by Bruce Catton
McClellan had left some seventy-three thousand men behind, as his note showed. Banks in the Shenandoah had slightly more than thirty-five thousand, some eighteen thousand were at Manassas and Warrenton, thirteen hundred or so were along the Potomac downstream from Washington, and there were approximately eighteen thousand in the Washington garrison. Total, seventy-three thousand and odd—enough, surely, to carry out the letter of his instructions?
Not to Lincoln's eyes, which were the eyes that had to be satisfied. To begin with, some ten thousand of these men were Blenker's Germans, bound west to serve with Fremont and hence out of calculation as far as the defense of Washington was concerned. In addition, when he figured the strength of Manassas and Washington, McClellan had included certain troops which were due to come in soon from the state capitals but which had not yet arrived; what Lincoln soon discovered was that there were actually less than thirteen thousand in the Washington garrison, almost all of them untrained men. As far as he could see, instead of the forty thousand men who were to be left "in and about Washington" there were only these almost useless thirteen thousand, plus the handful downstream, plus the troops at Manassas and Warrenton. All in all, after carefully counting heads, Lincoln could find fewer than twenty-eight thousand soldiers in and near the capital.
To this, of course, McClellan would have replied that the thirty-five thousand under Banks in the Shenandoah should properly be added, since they were near enough and strong enough to make their presence felt. But it was asking a little too much to expect Lincoln and the Cabinet to see it that way under the conditions then prevailing. To civilian eyes the force in the Shenandoah was a long way off. No one in Washington could forget that the Union had had a fairly strong army in the Shenandoah when McDowell was beaten at Bull Run: its presence in the valley had not served to protect Washington in July 1861, and an unmilitary President and Cabinet could hardly be blamed for feeling that things might be no different in April of 1862. Add it up any way he tried, the President could only conclude that McClellan had not done what he had been told to do. The capital was not properly defended.
The reaction to this was immediate. McClellan had barely started up the peninsula when he was officially notified that McDowell's corps at Fredericksburg had been withdrawn from his command and would get its orders hereafter direct from Washington.
Which meant that his campaign started under a great handicap. McClellan himself got off the boat at Fortress Monroe on April 2 and found that he had on hand—disembarked, equipped, and ready to go—some fifty-eight thousand men: five infantry divisions, a scattering of cavalry, and a hundred guns. He at once started them up the roads toward Yorktown, with instructions that the rest of the army was to follow as soon as it arrived. The first thing he discovered was that someone had steered him wrong about those sandy roads on the peninsula. Instead of being sandy they were uniformly of pure gumbo mud, with hollow crowns so that they collected whatever water might be coming down; and the weather turned rainy, so that the roads quickly became bottomless beyond anything in anybody's imagination. Guns and wagons sank to the axles and beyond. One officer wrote later that he saw a mule sink completely out of sight, all but its ears, in the middle of what was supposed to be a main road. He added that it was a rather small mule.4
McClellan's next discovery was that the Rebels had dug a line of entrenchments running completely across the peninsula from York-town, on the York River, to the mouth of Warwick Creek, on the James. Emplaced in these lines they had several dozen heavy naval guns (acquired a year earlier through capture of the United States navy yard at Norfolk) plus a number of fieldpieces, and they appeared to have all the infantry they needed. The approaches to this line led through swamps and tangled woodlands, and every foot of road would have to be corduroyed before guns could be brought up. Bewiskered old General Heintzelman, leading the advance, reported—somewhat hastily, it would seem—that a direct assault was out of the question. McClellan decided there would have to be a siege. Under his original plans he would simply have brought McDowell down from the north to take the Rebel works in the rear, thereby forcing their immediate evacuation, but McDowell was no longer his to command. To get past these lines McClellan would have to go straight over them, and that appeared to be a matter for the slow, methodical, step-by-step process of digging parallels, moving up heavy guns, and getting everything ready to blast the Rebel works off the face of the earth by sheer weight of gunfire.
