CHAPTER 28
Until recently the nations of the earth didn’t know our power. We didn’t know it ourselves. We don’t know it yet. One half of it has not been put forth.
—MACON DAILY TELEGRAPH, JANUARY 20, 1862
Lincoln ~ Fillmore
General George McClellan and his men successfully carried out the largest amphibious invasion in world history, landing at Old Point Comfort, Virginia.* The Peninsula Campaign would be a dark and deadly walk through the young history of America, writing a new chapter for sacred sites from Jamestown to Yorktown. Christopher Newport’s flagship, the Susan Constant, had landed here in 1607 on the voyage that birthed the Jamestown Colony. Marching into Hampton, McClellan’s army saw a once “beautiful and aristocratic village” now “charred and blackened” in “ruins.” At St. John’s Episcopal Church, founded in 1610 with a current building dating to 1725, where George Washington had worshipped, the tombstones had been broken and overthrown, the graves robbed for whatever they might yield.
* This record would remain intact until the Allied invasion of Normandy in World War II.
Despite “poor and muddy” roads, the army began its march on a sunny, “perfect Virginia day,” accented by chirping birds and blossoming flowers, nature providing a welcome they would not receive from man. Eighty-one years earlier, George Washington had won a war for American independence after a siege at Yorktown. Now George McClellan would seek to further hallow the ground, by preserving the Union. Many of his men believed they were close to ending the war, writing their parents with big plans for the following season. Not everyone was convinced. One private who sought food at a house along the way was promised by the mother of a Confederate soldier that the Union men “would drink hot blood” before laying eyes on Richmond.
As McClellan’s army sat before Yorktown, Union forces in the west believed they were on an offensive mission. They were collected at several points along the Tennessee River, including Pittsburg Landing, on their way to the critical railroad junction at Corinth, Mississippi. On April 6, General William Tecumseh Sherman wrote Ulysses Grant, “I have no doubt that nothing will occur today more than some picket firing.” There had been skirmishes in the days before, and the Union forces did not believe today would be any different.
The Confederates were less than two miles away, preparing for an all-out assault.
Grant’s breakfast was interrupted by the sounds of heavy firing in the direction of Pittsburg Landing. Summoning his diffused forces, the general acted quickly to bring reinforcements to the field of battle. “The Confederate assaults were made with such a disregard of losses on their own side that our line of tents soon fell into their hands,” Grant remembered. The battle was fought over uneven land, with trees and “scattered clearings,” giving each side a small measure of protection.
Throughout the first day, Confederates threw themselves at the Union lines, “first at one point, then at another,” Grant wrote, “sometimes at several points at once.” The heavily wooded area and close combat prevented the Union navy from assisting. After nightfall, however, weary Confederates were treated to a shell in their camp, every fifteen minutes until sunlight.
Several days before the battle, Grant had fallen with his horse, bruising his ankle so badly that his boot needed to be cut off. The throbbing pain kept him from sleeping, which the torrential rain may have done anyway. Around midnight, Grant entered the Shiloh Church, a one-room log meeting house. Shiloh, Hebrew for “peace,” was being used as a hospital, where the wounded were being treated, and arms and legs amputated. At this grisly sight, Grant returned outside to the rain.
As sunlight broke on that second day, Grant observed “it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground.” With his army finally concentrated in one place, the Union offensive drove the Confederates backward until the late afternoon, when a final “Charge!” command from Grant sent them to flight.
Union losses at the Battle of Shiloh were reported as 1,754 killed, 8,408 wounded, and 2,885 missing; the Confederates, 1,728 killed, 8,012 wounded, 959 missing. Among the Confederate dead was Lincoln’s brother-in-law, Samuel Todd.
Fillmore was no doubt glad for the Union triumph at Shiloh, if shocked by the death toll. Isaac Newton had written him with the news. “People are rejoicing over their recent victory.” Newton had shown Lincoln a complimentary message from Fillmore, to which Lincoln replied, “I have a very high opinion of Mr. Fillmore’s judgment. He was a good president.” Newton recorded that Lincoln was in “good spirits now and looks much better than he has for some time.”
On April 9, Lincoln wrote to McClellan, who had persisted that he was not properly supported. These messages, “while they do not offend me,” Lincoln said, “do pain me very much.” The president pointed out that McClellan had stripped the capital region bare, leaving “20,000 unorganized men without a single field battery.” The secretary of war listed 108,000 men with McClellan or on their way, but the general now said that he would have eighty-five thousand once everyone arrived. “How can the discrepancy of 23,000 be accounted for?”
“I think this is the precise time for you to strike a blow. By delay the enemy will relatively gain upon you—that is, he will gain faster, by fortifications and reinforcements, than you can by reinforcements alone.
“And once more let me tell you, it is indispensible to you that you strike a blow. I am powerless to help this.” Lincoln reminded McClellan that he had yielded to his battle plans over his own objections.
“I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious judgment I consistently can. But you must act,” Lincoln concluded.
Meanwhile, McClellan received telegraphs from the chairman of the National Democratic Committee, among others, urging him to disregard the administration and to do what he thought best.
On May 1 the most populous city in the Confederacy, the crucial port of New Orleans, fell to the Union navy. Another of Lincoln’s brothers-in-law, Alexander Todd, died from wounds received in a subsequent Confederate attempt to retake Louisiana.
