CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Thus began the chase across the York-James Peninsula that became the centerpiece of the Seven Days battles. Because of McClellan’s choice of strategy, the question was not whether the Union army would be defeated but how badly it would be defeated. It was in many ways the oddest sequence of the war: a large army retreating from a smaller one, as though it could not possibly, with the resources of an industrializing nation behind it, just stand and fight. Mechanicsville and its aftermath established the model for the campaign: the Union army would wage a defensive battle by day, always on the ground of its choosing, and then retreat south toward the new base on the James River under cover of darkness. As at Mechanicsville, the rebel advance was marked by incompetence, shoddy staff work, inefficiency, miscommunication, and an almost shocking failure to take advantage of the openings McClellan gave them. In spite of this, the Seven Days was a thrilling, war-changing Confederate triumph. Lee’s, Jackson’s, and everyone else’s mistakes were debated and hashed over ad infinitum in the years following the war. But the indisputable fact was that the Army of Northern Virginia, under its brilliant new commander, had driven off the invader. It had saved Richmond. That was all anyone in the South needed to know. The Seven Days made Robert E. Lee famous. His generals, who did well enough, basked in borrowed light.
But the details were ugly. They got uglier as the two armies plunged southward, locked in their bloody embrace. In the Confederate camps, the fog of war was thick and deep on the morning after Mechanicsville. Though McClellan had decided to shift his base of operations the night before, Lee did not know that yet. He would not know it for certain for several days. The immense Army of the Potomac was out there, amorphous and moving through a densely wooded landscape, and because of its very immensity its contours and destination were hard to fathom. Lee’s assumption was that the Union would try to protect its supplies and would move large numbers of troops north across the Chickahominy toward White House Landing to do that. He was therefore surprised to find that Porter’s victorious 5th Corps had vanished from its camps, and had quietly fallen back three miles to a new defensive position along Boatswain’s Swamp, about half a mile from Chickahominy and two miles above the bridges they would have to use to cross the river.
While Lee remained ignorant of McClellan’s intention to change his base, he knew that he still had a Union corps in front of him and he knew that he wanted to destroy it. And he believed, incorrectly, that the railroad was still the larger army’s Achilles’ heel. Lee thought that Porter had moved eastward behind a small stream called Powhite Creek, three and a half miles east of Beaver Dam Creek, and was waiting in a north-to-south line for him there. His plan for the next day was thus in many ways like the first. Jackson and D. H. Hill would be sent on a flanking march around the Union left to the village of Old Cold Harbor, thus forcing them from their breastworks. If all went according to plan, divisions under generals A. P. Hill and James Longstreet would then drive the Yankees eastward into Jackson’s and D. H. Hill’s clutches. Jackson would also be just a few miles from the railroad—still Lee’s main target. It was a sound, if unimaginative plan. The trouble was that it bore no resemblance to the reality on the ground. And Jackson, once again in the role of the instant legend who was supposed to save the day, would be the principal victim of the confusion.
At 9:30 a.m. on June 27 Lee and Jackson sat on a tree stump while Lee described Jackson’s flanking march to Old Cold Harbor. By 11:00 a.m. Jackson had his command moving. This time he had orders directly from the mouth of Lee himself. Lee then sent A. P. Hill and Longstreet forward, expecting to clash with Union forces at about noon. But the Federals were not at all where Lee thought they were. What happened next amounted to blind groping in a tangled wilderness: one army searching for another. It wasn’t until Confederate general Maxcy Gregg stumbled into the center of the Union line that Lee understood what had happened. Porter’s 5th Corps army was strung out in a big, convex arc for a mile and three-quarters along the steep banks of a sluggish body of water known as Boatswain’s Swamp, facing north and west.1 The troops were ranged along a high bluff in three stacked lines of breastworks, with cannons behind them, all fronted by a swamp of varying widths. Like Beaver Dam Creek, it was a formidable defensive position, one of the strongest of the war. Sometime after 2:00 p.m. Lee sent A. P. Hill’s men forward in a series of bloody assaults that accomplished nothing. Lee was committing the same old tactical sin that everybody else committed: piecemeal attacks against a strong position. The Battle of Gaines’s Mill had begun.
Where, again, was Jackson? This time on a wild-goose chase into the peninsula’s knotty backcountry that had no purpose at all. He was turning a nonexistent flank, headed for a nonexistent supply line, following a Confederate battle plan that was no longer relevant. But Jackson knew none of this. So he marched. He also suffered, as all the commanders did, from the lack of accurate maps and place names. Anticipating this problem (and without his great terrain-and-map man, Hotchkiss), he had engaged the services of a twenty-five-year-old private, John Henry Timberlake, whose family farm was nearby. Jackson told Timberlake he wanted to go to Cold Harbor, and Timberlake took him on the shortest and fastest route in that direction. Suddenly the sound of gunfire was heard—and as on the previous day, gunfire was something Jackson was supposed to bear away from.
“Where is that firing?” Jackson asked, astonished, standing up in his saddle.
“From over at Gaines’s Mill,” replied Timberlake.
“Does this road lead there?”
“Yes,” Timberlake replied, “it passes the mill en route to Cold Harbor.”
“But I do not wish to go to Gaines’s Mill,” replied Jackson impatiently. “I wish to go to Cold Harbor, leaving that place on the right.”
