The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct. Volume 1 of 2

This they would very probably have accomplished if McClellan had not developed in answer to a pressing need a fighting quality which he had not before shown, and his army a resolute determination to endure punishment such as none but the best of veterans are expected to show.

McClellan's one hope, one purpose, was to march his army out of the swamps and escape from the ceaseless Confederate assaults to a point on James river where the resistless fire of the gunboats might protect his men from further attack and give them a chance to rest. To that end, he retreated night and day, standing at bay now and then as the hunted stag does, and fighting desperately for the poor privilege of running away.

And the splendid fighting of his men was a tribute to the skill and genius with which he had created an effective army out of what he had described as "regiments cowering upon the banks of the Potomac, some perfectly raw, others dispirited by recent defeat, others going home." Out of a demoralized and disorganized mass reinforced by utterly untrained civilians, McClellan had within a few months created an army capable of stubbornly contesting every inch of ground even while effecting a retreat the very thought of which might well have disorganized an army. For soldiers in retreat do not usually fight as soldiers do when advancing upon an enemy. They are apt to be filled with the sentiment of hopelessness which retreat suggests and to hesitate to risk their lives in contests that seem to offer no adequate return for sacrifice.

If McClellan conspicuously failed as an energetic commander, in this his first important campaign, he succeeded at any rate in demonstrating the perfection of that work of organization by means of which he had created the splendid Army of the Potomac out of raw recruits and panic-stricken fugitives from battle.

At Gaines's Mill they gallantly endured a loss of no less than 9,000 men, and while they were driven from their position at last, they lost nothing of their morale, but were ready two days later to fight an equally determined battle, though it was the battle of a beaten and broken army which had been driven by force out of a supremely advantageous position and was now seeking safety in a flight that knew no ceasing night or day, except now and then a pause to offer a sullen resistance to an ever-present and pressing foe, and to ward off complete destruction by the offer of battle wherever the ground gave opportunity for resistance.

Here was McClellan's reward; here was his glory. This army of his a few months earlier under such a succession of defeats would have broken into panic-stricken rout. Thanks solely to his discipline and his dominant influence, it now endured compulsory and disastrous retreat with fortitude and stubbornly contested every inch of the blood-soaked ground.

It outnumbered Lee's force and its equipment was immeasurably superior to his. Under a commander of high gift for field work it might perhaps have beaten Lee and forced its triumphant way into Richmond. Under the commander it had it did itself great honor by retreating in good order and stubbornly resisting the Confederate advance wherever it was permitted to do so.

McClellan being now in full retreat and considering only those problems which related to escape, abandoned the position at Fair Oaks and posted Sumner and Heintzelman at Savage's Station. Their sole function was to guard the flank of the hurriedly retreating Federal army. To that end they were ordered to defend the position at Savage's Station until nightfall, or, in other words, until McClellan's retreating army should have passed that point in its hurried flight.

Here the Confederates under Magruder attacked with fury and the Federal general Heintzelman was driven into retreat. But Sumner heroically held his ground until nightfall, thus accomplishing McClellan's purpose, though at cost of a fearful loss in killed and wounded. He was so hard pressed indeed that when he retired at nightfall, he was forced to leave all his wounded in the enemy's hands and make a precipitate retreat to avoid the capture of his entire force.