Concerning which there was to be great argument, then and thereafter. When McClellan got his first look at the Yorktown fines, the Confederate force there was under command of General John B. Magruder, who had no more than twelve thousand men and who felt the lines to be faulty both in design and in construction. Magruder was never especially distinguished as a combat general, but in his idle moments he had considerable talent as an amateur actor, and he now called on this theatrical ability to help him. He marched a couple of regiments through a clearing, in sight of the Federal advance guard, double-quicked them around a little forest out of sight, and then marched them through the clearing again-over and over, like a stage manager using a dozen adenoidal spear carriers to represent Caesar's legions. The device worked, and Heintzelman reported the Rebels present in great strength with many more coming up.
Joe Johnston, hastening down in advance of his own troops to have a look at the situation, appreciated the dodge but felt it could hardly be relied on forever. He galloped back to Richmond in dismay to report that the lines were quite untenable: McClellan could get through or around them any time he wanted to make a real push, to put the whole Confederate Army there would simply be to put it in a trap, best to evacuate at once and prepare to fight near Richmond. Davis and Lee overruled him, on the ground that McClellan's advance must be delayed as long as possible. Evacuation would mean the fall of Norfolk, and that would mean the loss of the famous ironclad Virginia(ex-Merrimac), which drew too much water to come up James River to Richmond and was too unseaworthy to go out beyond the Virginia capes into the open ocean. Also—and far more important—the entire Confederate Army was about to undergo complete reorganization. The men had originally enlisted for twelve months, and their terms were just now expiring. Conscription was going into effect and none of the manpower would actually be lost, but for some weeks there would be complete turmoil, not to say chaos, with officers being shifted or replaced all over the lot and with every regiment having a grand reshuffle. It would be almost impossible to maneuver or to fight in the open until that was over. So Johnston, much against his will, took his army down to Yorktown to stave off the advance as long as he could. When he got it there his pessimism deepened; to Lee, in Richmond, he wrote that "no one but McClellan could have hesitated to attack." But the attack was not made. Instead there was a gradual, painstaking building up of Federal strength in preparation for a final, overwhelming artillery bombardment. Johnston knew that when this assault came he would have to leave, but mercifully (to his eyes) the assault was long in coming.
Lincoln and his Cabinet knew nothing of Johnston's trepidation or of the disorganized condition of the Confederate Army. What they did know was that McClellan's army was simply sitting down before the enemy's works, waiting. They had already begun to suspect that McClellan was a general who moved very slowly; now, knowing little or nothing of the obstacle in front of him, knowing only that weeks were passing without an advance, they found suspicion hardening to certainty. This was hard to bear; for men who already doubted McClellan's good faith and loyalty it was quite impossible to bear in silence. The clamor against McClellan deepened, became a clamor against Lincoln for keeping him in command. Lincoln tried to give McClellan an understanding of this increasing pressure as a factor which McClellan would have to keep constantly in mind when he made his plans; tried to show him that it was a pressure which, political conditions being what they so regrettably were, even the President of the United States might finally be unable to resist. On April 9 Lincoln wrote him: "And once more
let me tell you, it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I am powerless to help this." He concluded the letter by assuring McClellan that he would sustain him as far as he could: "but," he added, "you must act."
This was easy enough to order from Washington. McClellan might be pardoned for feeling that he was being second-guessed in an unconscionable manner by men who knew nothing about what he was really up against. To say "Strike a blow!" was simple enough; actually striking it meant sending young men through swamps and almost impassable second-growth timber against enemies amply protected by heavy earthworks, and even at this date it is not easy to say that such an attack would have won. The men of the Army of the Potomac were to learn that when the Army of Northern Virginia was once properly dug in, on ground where it proposed to linger, it could be uncommonly hard to move. Joe Johnston might have been wrong and McClellan might have been right. The trouble was that being right wasn't quite enough. Nothing was going to satisfy Washington except results, and Washington was not going to wait too long for them, either. Nobody was going to be reasonable about anything.
