan dated May 18, 1862, in the McClellan Letterbook.
2. Do It Quickly
1. For Johnston’s proposal regarding an offensive, and Mr. Davis’s response, see O.R., Vol. XI, Part Three, 477, 485.
2. Freeman, R. E. Lee, Vol. II, 4–6.
3. Basler, Vol. V, 182; O.R., Vol. XII, Part Three, 865–66, 872; G. F. R. Henderson, Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War, 223.
4. O.R., Vol. XI, Part Three, 477.
5. Toombs to Stephens dated May 17, 1862, in The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander Stephens and Howell Cobb, Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1911, Vol. II, 594–96.
6. O.R., Vol. XII, Part Three, 142, 149–50, 152.
7. Lee to Jackson, May 6, 1862, in the Headquarters Telegraph Book, Lee Headquarters Papers, Virginia State Historical Society.
8. O.R., Vol. XII, Part One, 462–65, 470, 472–73. According to Gen. Schenck, who says the battle was a delaying action to cover a retreat, the Federal force actually engaged was 2268. Jed Hotchkiss, Virginia, in Confederate Military History, Vol. III, 232, says about 4500 Confederates got into action.
9. Edwin E. Marvin, The Fifth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers, 97; Milo M. Quaife, ed., From the Cannon’s Mouth: the Civil War Letters of General Alpheus Williams, 73–74; O.R., Vol. XII, Part Three, 154; Part One, 524–25.
10. Col. John M. Patton, Reminiscences of Jackson’s Infantry, Southern Historical Society Papers, Vol. VIII, No. Three, 140–41; Jed Hotchkiss, in Confederate Military History, Vol. III, 232–40.
11. Mary Anna Jackson, Life and Letters of General Thomas J. Jackson, 261–62. General Alpheus Williams (Quaife, op. cit., 78–87) gives a graphic account of the Federal retreat.
12. B. T. Johnson, Memoirs of the First Maryland Regiment, 99–100.
13. O.R., Vol. XII, Part Three, 219–21; Basler, Vol. V, 235–36.
14. James F. Huntington, Operations in the Shenandoah Valley, 321–22.
3. The Last Struggle
1. O.R., Series Three, Vol. II, 44, 70, 109; Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, 196. Actually, the War Department telegraphed the Northern governors on May 19, several days before Jackson’s spectacular victories in the Front Royal-Winchester area, warning that additional volunteer regiments would be wanted and asking how long it would take the governors to raise and organize them.
2. Jed Hotchkiss in Confederate Military History, Vol. III, 247–52; Huntington, Operations in the Shenandoah Valley, 322–26. For Lincoln’s orders during this period see Basler, Vol. V, 230–36, 243, 247–51.
3. O.R., Vol. XI, Part One, 32, 33, 35, 37; Fitz John Porter, Hanover Court House and Gaines’s Mill, B. & L., Vol. II, 319. McClellan’s statement of May 25, that his troops north of the Chickahominy were ready to cross as soon as the bridges were completed, disposes of his later argument that he was compelled to hold them there in order to extend a welcome to McDowell.
4. Typescript of letters of C. I. Walker to Miss Ada Oriana Sinclair, dated April 26 and May 10, 1862, in the Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center.
5. Halleck seems to have had reservations about Grant from the beginning, and after Fort Donelson he criticized him so sharply that Grant asked to be relieved of his command; the situation was smoothed out only after Washington intervened in Grant’s favor. Details are set forth in this writer’s Grant Moves South, 186–208.
6. Alfred Roman, Military Operations of General Beauregard, Vol. I, 383–90; O.R., Vol. X, Part One, 668–69.
7. After the war Pope tried in vain to get Halleck to set the record straight. His indignant correspondence with Halleck is in O.R., Vol. X, Part Two, 635–36. For his original report, see Part One of that volume, 249.
8. Stanley Horn, The Army of Tennessee, 153–54; O.R., Vol. X, Part One, 775–79.
9. Letter of July 12, 1862, signed “G. T. Buenavista,” a code name sometimes used by Beauregard in writing to Gen. Jordan; in the Beauregard Papers, Manuscript Department, Duke University Library.
10. Letter of Sumner to R. H. Dana dated May 26, 1862, in the Dana Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
11. Correspondence of the Cincinnati Commercial, reprinted in Moore’s Rebellion Record, Vol. V, Documents, 88; Drury L. Armistead, The Battle in which General Johnston Was Wounded, Southern Historical Society Papers, Vol. VIII, 186; Francis W. Palfrey, After the Fall of Yorktown, Papers of the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, Vol. I, 176.
