Terrible Swift Sword (50 page)
McClellan called in
his corps commanders that night and issued his orders for a retreat to the
James. His staff was busy, and the detailed schedules by which the ponderous
army and its long wagon trains would move through the bottleneck between the
Chickahominy and White Oak Swamp toward Harrison's Landing were carefully
drawn; when the conference ended, the different commanders hurried off to put
these orders into effect. McClellan sent a dispatch to Flag Officer
Goldsborough, the Navy's ranking officer in Virginia waters: "We have met
a severe repulse today, having been attacked by greatly superior numbers, and I
am obliged to fall back between the Chickahominy and the James River. I look to
you to give me all the support you can in covering my flank as well as in
giving protection to my supplies afloat in the James River."
10
Then, a little after midnight, he got off one more message to Stanton: possibly
the most remarkable of all the dispatches he ever wrote.
"...
I have lost this battle because my force was too small. I again repeat that I
am not responsible for this, and 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 still hope to retrieve our fortunes, but to do this the
Government must view the matter in the same earnest light that I do. You must
send me very large re-enforcements, and send them at once. I shall draw back
to this side of the Chickahominy, and I think I can withdraw all our
material." He returned to his earlier thesis: if he had 10,000 fresh men
he could win a victory within twenty-four hours, and a few thousand more would
have made the battle which had just been lost a victory instead of a defeat.
Then came the peroration:
"As it is, the Government must not
and cannot hold me responsible for the result. I feel too earnestly tonight. I
have seen too many dead and wounded comrades to feel otherwise than that the
Government 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 to any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice
this army."
11
The Seven Days Battle would go on for four
more days, but its outcome was signed, sealed, and delivered when that dispatch
was composed. Whatever might be true of the Army of the Potomac, its commanding
general had been whipped into something close to hysteria. His gaze was fastened
with such feverish intensity on the shortcomings of his superiors and on his
own innocence that it was not possible for him to see the opportunity which
Lee's daring maneuver had opened to him. The man who wrote that dispatch had
given up the effort to win and was preparing for the postmortem.
Ordinarily,
a field commander who accuses the Secretary of War, to his face, of trying to
destroy the country's most important army can expect nothing less than instant
dismissal, and McClellan knew this as well as anyone. He told his wife, not
long afterward: "Of course they will never forgive me for that. I knew it
when I wrote it, but as I thought it possible that it might be the last I ever
wrote it seemed better to have it exactly true. The President, of course, has
not replied to my letter and never will. His reply may be, however, to avail
himself of the first opportunity to cut my head off." What McClellan did
not know, however, was that his dispatch was expurgated before it reached the
President and the Secretary. Custodian of military telegrams at the War Department
was Major A. E. H. Johnson, and when he read this wire he sent for his
superior, Colonel Edward S. Sanford. Properly horrified, Sanford simply lopped
off the last two sentences before sending the dispatch on to Mr. Stanton, and
that choleric official never saw the final, furious accusation until some time
after McClellan had been removed from command.
12
Unaware of this,
McClellan naturally assumed that the Secretary of War either felt too guilty or
lacked the courage to discipline him: an assumption which could only confirm
the low opinion of Mr. Stanton which he already had.
In
point of fact Mr. Lincoln did reply, on June 28. He told McClellan: "Save
your Army at all events. Will send re-enforcements as fast as we can. Of course
they cannot reach you today, or tomorrow, or next day." Then he had Mr.
Stanton set about it to get those reinforcements. General
Burnside, at New Bern, North Carolina,
was told to send north all the men he could spare and to come with them
himself. To Halleck, at Corinth, went a peremptory wire from Stanton telling
him to send 25,000 men "by the nearest and quickest route by way of
Baltimore and Washington to Richmond"; this was made necessary, the
Secretary explained, "by a serious reverse suffered by General McClellan
before Richmond yesterday, the full extent of which is not yet known." On
the same day Lincoln notified Major General John A. Dix at Fort Monroe that
they had lost touch with the Army of the Potomac, and ordered Dix to do
everything possible to open communication with General McClellan and tell the
War Department how things were going.
