by Bruce Catton
Some six weeks later, on the eve of the fateful Seven Days' Battles in front of Richmond, Pinkerton assured McClellan that Lee had more than 180,000 men facing him; probably many more, since the agents had actually identified 200 regiments of infantry and cavalry, eight battalions of independent troops, five battalions of artillery, twelve companies of independent infantry and cavalry, and forty-six additional companies of artillery, and the Rebels undoubtedly had many other outfits present whose designations could not be learned. After the fighting was over, Pinkerton reported that he was satisfied the Rebels had at least 200,000 men in the battles, of whom 40,000 were casualties. Long after the war Pinkerton continued to insist on the accuracy of his figures; he had obtained them, he said, "from prisoners of war, contrabands, loyal southerners, deserters, blockade-runners and from actual observations by trustworthy scouts."
So to all the other handicaps that beset him—distrust at the War Department, troops withheld, strategic plans countermanded—McClellan had this final, ruinous handicap to contend with: heavily outnumbering his opponent, he was led to believe that his opponent heavily outnumbered him. He and his staff took Pinkerton's word as gospel. This was hard to do sometimes; McClellan's headquarters had a fairly accurate count on the number of divisions in the Confederate Army, and that number could not conceivably account for the vast hordes of men supposed to be present. But instead of questioning Pinkerton's figures, headquarters simply assumed that those divisions were "grand divisions"—oversized groupings of two or more army corps, such as Burnside set up later at Fredericksburg—and continued to believe that from 180,000 to 200,000 armed Rebels were in front of them.
It was just tragic that this had to happen to McClellan, of all generals; for this man must always listen, at the last, to the voice of caution, the subconscious warning that action may bring unlooked-for perils, the lurking fear that maybe some contingency has not been calculated. Before he can act, everything must be ready, every preparation must be made, every possible mischance must be provided for. Now, with his own career and the nation's fate balanced on a knife's edge, with Lincoln quietly warning him that he must at all costs do something, there is this final deterrent: conducting an offensive campaign deep in enemy territory, he finds himself to be dreadfully outnumbered—so much so that only a very great daring would make an offensive possible at all. Almost everything he did and failed to do in this campaign can be explained by that one fact.
3, Tomorrow Never Comes
With all of these difficulties of espionage, counting numbers, and weighing risks, the men in the ranks had nothing to do. They never even saw their own army all in a mass, to say nothing of the enemy's. In this broken, wooded country the Rebels were usually visible, even in battle, only as small detachments. The men could see that they were edging up toward Richmond. Heintzelman's corps was close enough so that the men could hear the church bells ringing in the capital, and if progress looked slow to people back in Washington, it seemed fast enough to the men who had to tramp along the bottomless roads.
There had been too much rain, and in the lowlands the humid heat was an oppressive weight to boys from the North, and a general air of weather-beaten tarnish began to appear on brigades that had been natty and polished when they came off the transports. Officers who had been bright with gold-embroidered shoulder straps, red sashes, and plumed felt hats became more somber-looking; many of them bought privates' uniforms and sewed the insignia of rank on the shoulders, having learned that in a fight or on the picket lines the enemy believed in picking off the officers first. Regiments that had worn fancy leggings or gaiters began to discard them, the men finding that it was more comfortable to roll the trouser leg snug at the ankle and haul the gray regulation sock up over it. Paper collars had disappeared, and the men in the Zouave regiments, which wore gay red pants and yellow sashes, topped by Turkish-style fezzes, began to wonder if these uniforms were not both unduly conspicuous on the firing line and excessively hard to keep neat.
