Terrible Swift Sword (48 page)
South of the Chickahominy his line was
compact, running from White Oak Swamp to the Chickahominy in a big crescent
whose convex side was toward the enemy. Keyes's corps held the left, by the
swamp, with Heintzelman and Sumner next; at the right, Franklin was posted in a
strong position on the Golding farm overlooking the river. On June 19, McClellan
told Mr. Lincoln that his army was well over the river except for "the
very considerable force necessary to protect our flanks and communications,"
and said that his picket lines were within six miles of Richmond. The Rebels
were alert, ready for a fight at every point; a general engagement might take
place at any hour, and a Federal advance would involve "a battle more or less
decisive." The fact that the Confederates had sent upwards of 10,000 men
to reinforce Jackson simply showed how strong and confident they were.
Still, the Army of the Potomac was
ready: "After tomorrow we shall fight the Rebel army as soon as
Providence will permit. We shall await only a favorable condition of the earth
and sky and the completion of some necessary preliminaries."
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Along the front south
of the Chickahominy the Federal line was a mile or more from the Confederate
trenches— out of sight, most of the way, with a good deal of timber in between
the opposing lines. Each army had skirmishers and pickets in this no-man's
land, and there was much sniping and sharpshooting—a wearisome, monotonous
warfare, broken now and then by moments of fraternization between rival
infantrymen. Like the Confederates, the Federals found this country hot and
sickly. Typhoid fever was prevalent, scurvy had begun to appear in some units,
good drinking water was hard to find, and McCall's soldiers found the arrival
at White House depressing. A number of undertakers had set up shop
there—business was good, and it was certain to be
a
good deal better very soon—and their signs on
the wharves were the first things the soldiers saw when they disembarked:
"Undertakers & Embalmers of the Dead—Particular Attention paid to
Deceased Soldiers."
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On June 25, McClellan finally began his
advance; a modest forward movement of Heintzelman's skirmish line, with elements
from Sumner's and Keyes's corps coming in on each flank, the object apparently
being to clear the way for a more powerful advance a day or two later by
Franklin's corps in the direction of Old Tavern,
a
crossroads a mile or so west of Golding's
farm. McClellan spoke of it as a preparatory move, and because of the
prodigious fighting which took place during the week that followed it this
affair has been more or less forgotten; it cost the Army of the Potomac some
five hundred casualties, and it showed how this powerful host could inch
forward in its quest for positions from which the great siege guns could
operate.
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If General Lee proposed to make McClellan play a
different game the time was getting short.
Although
General McClellan spoke of this advance with confident satisfaction he had
reason to be somewhat uneasy.
In
the first place, Stuart's ride had shown McClellan exactly what it showed
Lee—that the Federal supply line, running back along the Richmond & York
River Railroad to
White House on the Pamunkey, was highly
vulnerable—and McClellan had been giving thought to a possible change of base.
The James River was perfectly safe, and a base at Harrison's Landing, fifteen
miles south of McClellan's present position, would have been secure. Basing the
army on the James had in fact been under consideration ever since the occupation
of Yorktown, but during the leisurely pursuit of Johnston the Federal supply
line had been anchored on the Pamunkey and the arrangements made then had never
been changed. Now, however, it was necessary to prepare for an emergency, and
McClellan ordered a temporary depot set up at Harrison's Landing: if the
Confederates did break the line to the Pamunkey, Harrison's Landing could
quickly be made the new base.
However, there was an immense catch to
this. To transfer the base to the James would be to ruin the whole campaign,
because if the army's supply line went by dirt road to Harrison's Landing,
McClellan would never be able to use his big guns. Once he let go of the
Richmond & York River Railroad it would be impossible for him to conduct
siege operations. He could fight the kind of fight he wanted to fight—the kind
at which the Confederates could not beat him—only if he operated from Pamunkey.
This
was so, simply because the most powerful weapons in his siege train could not
be moved any appreciable distance except by rail or water.
McClellan's siege
train at this time consisted of 101 pieces of ordnance.
Slightly more than half of these were
weapons which, although they were too cumbersome to be used as ordinary field
artillery, could nevertheless move slowly by road provided the roads were
reasonably solid. These were the four-and-one-half-inch Rodman rifles, the
30-pounder Parrotts, the rifled Whitworths from England, and a few eight-inch
howitzers and eight-inch mortars. They were good weapons and Lee had little to
match them, but they were not the guns that made McClellan's siege train
genuinely awesome.
The real rock-crushers, the huge weapons
which could pulverize any defensive works they could reach—the equalizers, in
short—were irresistible but hard to move. There were forty-eight of them:
eleven 100-pounder Parrotts, two 200-pounder Parrotts, ten 13-inch sea-coast
mortars and twenty-five 10-inch mortars. These could be transported by barge
or they could be transported by rail, but they could not be transported any
distance by road. (Lee had remarked, as early as June 4, in a discussion of
McClellan's base at White House: "I think the only way the enemy can get
his heavy guns up that way is by the railroad.") To move them at all, from
wharf or from railroad siding, involved building special ramps and using
derricks, sling carts, rollers and a prodigious amount of pully-hauly business;
the lightest of them weighed four and one half tons and the biggest weighed
twice that much. McClellan had been able to use some of them at Yorktown
because of a convenient creek, deep enough to carry barges, and he would be
able to use them in front of Richmond—once he had gained ground for suitable
emplacements—because of the railroad; but at Harrison's Landing there were
neither creeks nor railroads. To send this heavy ordnance to Harrison's Landing
would be about as bad as sending it back to Washington.
