This Hallowed Ground (26 page)

He believed that he was horribly outnumbered. He had always believed it — even in the fall of 1861, when Johnston waited in his works at Manassas with no more than half of McClellan’s strength. He had believed it on the peninsula in April, when Johnston was writing scornfully that “no one but McClellan would have hesitated to attack.” He believed it now. Lee, he was convinced, had between one hundred and fifty thousand and two hundred thousand men, possibly more.

These figures came mostly from Allan Pinkerton, whose intelligence reports were detailed, explicit, incredibly wrong — and believed down to the last digit. What McClellan believed, the whole officer corps believed. The attitude spread like an infection, and finally it was an article of faith all through the army that the Confederates had a huge advantage in numbers and that this invasion was a risky business that must be carried on with extreme caution.

It will not do to blame it all on Pinkerton. He ran perhaps the most unaccountably inefficient intelligence service an American army ever had, but his fantastic reports did not have to be accepted. Away back in Washington, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs that spring combed the Richmond newspapers, made a note of all infantry regiments and brigades mentioned, added this to other intelligence that was coming out of the Confederate capital, and made a very fair appraisal of Lee’s manpower.
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What Meigs did could easily have been done at McClellan’s headquarters, but nobody made the effort. Back of the blithe acceptance of the Pinkerton reports, obviously, there was a will to believe. McClellan believed that he was outnumbered because it was his nature to overestimate his disadvantages. As a result, it was impossible for him to take advantage of his opportunities.

His opportunities were not going to remain open very much longer. Lee had no intention of waiting to be hit. He proposed to do exactly what Albert Sidney Johnston had done at Shiloh — smite the invader while he was still off balance — and he was aware of the potential weakness of McClellan’s right wing, dug in north of the Chickahominy waiting for the absent McDowell.

In the middle of June, Lee sent his cavalry out on a wide sweep
to
find out if the Yankees had any real protection north and west
of that exposed flank. Lee’s cavalry was under a picturesque young soldier named Jeb Stuart, who managed to be a headline-hunting show-off and a very solid, energetic cavalry leader at the same time, and Stuart rode completely around McClellan’s army: a prestige item that humiliated the Federals and that also gave Lee the information he wanted. (It must be remarked that Stuart did not have much to fight just then. McClellan had plenty of cavalry, but it was all in fragments — one regiment here, another there, stray detachments all over the lot, with no solid fighting corps anywhere; as his army was organized, McClellan simply could not send out a body of cavalry that could meet Stuart on even terms.) As a result of this raid, Lee understood that the way was open for him to jump McClellan’s right wing, provided he moved fast.

He would move fast; also, when he moved, he would move with great strength. Lee was a gambler, ready to take long chances because he knew that if he did not take them the law of averages would inexorably catch up with him. Outnumbered though he was, Lee arranged to give himself an overpowering numerical advantage when he made his fight.

North of the Chickahominy, McClellan had the V Army Corps, between twenty and twenty-five thousand men under a handsome, careful major general named Fitz-John Porter. Lee prepared to strike this force with more than fifty-five thousand men.

To do this he would have to press his luck to the uttermost. McClellan’s main body was south of the river, facing Richmond — eighty thousand men or thereabouts. Lee calmly arranged to leave twenty thousand men in the trenches facing this host and trust to the great god of battles that they could keep McClellan from marching into Richmond while Porter was being crushed. Most of these twenty thousand, as it happened, were under command of the same John Magruder who had deceived McClellan so outrageously down on the peninsula early in April. Now Magruder would have to play the same sort of game, looking numerous and pretending to be aggressive. If it worked, the rest of the Confederate army could go north of the river, Stonewall Jackson could bring his army down from the valley, and the exposed Federal corps could be hacked to pieces.

So the man who was outnumbered was going to take a long chance, risking his country’s independence on his ability to perform a strategic deception; and the man who had all the advantages waited in his trenches, cautiously refraining from doing anything because the chances might possibly go against him; and the war was going to go on, as a result, for nearly three more terrible years.