2.The Voice of Caution
In the end, the big show at Yorktown never came off. The army waited in front of the Rebel lines for a month, nerving itself for the great test; and then one morning the pickets sent back word that the enemy trenches were all empty. Patrols went groping forward and confirmed the news: nobody there, nothing left but a few dozen heavy guns which the Confederates had been unable to move—not wooden guns this time, as at Manassas, but sure-enough cannon of the navy model, too heavy and cumbersome to be taken along by an army that proposed to make speed on the retreat. McClellan had finally completed his approaches, and his siege guns and heavy mortars were all in position. In one more day he would have been ready to open a shattering bombardment, and Johnston had decided not to wait for him.
So instead of the great drama of a ten-mile cannonade and a mighty assault by storming battle lines extending beyond vision, what the army got was a floundering pursuit and a nasty, confused rear-guard action in damp thickets and flat, dismal fields, where reality was limited to the actions of the nearest dozen comrades, where men fell killed or maimed without seeing the enemies who struck them, and where it was quite impossible for most of the men to get any sort of idea of what was actually going on.
The troops got across the empty entrenchments and moved up the unspeakable roads, with a dull rain coming down, over a soggy level country of soaked fields and gloomy woods and scattered farms, none of them like the familiar green farms of home; and far up ahead the men heard the noise of fighting, and the roads were hopelessly clogged with mired wagon trains, and Phil Kearny came galloping up to force a way for his troops. He stormed mightily, put two officers of the train guard under arrest, demanded that the wagons be tipped over off the road or burned where they stood—he was ordered up to fight and he would have the road regardless. Admiring, the soldiers listened while he roared: "I will show you what fire feels like unless you set the torch to your goddamned cowardly wagons!"1 And his men finally got by the tangle, passing open fields wherein huge bodies of troops were unaccountably standing quite idle, and went plodding unevenly forward until they got up within range; and there, in an obscuring haze of smoke, the boys formed fine as well as they could and blazed away in the general direction of the bursts of rifle fire that were coming out of the woods and fields a couple of hundred yards away.
Some of them were formed out in the open and some in dense forest, full of fallen trees and bothersome underbrush; the enemy was a more or less invisible presence—an area, like a hazy, indistinct wood lot, or a smoky line of rail fence with briars grown up around it, from which came little spitting streaks of flame, and whistling bullets that made an unnerving noise. The 55th New York, with its baggy red French pants quite rain-soaked, got into a stretch of timber where the soldiers could hear the Rebels but could seldom see them. They stayed there for three hours, firing as fast as they could load, using up sixteen thousand rounds of ammunition, and—as the colonel discovered later, when he went out to examine the ground in front of them—killing just fifteen Confederates. The colonel made a rough calculation and figured that perhaps a hundred and fifty more of the enemy, at a maximum, had been wounded: where had all those bullets gone, anyhow?
Hooker's men discovered that the neat, formal battle lines of the training camp didn't seem to make their appearance in actual combat. Instead everybody got behind a tree or a stump or a boulder if he could possibly manage it. One private, thus protected, called out to a buddy: "Why don't you get behind a tree?" and heard the buddy shout: "Confound it! There ain't enough for the officers!" Men of the 5th New York went up to the front through a little cemetery where were buried Confederate soldiers who had died during the preceding winter. The little burying ground was full of graves, but over the gate someone had tacked a sign: "Come along, Yank, there's room outside to bury you."2
The firing at last died down and the Rebels drew off. It was only a rear-guard action, after all, and Joe Johnston had no intention of keeping his men there to make a finish fight of it. Then the Federals at the front heard a great cheering behind them, and they knew what caused it and joined in it lustily; and there, spattering across the damp fields, came General McClellan, blue coat all stained with mud, a glazed covering over his cap, his staff riding furiously in a vain effort to keep up with him. McClellan rode all along the lines, each regiment got a chance to cheer, and night came down on the army's first battlefield.