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Thus McClellan had excellent reason for
being sensitive about any threat to the railroad line which ran back to the
Pamunkey; and to increase his unease he got news, on June
24
—the day before he
made his preparatory advance south of the Chickahominy—that Stonewall Jackson
was coming his way. A Confederate deserter, picked up by Federal cavalry,
asserted that Jackson's troops were moving to Frederick's Hall, on the
Virginia Central Railroad, and would come on from there to attack the Yankee
flank north of the river. McClellan passed this on to Stanton, asking if the
War Department had any news regarding Jackson. Stanton could only tell him
that all sorts of rumors, some of them obviously planted, were in circulation;
the deserter's story might also be a plant, he said, but at the same time it
would not be safe to disregard it entirely. It may be that McClellan considered
the story unreliable; at any rate he went ahead with the movement the next day,
and after the firing had stopped on June 25 he sent Stanton a confident
telegram saying "we have gained our point fully and with but little
loss" and adding that the whole front was quiet.
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The
confident mood quickly died. At 6:15 that evening McClellan sent the Secretary
another telegram in which he foresaw the worst. He was convinced, he said, that
Jackson was about to attack his flank, that Beauregard had checked in with
reinforcements and that the enemy's force was at least 200,000 men, and he went
on in strange vein:
"I shall have to
contend against vastly superior odds if these reports be true; but this army
will do all in the power of men to hold their position and repulse any attack.
I regret my great inferiority in numbers, but feel that I am in no way
responsible for it, as I have not failed to represent repeatedly the necessity
of reinforcements; that this was the decisive point, and that all the available
means of the Government should be concentrated here. I will do all that a
general can do with the splendid army I have the honor to command, and if it is
destroyed by overwhelming numbers, can at least die with it and share its fate.
But if the result of the action, which will probably occur tomorrow, or within
a short time, is disaster, the responsibility cannot be thrown on my
shoulders; it must rest where it belongs.
"Since I commenced this I have
received additional intelligence confirming the supposition in regard to
Jackson's movements and Beauregard's arrival. I shall probably be attacked
tomorrow, and now go to the other side of the Chickahominy" (his
headquarters were on the Trent farm, south of the river) "to arrange for
the defense on that side. I feel that there is no use in again asking for
reinforcements."
But this hour of gloom also passed, and at
10:40 that night McClellan wrote the Secretary still another dispatch, from
Fitz John Porter's headquarters:
"The information I received on this
side tends to confirm impressions that Jackson will soon attack our right and
rear. Every possible precaution is being taken. If I had another good division
I could laugh at Jackson. The task is difficult, but this army will do its
best, and will never disgrace the country. Nothing but overwhelming forces can
defeat us. Indications are of attack on our front tomorrow. Have made all
possible arrangements."
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5.
Seven Days
Ever after, men spoke
of the last week in June simply as The Seven Days; aptly enough, because during
those days a pattern emerged from chaos, much after the manner described in the
Book of Genesis. They were days of bitter fighting among wooded hills and
ravines, of confused flight and pursuit past broken bridges in impassable
swamps, with a final climax on a blazing slope where the great ranks of guns
proved stronger than the great ranks of men who tried to take the guns by
storm; one battle, seven days long and infinitely deep, changing the war and compelling
the nation in the end to find new definitions for itself. The hope that the war
could be something less than a revolutionary struggle died somewhere between
Mechanicsville and Malvern Hill. And so, for the matter of that, did thousands
of young men.
General
Lee's battle plan was admirable, but there was
a
good deal of slippage when it was put into
effect. Many things went wrong, and the Confederacy might have come to disaster
except that all of its mistakes were balanced by the mistakes of its enemies.
If, at last, Lee won less than he had hoped to win, he nevertheless won much
more than had seemed possible three weeks earlier, and his victory kept the war
alive for more than two and one half years. It was
a
dazzling achievement, even though it did not
always go according to the script.
The
left of Lee's line was held by an impetuous, hard-fighting officer who would
become one of the Confederacy's most famous combat soldiers, a bearded young
major general named Ambrose Powell Hill, who commanded an oversized division
of six brigades massed south of the Chickahominy to the north of Richmond.
Next to Hill on the east, drawn up by the turnpike that ran to Mechanicsville,
the modest village on the far side of the river where Porter's patrols guarded
the Federal right flank, were two more large divisions also led by men who
would win much fame in combat—James Longstreet, dogged, unbreakable, and
opinionated, and D. H. Hill, sharp-tongued, dyspeptic (as used in the 1860s,
the word apparently meant that he was plagued by ulcers), and distinguished, in
an army where personal valor was commonplace, by his extreme bravery under
fire.
Stonewall Jackson, with three
divisions—his own, Ewell's, and Whiting's—was coming down from the valley by
way of Gordonsville. The plan called for him to move southeast several miles
north of the Chickahominy, following
a
route
which would put him squarely behind Porter's corps. He was due to reach the
scene on June 26. As soon as his outriders made contact with A. P. Hill's
pickets, Hill would move to the north side of the Chickahominy at the Meadow
Bridge, a mile or so above the place where the Mechanicsville turnpike crossed,
would drive the Federals out of Mechanicsville, and move on to menace Porter's
main line, which was solidly established, facing west, behind Beaver Dam Creek.
Once Hill had cleared Mechanicsville, Longstreet and D. H. Hill would cross and
form in his rear. The Federal position on the creek was exceedingly strong, but
it would hardly need to be attacked frontally because Jackson's powerful force
would be cutting in behind it, and Porter would be obliged to retreat to escape
destruction. Then the entire force —Jackson, the Hills, and Longstreet, upwards
of 55,000 men altogether-—would sweep down the north bank of the river,
breaking the railroad line once and for all, cutting McClellan off from his
base and compelling him to pull his army together south of the Chickahominy
with an aggressive foe in his immediate rear.
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