On the third and fourth days of May, Yorktown was evacuated. A month of critical time was lost as McClellan refused to send fifty-five thousand men into battle against thirteen thousand Confederates. The next day, the forces reengaged outside Williamsburg, Virginia’s colonial capital. McClellan stationed a guard at Sherwood Forest for the protection of Julia Tyler and her children. The Confederates withdrew the following day. Surveying the scene, one young private saw a comrade aiming a rifle over a fallen tree. Calling to him, he heard nothing. Grasping his shoulder, he realized, “He was dead! Shot through the brain; and so suddenly had the end come that his rigid hand grasped his musket, and he still preserved the attitude of watchfulness, literally occupying his post after death.” Another man nearby had died holding a picture of his wife and children. On May 7,Union forces walked through “quaint, old fashioned Williamsburg,” past the buildings of the College of William and Mary. Now used as a Union hospital, in an earlier time it had educated sixteen signers of the Declaration of Independence, and Presidents Jefferson, Monroe, and Tyler.
While the Peninsula Campaign was underway to the south, “Stonewall” Jackson and seventeen thousand Confederates moved quickly throughout northern Virginia. His incredible speed and devastating attacks “diverted 60,000 Union soldiers” and “disrupted two major strategic movements”—Fremont’s campaign to liberate east Tennessee and McDowell’s plan to join McClellan before Richmond. As one of his men put it, in thirty-five days, Jackson had traveled “245 miles, fighting in the meantime four desperate battles, and winning them all.”
On May 25, Lincoln messaged McClellan that Confederate forces were driving northward in a way in which they could not if Richmond were actually being threatened. “I think the time is near when you must either attack Richmond or give up the job and come to the defense of Washington. Let me hear from you instantly.” McClellan’s forces were crossing the Chickahominy River at month’s end, and arrived at Seven Pines, Virginia, seven miles from the Confederate capital. The outmatched Confederates went on offense, inflicting heavy losses in the first day of fighting; the second day they endured them. In the words of one Confederate colonel, now “the two armies lay passively watching each other in front of Richmond.” Confederate general J. E. B. Stuart led his cavalry around McClellan’s right flank, pursued unsuccessfully by Union forces led by his own father-in-law. His daring maneuver complete, he reported back to General Robert E. Lee, who had assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia after General Johnston was wounded. McClellan, Stuart had learned, had no geographic defenses on his right flank.
On June 26, Lee’s first attempt at striking McClellan’s right flank failed terribly, exchanging two thousand men for 250. Throughout the night, the “moans of the dying and shrieks of the wounded” could be heard in the Union camp. With Lee amassing his army on McClellan’s right, the latter could have moved straight ahead to Richmond, but he seems to have contemplated no such thing. Lee had left behind a remainder of his forces between McClellan and the capital, but merely to distract and deter. It worked.
On May 27, Lee attacked again, breaking the Union lines at Gaines’s Mill. Though McClellan was driven back, the Confederates had again taken the worst of it. The same day, Confederates attacked McClellan’s forces south of the Chickahominy and were repulsed. McClellan, despite superiority in numbers, having withstood two days of attacks, completely lost his nerve. That night, he decided to abandon the entire campaign and retreat.
“I have lost this battle because my force was too small,” McClellan telegraphed Washington. “The government has not sustained this army . . .If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army.” An officer in the telegraph office decided to omit the last two lines before relaying the message to Secretary of War Stanton. McClellan’s insubordination, elevated to a new level, with his inexplicable abandonment of the entire Peninsula Campaign, would surely have resulted in his removal.
“McClellan, if not always great in the advance, was masterly in retreat,” according to one Confederate general. McClellan fell down to Harrison’s Landing, the ancestral homeland of the family of President Harrison, where gunboats could protect his forces. McClellan’s troops met him there, after winning a decisive battle against Lee at Malvern Hill. Despite this, they were ordered to abandon an impregnable position on the heels of another victory. The Peninsula Campaign, which had begun with such promise, had now ended. No Union soldier would stand as close to Richmond for three years.
“The suspense was dreadful whilst the fight was proceeding near Richmond,” Buchanan wrote, feeling “greatly relieved when I learned that General McClellan and our brave army had escaped destruction. His strategy was admirable, but I am at a loss to know why he did not occupy his present position from the beginning. Mystery hangs over the whole affair, though I feel very confident that when all is unraveled McClellan will be justified.”
The war was now well into its second year, with a massive loss of life but little indication of how it would end. Lincoln was determined to stay the course. He expressed this in a message to the Union governors, meeting in New York. After an update on recent happenings and his plans going forward, he asserted, “I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me.”
This resoluteness was pulsing through Lincoln as he wrote to Quintin Campbell, a relative of his wife who had just entered West Point but finding it not to his liking, was ready to quit. “Allow me to assure you,” the commander-in-chief wrote the cadet, “it is a perfect certainty that you will, very soon, feel better—quite happy—if you only stick to the resolution that you have taken to procure a military education. I am older than you, have felt badly myself, and know, what I tell you is true. Adhere to your purpose and you will soon feel as well as you ever did. On the contrary, if you falter and give up, you will lose the power of keeping any resolution, and will regret it all your life. Take the advice of a friend, who, though he never saw you, deeply sympathizes with you, and stick to your purpose.”
Three days later, Lincoln issued a call for three hundred thousand volunteers.