13
Then, strangely, the President and the
Secretary grew hopeful. They had heard no more from McClellan, but they had
been looking at the map, rereading McClellan's original battle plan, and
reflecting on the strategic possibilities, and they apparently concluded that
everything that had happened so far was more or less incidental to McClellan's
promised assault on Richmond. On June 29, Mr. Lincoln told Secretary Seward,
"I think we have had the better of it," and Stanton agreed, adding
the bright prediction that McClellan "will probably be in Richmond within
two days." On the following day Mr. Lincoln said that as far as he could
see things were going according to plan and that lack of news was the chief
reason for worry, although he did remark that McClellan "had a severe
engagement in getting the part of his army on this side of the Chickahominy
over to the other side." Stanton notified General Wool at Baltimore that
McClellan at last had his entire army across the Chickahominy, asserting: "The
position is favorable and looks more like taking Richmond than any time
before." When General Halleck reported that he would send the 25,000 men
he had been told to send but that this would mean giving up his projected
advance on Chattanooga, both the President and the Secretary told him to send
nobody: to get into East Tennessee and possess the railroad line to Virginia
was as important as taking Richmond itself. Obviously the intense anxiety
created by McClellan's midnight telegram after the battle of Gaines's Mill had
died down.
14
It
returned quickly enough. At 7
p.m
.
on June 30, McClellan got a telegram through to Stanton. He had reached the James
and had boarded a gunboat, and his words made it clear that no attack on
Richmond was anywhere in sight:
"Another day of desperate fighting.
We are hard pressed by superior numbers. I fear I shall be forced to abandon my
material to save my men under cover of the gunboats. You must send us very
large re-enforcements by way of Fort Monroe, and they must come very promptly.
My army has behaved superbly, and have done all that men can do. If none of us
escape, we shall at least have done honor to the country. I shall do my best to
save the army. Send more gunboats."
15
The
army was safe. General Lee, winning an improbable victory that was changing the
current of the war, was in fact feeling somewhat frustrated. He was a
perfectionist; he had had a chance to destroy McClellan's army and the chance
had eluded him—chiefly, when all is said and done, because the military machine
he was operating was still too new and too imperfectly fitted together to
function smoothly. It could fight like all the furies, but it could not shift
its weight quickly; its footwork was poor and its muscular co-ordination was
defective, and so an enemy that might have been killed got away alive—bloodied,
badly beaten, but nevertheless alive and capable of full revival.
On June 28, the day after the Gaines's
Mill fight, McClellan got his army started on the march to Harrison's Landing,
abandoning the base at White House, sending the transports off, destroying an
immense quantity of supplies that could not be moved—a staff officer mentioned
the loss of millions of rations and hundreds of tons of ammunition—and breaking
the bridges that crossed the Chickahominy.
16
Temporarily, Lee lost
contact with him, except for an unsuccessful assault made by some of Magruder's
men on the Golding farm position, and for a time it was not clear whether
McClellan was going to try to regain his lost base at White House, march down
the Chickahominy to the lower peninsula, or move directly to the James.
Altogether, the Army of the Potomac got a twenty-four-hour head start, and it
was just enough. Lee's army was never able to make up for the lost time, and
the great battle of annihilation did not take place.
Not quite . . . the opportunity was
there. McClellan's army had to go along a narrow roadway, and the column was
very long, encumbered by a wagon train and a shambling herd of 2500 beef
cattle, unable either to retreat with speed or to turn and fight with all its
strength. Theoretically, it was possible for part of Lee's army to circle
around south of the Chickahominy and smite the head of this column while another
part struck the flank and the remainder assailed the rear, and this is what Lee
tried to do. If all had gone as he hoped, the Army of the Potomac would have
ceased to exist. But nothing went quite right for him. Magruder proved an
inexpert tactician, Huger moved much too slowly, and Jackson, most
inexplicably, missed a crucial assignment. Although it had to fight on June 29
at Savage Station and on June 30 at Glendale—the latter engagement was as
vicious a battle as either army ever fought, but Lee could not get more than
two of his six divisions into action—the Army of the Potomac could not be
brought to a stand. By July 1 the head of the column had reached Harrison's
Landing and the protecting gunboats, and McClellan had Porter plant abundant
infantry and an overpowering array of guns on high ground at Malvern Hill,
overlooking the James, to indicate that the army was ready for one more fight.
