Terrible Swift Sword (47 page)

He knew, apparently by instinct, the
risks that must be taken and the gains that can be won thereby, the way to
impose his will on his opponent, and the fact that sooner or later a general
must be willing to move in close for a showdown fight regardless of the cost.
Because he was what he was, the war lasted much longer and was fought much
harder than seemed likely at the beginning of June in 1862.

When Lee took command
the army was moderately unhappy. It had had a costly fight and it sensed that
the fight had been badly directed. The swampy bottom lands were hot and humid
and stank fearfully from the debris of battle, there was
a
good deal of sickness, and some regimental
surgeons were easy marks for malingerers who suffered from nothing worse than a
desire to take it easy. Rations were ample, but poor; a Louisiana soldier said
the bacon was strong and the bread was sour, and for good measure he added that
he could not find one soldier whose pants were not worn out in the seat. Still,
morale was good enough, in the main—General Longstreet insisted after the war
that the chief result of Seven Pines had been to give the men greater
confidence in their own fighting capacity—and the men in the ranks cocked a
collective eye at the new commander and waited to see what he would do with
them.
¹

What he would do first was put all hands to
work digging trenches. The army had a long line to hold—it ran from Chaffin's
Bluff on the James, crossed all of the main roads coming into Richmond from the
east, touched the Chicka-hominy a little above New Bridge, and ran along the
south side of that stream to Meadow Bridge—and Lee ordered this line strongly
fortified. The soldiers grumbled a bit, considering day laborers' work with
pick and shovel beneath the dignity of fighting men, and Jefferson Davis noted
bitterly that "politicians, newspapers and uneducated officers have
created such a prejudice in our Army against labor that it will be difficult
until taught by sad experience to induce our troops to work efficiently."
²
But the men who complained nevertheless toiled as directed, and before long the
field fortifications were impressive.

Creating these
defensive works, Lee was actually getting ready to take the offensive.
McClellan was busily fortifying his own lines, making them so strong that the
blow which had been struck at Seven Pines could not be struck again. What Lee
needed was a line of his own strong enough to be held for a short time by a
small force. If he had that he could take the rest of the army out and compel
McClellan to fight in the open. Digging trenches, he was freeing his army for
maneuver.

If he could not do
this the war would probably be lost before the summer ended.

Everything
McClellan had done so far indicated that he was getting ready for siege
operations. Behind lines too strong to be attacked, he could prepare short
advances which, in the end, would give him positions for his matchless siege
artillery. With those terrible guns properly sited he could flatten the
strongest fortifications, and then his infantry could do the rest; and the very
fact that he overestimated Lee's numbers so greatly increased the probability
that he would follow this course, because if Lee had as much infantry as
McClellan thought he had this was the only course that made any sense at all.
His siege train was the great equalizer, and if he were allowed to play the
game in his own way it would inevitably win for him—as Joe Johnston had pointed
out weeks earlier and as Lee himself quickly realized. Lee was taking the first
step toward compelling McClellan to play a different sort of game, in which the
equalizer could not be used.

The second step would involve Stonewall
Jackson, who was just now finishing his spectacular valley campaign.

During the first week in June, Jackson
retreated from Strasburg, pursued by Fremont and followed on a parallel course,
east of the Massanutten Mountain, by Shields. At the southern end of this
mountain, where Fremont and Shields could join forces, Jackson paused to rest
his troops briefly at the hamlet of Port Republic, posting Ewell a few miles
west at Cross Keys, in Fremont's path. On June 8 Ewell repulsed a rather
spiritless attack by Fremont, and on June 9 Jackson at Port Republic had a much
more severe fight with the advance regiments of Shields's division. If the
entire division had been present Jackson might have had more than he could
handle, but as it was the Federals were too weak to make serious trouble and
Jackson, finally drove them off in full retreat. Then he withdrew to a
convenient gap in the Blue Ridge, from which point he could either strike the
flank of any Federal Army which tried to continue on up the valley, or if his
government wished could move to Richmond; and on June 13 he wrote to Lee,
outlining the situation and asking what Lee wanted him to do next.

A little before this,
Lee had considered reinforcing Jackson and sending him back to disturb the
peace of the lower valley once more, but the time for this had passed. Jackson
in his letter had said he did not think he ought to return to Winchester
"until we are in a condition under the blessing of Providence to hold the
country," and Lee sent his letter on to Mr. Davis with the significant
note: "I think the sooner Jackson can move this way, the better—the first
object now is to defeat McClellan. The enemy in the Valley seem at a pause. We
may strike them here before they are ready there to move up the Valley—they
will naturally be cautious and we must be secret & quick." Mr. Davis
endorsed this, "View concurred in," and Lee set about making his
arrangements.
⁸

The preliminaries were already under
way. Before he made final plans Lee needed to know where McClellan's right
flank was anchored, how it was guarded, and what sort of protection there was
for the all-important Federal supply route, the Richmond & York River
Railroad line back to White House on the Pamunkey. He told his cavalry
commander, the youthful, flamboyant, and highly gifted Brigadier General James
Ewell Brown Stuart, to go and find out. With 1200 troopers Stuart on June 12
rode off on what quickly became one of the most spectacular missions of the
war.