Fortunately his enemy was a civilized one, so that his wounded men, left in their hands, were as tenderly cared for as if Federal surgeons had had them in charge. The only difference was that Federal surgeons had all possible medicaments and surgical appliances, while the Confederates, by reason of the blockade, lacked many life-saving agents, particularly the quinine which men wounded after long campaigning in the Chickahominy and White Oak swamps needed as imperatively as a shipwrecked crew needs life-lines and breeches-buoys. The war was so far civilized that the surgeons on either side eagerly did their best for such of the enemy's wounded as might fall into their hands. But it was still so far savage, – and it remained so to the end – that the side which possessed a navy shut out from the other as contraband of war the medicines necessary to the saving of human life and the rescue of the wounded from a needless death, as resolutely as it shut out gunpowder itself. In other words, the blockade was to this extent a part of that savagery which makes war upon the sick and wounded and other non-combatants as determinedly as it does upon stalwart men with guns in their hands and cartridge boxes strapped around their waists. There is cruelly no room for doubt that during the Seven Days' battles thousands of gallant fellows on both sides were buried in the fetid mud of those swamps, who might have been saved, had the world then been civilized enough for the Federals to let the Confederates have the quinine, the calomel and the opium they needed for the salvation of the lives of those who could fight no more, whether Federal or Confederate in their allegiance.

No nation is even yet civilized enough for this. "War is all Hell," said General Sherman, and its hellishness is nowhere so aggressively manifest as when it denies to a hard-pressed adversary the medicines necessary to the salvation of human life, the rescue from death of those who are already incapacitated, either by wounds or by disease, from further fighting. It is quite legitimate and logical to forbid the sending of food supplies to your enemy, because food is the foundation of every army's resisting power. But when a starving army surrenders, as Lee's did at Appomattox, the first care of its conqueror is to issue rations to the men who have ceased to fight, as Grant issued them on that historic occasion, even before the terms of capitulation could be written out. But it is a very different and a very much more barbarous thing to deny to surgeons in the field the means of saving human life whether the subjects of such life-saving happen to belong to the one army or to the other. The people of the United States are to-day paying princely sums as pensions to the families of those who died under Confederate surgeons' hands simply because the laws and usages of war forbade to those surgeons the medicines necessary to their life-saving work, and treated life-saving appliances as they treated gunpowder and arms, as contraband of war. Why should this hideous wrong have existed after the middle of the nineteenth century? Why should it continue to exist at the dawn of the twentieth? Are we, after all, only savages under a thin veneer of pretended civilization?

On the thirtieth of June the Confederates again assailed McClellan's retreating columns at Frazier's farm. A fearful contest ensued, for so superbly had McClellan organized and disciplined his army that even after days of disaster and depressing retreat it stood ready still to resist and to fight for every inch of ground.

Here the Confederates confidently expected to overwhelm and capture McClellan's army, compelling its surrender. And there is small doubt that such must have been the outcome of the action had Lee's lieutenants accomplished that which he had set them to do. But Magruder and Huger failed Lee at the crisis. It was his plan that they should assail the Federals in flank with all possible vigor, while Jackson, Longstreet and A. P. Hill should press them upon the rear of their retreat which now became their front for purposes of battle. The destruction of McClellan's army seemed a certainty. But neither Magruder nor Huger arrived in time to make Lee's plan of assault successful. There was a bloody battle, but by reason of the delay of these two lieutenants it was an abortive one, failing utterly to accomplish that final and decisive overthrow and capture of McClellan's army upon which Lee had reckoned as the crowning achievement of this Seven Days' campaign.

The failure of these two generals to fulfil their obligations – a failure which resulted in the baffling of Lee's supreme purpose at the very moment when their presence must have given him quite all that he desired of victory – might well have been made the subject of an inquest by court martial or by a court of inquiry. But as Lee in the exceeding gentleness of his nature omitted to order any such inquest, the matter presents no authoritative basis of fact on which the historian may rest an award of blame. This much, however, seems to be certain – that if Huger and Magruder had done what Lee had ordered them to do, and what they might easily have done, McClellan's army must have been destroyed or captured on that thirtieth day of June, 1862.

As it was, McClellan fought all day and at night resumed his retreat, still doggedly intent upon that one difficult problem of "saving this army," concerning which he had written so doubtfully and so despairingly and so bitterly in his heart-wrung protest to Secretary Stanton.

After a fearfully bloody struggle the Federal army was able during the night to retire toward Malvern Hill, a position which the Confederates could not assail without exposing themselves to the destructive cross fire of the Federal fleet in the James river.