12. Davis, Rise and Fall, Vol. II, 119–20; Johnston, Narrative of Military Operations, 131–32; Steele, American Campaigns, Vol. I, 97–98, 104; John B. Gordon, Reminiscences of the Civil War, 57; Alexander S. Webb, The Peninsula, 97–117; Palfrey, After the Fall of Yorktown, 174–205; J. G. Barnard, The Peninsular Campaign, 28–29. In Lee’s Lieutenants (Vol. I, 225–63) Freeman examines the botched Confederate attack in detail and concludes that most of the blame must go to General Longstreet. E. P. Alexander, Military Memoirs of a Confederate, 79, 93, remarks that Johnston seemed utterly incapable of handling the army in battle.
13. The figures are from O.R., Vol. XI, Part One, 762, and Livermore, Numbers and Losses, 81.
4. Railroad to the Pamunkey
1. General Orders No. 13, issued by D. H. Hill on June 26, 1862, original in the Eldredge Collection, Huntington Library; letter of Ed. M. Burrus dated June 14, in the John C. Burrus and Family Papers, George Lester Collection, Department of Archives, Louisiana State University; post-war letter of Longstreet to Jefferson Davis in Dunbar Rowland, Vol. IX, 594–95.
2. Davis to Mrs. Davis, June 11, 1862, in Rowland, Vol. V, 272.
3. Letter of Jackson to Lee from Mount Meridian, June 13, 1862, bearing Lee’s note and Davis’s endorsement; in the R. E. Lee Papers, Manuscript Department, Duke University Library.
4. An excellent account of Stuart’s ride is in H. B. McClellan, I Rode with Jeb Stuart, 52 ff. For a good appraisal of what the raid accomplished see John W. Thomason, Jr., Jeb Stuart, 153–55.
5. Basler, Vol. V, 276.
6. Rowland, Vol. V, 283–84; O.R., Vol. XI, Part One, 51.
7. Lincoln to Stanton, June 8, 1862, from the Lincoln File, John Hay Library, Brown University; Lincoln to Frémont, June 15, in Basler, Vol. V, 271.
8. There is a tabulation of reinforcements in K. P. Williams, Lincoln Finds a General, Vol. I, 216–17.
9. O.R., Vol. XI, Part One, 46–47; J. G. Barnard, The Peninsular Campaign, 32–34.
10. McClellan to Lincoln dated June 19, in the Stanton Papers, Library of Congress. As printed in O.R., Vol. XI, Part Three, 233, the letter bears the date of June 18.
11. Francis W. Palfrey, The Seven Days Battles, Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, Vol. I, 224–25; Prince de Joinville, The Army of the Potomac, 79–82; Diary and Letters of Capt. John Taggart, 9th Pennsylvania Reserve Infantry, Mss. in the Bureau of Research, Publications and Records, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.
12. O.R., Vol. XI, Part One, 49. This minor engagement is usually counted as the first of the Seven Days Battles.
13. Ibid., 272–74; Part Three, 355. After the campaign ended McClellan protested that he had not, before the Seven Days, been able to base his army on the James because Stanton on May 18 ordered him to prepare to meet McDowell on the Pamunkey. However, he had already established his base at White House when he received that order, and the order in any case became inoperative on May 25,
when he was notified that McDowell was marching to the Shenandoah. There was plenty of time to make the change of base if he had wanted to do so.
14. O.R., Vol. XI, Part One, 49; McClellan’s Report, 237.
15. O.R., Vol. XI, Part One, 51.
16. O.R., Vol. XI, Part Three, 254.
5. Seven Days
1. There are of course many good accounts of the opening of the Seven Days, the best probably being Freeman’s, in R. E. Lee, Vol. II, 75–121. A good brief summary is in Steele, American Campaigns, Vol. I, 99. An oddity about the Seven Days is that they actually were only six—from June 26 to July 1, inclusive. Apparently most people in 1862 began the count with the engagement of June 25, when McClellan’s skirmish line made a moderate advance south of the Chickahominy at Oak Grove.