Stuart was storybook romance incarnate. He
had a compulsive desire for the limelight and just the right combination of
daring and military skill to get it, and along with his theatrical qualities he
was a hard worker and an unusually competent cavalry commander. He rode far to
the north, crossed the headwaters of the Chickahominy and swung east, went slicing
down behind the Federal right flank, crossed the railroad near the great base
at White House, and wound up by riding entirely around McClellan's army,
recrossing the Chickahominy far downstream and returning to the Confederate
lines on June 15 after days and nights of gaudy adventure. The ride made him
famous, and was most embarrassing to McClellan—if a Confederate cavalry brigade
could ride all the way around the army without even getting into a serious
fight there must be something wrong with the Federal security arrangements-—but
the important thing was that Stuart gave Lee exactly the information Lee
needed.
⁴

The Federal right flank consisted of
Fitz John Porter's corps, recently enlarged by the arrival of a good division
of Pennsylvania infantry under Brigadier General George A. McCall, just brought
down from McDowell's corps. Porter had McCall posted behind Beaver Dam Creek,
facing Mechanicsville, six or seven miles northeast of Richmond, with the rest
of the corps drawn up behind it. There were detachments of cavalry roving out
toward the right and rear, but there was nothing solid either to guard Porter's
flank or to protect the railway line. The right of the Army of the Potomac, in
other words, was in the air, and the army's connection with its source of
supplies could be snipped with one stroke . . . just the spot for Stonewall
Jackson.

Now it was necessary to do two things:
strengthen Jackson, and befuddle the Yankees. Lee found a way to gain both ends
at once. He sent reinforcements to Jackson—an infantry division under Brigadier
General William H. C. Whiting, which included a brigade consisting largely of
Texas troops led by a bearded young giant named John B. Hood; a brigade which
would soon be one of the world's most famous combat outfits—and he did it
ostentatiously so that the news would be certain to reach McClellan. (It did
reach him, and was passed on to Washington, where it caused a certain perplexity;
leading Mr. Lincoln, at last, to remark that if 10,000 Confederates had left
Richmond to join Jackson that was as good as a reinforcement of 10,000 for
McClellan, and how about getting on with the offensive?
⁵
) And then,
as he drew up the schedule for Jackson's descent on Porter's right and rear,
Lee showed one of the qualities that made him such a deadly opponent—the
readiness to risk everything in order to make a blow decisive.

McClellan
had an effective force of approximately 105,000 men, of whom some 30,000 were
with Porter, north of the Chickahominy, while all the rest were south of the
river facing Lee's new fieldworks. When Jackson and Whiting joined him, Lee
would have between 80,000 and 85,000. He proposed now to use no more than
25,000 of these to hold the Richmond lines—25,000 against approximately three
times their number —while he struck McClellan's exposed right with all the
rest. It was a battle plan which, if things went badly, could lose everything,
for if McClellan caught on he could smash that thinly held trench line and go
straight into Richmond; but it was also a plan which could win everything if it
worked properly, because it contemplated nothing less than McClellan's total
destruction. Lee was not merely trying to make his enemy retreat; he wanted to
annihilate him, cutting him off from his base, driving him into the muddy
pocket between the Chickahominy and White Oak Swamp and beating him to death
before the Federal commander had
a
chance
to figure out what was going on. It might accomplish much less than that, to be
sure, and much less would be acceptable, but basically it was a shot at winning
the war in one stroke, taken with a cool understanding of the fact that what
could be won at one stroke might also be lost the same way.

Even Mr. Davis, who
had the stoical self-control of an Iroquois Indian, felt the strain, and he
wrote to Mrs. Davis that "the stake is too high to permit the pulse to
keep its even beat." He took comfort in the thought that a total defeat of
McClellan would solve the Confederacy's problems in the east, "and then we
must make a desperate effort to regain what Beauregard has abandoned in the
West." He would have had a certain grim amusement, perhaps, if he had
known that
a
garbled
version of Beauregard's departure from Tupelo had reached McClellan's desk in
the' form of a report that Beauregard and part of his army had just reached
Richmond to help Lee in its defense.
⁸

. . . Washington was
a little harder to fool than it used to be. On the day Jackson turned back
Fremont's assault at Cross Keys, Mr. Lincoln told Stanton that Richmond after
all was the focal point, that Confederate activities elsewhere in the east were
nothing more than attempts to divert attention, and that hereafter it would be
wise to stand on the defensive in the valley; Fremont and Banks could hold that
area, and McDowell, once he got his command reassembled, should be sent down to
McClellan. A week later the President wrote to Fremont that "Jackson's
game—his assigned work—now is to magnify the accounts of his numbers and
reports of his movements, and thus by constant alarms keep three or four times
as many of our troops away from Richmond as his own force amounts to. . . . Our
game is not to allow this."
⁷
In the end, McDowell never did
get down to join McClellan, yet by the time Lee opened his offensive McClellan
had received, in reinforcements, rather more than the equivalent of what he had
lost when McDowell's corps was taken from him early in April. He had been sent
Franklin's and McCall's divisions (both originally of McDowell's corps) and the
11,500 men at Fort Monroe had recently been put under his command; in addition
to which, seven regiments from Baltimore had been ordered to join him.
Altogether, more than 35,000 men had gone to the Army of the Potomac since the
day McClellan was informed that McDowell was no longer part of his command.
⁸

McClellan
was an emotional sort, 'way up one day and far down the next, but during the
first few weeks of June he was rather consistently optimistic. A week after the
fight at Seven Pines he notified Washington that he would be ready to advance
and take Richmond as soon as McCall's division came down and the roads got dry
enough to move the guns. Three days later, after reporting that Beauregard was
said to be in Richmond, McClellan said that he would attack "as soon as
the weather and ground will permit." McCall arrived on June 12, and on
June 14 McClellan wired that the weather was "very favorable." The
country remained most difficult, and it was necessary to perfect the defensive
works because of the Federal inferiority in numbers, but the general remained
hopeful, and he found time to say that he would like to have permission to lay
before the President, by letter or by telegraph, his views "as to the
present state of military affairs throughout the whole country."
⁹
Whatever those views might be, his opinion of his own situation seemed clear:
he was just about ready to advance.