McClellan had now been completely dislodged from his position on the east and north of Richmond. He had been defeated in battle day after day, and driven out of his fortifications into a helpless retreat to the cover of his gunboats in the James river. His base of supplies at White House had been utterly broken up. He had lost in this series of battles no less than 15,249 men. The Confederates, being the assailants, had suffered even greater losses.

The Confederates at this point made one disastrous mistake. They had believed that McClellan would retreat by the route by which he had come, and in that belief they had remained where they were for twenty-four hours. During that precious time McClellan had moved his enormous wagon train and his great herd of 2,500 cattle towards his new base.

At White House General Casey loaded all the supplies he could upon transports and sent them to the new base. But he was obliged to burn millions of pounds of food and destroy hundreds of tons of ammunition which he could not remove. Trains of freight cars were loaded with food and ammunition and deliberately switched off the railroad tracks and into the river to prevent them from falling into the possession of the Confederates.

In brief McClellan's defeat was disastrous in the extreme; but by reason of the failure of Lee's lieutenants to do their proper part at the critical time the Federal commander was spared the humiliation of a surrender. He escaped instead to Malvern Hill after a succession of bloody defeats and after sacrificing the greater part of his reserve stores of food and ammunition at what he had established as a secure base of supplies.

It is not easy to imagine a completer or more disastrous defeat than this of the Seven Days, or an enforced retreat more humiliating. Yet at the last moment McClellan was enabled, by the mistake or the misconduct of Lee's lieutenants, to escape to Malvern Hill, under cover of his gunboats, and there Lee mistakenly assailed him, thus giving him, at the end of a series of conspicuous defeats, the appearance at least of a compensating victory.

Malvern Hill is rather a high plateau than a hill in the proper sense of the term. It lies about sixty feet above the surrounding country. It is a mile wide and a mile and a half long. At its base is a network of streams and impassable swamp lands, constituting a natural fortification practically impassable to any army in the field except at one point where a narrow road leads up the hill. The plateau lies so close to the James river that gunboats anchored in that stream can command its one approach with deadly certainty.

Here McClellan stood at bay. Here a wise direction should have made an end of the Confederate pursuit of him. To assail him there was to invite needless slaughter with no hope of any result commensurate with the inevitable sacrifice of human life.

But the Confederates were flushed with a week of continuous victories, and they hurled themselves recklessly upon Malvern Hill, hoping there to retrieve their lost opportunity of destroying or capturing the army that a week earlier had besieged and threatened Richmond.

The assault upon such a position ought not to have been made at all. Still worse, it was blunderingly made. The Confederates were not ready to bring their whole force into action when the first advance occurred, or in any wise to support the assailing force. Seven thousand men, with six guns, charged up the slope. There were thirty guns in position to sweep them away as with a broom, and many times seven thousand men to resist their advance. There was also the terrific fire of the gunboats to tear their columns into shreds and to throw their men into confusion. Still more important perhaps was the fact that the Confederate artillery had not yet been organized as a separate arm of the service. Each brigade had its battery, but there was nowhere any authority to bring these scattered batteries together and make them effective by massing them. Six guns in the presence of thirty were quickly put out of action, and throughout the day there was a like disproportion, due to the mistaken system which assigned batteries to brigades instead of organizing the whole artillery force into a single arm of the service and placing each corps of it under a commander of its own who could mass it at will and make it effective by concentration.

McClellan had massed his artillery; Lee had not massed his. The result was that McClellan's artillery fire quickly dismounted Lee's guns and rendered them useless.

After this first fruitless assault was repelled, there was nothing but artillery dueling for some hours. It was not until late in the afternoon of July 1 that Lee was ready to assail his enemy with his entire force. Then there was a strange lack of concert. One division after another attacked without support and was beaten back for want of it. At no time did the Confederates hurl their whole force upon their enemies. They fought gallantly, but in detail, and therefore without effect.