Among the higher echelons the battle gave rise to grumblings. Heintzelman, who had command of the advance, asserted that Sumner was on the field with thirty thousand men and failed to get any of them into action, and the two generals argued the matter hotly. McClellan, coming up as the fight ended, got the idea that most of the fighting had been done by Hancock's brigade, which had indeed done well, though it got into the action late. He built his dispatch around that part of the battle, telegraphing Stanton that "Hancock was superb," and thereby roused the anger of Hooker and Kearny, whose troops had suffered far more than had Hancock's, and who felt that the major general commanding was purposely slighting them. But in the end that was straightened out, and the army went toiling on up the peninsula, while Johnston pulled his own troops close to Richmond and made ready for a finish fight.
The men were beginning to get their officers sorted out by now. Hooker and Kearny were already known to the whole army. They had fire, ardor, the quality which writers of that generation called "dash"; like McClellan, they insisted that members of their staffs be brightly uniformed and excellently mounted, and they made their rounds as McClellan made his, with a fine brave clattering and show, very martial and stimulating for young soldiers to see. They built high morale in their troops. Hooker's division, going into action in this rear-guard fight at Williamsburg, saw a regiment of cavalry stringing out its mounted line in the rear, according to army custom, to check stragglers and round up laggards. Angrily the men set up the shout: "Hooker's men don't need any cavalry to make them stay in front!"
All kinds of stories were beginning to cluster about Kearny. His headquarters wagon carried a fancy carpet for his tent, a special camp bed imported from Europe, and a huge stock of imported wines and brandies; and he had a field kitchen on wheels, on the French army model, which always kept up with his headquarters so that he could have hot meals. (Kearny was independently wealthy and could afford such frills.) Officers of the New Jersey brigade claimed that he had happened along once just as they had taken over a planter's house for brigade headquarters. They found in the parlor a decanter of whisky which they hesitated to drink, fearing that it had been poisoned—army rumor said that was a favorite Rebel trick. Kearny listened as they explained their fears, then poured out a thumping major general's dose and drank it down. "If I'm not dead in fifteen minutes," he said, turning to mount his horse, "go ahead and drink all you want."3
The men were getting acquainted with Edwin V. Sumner, too; a tough
old man with white hair and beard, who had been in the army since 1819 and had a tremendous booming voice. They called him "Bull Sumner," or "The Bull of the Woods," and liked him even though he was a great martinet, with old-army ideas about discipline. He was a formidable-looking general, now in command of an army corps, always erect and proud in the saddle, and he never quite realized that the army was any different now than it had been before the war, when he spent almost forty years in slow progress from second lieutenant to colonel. Youthful Major Thomas Hyde of the 7th Maine was sent to deliver some report to him one day; Sumner looked him over from head to foot and finally burst out: "You a major? My God, sir, you will command the armies of the United States at my age, sir!"4 After one searing fight the 66th New York showed up under temporary command of a second lieutenant, who happened to be the senior surviving officer. Sumner looked at the boy and instead of seeing the frightfully cut-up regiment he saw only that a shavetail had a colonel's job. He shook his head and said: "If I had found myself, when a second lieutenant, in command of so fine a regiment, I would have considered my fortune made."5 He was still the cavalry colonel of the Indian-fighting plains army, with all the defects and virtues which that implies; not qualified for proper corps command, but a fine old smoothbore for all that.
Then there was Heintzelman, another corps commander, very much like Sumner in many ways; an old-timer, an Indian fighter from the plains, rugged and stiff and hard, still a regimental officer at heart, brave enough for a dozen men but unfitted for any problem of leadership that extended beyond men he could reach with his own voice. Like Sumner, he could put Johnny-come-lately officers in then-place. When Oliver Otis Howard first reported to him, proudly bringing in his new 3rd Maine Regiment, Heintzelman looked the men over and said to Howard: "You have a fine regiment; they march well and they give promise for the future; but they are not well drilled—poor officers but good-looking men!"8 Heintzelman had been in the middle of the fighting at the first battle of Bull Run, where he had been badly wounded.