by S. C. Gwynne
Jackson’s day had started with a miserable night of rain that had soaked him in his bed. He very likely did not sleep at all. Though he was sick and exhausted, he put his army on the march at 3:30 a.m., crossing the Chickahominy River and passing through Savage’s Station and its litter of supplies, some of them burning. The march once again was slow, this time in part because his men could not resist loading themselves up with Union discards: coffee, ammunition, clothing, shoes. It took his men seven hours to cover five miles to the bridge at White Oak Swamp, where they arrived at about noon to find the single bridge destroyed. At approximately 2:00 p.m. Jackson opened an artillery barrage against the Union forces on the high ground south of the swamp, and sent his cavalry chief, Thomas Munford, across the deep water to scout the crossing. Munford came under murderous fire and returned. He reported that there would be no possibility of reconstructing the bridge with William Franklin’s 6th Corps and its nineteen thousand men and artillery sitting atop the bluff on the other side.
And there, at the ruins of the White Oak Swamp Bridge, Jackson stalled, never to move again that day. It was the first failure in a string of failures. Jackson was not the only one who failed to advance: Huger’s division would be stymied by felled trees on the road; Magruder would spend the day in futile marching and countermarching. Thus Lee could muster only a little more than twenty thousand men under Longstreet and A. P. Hill when he finally mounted his attack at 4:00 p.m. Though the fighting was hard and bloody, and the Confederates breached Union lines once, the Battle of Glendale ended in a stalemate. Following the pattern of the Seven Days, the Union force retreated once again by night, this time to a strong position at Malvern Hill, a few miles toward the James River. “Never, before or after,” wrote Porter Alexander, “did the fates put such a prize in our reach.”26
Where was Jackson this time? The answer, broadly speaking, was that he was having what appears to be a temporary, though fairly complete, mental and physical breakdown. The description of him as “worn down to the lowest point of flesh consistent with effective service” conforms to almost all accounts of him that week. He was not himself. He was sick with fever, debilitated, possibly dehydrated. He had had an absurdly small amount of sleep since June 23. Jackson wrote Anna that he had been in a “wet bed” the night before in a torrential storm and had gotten up at midnight.27 By the time he arrived at White Oak Swamp he had probably been in the saddle for ten hours.
Indeed, the old Jackson seemed to disappear altogether that week. Anecdotes about him seem oddly substanceless; he wasn’t even indulging in his usual diversion of badgering his own generals. He seemed emotionally drained, too, strangely empty. In a letter to Anna, all he could muster was a formal, colorless, almost pro forma wish: “I do trust that our God will soon bless us with an honorable peace, and permit us to be together at home again in the enjoyment of domestic happiness.”28
Faced with the sharp Union artillery fire, Jackson decided immediately that he would not try to force his way across the swamp. This seemed completely out of character. Though he would have sustained large losses attempting it, he had never been shy about expending blood. He then looked for another way out of the swamp. Tom Munford continued his search downstream and found an undefended crossing. He sent word of this back to Jackson, adding that the Union flank on the other side of this swamp crossing also appeared to be undefended. He heard nothing back, and Jackson never followed up. Though this was only a “cowpath,” as Munford described it, and would present great difficulties for a full army corps to cross, Munford later wrote that “I had seen [Jackson’s] infantry cross far worse places, and I expected that he would attempt it.”29 Jackson’s subordinate Wade Hampton, the wealthy South Carolina plantation owner whose “Hampton legion” had fought bravely at Manassas, found yet another crossing, only a quarter mile from the destroyed bridge. Hampton returned and told Jackson that he could quickly build a log bridge for infantry but not artillery. Jackson ordered him to do it. Several hours later a serviceable bridge existed that could have put whoever crossed it 150 yards from the unsuspecting Yankees. When Hampton returned to tell Jackson, he found the general seated on a log, quite motionless, with