When the actual fighting came it was desperately confused, and even the generals seem to have had trouble understanding what was happening. Finding McClellan with part of his army south of the Chickahominy and part of it north, Joe Johnston waited for a heavy rain to swell the river and make passage between the two wings more difficult, and then fell hard on the part that was south of the river. The battle of Seven Pines, or Fair Oaks, which resulted was bloody enough, with five or six thousand casualties on each side, but it was indecisive. The diaries and memoirs of the men who fought in it cannot be put together to make a picture of anything but a series of savage combats in wood and swamp, where wounded Confederates drowned in stagnant pools and wounded Federals were burned when powder flashes set fire to dead leaves and underbrush insufficiently dampened by rain; and there seemed to be no tactical plans other than a simple urge to get the men up into places where they could shoot at each other.
Things went badly, and Bull Sumner was ordered to bring his corps over from the north side and get into the fight. He marched his men up to the flooded river to find that the makeshift bridge the engineers had built was ready to float off downstream—center part loose from its underpinning, foaming water all about, engineer officer coming up to tell him that the bridge was unsafe and it was impossible to use it. Sumner roared: "Impossible? Sir, I tell you I can cross! I am ordered!" And cross he did, too, although his men waded knee-deep in water that swirled over the planking. The muddy roads on the south side were so soupy that his artillery almost sank out of sight, and the gunners worked up to their waists in mud and water to inch the guns along. When they finally got them into action, each recoil drove the wheels down into the soft ground nearly to the hub caps.1 Sumner sent the 5th New Hampshire in on a counterattack after a Confederate charge had been repulsed. The regiment's colonel, a former newspaper editor named E. E. Cross, who had lived in the Far West and had fought both Mexicans and Indians, exhorted the men: "Charge 'em like hell, boys—show 'em you are damned Yankees!" As the regiment advanced, Cross fell wounded. He propped himself up on an elbow, and when some of the men came over to help him he told them: "Never mind me—whip the enemy first and take care of me afterward."2
General William H. French, stout and apoplectic, with a face so red that he always looked as if his collar were choking him, set out to gallop boldly along the line of his brigade as it prepared to go into action, and dropped completely out of sight in muddy water when his horse bounced into what had been thought to be a mere surface puddle. The general came up blowing and swearing mightily, while the brigade shouted with laughter. A lieutenant in the 57th New York was told by his colonel to lead his company off through the wood to get an enfilade fire on a Confederate detachment in front. He did so, and the Rebels withdrew, new troops being, as Longstreet indelicately remarked, "as sensitive about the flanks as a virgin." When the metropolitan papers came to camp a few days later the lieutenant discovered that this modest little exploit had become a grand charge, led by a general, which had driven the enemy with great slaughter. Reflecting on the way a small story can become great, the lieutenant wrote: "If the history of past ages is as much tainted as the history we are now making—then alas poor Yorick!"3 Toward the end of the battle, some anonymous Federal put a bullet through Joe Johnston's shoulder, and a moment later a shell fragment hit the general in the chest and unhorsed him: and thus the one significant result of the battle—its significance not guessed at the time—was that Robert E. Lee became commander of the Army of Northern Virginia.
After the battle things were about as they had been, except that a horrible stench hung over the whole broad valley. McClellan felt that the attack had been intelligently conceived—"It is the only smart thing Joe Johnston has yet attempted. It was very smart," he was quoted as saying—and he busied himself getting the roads improved so that heavy guns could be moved up, while he saw to it that his lines were protected by proper entrenchments, and he moved more and more of the army over to the south side of the ri
ver. He had each division lined up for dress parade a few days after the battle, and a stirring order from himself was read to the men:
"Soldiers of the Army of the Potomac! I have fulfilled at least a part of my promise to you. You are now face to face with the Rebels, who are held at bay in front of their capital. The final and decisive battle is at hand. Unless you belie your past history, the result cannot be for a moment doubtful." The proclamation went on and on, assuring the soldiers that they were better fighters than their enemies, and concluding: "Soldiers! I will be with you in this battle and share its dangers with you. Our confidence in each other is now founded upon the past. Let us strike the blow which is to restore peace and union to this distracted land. Upon your valor, discipline and mutual confidence the result depends."4
It is written that the soldiers cheered when they heard these fine words, and they probably did—although during the next fortnight or so there seemed to be very little in their general situation to cause much cheering. The weather was muggy and enervating, the mosquitoes were a trial, sick lists grew dolefully long as malaria and other complaints appeared, and there was no escape whatever from the frightful smell. Many dead had gone unburied in the swamps and thickets, others had been given a mere covering of earth which the rains quickly washed away, and anyway, nobody had warned these boys that one of the worst things about war is the way it stinks. All any individual soldier could see was the uninspiring acre or so in his immediate vicinity, and the adventure and excitement of war seemed to have shrunk to sullen endurance of boredom and acute physical discomfort.