“Then the left hand road was the one you should have taken. Had you let me know what you desired, I could have directed you in the right direction at first.”2
Part of the confusion was that Jackson did not know there were two towns named Cold Harbor, old and new, more than a mile apart. He wanted Old Cold Harbor. Now he had to backtrack to the north and resume his eastward march. It would cost him at least ninety minutes. When one of his officers asked him if the delay would ruin the day’s plan, Jackson replied, “No, let us trust that the providence of our God will so overrule it, that no mischief shall result.”3 His entire march was already irrelevant. But no one had told him that.
As the Confederate assaults on the Union lines behind Boatswain’s Swamp were repulsed, one after another, Lee concluded that the only way to break them was to launch a massive, concerted assault across the nearly two-mile front. He spent the afternoon working furiously to make that happen. He finally sent a messenger to order Jackson into the fight. In the meantime he marshalled the trailing divisions of Jackson’s command under Generals Richard Ewell and Chase Whiting, and inserted them on the center and right of his line. He ordered Longstreet, on the far left, forward. By 5:00 p.m. Lee’s effort was starting to coalesce—so much so that General Porter, who had sent an optimistic message to McClellan at 4:00 p.m. saying “our men have behaved nobly and driven the enemy back many times,” now sent an urgent call for help, saying that he was being pressed hard and that without reinforcements, “I am afraid I shall be driven from my position.”4
McClellan was alarmed by Porter’s SOS but did nothing more than send a few brigades that would arrive too late to be of much use. (One was commanded by Jackson’s old nemesis from his army days in Florida, Brigadier General William H. French.) McClellan had remained far from both fronts and seemed convinced that he was going to be attacked that day at all points. He had sent an 8,500-man division to Porter earlier that day and seemed to think that was enough. The only help Porter got later came in the form of patronizing encouragement. “If the enemy are retiring, and you are a chasseur, pitch in,” McClellan told him.5 Later, still clueless about what was happening, he urged Porter, “Try to drive the rascals and take some prisoners and guns.” McClellan, closeted at headquarters and out of touch with both fronts, had apparently lost the will to command. He would no longer consider launching an attack of any sort. He simply awaited whatever Lee had in store for him and dreamed only of getting his army safely to Harrison’s Landing.
At about 5:00 p.m. Lee caught up with Jackson, who was dutifully following Lee’s morning instructions and who in obeying his orders to move to Old Cold Harbor—supposedly well behind the Union lines—had in fact landed not far from the Union right. Lee, who must have understood that Jackson’s pointless march was a result of his own mistake, nonetheless seemed impatient. Jackson was commanding more than half of his army. Lee needed all of that army in the fight, and he needed it right away. The two generals met on Telegraph Road, less than a mile from the fight at Boatswain’s Swamp. Jackson, as usual, looked nothing like a general. According to one of Jeb Stuart’s soldiers who saw Jackson a bit earlier in the afternoon, his coat “was positively scorched by the sun. . . . The cap of the general matched the coat. . . . The sun had turned it quite yellow indeed, and it tilted over the wearer’s forehead, so far as to make it necessary for him to raise his chin, in looking at you. He rode in his peculiar forward-leaning fashion, his old rawboned sorrel, gaunt and grim. Moving about slowly, and sucking a lemon [one of the few recorded instances of this] . . . he had rather the air of a spectator.”6 Lee greeted Jackson warmly, while soldiers around them erupted into loud cheers and rebel yells and then offered what has sounded to many historians like a mild rebuke.
“Ah, General, I am glad to see you! I had hoped to be with you before.”
Jackson mumbled something in reply that bystanders could not hear. Lee then turned for a moment toward the sounds of the battle.
“That fire is very heavy,” he said. “Do you think your men can stand it?”
“They can stand almost anything,” Jackson replied. “They can stand that.” Lee gave him new orders. Jackson then saluted and galloped away, his eyes alight with the prospect of battle after so much dreary marching. Jackson, who had seemed bleary-eyed and lethargic all day, was now full of fire and resolve. Robert Dabney commented that he had only seen this sort of “tempest of passion” on his face three times in his Civil War career. He issued orders to his commander to press the attack. Finally he was engaged.
With Jackson in hand, Lee was now ready to launch the massive attack he had been working on all afternoon, during which time the fighting had raged on and he had taken heavy losses. It was very likely his largest single attack of the war.7 There was nothing piecemeal about it this time. He had managed to bring roughly thirty-two thousand men forward along a curving, two-mile front against Porter’s entrenched thirty-four thousand. At 7:00 p.m. Lee sent them forward. What followed was some of the roughest fighting of the war, as long rolls of musket fire and billows of white smoke swept across the long bluff, and Union cannon pounded canister into the graybacks as they came forward. The butchery was shocking, even for men who were getting used to it. “Never before did I see so many dead men,” wrote one soldier, “such a scene of carnage, men with no arms, some without legs, others with part of their heads off, some with their bowels out.”8 The smell of blood mingled with the smell of black powder.