2. O.R., Vol. XI, Part One, 405; Part Three, 455–56.
3. In his memorandum of a post-war conversation with Lee, Col. William Allan of the faculty of Washington College reports Lee as saying that the attack at Mechanicsville was made “in order to occupy the enemy and prevent any counter movement.” In the same way, according to Allan, Lee felt obliged to attack the next day at Gaines’s Mill even though Jackson was not ready: “Otherwise, with a large part of his army really farther from Richd. than McClellan was, disaster was to be apprehended.” In this account there is no criticism of A. P. Hill for his movements on the afternoon of June 26. The implication, at least, of Allan’s version is that the move had Lee’s approval. (Memorandum of Conversations of Lee with Col. William Allan: typescript in the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina Library.) Hill’s report on Mechanicsville, O.R., Vol. XI, Part Two, 834–36, says flatly: “Three o’clock having arrived, and no intelligence from Jackson … I determined to cross at once rather than hazard the failure of the whole plan by longer deferring it.”
4. O.R., Vol. XI, Part Three, 257, 259, 260.
5. In McClellan’s Own Story, 411, McClellan says that he “determined to resist Jackson … in the new position near the bridge heads, in order to cover the withdrawal of the trains and heavy guns and to give time for the arrangements to secure the adoption of the James River as our line of supplies in lieu of the Pamunkey.” Col. Robert Tyler’s account of the moving of the guns is in O.R., Vol. XI, Part One, 272–74. Kellogg’s report is in Part Two, 969–72.
6. Letters of James L. Dinwiddie to his wife, dated June 29, 1862, in the Virginia State Library; Reminiscences of Berry G. Benson, 1st South Carolina Volunteers, in the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina Library; diary of J. R. Boulware, 6th South Carolina Volunteers, entries for June 27 and June 28; in the Virginia State Library.
7. Letter of A. A. Humphreys to Mrs. Humphreys dated July 17, 1862, from Vol. 33, the A. A. Humphreys Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Humphreys wrote: “I was not in the battle on the north side of the Chickahominy nor was Genl. McClellan—we waited for him expecting any moment to mount.”
8. Reminiscences of Berry G. Benson, cited in Footnote 6.
9. O.R., Vol. XI, Part Three, 264–66.
10. O.R., Vol. XI, Part One, 60–61; Part Three, 267.
11. O.R., Vol. XI, Part One, 61. It may be as well to remark that McClellan had seen none of the fighting at Gaines’s Mill, and that the number of “dead and wounded comrades” he had actually beheld was strictly minimal.
12. McClellan’s Own Story, 453; David Homer Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office, 109–10. Senator Browning noted in mid-July that Lincoln told him he had approved all that Stanton had done in respect to the Army of the Potomac. Browning wrote: “That immediately after Fitz Jno. Porter’s fight McClellan telegraphed to Stanton in very harsh terms, charging him as the author of the disaster—that Stanton came to him with the telegram in his hand and said to him with much feeling ‘You know—Mr. President that all I have done was by your authority.” (Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, 558–59.) This story, of course, fits either the expurgated telegram or the original version.
13. Basler, Vol. V, 289–91; O.R., Vol. XVI, Part Two, 69–70; Vol. XI, Part Three, 270. Dix had been put in command at Fort Monroe early in June, and the former commander, General Wool, had been given Dix’s former post at Baltimore.
14. O.R., Vol. XI, Part Three, 274–75, 277; Basler, Vol. V, 293, 295–96. This burst of optimism of course was quite groundless, but it did rest upon a correct appraisal of the possibilities that existed after Porter’s corps crossed the Chickahominy. The last word Lincoln and Stanton had from McClellan had said nothing about a retreat; it simply talked of a move “to this side of the Chickahominy.”
15. O.R., Vol. XI, Part Three, 280.
16. Alexander S. Webb, The Peninsula, 136–37; Prince de Joinville, The Army of the Potomac, 91.
17. The failure of Lee’s battle plan is examined in detail in Freeman, R. E. Lee, Vol. II, 176–99. Jackson’s strange failure to measure up to his responsibilities has perplexed all of his biographers, beginning with Col. Henderson; the riddle is most carefully studied in Lenoir Chambers Stonewall Jackson, Vol. II, 61–76. No one has ever been able to suggest anything much more definite than that Jackson was physically ailing and at the point of exhaustion—and that like everyone else at the time he was still learning his trade.
6. Letter from Harrison’s Landing
1. Newspaper account dated July 2, 1862, in a scrapbook of unidentified clippings at the Huntington Library; letter of G. F. Newhall to his father dated July 4, 1862, in the Newhall Letters, Boston Public Library; McClellan’s Own Story, 442.
2. Lee’s report, O.R., Vol. XI, Part Two, 497; letter of Stephen Mallory to Mrs. Mallory, mis-dated May 13, 1862, in the Mallory Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina. Mallory was by no means the only man of that time who used the spelling “McClelland.”
