Rebel Yell

by S. C. Gwynne

  The battle was soon over. In seven hours’ fighting over possession of a swamp and the bluff that rose above it, the Union sustained six thousand casualties and the Confederates nine thousand. On an hourly basis, Gaines’s Mill was one of the war’s costliest battles. The ratio was predictable for a force attacking such a strong defensive position. The very capable Fitz John Porter, with a single corps plus a division, had held off most of Lee’s army for seven hours. But in the end it had been Lee’s battle, his first great victory, against a worthy opponent on the opponent’s chosen field of combat. He, and he alone, had managed the victory. Jackson, in a subordinate position, was just another battlefield commander. He performed adequately: he followed orders. He had no special role in the final attack and in fact it was Lee, not Jackson, who had ordered the latter’s divisions into place. That night Jackson went to the tent of his new friend Jeb Stuart, woke him, and the two men sat on blankets and talked of the next day’s work. Jackson observed that Gaines’s Mill “was the most terrific fire of musketry I ever heard.”10 During that night came the results of that musket fire: the screams and moans of the wounded and dying rising from the swamps, woods, and fields.

  • • •

  McClellan took the defeat at Gaines’s Mill hard. The invincibility he thought he had glimpsed had vanished in the white smoke of its musket fire, as had whatever confidence he had left, and in its place came only heartache and bitterness that his outnumbered men had been so wantonly sacrificed. Even though he himself had been miles from the battlefield, sequestered in his headquarters office, here at last was a real, palpable, verifiable threat, a rampaging Confederate army of untold numbers with Stonewall Jackson in its midst, a reason to run as fast as he could to his new base. He called a meeting of his commanders that evening, told them about his plan for retreat, and got their support for the plan by selling them on the magnitude of the Confederate threat.

  Not all of his generals agreed. Division commanders Joseph Hooker and Phil Kearny were indignant when they learned of the decision. They had been watching, ever more skeptically, the amateur theatrics of General Magruder in front of Richmond and were fully convinced that rebel strength there was a sham. They knew how vulnerable Richmond was. They were so upset that they pressured their corps commander, Samuel Heintzelman, into taking them, at a late hour, to McClellan, where they made their case for an immediate attack on the city. Heintzelman supported them. McClellan was unmoved. The change of base, the euphemism he insisted on, would take place. Kearny, known for his hair-trigger temper, exploded at McClellan, denouncing him, according to a staff officer who was there, “in language so strong that all who heard it expected he would be placed under arrest until a general court-martial could be held, or at least he would be relieved of his command.”11 Actually, the retreat was already under way: Mac had ordered Erasmus Keyes and his 4th Corps to begin retreating through White Oak Swamp toward Harrison’s Landing. The rest of the army—100,000 men, 300 pieces of artillery, 4,000 wagons, tens of thousands of horses, and 2,500 cattle—would soon be in motion.12

  McClellan did something else that night, too: shortly after midnight, feeling bitter and despondent and abandoned by his government, which had once again failed to send him the troops he needed, he sent one of the war’s most infamous telegrams to Secretary of War Stanton. He told Stanton of the desperate battle he had not witnessed, and its outcome, then wrote:

  I have lost this battle because my force was too small. I again repeat that I am not responsible for this & I say it with the earnestness of a General who feels in his heart the loss of every brave man who has been needlessly sacrificed today. . . .

  I know that a few thousand men more would have changed this battle from a defeat to a victory—as it is the Govt must not & cannot hold me responsible for the result.

  I feel too earnestly tonight—I have seen too many dead & wounded comrades to feel otherwise than that the Govt has not sustained this Army. If you do not do so now the game is lost.