Just before dark Porter’s lines, exhausted after repelling attacks for eight hours, broke in two places. Perhaps the most spectacular drive was that of a thirty-two-year-old Kentuckian and former Indian fighter named John Bell Hood, commanding the 4th Texas Brigade (containing Georgians and some South Carolinians) in Chase Whiting’s division under Jackson’s command. Just before the final attack, Lee rode up to Hood and asked, “Can you break this line?” Hood said he would try. “May God be with you!” Lee shouted, lifting his hat as he rode away. Hood’s men then moved forward at the quickstep, without pausing to fire, through what Confederate colonel Evander Law called “a withering storm of lead and iron.” They passed through and over dead and wounded men, mangled horses, and busted wagons. They fell by the score, victims of canister and enfilading fire from most of the left side of the Union lines. Hood took a thousand casualties. At one hundred yards they broke into a run, erupting into the full, high-pitched, whirring scream of the rebel yell, which sounded to Longstreet’s men like the noise made by “forty-thousand wildcats.”9 Across the swamp they came, and up the rise, and suddenly they had broken through to the artillery. Just as suddenly the Union defenses, which had held solidly through attack after attack, began to break. Though Hood became the battle’s most visible hero, it would turn out later that brigades from James Longstreet’s divisions had broken through at about the same time. But that didn’t matter anymore. The Union retreat had begun.
The battle was soon over. In seven hours’ fighting over possession of a swamp and the bluff that rose above it, the Union sustained six thousand casualties and the Confederates nine thousand. On an hourly basis, Gaines’s Mill was one of the war’s costliest battles. The ratio was predictable for a force attacking such a strong defensive position. The very capable Fitz John Porter, with a single corps plus a division, had held off most of Lee’s army for seven hours. But in the end it had been Lee’s battle, his first great victory, against a worthy opponent on the opponent’s chosen field of combat. He, and he alone, had managed the victory. Jackson, in a subordinate position, was just another battlefield commander. He performed adequately: he followed orders. He had no special role in the final attack and in fact it was Lee, not Jackson, who had ordered the latter’s divisions into place. That night Jackson went to the tent of his new friend Jeb Stuart, woke him, and the two men sat on blankets and talked of the next day’s work. Jackson observed that Gaines’s Mill “was the most terrific fire of musketry I ever heard.”10 During that night came the results of that musket fire: the screams and moans of the wounded and dying rising from the swamps, woods, and fields.
• • •
McClellan took the defeat at Gaines’s Mill hard. The invincibility he thought he had glimpsed had vanished in the white smoke of its musket fire, as had whatever confidence he had left, and in its place came only heartache and bitterness that his outnumbered men had been so wantonly sacrificed. Even though he himself had been miles from the battlefield, sequestered in his headquarters office, here at last was a real, palpable, verifiable threat, a rampaging Confederate army of untold numbers with Stonewall Jackson in its midst, a reason to run as fast as he could to his new base. He called a meeting of his commanders that evening, told them about his plan for retreat, and got their support for the plan by selling them on the magnitude of the Confederate threat.
Not all of his generals agreed. Division commanders Joseph Hooker and Phil Kearny were indignant when they learned of the decision. They had been watching, ever more skeptically, the amateur theatrics of General Magruder in front of Richmond and were fully convinced that rebel strength there was a sham. They knew how vulnerable Richmond was. They were so upset that they pressured their corps commander, Samuel Heintzelman, into taking them, at a late hour, to McClellan, where they made their case for an immediate attack on the city. Heintzelman supported them. McClellan was unmoved. The change of base, the euphemism he insisted on, would take place. Kearny, known for his hair-trigger temper, exploded at McClellan, denouncing him, according to a staff officer who was there, “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.”11 Actually, the retreat was already under way: Mac had ordered Erasmus Keyes and his 4th Corps to begin retreating through White Oak Swamp toward Harrison’s Landing. The rest of the army—100,000 men, 300 pieces of artillery, 4,000 wagons, tens of thousands of horses, and 2,500 cattle—would soon be in motion.12
McClellan did something else that night, too: shortly after midnight, feeling bitter and despondent and abandoned by his government, which had once again failed to send him the troops he needed, he sent one of the war’s most infamous telegrams to Secretary of War Stanton. He told Stanton of the desperate battle he had not witnessed, and its outcome, then wrote:
I have lost this battle because my force was too small. I again repeat that I am not responsible for this & 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 know that a few thousand men more would have changed this battle from a defeat to a victory—as it is the Govt must not & cannot hold me responsible for the result.
I feel too earnestly tonight—I have seen too many dead & wounded comrades to feel otherwise than that the Govt 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 any other persons in Washington—you have done your best to sacrifice this Army.13
With those words, accusing the secretary of war of treason, or something very like it, McClellan must have surely known he was committing career suicide. Or maybe he was so absorbed in his own pathos that he could not see what he was doing. In any case, an enterprising man named Edward S. Sanford, who was head of the War Department’s telegraphic office, took it upon himself to remove the final nine words before delivering the telegraph, thus saving McClellan from himself. Instead of an abrupt dismissal, McClellan received a reasonably sympathetic response from Lincoln in reply: “Save your army at all events. Will send reinforcements as fast as we can.”
Once again Porter’s army fled by night from Lee, managing to get all of the roughly twenty-nine thousand men he had left across the Chickahominy. Once again the Confederates awoke to a deserted battlefield and deserted enemy camps, strewn with abandoned supplies. That day—June 28—would see the vaunted Army of the Potomac in full flight southward across the peninsula toward Harrison’s Landing. In military terms McClellan was taking a very large risk. A one-hundred-thousand-man army, strung out over fifteen miles of road, was an exquisitely vulnerable target, all the more so since an entire army would be jammed onto a single road across a single bridge through a swamp, with constant jarring stops and starts. It was McClellan’s good fortune that Lee faced a version of the same problem Jackson had faced at Winchester: Lee knew the enemy was retreating, but where was it going? On June 28 his army was virtually frozen in place while he tried to figure it out.