3. B. & L., Vol. II, 315, 317.
4. Letter of Beauregard to Thomas Jordan dated July 12, 1862, in the Beauregard Papers, Library of Congress.
5. O.R., Vol. XI, Part Three, 281, 287–88.
6. McClellan’s Own Story, 483; O.R., Vol. XI, Part Three, 291–92.
7. Basler, Vol. V, 301.
8. O.R., Series Three, Vol. II, 45–46.
9. Basler, Vol. V, 292, 297; Fred Shannon, Organization and Administration of the Union Army, Vol. I, 269–70.
10. O.R., Vol. XI, Part Three, 294, 298–99; Basler, Vol. V, 305–6.
11. McClellan to Mrs. McClellan, July 6, 1862, in the McClellan Letterbook; Lee to Davis, July 6, O.R., Vol. XI, Part Three, 634–35.
12. Warren W. Hassler, Jr., General George B. McClellan, 177–78: McClellan’s Own Story, 487–89.
13. Two oddly contrasting views of Lincoln’s reception by the troops are offered here for whatever they may be worth. A soldier named Felix Brannigan, whose letters are in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, wrote home on July 16 telling about the review and saying: “Talk of McClellan’s popularity among the soldiers. It will never measure the 1/100th part of Honest Old Abe’s. Such cheers as greeted him never tickled the ears of Napoleon in his palmiest days.” On July 17 McClellan, whose Letterbook is also in the Library of Congress, wrote to Mrs. McClellan that “a certain eminent individual is ‘an old stick’—of pretty poor timber at that.… The army did not give him an enthusiastic reception—I had to order the men to cheer.”
14. Basler, Vol. V, 309–12, 322. A slightly more detailed discussion of the home-state hospital situation is presented in this writer’s Glory Road, 126–29.
15. Letter of Warren to his brother, July 20, 1862, in the G. K. Warren Papers, Manuscript and History Section, New York State Library, Albany. Warren’s letter calls to mind the bitter outburst of the Abolitionist Congressman Owen Lovejoy, who told the House six months earlier: “We are afraid that we shall hurt somebody if we fight; that we shall get these rebels and traitors so exasperated that they will not return to their loyalty.” (Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, Second Session, Part One, 194.)
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16. McClellan to Mrs. McClellan, July 10, 1862, in the McClellan Letterbook.
17. McClellan to Mrs. McClellan, July 22, in the McClellan Letterbook.
18. Porter to Marble, June 20, in the Manton Marble Papers, Library of Congress; Webb to his father, August 14, in the Alexander Stewart Webb Collection, Historical Manuscript Division, Yale University Library.
19. Letter to Mrs. McClellan dated July 11, and an undated letter to her written late in July or early in August 1862; in the McClellan Letterbook.
20. McClellan to Mrs. McClellan dated July 17, July 18, and July 27, in the McClellan Letterbook. It should be remembered that W. C. Prime, the editor of McClellan’s Own Story, either omitted or sharply expurgated the most revealing of the letters when he assembled his book.
21. McClellan to Barlow, July 15, in the Barlow Papers, Huntington Library.
22. McClellan to Mrs. McClellan, July 13, in the McClellan Letterbook.
CHAPTER SIX: Unlimited War
1. Trade with the Enemy
1. Thomas E. Taylor, Running the Blockade, 23, 69; James Morris Morgan, Recollections of a Rebel Reefer, 99; J. Wilkinson, The Narrative of a Blockade Runner, 123–24; Augustus Charles Hobart-Hampden, Hobart Pasha: Blockade Running, Slaver-Hunting and War and Sport in Turkey, 119–23.
2. Taylor, Running the Blockade, 11–14; F. B. C. Bradlee, Blockade Running During the Civil War, 29–30; Frank Lawrence Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy, 285.
3. Taylor, op. cit., 12; James Sprunt, Chronicles of the Cape Fear River, 238–40; Bradlee, op. cit., 118–19.
4. Diary of Gideon Welles, Vol. II, 127.
5. Wilkinson, The Narrative of a Blockade Runner, 199–202; Sprunt, Chronicles of the Cape Fear River, 243–44, 246, 252.
6. C.C.W. Report for 1863, Part III, 611–12.
7. American Annual Cyclopaedia, 1862, 765; Joseph H. Parks, “A Confederate Trade Center under Federal Occupation,” Journal of Southern History, Vol. VII, Number Three, 289–94; O.R., Vol. XVII, Part Two, 123, 140.
8. Memoirs of William T. Sherman, Vol. I, 265–68; O.R., Vol. XVII, Part Two, 150; Series Three, Vol. II, 349–50.