Even so, McClellan very nearly beat Lee to the punch. On June 25
he carefully moved his skirmish lines forward, south of the Chickahominy. There was some sharp fighting in weedy fields and swampy woods, the Confederates gave ground, and a full-dress attack by three army corps was planned for the next day along a road leading past a place called Old Tavern.
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Meanwhile some of McClellan’s cavalry squadrons, ranging off far above the river, picked up a Confederate deserter, a ragged, footsore chap who was willing to answer his captors’ questions. He belonged to Stonewall Jackson’s corps, he said, and the whole outfit was just a day’s march away, hot-footing it down to fall on Porter’s unprotected right and rear. McClellan put Porter on the alert, and the plans for a big push at Old Tavern were temporarily laid aside.

They were never picked up again. Next day, June 26, Lee took the initiative, and from that moment on McClellan had to move in step with his opponent. The greater part of Lee’s army crossed the Chickahominy, brushed Union pickets out of the suburban hamlet of Mechanicsville, and went charging east across a wide plain that slanted down to shallow Beaver Dam Creek, behind which Porter’s men were in line, waiting. Confederate arrangements had got all messed up; nobody made contact with Jackson and his men did not get into action, but the assault was made anyway — a frightful, botched affair that could have been written off as an outright Confederate disaster if either of the rival commanders had chosen to interpret it that way. The Confederates went in, head on, against a trench line that was as strong as a regular fort, and the Federal cannon had a clear sweep across the plain and up and down the creek valley. The Southerners gave up, finally, after dark, fearfully cut up. They had done Porter’s men very little harm and had gained nothing worth talking about; furthermore, the Union commanders south of the river were reporting that a number of the Rebel camps opposite them seemed to be deserted, and now was perhaps a very good time for a solid whack at Magruder’s lines.

But McClellan had pulled in his horns. From the moment when he learned of Jackson’s approach he had gone entirely over to the defensive. He abandoned his supply line, which led from the Chickahominy to the York River, and set about establishing a new one leading down to the James. Porter was told, even before the June 26 attack hit him, to send his wagon trains and siege guns south of the Chickahominy so that he could get away fast if he had to; and both Lee and McClellan, on the night of June 26, were thinking about exactly the same thing — whether the entire Federal army might not presently be destroyed.

Porter’s men had won their fight, but they could not stay where they were. Although Jackson had not got into action he was known to have reached a spot where he could come slicing down behind Porter’s lines
first thing next morning, and so during the night Porter’s corps retreated five miles to the east, posting themselves at last in a wide, irregular crescent on rising ground that covered some of the most important bridges over the Chickahominy.

The Confederates took out after them soon after daylight on June 27, broke through a rear guard at Gaines’s Mill, and early in the afternoon the biggest assault of the entire war, down to that moment, got under way — fifty-five thousand Confederates, Jackson and his corps in action at last, swarming in through swamps and dense underbrush to attack about half their number of Yankees.

All afternoon Porter’s men held their ground. They had a good position, they were supported by some first-rate artillery, and McClellan had brought them to a sharp fighting edge. Long afterward some of the survivors on both sides said that they never had a hotter fight than this one of Gaines’s Mill. Along most of the line the Confederates made so many separate assaults that the defenders lost all count of them. Rifle fire reached terrible intensity, splintering muskets in men’s hands, cutting down brush and saplings, strewing the fields with dead and wounded. A tremendous clamor of artillery fire shook the air, and heavy siege guns planted south of the Chickahominy joined in the fight, reaching far across the river to send huge shells into the Confederate ranks. Porter wrote afterward that some Confederate assault waves seemed to dissolve as they approached the Union lines, but as fast as one line disappeared another would come up from the rear, the men fairly clambering over their comrades’ bodies as they charged up to get within good musket range.
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Then, along toward sunset, there came a lull: hurricane center, with its deceptive peace, one unhealthy patch of clear sky in the murk overhead, the worst of the storm yet to come. Porter began to hope that perhaps the thing was over — and then, from end to end of the line, there was a great new crash of firing, and every man Lee had north of the river came on the run in a final, desperate, all-or-nothing charge. The Union line broke, guns were captured, whole regiments were surrounded and taken, and as darkness came and the triumphant Confederates held the edge of the plateau it was clear that all of the Federals would have to be south of the Chickahominy by morning.