As Lee saw it, McClellan had three options: he could move his army east and cross the Chickahominy to protect his supplies; he could retreat back down the peninsula the way he had come; or he could move to the James River. The first thing Lee did was to send Richard Ewell’s division and Jeb Stuart’s cavalry to White House Landing to find out. They found the railroad unguarded and part of it destroyed; they found tons of supplies in flames. McClellan’s old headquarters mansion—the Lee place—was burning, too. (The Union had already loaded three thousand fugitive slaves onto canal boats for evacuation.) Though this was the first clear evidence of a general retreat, Lee would not be completely sure until early the next morning that the Union army was headed for the James River.
What he did know for certain was that his original plan had worked. By threatening their supply lines he had levered the Federals out of their trenches and forced them to abandon their planned siege of Richmond. It was his first great stroke of tactical brilliance. But that was only the first step. He now had in his hands—he could see it with startling clarity—the opportunity to capture or destroy a large part of the Union’s largest army. He had the chance—perhaps the only time he would ever be given it—to end the war right here. This was not just conjecture; McClellan himself believed it, too. An army strung out for fifteen miles with its full supply train was a case study in vulnerability. Time, of course, was the critical element. Lee had to catch the snake in midflight.
The plan he concocted for Sunday, June 29, had two main elements: first, Major General John B. Magruder, he of the recent theatrics, would advance east from Richmond and engage the Union rear guard, fixing it in place, making it fight, and thus slowing the pace of the retreat. Jackson would rebuild the destroyed bridges on the Chickahominy, then cross the river with his divisions under Chase Whiting, Richard Ewell, D. H. Hill, and himself, and join the fight. Meanwhile, divisions under James Longstreet, A. P. Hill, and Benjamin Huger would swing south and east in an arc whose terminus was at a crossroads called Glendale. If all went according to plan, the following day, the thirtieth, the Confederate army would hit McClellan from three directions—Jackson’s twenty-four thousand coming down from the north, through the White Oak Swamp—and with luck they would catch enough of it out in the open to deal it a crippling blow. It was, in a sense, a race to Glendale.
Like almost every other grand plan Lee made during the Seven Days, the one for June 29 did not work as he had anticipated. Once again, Jackson, with fourteen of Lee’s thirty-five brigades, was the main victim of the confusion, and, as with the fiasco at Mechanicsville, he has come under sharp criticism over the years for the supposed missteps that resulted from it. Once again, the criticism, focused on his failure to show up at the Battle of Savage’s Station that day, was unfair. Jackson, again, was following Lee’s orders. When Jackson met with Lee that morning, he had been given straightforward orders: repair the Grapevine and Alexander’s Bridges on the Chickahominy, which Porter’s men had destroyed, then cross the river and come to the aid of Magruder in his attack on the Union rear. Jackson proceeded with the first task, completing repairs of the Grapevine Bridge quickly; unfortunately he had assigned the other bridge to the incompetent Dabney, who failed and was quickly replaced. (Jackson would need both bridges for his corps and ponderous supply train.) While he was repairing them, Magruder had launched a lukewarm attack on the Union force near a railroad depot called Savage’s Station, but soon became fearful that he was facing a larger force and asked Lee for reinforcements. Jackson, meanwhile, sent a courier to Magruder to tell him that his troops would begin crossing the Chickahominy at about 2:00 p.m.14
He was preparing to cross several brigades when, at about 3:00 p.m., he received new orders in the form of a communiqué from Lee’s adjutant, Colonel R. H. Chilton. The message was addressed to Jeb Stuart, who was still at White House Landing, and read as follows:
The Gen’l Comd’g. requests that you will watch the Chicahominy [sic] as far as Forge Bridge, ascertain if any attempt will be made in that direction by the enemy, advising Genl. Jackson, who will resist their passage until reinforced.15
Stuart had sent it on to Jackson, who added the following reply—“Gen’l Ewell will remain near Dispatch Station & myself near my present position”—and sent it by horseman right back to him. Both the note and Jackson’s understanding of it are perfectly clear: he was to guard the lower bridges on the Chickahominy and prevent the enemy from crossing. Why? Because Lee was still not absolutely certain that McClellan would not try to recross the Chickahominy. With the power at his disposal—if he only believed in it—McClellan could still do whatever he wanted, and Lee knew it.