  If I save this Army now I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons in Washington—you have done your best to sacrifice this Army.13

  With those words, accusing the secretary of war of treason, or something very like it, McClellan must have surely known he was committing career suicide. Or maybe he was so absorbed in his own pathos that he could not see what he was doing. In any case, an enterprising man named Edward S. Sanford, who was head of the War Department’s telegraphic office, took it upon himself to remove the final nine words before delivering the telegraph, thus saving McClellan from himself. Instead of an abrupt dismissal, McClellan received a reasonably sympathetic response from Lincoln in reply: “Save your army at all events. Will send reinforcements as fast as we can.”

  Once again Porter’s army fled by night from Lee, managing to get all of the roughly twenty-nine thousand men he had left across the Chickahominy. Once again the Confederates awoke to a deserted battlefield and deserted enemy camps, strewn with abandoned supplies. That day—June 28—would see the vaunted Army of the Potomac in full flight southward across the peninsula toward Harrison’s Landing. In military terms McClellan was taking a very large risk. A one-hundred-thousand-man army, strung out over fifteen miles of road, was an exquisitely vulnerable target, all the more so since an entire army would be jammed onto a single road across a single bridge through a swamp, with constant jarring stops and starts. It was McClellan’s good fortune that Lee faced a version of the same problem Jackson had faced at Winchester: Lee knew the enemy was retreating, but where was it going? On June 28 his army was virtually frozen in place while he tried to figure it out.

  As Lee saw it, McClellan had three options: he could move his army east and cross the Chickahominy to protect his supplies; he could retreat back down the peninsula the way he had come; or he could move to the James River. The first thing Lee did was to send Richard Ewell’s division and Jeb Stuart’s cavalry to White House Landing to find out. They found the railroad unguarded and part of it destroyed; they found tons of supplies in flames. McClellan’s old headquarters mansion—the Lee place—was burning, too. (The Union had already loaded three thousand fugitive slaves onto canal boats for evacuation.) Though this was the first clear evidence of a general retreat, Lee would not be completely sure until early the next morning that the Union army was headed for the James River.

  What he did know for certain was that his original plan had worked. By threatening their supply lines he had levered the Federals out of their trenches and forced them to abandon their planned siege of Richmond. It was his first great stroke of tactical brilliance. But that was only the first step. He now had in his hands—he could see it with startling clarity—the opportunity to capture or destroy a large part of the Union’s largest army. He had the chance—perhaps the only time he would ever be given it—to end the war right here. This was not just conjecture; McClellan himself believed it, too. An army strung out for fifteen miles with its full supply train was a case study in vulnerability. Time, of course, was the critical element. Lee had to catch the snake in midflight.

  The plan he concocted for Sunday, June 29, had two main elements: first, Major General John B. Magruder, he of the recent theatrics, would advance east from Richmond and engage the Union rear guard, fixing it in place, making it fight, and thus slowing the pace of the retreat. Jackson would rebuild the destroyed bridges on the Chickahominy, then cross the river with his divisions under Chase Whiting, Richard Ewell, D. H. Hill, and himself, and join the fight. Meanwhile, divisions under James Longstreet, A. P. Hill, and Benjamin Huger would swing south and east in an arc whose terminus was at a crossroads called Glendale. If all went according to plan, the following day, the thirtieth, the Confederate army would hit McClellan from three directions—Jackson’s twenty-four thousand coming down from the north, through the White Oak Swamp—and with luck they would catch enough of it out in the open to deal it a crippling blow. It was, in a sense, a race to Glendale.

 
Like almost every other grand plan Lee made during the Seven Days, the one for June 29 did not work as he had anticipated. Once again, Jackson, with fourteen of Lee’s thirty-five brigades, was the main victim of the confusion, and, as with the fiasco at Mechanicsville, he has come under sharp criticism over the years for the supposed missteps that resulted from it. Once again, the criticism, focused on his failure to show up at the Battle of Savage’s Station that day, was unfair. Jackson, again, was following Lee’s orders. When Jackson met with Lee that morning, he had been given straightforward orders: repair the Grapevine and Alexander’s Bridges on the Chickahominy, which Porter’s men had destroyed, then cross the river and come to the aid of Magruder in his attack on the Union rear. Jackson proceeded with the first task, completing repairs of the Grapevine Bridge quickly; unfortunately he had assigned the other bridge to the incompetent Dabney, who failed and was quickly replaced. (Jackson would need both bridges for his corps and ponderous supply train.) While he was repairing them, Magruder had launched a lukewarm attack on the Union force near a railroad depot called Savage’s Station, but soon became fearful that he was facing a larger force and asked Lee for reinforcements. Jackson, meanwhile, sent a courier to Magruder to tell him that his troops would begin crossing the Chickahominy at about 2:00 p.m.14