McClellan himself does not seem to have known exactly what was going on this day. His headquarters were south of the river, and he stayed in them, quite as much concerned by the reports he was getting from his commanders there as by the things that were happening to Porter on the north side. For that devotee of amateur theatricals, John B. Magruder, was putting on the best performance of his life today. Hopelessly outnumbered, holding a line that would be pulverized if
the Federals ever attacked it, Magruder all day long played the part of a general who was just about to launch a shattering offensive. His skirmish and patrol parties were constantly active, his batteries were forever emitting sudden bursts of fire, he kept bodies of men in movement on open ground in the rear where the Yankees could see them, and with drums and bugles and human voices he caused noises to be made in the woods like the noise of vast assembling armies — and all of it worked.

It worked, partly because Magruder was very good at that sort of thing, and partly because the Federal command was fatally infected by the belief that Lee had overwhelming force at his command. This was the grand delusion that brought other delusions after it, the infection that made victory impossible. And so the Federal generals told McClellan that a powerful Rebel offensive was on (or, if not actually on, due to start at any moment) and they said that while they hoped that they could hold their ground they could not possibly do anything more than that. McClellan notified Washington that evening that he could not yet be sure where the principal Rebel attack was going to be made. He added that he had that day been assaulted “by greatly superior numbers on this side” — by which, of course, he was referring to nothing on earth but Magruder’s shadowboxing.
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There could be just one outcome to this sort of thing, and it was ordered that night at a corps commanders’ conference in army headquarters: retreat to some safe spot down the James River before these overpowering Rebels destroyed the army entirely.

The retreat was very ably handled. Huge quantities of supplies had to be destroyed, of course, a number of field hospitals and their occupants were abandoned outright, and any detachments that strayed away from camp or march were left behind for the Rebels to capture at their leisure, but the army itself, with its artillery and its immense trains, was neatly extricated from the pocket into which Lee had maneuvered it. Indeed, McClellan conducted the retreat so smartly that Lee lost touch with him for a day or so, and the bright Confederate hope that the Army of the Potomac could be kept from getting to the James never came close to realization. There were furious isolated actions, at places like Savage Station, White Oak Swamp, and above all at the seedy little hamlet of Glendale, but these did nothing but increase the casualty lists on both sides. Lee was never quite able to get around in front and head the retreating Yankees off.

Last act came on July 1. The army was getting away clean by now, the van coming to the James at Harrison’s Landing, where there were wide fields for camps, fine mansions for headquarters, deep water for supply vessels and protecting gunboats. Lee was following hard, furious
because his enemy was getting away alive, and it was going to be necessary to fight one more rear-guard battle. The road to Harrison’s Landing led up over a broad, undulating height called Malvern Hill, and McClellan told Porter to take his own corps, as much of the rest of the army as he thought he would need, and all of the reserve artillery, and make a stand there.

Porter did as he was told. His position was immensely powerful — so much so that he needed few troops besides the men of his own hard-fighting corps. He had long ranks of artillery ranged hub to hub where they could sweep every field of approach, he had siege guns farther back, and in the river there was a naval squadron that could toss horrendous large-caliber shells into the Confederate ranks. If Lee had one more attack in his system, the army was going to be ready for him.

The attack came late in the afternoon. Lee had had much trouble getting his army into position — the roads were bad, the maps were poor, and officers and men alike had been worn to a frazzle by a week of fighting and marching — and when the Confederates tried to move up their artillery to soften the Yankee line with gunfire, Porter’s gunners all but murdered them; fifty Federal guns, at times, would turn on one Confederate battery trying to get into position, killing horses and men, smashing caissons, knocking guns off their carriages, and leaving a horrible pile-up of wrecked wood and metal and torn bodies. On no other field in the war did artillery have such dominance as the Federal guns had here at Malvern Hill.