But by midafternoon both Lee and Magruder were wondering, Where was Jackson? His lateness was getting to be a daily occurrence. Magruder sent a courier to Jackson to find out what was wrong, and Jackson made the problem worse with his clipped, uninformative reply, saying that he could not help Magruder because he had “other important duties to perform.” By this he meant guarding the crossings, as Lee had ordered him to do. But the note’s almost insolent brevity enraged Magruder, who could not imagine what could be more important than coming to his assistance. Though Lee insisted to Magruder that he had ordered Jackson to cross and fight, blame for the misunderstanding must rest squarely on either Lee or his adjutant, Chilton: Lee if he wrote the order, and Chilton if he sent something to Stuart other than what Lee had told him to. Once again, Jackson and his 24,000 men were prevented from engaging in combat. Magruder managed to mount a tepid attack in late afternoon, bringing 14,000 of his men against 16,000 Union troops under Major General Edwin Sumner. The advance soon burned itself out. The threat he had posed was so slight at Savage’s Station that an entire Union corps under Samuel Heintzelman had slipped away—precisely what Lee had been trying to prevent. Still, the net result in military terms was a Confederate victory. After the battle, Sumner fled south, and what he left behind suggested an army in panicked retreat: 1,000 men who became prisoners—stragglers from the retreating army—and 2,500 sick and wounded.16 In their haste they had also left tons of supplies, some only partially destroyed. In Dabney’s description, they found “all the apparatus of a vast and lavish host”:
The whole country was full of deserted plunder, army wagons, and pontoon trains partially burned or crippled; mounds of grain and rice and hillocks of mess beef smoldering; tens of thousands of axes, picks, and shovels . . . medicine chests with their drugs stirred into a foul medley . . . overcoats torn from the waist up. For weeks afterward the agents of our army were busy gathering in the spoils.17
In one railroad ditch the discarded molasses ran knee deep, a symbol, just at that moment, of the helplessness of the most extravagantly equipped army in history.18 Jackson’s letter home to Anna was that of a victorious general in pursuit of a fleeing enemy. “An ever-kind Providence has greatly blessed our efforts and given us great reason for thankfulness in having defended Richmond. Today the enemy is retreating down the Chickahominy towards the James River. Many prisoners are falling into our hands.”19McClellan’s “change of base” had meanwhile appeared in the newspapers and had quickly become a Confederate joke. It was a “catch word among our fun loving troops,” wrote one soldier in his memoirs, “to signify discomfiture or defeat; if two dogs fought and one ran, the men cheered and shouted, ‘Look at him changing his base’ ”20
In spite of the crossed signals, on the morning of Monday, June 30, Lee still had a clear opportunity to destroy a large part of McClellan’s army. The latter had, once again, marched all night; its lead columns under Erasmus Keyes were already camped on the James River. The rest of the army had just made it across White Oak Swamp and onto the gently swelling plains and woodlands around Glendale where seven of McClellan’s eleven divisions were now camped, eight to nine miles from their destination at Harrison’s Landing. Lee’s scheme to reach Glendale ahead of some of the Union army had failed. But his basic idea of attack would be the same: nine divisions would converge in a concentric assault on the retreating Federals. McClellan himself, unaccountably, had chosen this moment to withdraw to the gunboats on the James River, where the head of his army was camped, thus leaving his rear guard to confront the full fury of Lee’s army, which he knew was coming. His behavior is difficult, or perhaps impossible, to justify, the more so since later that day he boarded the warship Galena, where he enjoyed dinner with wine with the captain while a major battle was under way. In doing so he left units from five different corps to work out tactical details among themselves.21 It was as though the exhausted, anxiety-ridden general had again, as he had at Gaines’s Mill, temporarily lost the resolve to exercise command. His behavior would be the basis for many later accusations of cowardice and dereliction of duty. “The Corps Commanders fought their troops according to their own ideas,” General Samuel Heintzelman testified later of the fighting that day at Glendale. “We helped each other. If anybody asked for reinforcements, I sent them. If I wanted reinforcements, I sent to others. He [McClellan] was the most extraordinary man I ever saw. I do not see how any man could leave so much to others, and be so confident that everything would go just right.”22
Lee, on the other hand, was quite in the middle of things. It was a momentous day. The future of the war and the nation itself was conceivably riding on what his army did, and he was keenly aware of it. He met with Jackson at Savage’s Station just after dawn. Jackson had ridden up on Little Sorrel at the head of a large mounted escort, looking as dusty and nondescript as ever. “He sat stark and stiff in the saddle,” wrote an observer later. “Horse and rider appeared worn down to the lowest point of flesh consistent with effective service. His hair, skin, eyes, and clothes were all one neutral dust tint. . . . The ‘mangy little cadet cap’ was pulled so low in front that the visor just cut the glint of his eyeballs.”23 Lee arrived a few moments later, handsome, smartly dressed, and as usual the picture of perfection on horseback. The two generals exchanged a warm greeting, then began to talk animatedly in tones that were just out of the hearing of several curious observers. Then one of the two generals—the observers did not agree on which one it was—began to mark off a diagram in the dirt with his boot, talking earnestly all the while. When it was finished, the draftsman—Lee or Jackson, but most probably Lee—in the words of one of the observers, raised his foot and stamped it down and said, this time loud enough to hear, “We’ve got him.”24 Jackson then mounted his horse and rode away. Lee looked after him for a moment, then rode off, too.25 They did not “have him” in the sense that McClellan’s forces, like Banks’s before Winchester, were deployed in a long line of march. McClellan was too smart for that, marching by night and setting up carefully chosen defensive positions during the day. Lee most likely saw the likelihood—or virtual certainty—that he would be able to fall on a piece of the army with his larger force. He was right: while he and Jackson had their meeting, 70,000 Confederates were advancing on 55,000 Federals at Glendale.
What happened over the next few hours was one of the great missed chances of the war. Lee’s plan—even more complex than his scheme for Mechanicsville—required the orchestrated movements of 12,000 men under Benjamin Huger, 20,000 under A. P. Hill and James Longstreet, 13,500 under John Magruder, and 24,000 under Stonewall Jackson. Jackson, with the largest force, would take the same road the Union army had taken, across White Oak Swamp. The others would come in from the west and attack the Union flank. Under Lee’s orders, they were all moving that morning.