One more fight it immediately got. The
position at Malvern Hill was really far too strong to attack With any hope of
success, but the Federals had been getting whipped and retreating day after
day and if Lee suspected that one more battle would finish them it is easy to
see why he felt that way. Besides, this would be the last chance to strike a
blow, and Lee was a fighter; and that afternoon and evening saw one of the most
tragic and hopeless attacks of the war, with Magruder's and D. H. Hill's
divisions and elements from other commands trying heroically to do the
impossible. Up the long slope they went, brigade after brigade, and the Federal
guns knocked their lines all apart and covered the hillside with broken bodies;
this was one of the few battles in the Civil War in which most of the
casualties were inflicted by artillery. At Gaines's Mill an afternoon of
failure had been followed by an almost miraculous moment when everything
suddenly worked, and a victory had been gained, with the triumphant Rebel yell
tingling across the twilight. That did not happen at Malvern Hill. Night came,
the killing ended and the Federals were unshaken; and as the crash of the guns
stopped the dusk throbbed with the pathetic cries of thousands of wounded men
who wanted somebody to come out and help them.
17
Victorious at last, but nevertheless
beaten, the Army of the Potomac withdrew during the night and made its camp at
the new base of Harrison's Landing, with warships in the river to stand guard.
6.
Letter from Harrison's Landing
A newspaper
correspondent who reached Harrison's Landing on July 2 wrote that the Army of
the Potomac seemed to be "more dead than alive." The soldiers who had
been fighting and marching in the swamps for a week were unutterably dirty,
plastered with mud from head to foot, and hundreds of them stood knee-deep in
the James trying to scrape the clay off of their uniforms with sticks. At least
one field hospital was so jammed that an army surgeon was unable to get inside
and go to work, and the correspondent remembered seeing a wounded officer, his
face streaked with blood and mud, wandering about offering five dollars to anyone
who would give him something to eat and getting no takers. Yet when one talked
to the soldiers they seemed to be in good spirits, all things considered, and
most of them said they were ready to "go at them again" as soon as
reinforcements arrived. They were not entirely sure what had happened, and
one enlisted man doubtless spoke for many when he admitted that he did not know
whether "we have made an inglorious skedaddle or a brilliant
retreat," but at least the marching and fighting had ended and there was a
chance for tired soldiers to get a little rest. McClellan wrote to his wife:
"I have still very great confidence in them, and they in me. The dear
fellows cheer me as of old."
1
No one in Richmond had the least doubt
what had happened: the Confederacy had won a mighty victory. General Lee wrote
soberly that "under ordinary circumstances the Federal Army should have
been destroyed," but he remarked that "regret that more was not accomplished
gives way to gratitude to the Sovereign Ruler of the Universe for the results
achieved," and he spelled these results out with unemotional accuracy:
the siege of Richmond had been raised, the whole Federal campaign had been
completely frustrated, thousands of prisoners had been taken, fifty-two pieces
of artillery and more than
35
,000 stands of small
arms had been captured, and stores and supplies of great value had been taken
although these were "but small in comparison with those destroyed by the
enemy." Secretary Mallory assured his wife that the Seven Days made up
"a series of the grandest Battles that was ever fought on the American
continent," and exulted that "the Great McClelland the young Napoleon
now like a whipped cur lies on the banks of the James River crouched under his
Gun Boats."
2
The
cost of this achievement had been high. Lee's army had lost 3286 men killed and
15,090 wounded, with somewhere between 900 and 1000 men recorded as missing,
for a total casualty list of slightly more than 20,000: very close to one
fourth of all of the men Lee had in his command when the Seven Days began.
(Federal losses had been smaller: 1734 killed and 8062 wounded, with the
dismaying number of 6053 missing in action. Most of the "missing" had
been taken prisoner, as had a great many of the wounded men.) Over the long
pull, the Confederacy could not afford such casualties; there was a grim hint
here that the aggressive strategy which had saved Richmond might be altogether
too expensive for regular use.
