IV
In the view from Richmond the threat of McClellan's splendidly equipped army loomed even larger than disasters in the West. After much anxious prodding from Lincoln, McClellan had finally submitted a plan for a spring offensive against Joseph E. Johnston's army defending Manassas. Instead of attacking the rebels directly, McClellan proposed to transport his army by water down the Chesapeake Bay to the mouth of the Rappahannock River, eighty miles southeast of Manassas. This would place the Federals between Johnston and Richmond, thereby forcing the Confederates to race southward to defend their capital. McClellan anticipated either the capture of Richmond before Johnston could get there or a battle on a field of McClellan's choice where his men would not have to assault enemy trenches.
Lincoln did not like this plan, for if it placed McClellan's army between Johnston and Richmond it also left Johnston's army between McClellan and Washington. While Lincoln did not yet share the suspicion that as a Democrat McClellan was "soft" on the rebels and did not really want to smash them, he was not happy with McClellan's concept of strategy. Like Grant, the president believed in attacking the enemy's army rather than in maneuvering to capture places. By "going down the Bay in search of a field, instead of fighting near Manassas," Lincoln told McClellan, "[you are] only shifting, and not surmounting, a difficulty. . . . [You] will find the same enemy, and the same, or equal, intrenchments, at either place."42
Before McClellan could launch his maneuver, Johnston anticipated it by withdrawing from Manassas in early March to a more defensible position behind the Rappahannock forty miles to the south. While perhaps prudent militarily, this retreat had adverse political consequences. Coming amid other Confederate reverses, it added to the depression of public morale. And it also drove deeper the wedge of distrust between Johnston and Davis. The latter was not persuaded of the necessity for pulling back; when he learned that Johnston had done so with a haste that required the destruction of huge stockpiles of supplies which could not be moved over muddy roads, Davis was mortified and angry.
He was no more mortified than Lincoln was by the discovery that the evacuated Confederate defenses were not as strong or extensive as McClellan had claimed. Newspaper correspondents found more Quaker guns at Centreville. One reporter wrote that "the fancied impregnability
42. CWL, V, 185.
of the position turns out to be a sham." There had clearly been no more than 45,000 rebels on the Mansassas-Centreville line, fewer than half the number McClellan had estimated. "Utterly dispirited, ashamed, and humiliated," wrote another northern reporter, "I return from this visit to the rebel stronghold, feeling that their retreat is our defeat."43
The question was, what to do now? Johnston's retreat ruined McClellan's plan for flanking the enemy via the Rappahannock. But the Union commander was loath to give up the idea of transporting his army by water to a point east of Richmond. He proposed a landing at Fortress Monroe on the tip of the peninsula formed by the York and James rivers. With a secure seaborne supply line, the Union army could then drive seventy miles up the peninsula, crossing only two rivers before reaching Richmond. This seemed to McClellan much better than Lincoln's idea of an overland invasion, which would have to advance one hundred miles from Washington to Richmond with a half-dozen rivers to cross and dependent on a railroad vulnerable to cavalry raids. Nevertheless, Lincoln remained skeptical. Operating on interior lines, the Confederates could shift troops to the peninsula and McClellan would still "find the same enemy, and the same, or equal intrenchments." But the president reluctantly consented to McClellan's plan, provided he left behind enough troops to defend Washington from a sudden rebel strike. McClellan promised.
Quartermaster-General Montgomery Meigs assembled 400 ships and barges to transport McClellan's army of more than 100,000 men, 300 cannon, 25,000 animals, and mountains of equipment to the Peninsula. It was an awesome demonstration of the North's logistical capacity. But from the outset an ill fate seemed to upset McClellan's plans. Having lost full confidence in his commander, Lincoln reduced McClellan's authority. On March 8 he appointed four corps commanders for the Army of the Potomac after consulting the Committee on the Conduct of the War but without consulting McClellan. Three days later he demoted McClellan from general in chief to commander only of the Army of the Potomac. Lincoln justified this on the ground that McClellan's duties as a field commander would prevent him from giving attention to other theaters. Although this made sense, it also signaled Lincoln's reservations about McClellan. On March 11 the president also created a new military department in West Virginia for General
43. New York Tribune, March 13, 1862, quoted in Williams, Lincoln Finds a General, I, 153; Foote, Civil War, I, 264.
Frémont. Republican pressure had compelled this move to give the antislavery Frémont an important command. Three weeks later the same pressure induced Lincoln to detach a division from McClellan's army and send it to Frémont.
The president subsequently withheld other divisions from McClellan because he discovered that the general had left behind fewer troops than promised for the defense of Washington. The confusion surrounding this matter led to a bizarre juggling of numbers by contemporaries that still bedevils the historian trying to arrive at truth. McClellan claimed to have assigned 73,000 men for the capital's defense. But Lincoln could count only 29,000. It turned out that McClellan had counted some troops twice and was including Nathaniel Banks's army of 23,000 in the Shenandoah Valley as part of the capital's defense. McClellan was correct in his belief that the rebels had no intention of launching a strike against Washington and that even if they did, Banks's divisions could be shifted in time to meet them. But in his impatience with civilian interference he failed to explain to Lincoln his arrangements for defending the capital. Lincoln's concern for the safety of Washington was excessive. Yet if by some chance the rebels did threaten the city, the president would stand convicted of criminal negligence in the eyes of the northern people.