But morale did not sag as much as might be supposed. McClellan's prose might be purple, but it did create self-esteem. The men felt that they had done well at Williamsburg, and Seven Pines had been twice as big a fight and they had got through it ah right; they had passed the test of battle and nobody had ever licked them, and they began to feel that they were seasoned old soldiers. They had learned about artillery fire, which was so terrifying to new troops and, for that matter, not exactly pleasant even to old ones. Shell and solid shot fired by smoothbore cannon were perfectly visible in flight and always seemed to be coming right at the observer: a completely unnerving thing until one got used to it. Spent shot, rolling along the ground, was deceptively dangerous; it looked harmless but wasn't, and some of Hooker's men told how an officer had put his foot out to stop such a ball and had lost his leg thereby. Shells were unpredictable. One man had picked up a dud and it had exploded in his hands—yet by some freak he was not badly hurt; at other times one shellburst might kill half a dozen men. A boy in a New Jersey regiment wrote that going under fire for the first time was pretty terrible: some of the men in his company, he said, were so scared they simply fell to the ground as if shot, picking themselves up sheepishly a bit later as nerve returned. He recalled one boy who went up to the firing line like a man in a trance, moaning over and over: "O Lord, dear good Lord!"
Regiments which were still equipped with the old Harper's Ferry muskets were disgusted with these weapons: ancient flintlocks which had been altered to percussion firing, with a rifled tube inserted in the barrel. They had a tremendous kick and were considered almost as dangerous to the user as to his target. Members of the Pennsylvania Bucktails—the 13th Pennsylvania, recruited in the Northern mountains and used to good rifles—found that the kick arose from the fact that the original bore of the musket was deeper than the tube; they remedied matters by ramming two or three dimes solidly down the bottom of the barrel, filling the chamber and preventing "back action."
The Frenchmen of the 55th New York, who knew things about cookery that most of the American boys did not know, felt that there were worse places to camp than the Chickahominy Valley. The place was full of bullfrogs, and the regimental mess reveled in frogs' legs "as large as and more delicate than the legs of chicken." The venturesome Frenchmen also learned that the blacksnakes found in the swamps were good to eat, although the other regiments were slow to copy them. A number of the generals, gifted with some political awareness, took the trouble to write to the state governors, telling them how well their troops had behaved.
New troops came in. McDowell's corps was still an independent command, but McCaU's division was detached from it and joined McClellan via Fortress Monroe, while a division under General William B. Franklin came along a bit later. McClellan got permission to form a couple of new army corps and name the commanders himself, Porter and Franklin getting the posts; now he at least had two corps commanders of his own selection, and he began to feel encouraged. Day by day he got his lines closer in toward Richmond, bringing up the heavy guns that were to have blasted Joe Johnston at Yorktown, defending himself every step of the way with earthworks.
Lee concluded that McClellan's attack would be a matter of regular approaches and siege guns, as at Yorktown, and confessed that the Confederates could not play that sort of game. Longstreet wrote long afterward that the Yankee plan was sound "and would have been a success if the Confederates had consented to such a program." McClellan kept Porter and his new corps north of the river—McDowell was under orders to march down from Fredericksburg and join him, and it was important to extend a hand to him. A little later Stonewall Jackson erupted again in the Shenandoah Valley, and McDowell was held back on panicky orders from Washington, and Porter's corps was left extending its welcoming hand into empty space. Once again McClellan felt betrayed; but the long rainy spell had ended, the sun was drying the roads, and the prospects for an advance looked good.