3
From afar, Beauregard wrote that
Lee's feat in concentrating forces against McClellan's exposed right was
"a master-stroke of policy," although he considered that if McClellan
had not "lost his presence of mind" he might well have broken through
Magruder's carefully staged defenses and taken Richmond.
4
McClellan was sorting out his own
impressions. He was justly proud of the fighting his troops had done and he
assured the President that once the men had had a little rest they would be as
spirited and as vigorous as ever; his immediate plan was to make the camp on
the James perfectly secure, but he believed that if he had more men he might
make a new campaign. Early on July 1, before the fighting began at Malvern
Hill, he telegraphed Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas that if the government
planned to reinforce him at all it should do so at once, and liberally: "I
need 50,000 more men, and with them I will retrieve our fortunes. More would be
well, but that number sent me at once will, I think, enable me to assume the
offensive." Even a few thousand fresh men, if they came quickly,
"will do much toward relieving and encouraging this wearied army." On
July 2, after Mr. Lincoln and Secretary Stanton told him that moderate reinforcements
were on the way, McClellan reported that he would have the army "ready to
repulse the enemy tomorrow," and he assured the President that "every
1,000 men you send at once will help me much."
5
Then the picture began to look darker. His
chief engineer officer, Brigadier General J. G. Barnard, warned McClellan that
"the only salvation is for this army to be ready promptly to resume the
offensive"; it must advance speedily "or we are bagged." It
could do nothing of the kind, however, unless it were greatly strengthened, and
the administration (said General Barnard) was most unlikely to do much because
if it revealed the size of the crisis it could not conceal its own blunders.
Let McClellan, therefore, send a trusted emissary to lay the case before
President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton; the mere fact that such a man was sent
would show the country that something was wrong. In General Barnard's opinion,
"We need 200,000 more men to fill up the ranks and form new
regiments."
McClellan forthwith sent his
chief-of-staff, General Marcy, off to Washington, notifying Mr. Stanton that
Marcy would give him "a perfect understanding of the exact condition of
this army." He was much more pessimistic now than he had been forty-eight
hours earlier, and he explained that it was vital to get his army into proper
shape "before the enemy can attack again." Then he gave the Secretary
the bad news: "I doubt whether there are today more than 50,000 men with
the colors. To accomplish the great task of capturing Richmond and putting an
end to this rebellion re-enforcements should be sent to me rather much over
than much less than 100,000 men. I beg that you will be fully impressed by the
magnitude of the crisis in which we are placed."
8
At
this point General McClellan heard from President Lincoln, who wrote that the
government just did not possess, east of the mountains and outside of
McClellan's army, more than 75,000 men altogether.
"Thus," said Mr. Lincoln,
"the idea of sending you fifty thousand, or any other considerable force
promptly, is simply absurd. If in your frequent mention of responsibility you
have the impression that I blame you for not doing more than you can, please be
relieved of such impression. I only beg that in like manner you will not ask
impossibilities of me. If you think you are not strong enough to take Richmond
just now,
I do not ask you to try just now. Save
the Army, material and personal; and I will strengthen you for the offensive
again, as fast as I can. The Governors of 18 states offer me a new levy of
three hundred thousand, which I accept."
7
The disaster in front
of Richmond was bringing results that could be seen more clearly in Washington
than at Harrison's Landing, and Mr. Lincoln was responding to them. He was
moving very carefully, because an abrupt right-angle turn could not be taken at
high speed and also because it was very hard to see what sort of road lay
beyond the turn.
So
far the Northern war effort had gone on its original momentum. Save-the-Union
patriotism plus the fury born of defeat at Bull Run had put 637,000 men in the
army and there had been an impressive list of victories; the order that stopped
recruiting in April had been born of the general belief that the war would soon
be won. But the old momentum was gone. The western army had gone to Corinth at
a crawl, letting its opponent escape virtually unhurt. The eastern army had
been equally slow in its approach to Richmond and had at last met cruel defeat.