his eyes closed. His cap, as usual, was pulled down to his nose. Hampton gave Jackson his report and volunteered to lead an advance over his new bridge. To Hampton’s complete amazement, the general did not speak, nor did he even move. He “sat in silence for some time, then rose and walked off in silence.” Jackson later was found prostrate and asleep underneath a tree, in spite of the daylong artillery battle that was screaming overhead. He seemed almost perfectly passive. When Longstreet sent an aide to him asking for his help, Jackson replied that he could do nothing. He later fell into such a deep sleep that his aides had trouble waking him. He fell asleep at dinner with a biscuit between his teeth. When he was awakened, he suddenly seemed to come to his senses, saying, “Now, gentlemen, let us at once to bed, and rise with the dawn, and see if tomorrow we cannot do something.”30
That was little consolation for Lee. Jackson commanded his largest force, and he had failed not only to cross the swamp but even to distract the Union army into keeping units in place to watch him. In midday the threat from Jackson seemed so slight that Union major general William B. Franklin was able to release two brigades—nearly ten thousand men—to help fight Longstreet and Hill. Franklin himself was later critical of his adversary, saying “it must be evident to any military reader that Jackson ought to have known about Brackett’s Ford, only one mile above White Oak Bridge, and ought to have discovered the weakness of our defense at that point.”31 Nor had Jackson bothered to contact Lee about this, who was a mere forty-five minutes away by courier. Jackson acknowledged none of this in his official report, saying only that the relatively deep swamp, the destruction of the bridge, and the strength of the enemy position prevented crossing. He did, however, react when, two weeks later, he overheard surgeon Hunter McGuire, aide Sandie Pendleton, and artillery chief Stapleton Crutchfield talking about the campaign. When one brought up the subject of why Jackson had not gone to the aid of Longstreet and Hill, Jackson interrupted, “If General Lee had wanted me, he could have sent for me.” His statement managed to be both cryptic and accurate. Lee had never once communicated with Jackson during the day, not to request that he cross the swamp, nor to find out why he had not crossed the swamp.
Lee was appalled at the results of the day. “We of Gen. Lee’s staff knew at the time that he was deeply, bitterly disappointed,” wrote Porter Alexander, “but he made no official report of it & glossed over as much as possible in his own reports.”32 Lee had not yet learned how to wield the full power of his army, how to make it move in concert, how to deal with its sometimes balky or independent commanders. Then again, for all appearances he had just won another stunning victory, once again driving the Union forces before him. Whatever contretemps there were remained between Confederate generals and their staffs. Few of the rank and file had any idea of who was supposed to be where and doing what, and what opportunities might have been missed. To them and to the rest of the South it was all pure rebel glory, vindication of the idea—as Manassas had been—that Yankees were no match for the Confederate fighters. The morning after the battle Jackson, on horseback, happened upon a group of troops from Magruder’s command, most of whom were seeing him for the first time. “Such cheering I had never heard before,” wrote one Georgia soldier, of the man he called “our most famous general. The soldiers went wild as they tossed their caps in the air.”33 As the Army of Northern Virginia pushed the hated Yankees inexorably toward the river, Jackson was a bigger hero than ever.
Glendale was not the end of the Seven Days, though it should have been. In his disappointment and frustration, mixed with fatigue and sickness that sounded a bit like what Jackson was experiencing, Lee decided he wanted to strike one last time at his enemy before it took shelter under its navy’s guns. He believed the Army of the Potomac was badly demoralized: evidence of it was everywhere on t
heir marches, thousands of rifles, knapsacks, blankets, and other supplies strewn randomly on the ground. He would fight yet again on ground of the Union’s choosing, and once again it was excellent defensive ground: a mile and a half long, half a mile wide, gently sloping, amphitheater-like meadow bordered by thick woods, the swamps and ravines on the margins. It was called Malvern Hill.
