Mr Lincoln's Army

by Bruce Catton

  And while all of this was going on, Lee, half a dozen miles away, was exerting all his strategy to keep McClellan immobile, with Porter's corps extended helplessly north of the river, until by the use of every possible expedient the Rebel army could be made strong enough to hit that one weak spot. McClellan could not be attacked south of the river—his works there were too strong, Lee's numbers were too few —but at all costs he must be kept from asserting the initiative and beginning his remorseless siege-gun advance, for if that were once well begun Richmond would inevitably be lost. And so while McClellan waited and made ready (he was writing: "I have a kind of presentiment that tomorrow will bring forth something—what, I do not know"), Lee brought Jackson down from the valley and with an audacity that still looks breath-taking assembled three fourths of his outnumbered army on the north side of the Chickahominy to assault the troops of Fitz-John Porter.

  Lee was barely in time. Even while he was grouping his forces for the grand attack, McClellan was at last beginning to move. Orders filtered downward, from army to corps to division; and on the morning of June 25, Kearny's and Hooker's men left their knapsacks in camp, formed line of battle, and started out toward the Rebel capital.

  They passed the advance entrenchments along the old Williamsburg road, where the Seven Pines fighting had centered, and set out across the gloomy country in a drizzling rain. There was a broad open field, and on the far side there was a stretch of timber, with the ground all swampy underfoot, the black tree trunks coming up in damp twilight out of dead pools and spongy earth. At the near side of this wood the infantry halted, and the guns in the rear opened up and raked the timber. Rebel batteries off in the distance answered back, and for a time there was a spirited artillery duel, noisy but not doing much harm to either side. Then the gunfire died away, the soldiers moved forward into the wood, and the skirmish line began to shoot at the Rebel pickets and waited for the main line to come up; and there was a slow, mean fire fight in the wood, where wounded men had to be propped up against trees or stumps, while they waited for the stretcher-bearers, lest they drown. In the end the Rebels withdrew—they were not present in any great strength—and the Northerners cleared the wood and got to the far edge, where they looked out upon a broad clearing which held the dark earthworks of Lee's main line of defense. The drizzly afternoon wore away and word came to dig in; the new line was a mile or more in advance of the old one, and it looked as if the big push for Richmond had begun.

  But next day everything slowed down. The Confederate Army seemed to be in a high state of nervous irritability. The Yankee picket line had to be strengthened until it had almost the weight of a regular skirmish line; here and there, up and down the front, little detachments of Rebels would attack in a rush, drawing off again when the fire got hot. All along the line, throughout the day, there would be sudden bursts of artillery fire as Confederate batteries sprang into unexpected activity, fired a dozen rounds, and then subsided into silence. Nothing ever quite developed into a real battle, but it was not what could be called quiet, either.

  Through gaps in the trees, in the rare spots where one could get a look into the distance, lines of marching troops could be seen. There was an ominous sense that something was building up, as if thunderheads were piling high on the horizon, about to break forth with wild lightning. Off to the north, muffled by distance and dead air, there was a steady rumble of gunfire during the afternoon and evening, but three quarters of the army was south of the river and the boys had their minds on what was right in front of them; what was going on north of the river didn't sound much different from what was going on right here, except that there were fewer breaks in it. The men spent an uneasy night on the line; a number of regimental bands were kept playing long after dark, the brisk tunes dying away in the somber pine flats. Some of the men heard vague talk of a victory won north of the river.

  Next day there was more of the same, with a slightly increased tempo. The outposts in front of Hooker's division could hear a good deal of frenzied activity beyond the Rebel picket posts. Southern officers were shouting constantly, apparently trying to get large bodies of troops formed up and moved; the Northerners could hear repeated commands—"From the right of companies to rear in a column. . . . Right face. . . . Don't get into a dozen ranks there. . . . Why don't they move forward?" Something big was in the wind; yet afterward the outposts remembered that they had been mildly puzzled: with all that shouting and maneuvering going on, they didn't seem to hear the actual tramp of marching men.5

  At the various headquarters the men noticed a good deal of coming and going, with aides and mounted orderlies constantly galloping in and galloping out. To the northward, as the afternoon of June 27 wore away, a huge cloud of dirty white smoke went rolling up the sky, and the men who saw it wagged their heads: lot of guns being fired over there across the river, to make all that smoke. The atmosphere was heavy, and for some reason it affected the acoustics; in places the roar of that battle could be heard plainly, in other places there was no noise at all, even though the firing was abnormally heavy and was taking place only a few miles away. Along in mid-afternoon Slocum's division of Franklin's corps was pulled out of camp and was sent hiking along the miserable woods roads to the Chickahominy bridges. In this division was the 16th New York, gay and bright with a fancy touch to its uniforms; the colonel's wife had sent down a huge bale of brand-new straw hats, one for each man, and the whole regiment was wearing them. A few days later it was noticed that every straw hat was gone. The men found that when they got into action—which they did, as soon as they crossed the river—the hats turned them into perfect targets, and they lost 228 men before they discarded them.