Jackson’s day had started with a miserable night of rain that had soaked him in his bed. He very likely did not sleep at all. Though he was sick and exhausted, he put his army on the march at 3:30 a.m., crossing the Chickahominy River and passing through Savage’s Station and its litter of supplies, some of them burning. The march once again was slow, this time in part because his men could not resist loading themselves up with Union discards: coffee, ammunition, clothing, shoes. It took his men seven hours to cover five miles to the bridge at White Oak Swamp, where they arrived at about noon to find the single bridge destroyed. At approximately 2:00 p.m. Jackson opened an artillery barrage against the Union forces on the high ground south of the swamp, and sent his cavalry chief, Thomas Munford, across the deep water to scout the crossing. Munford came under murderous fire and returned. He reported that there would be no possibility of reconstructing the bridge with William Franklin’s 6th Corps and its nineteen thousand men and artillery sitting atop the bluff on the other side.
And there, at the ruins of the White Oak Swamp Bridge, Jackson stalled, never to move again that day. It was the first failure in a string of failures. Jackson was not the only one who failed to advance: Huger’s division would be stymied by felled trees on the road; Magruder would spend the day in futile marching and countermarching. Thus Lee could muster only a little more than twenty thousand men under Longstreet and A. P. Hill when he finally mounted his attack at 4:00 p.m. Though the fighting was hard and bloody, and the Confederates breached Union lines once, the Battle of Glendale ended in a stalemate. Following the pattern of the Seven Days, the Union force retreated once again by night, this time to a strong position at Malvern Hill, a few miles toward the James River. “Never, before or after,” wrote Porter Alexander, “did the fates put such a prize in our reach.”26
Where was Jackson this time? The answer, broadly speaking, was that he was having what appears to be a temporary, though fairly complete, mental and physical breakdown. The description of him as “worn down to the lowest point of flesh consistent with effective service” conforms to almost all accounts of him that week. He was not himself. He was sick with fever, debilitated, possibly dehydrated. He had had an absurdly small amount of sleep since June 23. Jackson wrote Anna that he had been in a “wet bed” the night before in a torrential storm and had gotten up at midnight.27 By the time he arrived at White Oak Swamp he had probably been in the saddle for ten hours.
Indeed, the old Jackson seemed to disappear altogether that week. Anecdotes about him seem oddly substanceless; he wasn’t even indulging in his usual diversion of badgering his own generals. He seemed emotionally drained, too, strangely empty. In a letter to Anna, all he could muster was a formal, colorless, almost pro forma wish: “I do trust that our God will soon bless us with an honorable peace, and permit us to be together at home again in the enjoyment of domestic happiness.”28
Faced with the sharp Union artillery fire, Jackson decided immediately that he would not try to force his way across the swamp. This seemed completely out of character. Though he would have sustained large losses attempting it, he had never been shy about expending blood. He then looked for another way out of the swamp. Tom Munford continued his search downstream and found an undefended crossing. He sent word of this back to Jackson, adding that the Union flank on the other side of this swamp crossing also appeared to be undefended. He heard nothing back, and Jackson never followed up. Though this was only a “cowpath,” as Munford described it, and would present great difficulties for a full army corps to cross, Munford later wrote that “I had seen [Jackson’s] infantry cross far worse places, and I expected that he would attempt it.”29 Jackson’s subordinate Wade Hampton, the wealthy South Carolina plantation owner whose “Hampton legion” had fought bravely at Manassas, found yet another crossing, only a quarter mile from the destroyed bridge. Hampton returned and told Jackson that he could quickly build a log bridge for infantry but not artillery. Jackson ordered him to do it. Several hours later a serviceable bridge existed that could have put whoever crossed it 150 yards from the unsuspecting Yankees. When Hampton returned to tell Jackson, he found the general seated on a log, quite motionless, with his eyes closed. His cap, as usual, was pulled down to his nose. Hampton gave Jackson his report and volunteered to lead an advance over his new bridge. To Hampton’s complete amazement, the general did not speak, nor did he even move. He “sat in silence for some time, then rose and walked off in silence.” Jackson later was found prostrate and asleep underneath a tree, in spite of the daylong artillery battle that was screaming overhead. He seemed almost perfectly passive. When Longstreet sent an aide to him asking for his help, Jackson replied that he could do nothing. He later fell into such a deep sleep that his aides had trouble waking him. He fell asleep at dinner with a biscuit between his teeth. When he was awakened, he suddenly seemed to come to his senses, saying, “Now, gentlemen, let us at once to bed, and rise with the dawn, and see if tomorrow we cannot do something.”30
That was little consolation for Lee. Jackson commanded his largest force, and he had failed not only to cross the swamp but even to distract the Union army into keeping units in place to watch him. In midday the threat from Jackson seemed so slight that Union major general William B. Franklin was able to release two brigades—nearly ten thousand men—to help fight Longstreet and Hill. Franklin himself was later critical of his adversary, saying “it must be evident to any military reader that Jackson ought to have known about Brackett’s Ford, only one mile above White Oak Bridge, and ought to have discovered the weakness of our defense at that point.”31 Nor had Jackson bothered to contact Lee about this, who was a mere forty-five minutes away by courier. Jackson acknowledged none of this in his official report, saying only that the relatively deep swamp, the destruction of the bridge, and the strength of the enemy position prevented crossing. He did, however, react when, two weeks later, he overheard surgeon Hunter McGuire, aide Sandie Pendleton, and artillery chief Stapleton Crutchfield talking about the campaign. When one brought up the subject of why Jackson had not gone to the aid of Longstreet and Hill, Jackson interrupted, “If General Lee had wanted me, he could have sent for me.” His statement managed to be both cryptic and accurate. Lee had never once communicated with Jackson during the day, not to request that he cross the swamp, nor to find out why he had not crossed the swamp.