The place was more like a killing field, a defensive position that Fitz John Porter, architect of the fearsome works at Mechanicsville and Gaines’s Mill, considered to be the strongest of the campaign by far. The Union advantage started with its artillery: 268 cannons, many of them rifled, plus 26 giant siege guns that McClellan had been preparing to use against Richmond. The guns were everywhere: stacked on the brow of the hill, bristling on the army’s flanks, and even ranged in front of the infantry, where their flesh-shredding canister loads would enjoy a clear field of fire. Around them, stacked to the top of the rise, were the blue masses of infantry, fifty-four thousand of them. The borders of the amphitheater were unassailable: ravines, swamps, streams, and thick woods meant that the Union troops could not be flanked. Which meant that the Confederate attack would be funneled into a narrow front with no cover. The rebel infantry would have to attack the Union position by coming up the rise, straight into the teeth of the strongest artillery emplacement of the war. It sounded like suicide, and Jackson and his brother-in-law D. H. Hill, who formed the Confederate left at the base of the slope, and along with Huger’s and Magruder’s troops would do the fighting this day, understood this at once. Hill thought it was “hopeless” and had warned Lee not to try to fight there.34 Jackson, who saw no chance for a successful assault, wrote in his battle report:
The enemy in large force were found strongly posted on a commanding hill, all the approaches to which in the direction of my position could be swept by his artillery and were guarded by infantry. The nearest batteries could only be approached by traversing an open space of 300 or 400 yards, exposed to the murderous fire of artillery and infantry.35
The Confederate strategy began with an idea. James Longstreet, looking at the spectacle of raw force arrayed in front of him, had the notion to bring up artillery on the left and right, subject the Federals to a pounding crossfire, and hope that this might have some effect on their apparently ironclad defenses. As a tactical plan it wasn’t much good; in practice it was a disaster. Even though Jackson and others tried to bring up batteries quickly—at one point he personally helped haul a North Carolina gun forward—the Confederate guns came up piecemeal and to little effect.36 They were losing, and losing badly. Soon after the artillery duel started, Jackson sat down on a stump to write a note to Jeb Stuart. While he was writing, a shell from a rifled Parrott gun exploded nearby. Half a dozen men were killed or wounded, and dust and dirt rained over Jackson and his letter. He calmly shook the dirt off the paper and finished his writing. He then stood up, gave directions for the dead and wounded to be carried off, mounted, and rode off. The last words of his letter were “I trust that God will give our army a glorious victory.”37 He could not have been more wrong. For the Union gunners, the battle was more like a large-scale turkey shoot. Whenever a Confederate battery would unlimber, the massed Union guns would open up on it, blowing it to pieces. When Jackson requested that his division commander Brigadier General Chase Whiting bring up his guns, Whiting protested, saying that he had only sixteen of the fifty he was supposed to have. Whiting further complained that his gunners would be cut to shreds. “They won’t live in there five minutes!” said the man who had graduated first in the Class of 1845 at West Point and had been Jackson’s tutor in the latter’s plebe year. “Obey your orders, General Whiting, promptly and willingly.” Whiting, now furious, replied, “I have always obeyed my orders promptly, but not willingly under such circumstances.”38 The guns were brought up. It took a moment for the Union batteries to register this. And then they blew the guns, wagons, men, horses, limbers, and caissons to bits. Jackson, meanwhile, continued giving orders, in one case while a battery was being destroyed before his eyes. “He sat erect on his horse in this hurricane of canister and grape,” recalled one soldier, “his face was aflame with passion, his eyes flashing.” Whiting thought he was aflame with something more like madness. “Great God!” he cried out to anyone listening. “Won’t some ranking officer save us from this fool?”
Other Confederate gun crews were just as helpless before the massed counterbattery fire from the hill. After the war, McClellan’s chief of artillery, Brigadier General William Barry, told Jackson’s artillerist Tom Munford, chillingly, how easy it was to destroy the rebel guns. He said he had “fifty pieces massed at Malvern Hill, which he could concentrate on any battery that came out in the open and that they melted like wax under his rain of projectiles.”39
Thus it went. By midafternoon Lee decided that Longstreet’s misguided barrage plan was not going to work. There would be no attack that day. Thinking ahead to a battle the following day, Lee began to move some of his reserves. He shifted some of them to be in place for the following day and left the field of battle. And then something strange and tragic happened. Earlier in the day, Lee, through his adjutant, Chilton, had issued an order to all his commanders that was predicated on the idea that Longstreet’s idea might work. The directive read as follows:
Batteries have been established to act upon the enemy’s line. If it is broken, as is probable, [Brigadier General Lewis] Armistead, who can witness the effect of the fire, has been ordered to charge with a yell. Do the same.