  And still nothing much actually seemed to happen south of the river. When night came word trickled back that there had been a terrible big fight over on the north side; but on the south side, although they had been right on the edge of an all-out battle for two days, it never quite developed. The Rebel lines continued to bristle, and in one or two spots the Confederates came out with what looked like pretty serious assaults (although it did seem that they were repulsed rather easily) and the Rebel artillery was ready to make a nuisance of itself at a moment's notice all along the front. And then next morning there was more galloping and coming and going than ever, around corps and division and brigade headquarters, and great black clouds of smoke went up as men set fire to various supply dumps. While the boys were puzzling over this, they were marched up to wagon trains and told to load up with salt pork, hardtack, coffee, and the like; and they noticed that instead of having definite quantities measured out for them, the way it usually happened, they were simply given all they could put in their haversacks. The 5th New York was directed to wagons containing the brigade's knapsacks; instead of being allowed to look for their own, the men were told to take the first ones they came to and be quick about it, and as soon as every man had one, provost guards set fire to the rest. The 4th New Jersey, to its amazement, got sudden orders to dig pits and bury all knapsacks. Up and down the camps the men began to look at each other and mutter: "It's a big skedaddle."

  It was. By a painfully narrow margin Lee had beaten McClellan to the punch. Leaving twenty thousand men on the south side of the river—twenty thousand to face some seventy thousand Federals—he had marched everybody else to the north side for a vicious attack on Porter's isolated corps. The first blow, struck at Mechanicsville on the afternoon of June 26, had been rebuffed, but the next day Lee threw fifty-seven thousand men at Porter's new lines back of Boatswain's Swamp, near Gaines's Mill, and after a crunching, grinding struggle in which some Confederate brigades were all but torn apart he broke the lines in and drove Porter back across the river, forcing McClellan to order a retreat.

  The ominous noises which the Federals south of the river had been hearing in their front throughout the two days were simply the contribution of the Confederacy's distinguished amateur actor, General Magruder, who was having just the kind of time for himself he had
had at Yorktown. Magruder had been exceedingly nervous. His twenty thousand men were all that stood between McClellan and Richmond for forty-eight hours, and Magruder was very much aware that if the Yankees once caught on there was little he could do to keep them from rolling right over him and going into the capital. So he had played the old Yorktown game with every variation he could think of. Regiments had gone out into open spaces to march and countermarch and look numerous; officers had stood in the woods, shouting commands to completely imaginary brigades; picket lines and patrols and advanced batteries had been kept effervescently active, as if making final preparation for a huge attack. In the end, it had worked.

  It had worked, partly because Magruder skillfully imposed on the Union commanders facing him—or on most of them, at any rate— and partly because McClellan and his corps commanders were already convinced that Lee had close to two hundred thousand men on the field, so that it was possible for him (as it seemed to them) to use sixty thousand or more to crush Porter north of the river and still retain overwhelming numbers on the south side. Pinkerton's fantastic reports, believed like the writ of the true faith, were worth a couple of army corps to the Confederacy that week. Heintzelman, under whom the preparatory advance had been made on June 25, had been worried all along; told McClellan that night that he hardly thought he could hold his advanced position unless he could be reinforced, and when the attack on Porter was at its height and McClellan messaged his corps commanders to see if they could possibly spare any men, Heintzelman replied that in a pinch he could send two brigades, "but the men are so worn out I fear they would not be in a condition to fight after making a march of any distance." Sumner had been imposed on equally; his messages back to army headquarters told about "sharp shelling" all along his lines and predicted a heavy attack on his right. Franklin notified the commanding general that the enemy was "massing heavy columns" in his front, and the remaining corps commander, Erasmus Keyes (who was to drop into military oblivion at the end of this campaign), reported it would take all the men he had to hold his position.

  McClellan stayed in his headquarters tents, pitched under trees on a pleasant hill by a farmhouse a mile or more south of the river, his uniform coat folded over a camp chair, standing in the open now and then to listen to the firing, totting up the reports from his subordinates. The situation on both sides of the river, he wrote, was so ominous that he could not tell where the real assault was going to be made; at night he wired Stanton that he was "attacked by greatly superior numbers on this side."

  He did not visit the battlefield. Indeed, in all of the great fights which the Army of the Potomac had while under his command, McClellan stayed close to headquarters. His physical courage was high enough—many of his soldiers have commented on his extreme coolness when making reconnoissance under fire—but there seems to have been in him a deep, instinctive shrinking from the sight of bloodshed and suffering, an emotional reaction to the horrors of the front lines that was more than he could stand. He wrote to his wife, about this time, that "every poor fellow that is killed or wounded haunts me," and the army's profound confidence that McClellan was anxious to spare his men's lives was solidly based on fact. He was anxious to spare them, and when he had to send them to their deaths he did not like to watch it. So, in any case, he remained at headquarters, where he took counsel of his caution: dangerous to send heavy reinforcements north of the river lest the lines to the south be broken; dangerous to strike boldly for Richmond, on the south side, lest disaster take place on the north; hold on, then, as well as may be, on both banks, make Porter's fight a holding and delaying action, withdraw to some good point on the James River, get reinforcements, refit, and prepare for a new offensive at a later date. On the night the Gaines's Mill fight ended McClellan called in his corps commanders and gave orders for the retreat.