The fighting was continued till nine o'clock in the evening. Its net result was that the Confederates had failed to dislodge McClellan from his strong position. But they had so nearly accomplished that object that McClellan dared not risk another day's trial of the issue, even in his supremely advantageous position. He withdrew during the night to Harrison's Landing under cover of his gunboats, and the Seven Days' battles were done.

No military operation was ever more dramatic than this. At the beginning of that fateful week McClellan, with about 120,000 men, was closely besieging the Confederate capital. His heavy guns were almost within shelling distance of the city, and an army of 40,000 men or more, was marching to his reinforcement. At the end of that week's fighting the broken remnant of his army was thankfully cowering under cover of a resistless gunboat fire, with siege abandoned, works deserted, millions of dollars worth of stores destroyed, and such a record of daily defeats as falls to the lot of few armies in the field.

But one thing had been demonstrated, McClellan had made an army out of the exceedingly raw material furnished to his hand. He had converted "a mere collection of regiments cowering on the banks of the Potomac, some perfectly raw, others dispirited by recent defeat, some going home," into an army capable of meeting and fighting Lee at Mechanicsville, Frazier's Farm, Gaines's Mills, Savage's Station and Malvern Hill.

Henceforth the war was to be fought out by armies of seasoned soldiers and not by raw recruits and panic-stricken volunteers.

This great series of battles had cost the Confederates about 19,000 men and the Federals 15,249. It had made an end of the second attempt to conquer Richmond and in that way to finish the war. It had left the Confederates as conspicuously victorious in the east as they were conspicuously defeated in the west.

CHAPTER XXIX

The Second Manassas Campaign

Lee had now accomplished the first of his two purposes. He had raised McClellan's siege of Richmond. He had not succeeded in capturing or destroying McClellan's army as he had hoped to do, but he had completely baffled its endeavor. He had driven it out of its strongly fortified positions. He had kept it in an enforced and continuous retreat for a whole week. He had compelled it to fight losing battles by day, and to spend the nights in painful and exhausting efforts to escape, which McClellan himself, as his grieved and angry official reports clearly showed, regarded as efforts of extremely doubtful outcome.

McClellan's campaign against Richmond had disastrously failed. He had saved his army indeed without a repetition of the Manassas panic, but he had been baffled in all his purposes and driven for seven days and nights like a hunted stag seeking safety in flight. All his combinations had come to naught, all his elaborately constructed earthworks had failed him even as means of holding his position as an assailant. All his siege guns had proved of no avail.

But he had organized a great army so well disciplined that it could fight with determination, lose with a calm mind, and retreat before a pursuing enemy without losing cohesion or falling into panic. That service of his was emphasized during all the brilliant future history of the Army of the Potomac. It made itself manifest at Antietam, at Fredericksburg, at Chancellorsville, at Gettysburg, and later at the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor and Petersburg. But with all his splendid ability as an engineer, and his still more conspicuous gifts as an organizer of raw material into an effective force, McClellan was manifestly unfit to command an expedition in which he must try his wits against the genius of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. A historian most friendly to him, Dr. Rossiter Johnson, has written: "He was an accomplished engineer and a gigantic adjutant, but hardly the general to be sent against an army that could move and a commander that could think."

Lee had driven a splendid army, nearly double his own in numbers, to a position where it lay cowering on the river-bank, under protection of the gunboats and no longer depending upon its own prowess even for self-defense.

But Lee had not destroyed McClellan's army, or captured it, or even weakened it in any conspicuous degree. That army, splendidly organized, superbly equipped, and strengthened rather than weakened in morale, lay securely at rest on the James river, within easy striking distance of Richmond. There was no knowing at what moment McClellan might hurl it again upon Richmond or upon that commanding key to Richmond – the Petersburg position. In the hands of a capable commander McClellan's army would at this time have been a more serious menace than ever to the Confederate capital, for it now had an absolutely secure and unassailable base of operations, while its fighting quality had been improved rather than impaired by its seven days of battling.