Lee’s orders sounded simple enough. If Armistead saw Yankees retreating from the Confederate cannon fire, he was to charge and yell, which would signal a general assault on Union lines. But the order gave no time for the attack and no time limit; the decision to advance was left to a brigadier who had never led a brigade in battle (and was further distinguished for having been kicked out of West Point after an incident in which he broke a plate on Jubal Early’s head); finally, amid the din of battle a “yell,” even by a full brigade, would have been inaudible to most of the men on the Confederate lines. That Lee could have even issued such an order was inexplicable. Perhaps he was exhausted; later that day—as Jackson had the day before—he fell asleep on the field.
While Jackson and D. H. Hill had concluded that an advance would be foolhardy, sometime in late afternoon others suddenly had different ideas about what was going to happen. First Chase Whiting and then John Magruder sent notes to Lee saying that parts of the Union line were retreating. Magruder, moreover, reported that Lewis Armistead was driving a body of the Union forces. Neither report was true. McClellan was in no sense retreating, merely rearranging, and Armistead’s minor advance had succeeded only in getting various rebel units pinned down.40 Lee, who was no longer on the field, for some reason credited these optimistic reports and dictated the following message to Magruder: “General Lee expects you to advance rapidly. He says it is reported that the enemy is getting off. Press forward your whole line and follow up Armistead’s success.” Just before the late-arriving Magruder received those orders, he somehow received a copy of the earlier order from Chilton for a general advance. This was at about 5:00 p.m. Now his orders were perfectly clear: he had to attack, he had to follow Armistead. So he went forward with maybe seven thousand men against the war’s greatest defensive concentration. Confederate guns boomed again, and again were immediately targeted for destruction.
Magruder’s first attacks did nothing but sacrifice several thousand men to Federal artillery and musketry. But they had another unfortunate effect, too. They became the inadvertent signal—per the orders Chilton had delivered—for a general advance. At about five thirty, Jackson, who was commanding the D. H. Hill units, ordered those brigades forward, too. The result was pure slaughter, some of the worst of the war. To their credit, the Southern infantry did not give up. They pressed attack after attack and were badly shot up, a huge percentage of them by artillery. “It was not war, it was murder,” said D. H. Hi
ll later. Mass murder, actually. By sundown more than five thousand rebels had fallen, compared to three thousand Federals. They lay on the field, in one description, “woven into a carpet of cold or agonized flesh . . . enough of them were alive and moving to give the field a singular crawling effect.” Later burial details would report exploding corpses and pigs eating pieces of flesh that once belonged to live human beings. In their doomed attack, Lee’s men had performed with extraordinary bravery.
After the battle was over, Lee still did not seem to quite understand what had happened. He sought out Magruder. “General Magruder, why did you attack?” he asked. It was an odd question, considering the second, quite specific, order that he had issued. Magruder replied, “In obedience to your orders, twice repeated.” That night, at about 1:00 a.m., a group of Jackson’s generals and other officers, worried that McClellan might attack in the morning, went to Jackson’s headquarters, where they found him in a deep sleep. As surgeon Hunter McGuire described it, they sat him up and shouted in his ear “something about the condition of our army, its inability to resist attack, etc.” Jackson, barely awake, replied, “Please let me sleep. There will be no enemy there in the morning.” His officers thought he was crazy. He was right.41 As had become their habit, the Union forces again withdrew by night, again over the howls of McClellan’s commanders, most notably Fitz John Porter and Phil Kearny, who thought he could still make a run at Richmond. “If an army can save this country,” came Little Mac’s canned reply, “it will be the Army of the Potomac, and it must be saved for that purpose.”42 By the next morning they were gone. Malvern Hill was a bloody, and pointless, end to the Seven Days, which had seen a total of 36,463 casualties, half again more than at the Battle of Shiloh, whose killed-and-wounded numbers had shocked the nation. The casualties in this single week, in fact, equaled those in all the battles of the western theater in the first half of the year 1862, including Shiloh. It was by far the bloodiest week in the nation’s history.