  The corps commanders agreed that this was the only thing to do. Not so the two firebrand division commanders who held the lines nearest Richmond, Phil Kearny and Joe Hooker. They were indignant at the news, for it appears that Magruder had not fooled them very much; they knew the Rebel lines in front of them were thin and they believed they could and should be broken at once. They pressured their corps commander, Heintzelman, and late in the evening dragooned him into taking them to see McClellan, accompanied by a few of their brigade commanders. At the headquarters tent Kearny demanded permission to make an attack at once. He and Hooker, he said, could march straight into Richmond: if the general felt that they couldn't stay there (the disaster north of the river had broken the army's supply line) they could at least free the fourteen thousand Union prisoners of war in the city, disrupt all of Lee's strategic plans, and get back safely. Hooker agreed; in his opinion one division could do the job, but to play safe they might use two—let Kearny make the attack with his division and let Hooker support him with his. Heintzelman, under pressure, said that he felt the generals' proposal was sound.

  McClellan was unmoved and insisted that the retreat must take place as ordered. Fiery Kearny was indignant; a staff officer who was present wrote later that Kearny denounced McClellan "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." That didn't happen, however, McClellan apparently feeling that the thing to do with Kearny was to let him blow off steam every now and then, and the officers went back to their posts.8

  So the retreat was made. It was handled, the books say, with consummate skill. Lee never could quite find the opening he needed to turn the withdrawal into a rout, and if the general situation gave him a chance to destroy the invading army, McClellan prevented him from taking advantage of it. But to the soldiers themselves the picture was never clear. They had no maps; they only knew that after spending some weeks in their fortified lines they were on the march again, in a confused country where none of the narrow, winding roads appeared to lead anywhere in particular, and there seemed to be a good deal of fighting mixed in with all the marching.

  A member of the 40th New York wrote that, when his regiment was pulled out of the line and marched off to become part of the rear guard, the men thought for quite a time that they were actually advancing on Richmond to capture the place and end the war. The

  1st Minnesota found itself drawn up in a field near a country railroad station, supporting a Rhode Island battery. A Confederate battle line emerged from a wood a mile away and advanced to the attack. Old General Sumner came galloping up, his white head bare in the wind, his hat clenched in one fist; he put the 5th New Hampshire and the 88th New York in beside the Westerners, and they went out into the field and drove the Rebels back. A little later a brigade of New York troops charged and captured a section of a Rebel battery, spiking the guns when they found they couldn't get them away. Then, after dark, the Federals moved off down a road through a swamp. Long afterward they learned that they had had a part in the battle of Savage Station, in which the army's retreat was effectively protected, but at the time it was just a fight; and if the rest of the army was in retreat, the fact was not especially evident to the high private.

  Indeed, old man Sumner himself got a little mixed up about it. When evening came he felt that he had won a victory, and when orders came to withdraw he cried: "I never leave a victorious field —why, if I had twenty thousand more men I could crush this rebellion." Staff pointed out that McClellan's orders to withdraw were explicit, and Sumner finally obeyed, complaining: "General McClellan did not know all the circumstances when he wrote that note. He did not know that we would fight a battle and gain a victory."7

  The 15th Massachusetts knew a retreat was going on, but had fun anyway: their job was to destroy supplies that couldn't be moved, and they had a freight train of ammunition to get rid of. The railroad bridge over the river had been wrecked, so they simply set the train on fire, started it moving toward the ruined bridge, and sat back to enjoy a grand combination of train wreck, bonfire, and Fourth of July firewor
ks.

  Night came on, and two weary batteries of regular artillery—Batteries A and C, 4th U.S.—went to sleep in a wood, dead-tired. Next morning the skipper of the two batteries, Captain George W. Haz-zard, heard bugles sounding reveille from fields which he knew had been unoccupied the night before. He got up to look about—Rebels all around him, no sign of any Union troops anywhere. He gave hurried orders: hitch up quickly but quietly and get the guns away before the Rebels catch on, move at a walk so as not to make any more noise than can be helped. He finally rejoined the army, bringing with him a battalion of infantry stragglers who, like the artillerymen, had gone to sleep in the wood ignorant that the army was pulling out. A similar adventure befell three infantry regiments—104th Pennsylvania and 56th and 100th New York, which fought in front of Savage Station and weren't notified that everybody else was leaving. They were nearly captured, made an all-night march along bewildering roads, got entirely lost, and at last came stumbling into camp three days later, mad enough to bite the heads off nails. It was reported that they were the only regiments in the army which failed to cheer McClellan after the army was safely back on the James River.

  That same night Colonel William Averell of cavalry came riding up to McClellan's field headquarters all excited: the roads between the army and Richmond were empty and the army might go there unopposed. McClellan smiled grimly and shook his head; the roads would be full enough tomorrow—which was entirely correct, since Lee was bringing every man he had to press the retreat, and the moment for a counterblow had passed. To Averell, McClellan added: "If any army can save this country it will be the Army of the Potomac, and it must be saved for that purpose."8