  He was preparing to cross several brigades when, at about 3:00 p.m., he received new orders in the form of a communiqué from Lee’s adjutant, Colonel R. H. Chilton. The message was addressed to Jeb Stuart, who was still at White House Landing, and read as follows:

  The Gen’l Comd’g. requests that you will watch the Chicahominy [sic] as far as Forge Bridge, ascertain if any attempt will be made in that direction by the enemy, advising Genl. Jackson, who will resist their passage until reinforced.15

  Stuart had sent it on to Jackson, who added the following reply—“Gen’l Ewell will remain near Dispatch Station & myself near my present position”—and sent it by horseman right back to him. Both the note and Jackson’s understanding of it are perfectly clear: he was to guard the lower bridges on the Chickahominy and prevent the enemy from crossing. Why? Because Lee was still not absolutely certain that McClellan would not try to recross the Chickahominy. With the power at his disposal—if he only believed in it—McClellan could still do whatever he wanted, and Lee knew it.

  But by midafternoon both Lee and Magruder were wondering, Where was Jackson? His lateness was getting to be a daily occurrence. Magruder sent a courier to Jackson to find out what was wrong, and Jackson made the problem worse with his clipped, uninformative reply, saying that he could not help Magruder because he had “other important duties to perform.” By this he meant guarding the crossings, as Lee had ordered him to do. But the note’s almost insolent brevity enraged Magruder, who could not imagine what could be more important than coming to his assistance. Though Lee insisted to Magruder that he had ordered Jackson to cross and fight, blame for the misunderstanding must rest squarely on either Lee or his adjutant, Chilton: Lee if he wrote the order, and Chilton if he sent something to Stuart other than what Lee had told him to. Once again, Jackson and his 24,000 men were prevented from engaging in combat. Magruder managed to mount a tepid attack in late afternoon, bringing 14,000 of his men against 16,000 Union troops under Major General Edwin Sumner. The advance soon burned itself out. The threat he had posed was so slight at Savage’s Station that an entire Union corps under Samuel Heintzelman had slipped away—precisely what Lee had been trying to prevent. Still, the net result in military terms was a Confederate victory. After the battle, Sumner fled south, and what he left behind suggested an army in panicked retreat: 1,000 men who became prisoners—stragglers from the retreating army—and 2,500 sick and wounded.16 In their haste they had also left tons of supplies, some only partially destroyed. In Dabney’s description, they found “all the apparatus of a vast and lavish host”:

  The whole country was full of deserted plunder, army wagons, and pontoon trains partially burned or crippled; mounds of grain and rice and hillocks of mess beef smoldering; tens of thousands of axes, picks, and shovels . . . medicine chests with their drugs stirred into a foul medley . . . overcoats torn from the waist up. For weeks afterward the agents of our army were busy gathering in the spoils.17

  In one railroad ditch the discarded molasses ran knee deep, a symbol, just at that moment, of the helplessness of the most extravagantly equipped army in history.18 Jackson’s letter home to Anna was that of a victorious general in pursuit of a fleeing enemy. “An ever-kind Providence has greatly blessed our efforts and given us great reason for thankfulness in having defended Richmond. Today the enemy is retreating down the Chickahominy towards the James River. Many prisoners are falling into our hands.”19 McClellan’s “change of base” had meanwhile appeared in the newspapers and had quickly become a Confederate joke. It was a “catch word among our fun loving troops,” wrote one soldier in his memoirs, “to signify discomfiture or defeat; if two dogs fought and one ran, the men cheered and shouted, ‘Look at him changing his base’ ”20