Indeed, McClellan was whistling quite a hopeful tune just then. A week after the Seven Pines fight he wired Secretary Stanton that he would be "in perfect readiness to move forward and take Richmond the moment McCall reaches here and the ground will admit the passage of artillery." Three days later he assured the Secretary: "I shall attack as soon as the weather and the ground will permit." Four days after that he wired: "After tomorrow we shall fight the Rebel army as soon as Providence will permit."
Nor was this just his official version. To his wife McClellan wrote with equal confidence. In mid-June, a few days after McCall's division had checked in, he assured her that he would begin his advance "on Tuesday or Wednesday," when the roads would be thoroughly dry and all the temporary bridges over the river would be complete.
He gave her a peek at his strategy; as Lee and Longstreet had suspected, he would try to get his heavy artillery far enough forward to blast an opening for his troops, driving the Rebels from their trenches by gunfire, moving his soldiers up to the abandoned works, bringing the siege guns up close again, shelling the city, and then making a final assault. He was confident because of the soundness of his plans and because of the ardor of his men: "I think there is scarcely a man in this whole army who would not give his life for me, and willingly do whatever I ask. ... I think I can so use our artillery as to make the loss of life on our side comparatively small." Two days later he was writing that "we shall soon be on the move," and four days after that he confided that he would strike his first great blow "within a couple of days." Two days after this letter he wrote: "I expect to be able to take a decisive step in advance day after tomorrow."
Day after tomorrow was slow in coming. For more than a fortnight the opening of the grand assault was always just a day or two ahead; and always there were additional last-minute preparations to make, final repairs to be put on the roads and the bridges, new dispositions to be made in the arrangement of the waiting troops. He believed that he was outnumbered, even with the reinforcements; Pinkerton's reports on Lee's overwhelming strength were detailed and explicit. Everything must be completely ready before the army can move, the last perfecting touch must be added, when the fight begins there must be nothing left to chance. And this was not only because of the overmatching strength of the enemy. There was Washington to think of; men there were trying to wreck the country, and if anything went wrong in the army the nation's ruin would be complete.
McClellan went into detail on this subject in
a letter to his wife. The grapevine told him that Secretary Stanton and Secretary Chase had quarreled, and that McDowell—whom, by this time, McClellan had written down as a conniving schemer who wanted the top command for himself—had given up his old alliance with Chase and was now cultivating the Secretary of War. Sadly (and, heaven knows, understandably enough) McClellan wrote: "Alas! poor country that should have such rulers." He added: "When I see such insane folly behind me I feel that the final salvation of the country demands the utmost prudence on my part, and that I must not run the slightest risk of disaster, for if anything happened to this army our cause would be lost." A day or two earlier he had written her that recent messages from Lincoln and Stanton had quite an amiable tone, but he added acidly: "I am afraid that I am a little cross to them, and that I do not quite appreciate their sincerity and good feeling. Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. How glad I will be to get rid of the whole lot!"
From all of which it is clear that the whole miserable combination of sorry circumstances—estrangement from his superiors, false reports from his intelligence section, and dreadful suspicion and enmity clouding all the channels between army headquarters and Washington —had piled up too much of a load for this man's army to carry. The great assault on Richmond must be delayed to the last moment because caution, above all other qualities, is the one great essential: caution in the face of powerful foes in front, caution because of treachery and foul conspiracy in the rear. Everything that had been building up through nine long months of disillusionment, every paralyzing force created by the willingness of public men to believe the worst of their fellows, was pressing on him now to make him wary, to compel him to think twice and thrice before taking a step, to people the starless darkness of imagination with just-discernible dangers that must be prepared for in advance. One false move and the country itself is lost! No wonder that tomorrow never quite comes, that there is always a final safeguard to erect.