Lee was appalled at the results of the day. “We of Gen. Lee’s staff knew at the time that he was deeply, bitterly disappointed,” wrote Porter Alexander, “but he made no official report of it & glossed over as much as possible in his own reports.”32 Lee had not yet learned how to wield the full power of his army, how to make it move in concert, how to deal with its sometimes balky or independent commanders. Then again, for all appearances he had just won another stunning victory, once again driving the Union forces before him. Whatever contretemps there were remained between Confederate generals and their staffs. Few of the rank and file had any idea of who was supposed to be where and doing what, and what opportunities might have been missed. To them and to the rest of the South it was all pure rebel glory, vindication of the idea—as Manassas had been—that Yankees were no match for the Confederate fighters. The morning after the battle Jackson, on horseback, happened upon a group of troops from Magruder’s command, most of whom were seeing him for the first time. “Such cheering I had never heard before,” wrote one Georgia soldier, of the man he called “our most famous general. The soldiers went wild as they tossed their caps in the air.”33 As the Army of Northern Virginia pushed the hated Yankees inexorably toward the river, Jackson was a bigger hero than ever.
Glendale was not the end of the Seven Days, though it should have been. In his disappointment and frustration, mixed with fatigue and sickness that sounded a bit like what Jackson was experiencing, Lee decided he wanted to strike one last time at his enemy before it took shelter under its navy’s guns. He believed the Army of the Potomac was badly demoralized: evidence of it was everywhere on their marches, thousands of rifles, knapsacks, blankets, and other supplies strewn randomly on the ground. He would fight yet again on ground of the Union’s choosing, and once again it was excellent defensive ground: a mile and a half long, half a mile wide, gently sloping, amphitheater-like meadow bordered by thick woods, the swamps and ravines on the margins. It was called Malvern Hill.
The place was more like a killing field, a defensive position that Fitz John Porter, architect of the fearsome works at Mechanicsville and Gaines’s Mill, considered to be the strongest of the campaign by far. The Union advantage started with its artillery: 268 cannons, many of them rifled, plus 26 giant siege guns that McClellan had been preparing to use against Richmond. The guns were everywhere: stacked on the brow of the hill, bristling on the army’s flanks, and even ranged in front of the infantry, where their flesh-shredding canister loads would enjoy a clear field of fire. Around them, stacked to the top of the rise, were the blue masses of infantry, fifty-four thousand of them. The borders of the amphitheater were unassailable: ravines, swamps, streams, and thick woods meant that the Union troops could not be flanked. Which meant that the Confederate attack would be funneled into a narrow front with no cover. The rebel infantry would have to attack the Union position by coming up the rise, straight into the teeth of the strongest artillery emplacement of the war. It sounded like suicide, and Jackson and his brother-in-law D. H. Hill, who formed the Confederate left at the base of the slope, and along with Huger’s and Magruder’s troops would do the fighting this day, understood this at once. Hill thought it was “hopeless” and had warned Lee not to try to fight there.34 Jackson, who saw no chance for a successful assault, wrote in his battle report:
The enemy in large force were found strongly posted on a commanding hill, all the approaches to which in the direction of my position could be swept by his artillery and were guarded by infantry. The nearest batteries could only be approached by traversing an open space of 300 or 400 yards, exposed to the murderous fire of artillery and infantry.35
The Confederate strategy began with an idea. James Longstreet, looking at the spectacle of raw force arrayed in front of him, had the notion to bring up artillery on the left and right, subject the Federals to a pounding crossfire, and hope that this might have some effect on their apparently ironclad defenses. As a tactical plan it wasn’t much good; in practice it was a disaster. Even though Jackson and others tried to bring up batteries quickly—at one point he personally helped haul a North Carolina gun forward—the Confederate guns came up piecemeal and to little effect.36 They were losing, and losing badly. Soon after the artillery duel started, Jackson sat down on a stump to write a note to Jeb Stuart. While he was writing, a shell from a rifled Parrott gun exploded nearby. Half a dozen men were killed or wounded, and dust and dirt rained over Jackson and his letter. He calmly shook the dirt off the paper and finished his writing. He then stood up, gave directions for the dead and wounded to be carried off, mounted, and rode off. The last words of his letter were “I trust that God will give our army a glorious victory.”37 He could not have been more wrong. For the Union gunners, the battle was more like a large-scale turkey shoot. Whenever a Confederate battery would unlimber, the massed Union guns would open up on it, blowing it to pieces. When Jackson requested that his division commander Brigadier General Chase Whiting bring up his guns, Whiting protested, saying that he had only sixteen of the fifty he was supposed to have. Whiting further complained that his gunners would be cut to shreds. “They won’t live in there five minutes!” said the man who had graduated first in the Class of 1845 at West Point and had been Jackson’s tutor in the latter’s plebe year. “Obey your orders, General Whiting, promptly and willingly.” Whiting, now furious, replied, “I have always obeyed my orders promptly, but not willingly under such circumstances.”38 The guns were brought up. It took a moment for the Union batteries to register this. And then they blew the guns, wagons, men, horses, limbers, and caissons to bits. Jackson, meanwhile, continued giving orders, in one case while a battery was being destroyed before his eyes. “He sat erect on his horse in this hurricane of canister and grape,” recalled one soldier, “his face was aflame with passion, his eyes flashing.” Whiting thought he was aflame with something more like madness. “Great God!” he cried out to anyone listening. “Won’t some ranking officer save us from this fool?”