Lincoln's concern was heightened by a clash in the Shenandoah Valley on March 23. Stonewall Jackson commanded a small Confederate army there. His mission was to harass Banks's force near Winchester and to prevent the transfer of Union troops from the Valley to McClellan. When Jackson learned that two of Banks's three divisions were about to be transferred, he attacked what he thought was the rear guard at Kernstown, just south of Winchester. Instead of swatting a small force, the 4,200 rebels ran into a full division of 9,000 men and were badly mauled. Jackson's tactical defeat at Kernstown—yet another Confederate reverse in this dismal spring—suddenly turned into an important strategic victory. Reasoning that Jackson would not have attacked unless he had a sizable force, Lincoln cancelled the transfer of Banks's divisions. Moreover, discovering at this time the discrepancy in the number of troops left in and near Washington, the president also ordered Irvin McDowell's large corps of 35,000 men to remain in northern Virginia. For the time being, McClellan was deprived of some 50,000 of the 150,000 men he had expected to become part of his army on the Peninsula.
An embittered McClellan later charged that the administration did not want him, a Democrat, to succeed. This accusation contained little if any truth; indeed, Republicans fumed at the general's apparent lack of will to succeed. During the first week of April about 55,000 of McClellan's troops approached the Confederate defenses near the old Revolutionary War battlefield at Yorktown. Dug in behind the Warwick River were fewer than 13,000 rebels commanded by John B. Magruder. McClellan hesitated to attack, believing that the strength of the southern works would make the cost in casualties too high. "Prince John" Magruder did his best to encourage this conviction. A lover of the theater, Magruder staged a pageant for McClellan. He marched his infantry in endless circles and moved his artillery noisily from place to place, to give the impression of having more men than he actually had. McClellan reacted as Magruder hoped. He concluded that he could take Yorktown only by a siege. This news distressed Lincoln. "I think you had better break the enemies' line . . . at once," the president wired McClellan. "By delay the enemy will relatively gain upon you." Lincoln tried to warn McClellan about growing Republican doubts of his loyalty. "It is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. . . . The country will not fail to note—is now noting—that the present hesitation to move upon an entrenched enemy, is but the story of Manassas repeated. . . . I have never written you . . . in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you. . . . But you must act."44
McClellan did not act; instead he wrote to his wife that if Lincoln wanted to break the rebel lines, "he had better come & do it himself." While the general complained of his difficult position with "the rebels on one side, & the abolitionists & other scoundrels on the other," he brought up his sappers and siege guns. Week after week went by as Union artillery prepared to blast the rebels from their trenches with mortars and 200-pound shells. Lincoln felt driven to distraction by this "indefinite procrastination." As he had warned, the Confederates used the delay to shift Johnston's whole army to the Peninsula.45
An inspection of the Yorktown defenses convinced Johnston that they were hopelessly weak: "No one but McClellan could have hesitated to attack."46 Johnston recommended withdrawal all the way to prepared defenses just outside Richmond itself. But Jefferson Davis and Robert
44. Lincoln to McClellan, April 6, 9, 1862, CWL, V, 182, 185.
45. McClellan to Ellen Marcy McClellan, April 8, 30, 1862, McClellan Papers, Library of Congress; Lincoln to McClellan, May 1, 1862, CWL, V, 203.
46. Johnston to Robert E. Lee, April 22, 1862, O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 11, pt. 3, p. 456.
E. Lee vetoed this proposal and ordered Johnston to defend the York-town line as long as possible. Lee's role in this matter was a measure of Davis's loss of confidence in Johnston. The president had recalled Lee from Savannah in March and installed him in Richmond as a sort of assistant commander in chief. Johnston hung on at Yorktown until the beginning of May, when he knew that McClellan was about to pulverize the defenses with his siege guns. Rather than wait for this, Johnston evacuated the trenches on the night of May 3–4 and retreated up the Peninsula. Davis was as dismayed by this further loss as Lincoln was by the consumption of a month's time in accomplishing it. On May 5 a strong Confederate rear guard commanded by James Longstreet fought a delayed action near the old colonial capital of Williamsburg. At the cost of 1,700 casualties the rebels inflicted 2,200 and delayed the Union pursuit long enough to enable the rest of the army to get away with its artillery and wagons.
Frequent rains had impeded operations during April; even heavier rains bogged down the armies during May. The only significant action took place on the water. With Johnston's retreat, Norfolk and its navy yard were no longer tenable. The Confederates blew up everything there of military value—including the Virginia—and pulled out. The Monitor led a flotilla of five gunboats up the James River. Their captains dreamed of emulating Farragut by running the river batteries and steaming on to level their guns at Richmond. Confederate officials began packing the archives and preparing to leave the city. But they soon unpacked. On May 15 the batteries at Drewry's Bluff seven miles below Richmond stopped the gunboats. The Monitor proved ineffective because her guns could not be elevated enough to hit the batteries on the ninety-foot bluff. Rebel cannons punished the other boats with a plunging fire while sharpshooters along the banks picked off Yankee sailors. The fleet gave up; Richmond breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Despite the gleam of cheer afforded by the battle of Drewry's Bluff, a sense of impending doom pervaded the South. McClellan's army approached to within six miles of Richmond, while reports of defeats and retreats arrived almost daily from the West. In the crisis atmosphere created by these setbacks during the spring of 1862, the southern Congress enacted conscription and martial law. Internal disaffection increased; the Confederate dollar plummeted. During these same months a confident Union government released political prisoners, suspended recruiting, and placed northern war finances on a sound footing. In contrapuntal fashion, developments on the homefront responded to the rhythm of events on the battlefield.