  In spite of the crossed signals, on the morning of Monday, June 30, Lee still had a clear opportunity to destroy a large part of McClellan’s army. The latter had, once again, marched all night; its lead columns under Erasmus Keyes were already camped on the James River. The rest of the army had just made it across White Oak Swamp and onto the gently swelling plains and woodlands around Glendale where seven of McClellan’s eleven divisions were now camped, eight to nine miles from their destination at Harrison’s Landing. Lee’s scheme to reach Glendale ahead of some of the Union army had failed. But his basic idea of attack would be the same: nine divisions would converge in a concentric assault on the retreating Federals. McClellan himself, unaccountably, had chosen this moment to withdraw to the gunboats on the James River, where the head of his army was camped, thus leaving his rear guard to confront the full fury of Lee’s army, which he knew was coming. His behavior is difficult, or perhaps impossible, to justify, the more so since later that day he boarded the warship Galena, where he enjoyed dinner with wine with the captain while a major battle was under way. In doing so he left units from five different corps to work out tactical details among themselves.21 It was as though the exhausted, anxiety-ridden general had again, as he had at Gaines’s Mill, temporarily lost the resolve to exercise command. His behavior would be the basis for many later accusations of cowardice and dereliction of duty. “The Corps Commanders fought their troops according to their own ideas,” General Samuel Heintzelman testified later of the fighting that day at Glendale. “We helped each other. If anybody asked for reinforcements, I sent them. If I wanted reinforcements, I sent to others. He [McClellan] was the most extraordinary man I ever saw. I do not see how any man could leave so much to others, and be so confident that everything would go just right.”22

  Lee, on the other hand, was quite in the middle of things. It was a momentous day. The future of the war and the nation itself was conceivably riding on what his army did, and he was keenly aware of it. He met with Jackson at Savage’s Station just after dawn. Jackson had ridden up on Little Sorrel at the head of a large mounted escort, looking as dusty and nondescript as ever. “He sat stark and stiff in the saddle,” wrote an observer later. “Horse and rider appeared worn down to the lowest point of flesh consistent with effective service. His hair, skin, eyes, and clothes were all one neutral dust tint. . . . The ‘mangy little cadet cap’ was pulled so low in front that the visor just cut the glint of his eyeballs.”23 Lee arrived a few moments later, handsome, smartly dressed, and as usual the picture of perfection on horseback. The two generals exchanged a warm greeting, then began to talk animatedly in tones that were just out of the hearing of several curious observers. Then one of the two generals—the observers did not agree on which one it was—began to mark off a diagram in the dirt with his boot, talking earnestly all the while. When it was finished, the draftsman—Lee or Jackson, but most probably Lee—in the words of one of the observers, raised his foot and
stamped it down and said, this time loud enough to hear, “We’ve got him.”24 Jackson then mounted his horse and rode away. Lee looked after him for a moment, then rode off, too.25 They did not “have him” in the sense that McClellan’s forces, like Banks’s before Winchester, were deployed in a long line of march. McClellan was too smart for that, marching by night and setting up carefully chosen defensive positions during the day. Lee most likely saw the likelihood—or virtual certainty—that he would be able to fall on a piece of the army with his larger force. He was right: while he and Jackson had their meeting, 70,000 Confederates were advancing on 55,000 Federals at Glendale.

  What happened over the next few hours was one of the great missed chances of the war. Lee’s plan—even more complex than his scheme for Mechanicsville—required the orchestrated movements of 12,000 men under Benjamin Huger, 20,000 under A. P. Hill and James Longstreet, 13,500 under John Magruder, and 24,000 under Stonewall Jackson. Jackson, with the largest force, would take the same road the Union army had taken, across White Oak Swamp. The others would come in from the west and attack the Union flank. Under Lee’s orders, they were all moving that morning.