Other Confederate gun crews were just as helpless before the massed counterbattery fire from the hill. After the war, McClellan’s chief of artillery, Brigadier General William Barry, told Jackson’s artillerist Tom Munford, chillingly, how easy it was to destroy the rebel guns. He said he had “fifty pieces massed at Malvern Hill, which he could concentrate on any battery that came out in the open and that they melted like wax under his rain of projectiles.”39
Thus it went. By midafternoon Lee decided that Longstreet’s misguided barrage plan was not going to work. There would be no attack that day. Thinking ahead to a battle the following day, Lee began to move some of his reserves. He shifted some of them to be in place for the following day and left the field of battle. And then something strange and tragic happened. Earlier in the day, Lee, through his adjutant, Chilton, had issued an order to all his commanders that was predicated on the idea that Longstreet’s idea might work. The directive read as follows:
Batteries have been established to act upon the enemy’s line. If it is broken, as is probable, [Brigadier General Lewis] Armistead, who can witness the effect of the fire, has been ordered to charge with a yell. Do the same.
Lee’s orders sounded simple enough. If Armistead saw Yankees retreating from the Confederate cannon fire, he was to charge and yell, which would signal a general assault on Union lines. But the order gave no time for the attack and no time limit; the decision to advance was left to a brigadier who had never led a brigade in battle (and was further distinguished for having been kicked out of West Point after an incident in which he broke a plate on Jubal Early’s head); finally, amid the din of battle a “yell,” even by a full brigade, would have been inaudible to most of the men on the Confederate lines. That Lee could have even issued such an order was inexplicable. Perhaps he was exhausted; later that day—as Jackson had the day before—he fell asleep on the field.
While Jackson and D. H. Hill had concluded that an advance would be foolhardy, sometime in late afternoon others suddenly had different ideas about what was going to happen. First Chase Whiting and then John Magruder sent notes to Lee saying that parts of the Union line were retreating. Magruder, moreover, reported that Lewis Armistead was driving a body of the Union forces. Neither report was true. McClellan was in no sense retreating, merely rearranging, and Armistead’s minor advance had succeeded only in getting various rebel units pinned down.40 Lee, who was no longer on the field, for some reason credited these optimistic reports and dictated the following message to Magruder: “General Lee expects you to advance rapidly. He says it is reported that the enemy is getting off. Press forward your whole line and follow up Armistead’s success.” Just before the late-arriving Magruder received those orders, he somehow received a copy of the earlier order from Chilton for a general advance. This was at about 5:00 p.m. Now his orders were perfectly clear: he had to attack, he had to follow Armistead. So he went forward with maybe seven thousand men against the war’s greatest defensive concentration. Confederate guns boomed again, and again were immediately targeted for destruction.
Magruder’s first attacks did nothing but sacrifice several thousand men to Federal artillery and musketry. But they had another unfortunate effect, too. They became the inadvertent signal—per the orders Chilton had delivered—for a general advance. At about five thirty, Jackson, who was commanding the D. H. Hill units, ordered those brigades forward, too. The result was pure slaughter, some of the worst of the war. To their credit, the Southern infantry did not give up. They pressed attack after attack and were badly shot up, a huge percentage of them by artillery. “It was not war, it was murder,” said D. H. Hill later. Mass murder, actually. By sundown more than five thousand rebels had fallen, compared to three thousand Federals. They lay on the field, in one description, “woven into a carpet of cold or agonized flesh . . . enough of them were alive and moving to give the field a singular crawling effect.” Later burial details would report exploding corpses and pigs eating pieces of flesh that once belonged to live human beings. In their doomed attack, Lee’s men had performed with extraordinary bravery.
After the battle was over, Lee still did not seem to quite understand what had happened. He sought out Magruder. “General Magruder, why did you attack?” he asked. It was an odd question, considering the second, quite specific, order that he had issued. Magruder replied, “In obedience to your orders, twice repeated.” That night, at about 1:00 a.m., a group of Jackson’s generals and other officers, worried that McClellan might attack in the morning, went to Jackson’s headquarters, where they found him in a deep sleep. As surgeon Hunter McGuire described it, they sat him up and shouted in his ear “something about the condition of our army, its inability to resist attack, etc.” Jackson, barely awake, replied, “Please let me sleep. There will be no enemy there in the morning.” His officers thought he was crazy. He was right.41 As had become their habit, the Union forces again withdrew by night, again over the howls of McClellan’s commanders, most notably Fitz John Porter and Phil Kearny, who thought he could still make a run at Richmond. “If an army can save this country,” came Little Mac’s canned reply, “it will be the Army of the Potomac, and it must be saved for that purpose.”42 By the next morning they were gone. Malvern Hill was a bloody, and pointless, end to the Seven Days, which had seen a total of 36,463 casualties, half again more than at the Battle of Shiloh, whose killed-and-wounded numbers had shocked the nation. The casualties in this single week, in fact, equaled those in all the battles of the western theater in the first half of the year 1862, including Shiloh. It was by far the bloodiest week in the nation’s history.