Thus the second part of Lee's military problem remained still to be solved, and it was very greatly the more difficult part – the part that most imperatively called for the exercise of strategic genius of a high order. He must prevent a junction between Pope's army, which was now advancing by way of Manassas Junction, and McClellan's force on the James river. He must overthrow Pope on the one hand and compel McClellan to retire on the other.

For the accomplishment of this Lee relied confidently upon the positively morbid dread of the loss of Washington which at that time filled the Northern mind and inspired every order given at the Federal capital. His problem was to put Washington in peril without losing Richmond, and thus to compel the withdrawal of McClellan's army for the defense of the Federal capital and to meet a threatened invasion of the North.

To that end Lee boldly risked a division of his force as he afterwards did on several occasions in presence of an enemy who already outnumbered him.

On the thirteenth of July he detached Jackson, with his own and Ewell's commands, to operate against Pope in northern Virginia, himself holding Richmond with the rather scant remainder of his army.

Jackson moved at once to Orange Court House, confronting Pope. This movement threatened Washington only in a rather remote way and not very seriously, but it had the desired effect. A part of McClellan's force was at once withdrawn from the position at Harrison's Landing and sent by water to the national capital as a reserve and reinforcement for Pope in case that general should be beaten in the field.

Promptly – near the end of July – Lee sent A. P. Hill's corps to Jackson, and, thus strengthened, Jackson pushed his column across the Rapidan river and encountered a part of Pope's forces at Cedar Mountain on the ninth of August. The action was not a decisive one, but it served Lee's purpose of compelling the early and complete withdrawal of McClellan from his threatening position below Richmond.

Two days after the battle at Cedar Mountain Jackson retired to the south bank of the river to await the reinforcements which Lee was sending to him as rapidly as McClellan's withdrawal rendered it measurably prudent for him to deplete the army defending Richmond.

By August 14, Lee had transferred practically all of his army from Richmond to the line of the Rapidan, leaving only a meager garrison at the Confederate capital. On that day he joined the army and assumed direct personal command.

Pope was a good and active officer, unfortunately given to vainglorious boasting. He dated his orders "Headquarters in the saddle, Army in the field," and set forth in them the assertion that he had so far seen only the backs of the rebels. He announced his policy in the phrase, "bayonets to the front, spades to the rear." In brief, he jauntily and with ridiculous boastings, undertook to meet one of the finest fighting forces that had ever been organized in the world, commanded by the most brilliant and the ablest general of the South. He thus prepared for himself a peculiar humiliation in the event of defeat, stripping himself in advance of all excuses and all pleas in abatement of failure, and in advance minimizing the glory of victory should he succeed in overcoming Lee.

There was no more ridiculous spectacle seen from beginning to end of the war than this. It invited all the wits of the newspapers to facile jestings, and when Pope's failure was complete, one of them said, in reference to his "headquarters in the saddle" phrase, that he had "placed his headquarters where his hind-quarters ought to have been."

Nevertheless, General John Pope was a very able and a very enterprising officer, as he had demonstrated at the West. He knew how to handle an army effectively, and he had an army of great effectiveness under his command, with seasoned and battle-trained reinforcements coming to him every hour from McClellan's splendidly behaving force. He boldly challenged Lee's advance and baffled it for a time. He had all that could be imagined of equipment and of limitless supplies. Had he been even in a measurable degree the commanding military genius that he confidently believed himself to be, he must have hammered Lee's forces into confusion at the first encounter and driven the great Confederate back to his half-hopeless task of defending Richmond behind a barrier of earthworks. The result of the encounter was quite other than this, as we shall see.

Having at last brought up a force slightly superior to Pope's, Lee's plan was to attack as quickly as possible and before Pope should be strengthened by the heavy columns of reinforcements that were hurrying to his support from McClellan's army and from every other quarter whence reinforcements could be drawn. But before Lee's dispositions for attack could be completed, Pope penetrated his design and fell back to the stronger line of the Rappahannock.