In May the War Department quietly urged Northern governors to raise some new
regiments, and in June it reopened the recruiting stations, but the harvest was
very thin. From western Virginia, where the response was more or less typical,
Governor F. H. Pierpoint reported that the men who might enlist "have
engaged in other pursuits for the season," and even the all-out-war
stalwart, Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts, confessed that this unexpected
plea for more men "finds me without materials for an intelligent
reply."
8
The administration could not suddenly call for more
volunteers without confessing error and ruinous defeat—General Barnard's
appraisal had been tolerably acute —but more volunteers it had to have, and a
slightly involved political approach had been devised.
Secretary
Seward went off to New York at about the time the Seven Days fight was
beginning. He was to take certain political soundings, and he bore a letter
from Mr. Lincoln, to be shown wherever it might be helpful. Mr. Lincoln explained
the military necessities as of that hour: hold all that had been won in the
west, open the Mississippi, take Chattanooga and eastern Tennessee, and raise
at least 100,000 new troops so that Richmond could be captured. This would substantially
end the war, the President believed; and then, characteristically, he went on
to adorn this instrument of political maneuver with
a
frank statement of his own bedrock determination:
"I expect to
maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my
term expires, or Congress or the country forsake me; and I would publicly
appeal to the country for this new force, were it not that I fear
a
general panic and stampede would follow—so
hard is it to have
a
thing
understood as it really is. I think the new force should be all, or nearly all,
infantry, principally because such can be raised most cheaply and
quickly."
Using
this, Secretary Seward persuaded the Northern governors to sign an appeal
(which, most thoughtfully, he himself had drafted in advance) expressing the
patriotic hope that "the recent successes of the Federal arms may be followed
up by measures which must insure the speedy restoration of the Union."
The time had come for "prompt and vigorous measures to be adopted by the
people"; Mr. Lincoln accordingly was urged to call upon the states for
such numbers of volunteers as might be needed to win final and lasting
victory. This appeal, which won approval on June 30, was then pre-dated to June
28 and sent to the White House, and, on July 2, Mr. Lincoln made it public
together with
a
formal
call on the states for 300,000 more recruits.
9
Thus, as he told
General McClellan, he had been "offered" a huge new body of men, and
he had accepted the offer. The North would get on with the war.
It was hard, as Mr. Lincoln said, to get
a genuine understanding of reality. The reality here was that the war had
grown larger than it had been, and that a larger effort would be required to
win it. This larger effort would come from
a
people who were just learning that the energy
which had won part of the war was not enough to win all of it; and the effort
would be called for by a President who had just defined his will to win as
absolute. Here was the clearest possible warning that with this man in the
White House there would not be a peace without victory, that a restored union
would be fought for but not bartered for, that whatever needed to be done would
be done. The device by which the 300,000 men were to be got might be a devious
political trick, but the important thing was that the government was going to
get them. In the end the shock of the Seven Days would be as significant a
turning point as the shock of Bull Run had been a year earlier.
On July 8 Mr. Lincoln showed up at
Harrison's Landing to have a talk with General McClellan.
The general's mood seemed to be good. On
July 4 he sent a soldierly reply to the President's message about reinforcements:
"I will do the best I can with such force as I have and such aid as you
can give me.
...
If the capital be
threatened, I will move this army at whatever hazard in such direction as will
best divert the enemy." He went on to say that the whole army was drawn up
for an Independence Day review, with bands playing and everything looking
good; and on July 5 he notified Adjutant General Thomas that he had his army
satisfactorily placed for all defensive purposes and that the position also
"enables me at any time to resume the offensive, which I hope soon to be
in a condition to do." This message crossed a letter from Mr. Lincoln, who
said that he had talked with General Marcy and understood the whole situation,
and that for the immediate future the defensive must be McClellan's primary
concern. McClellan himself, said the President, must be the judge of what he
could or could not do at Harrison's Landing, but a significant postscript gave
the admonition: "If, at any time, you feel able to take the offensive,
you are not restrained from doing so."
10
For the first time in
weeks, the general and the President seemed to be in complete harmony.
