Mr Lincoln's Army (24 page)

And still nothing much actually seemed to
happen south of the river. When night came word trickled back that there had
been a terrible big fight over on the north side; but on the south side,
although they had been right on the edge of an all-out battle for two days, it
never quite developed. The Rebel lines continued to bristle, and in one or two
spots the Confederates came out with what looked like pretty serious assaults
(although it did seem that they were repulsed rather easily) and the Rebel artillery
was ready to make a nuisance of itself at a moment's notice all along the
front. And then next morning there was more galloping and coming and going than
ever, around corps and division and brigade headquarters, and great black
clouds of smoke went up as men set fire to various supply dumps. While the boys
were puzzling over this, they were marched up to wagon trains and told to load
up with salt pork, hardtack, coffee, and the like; and they noticed that
instead of having definite quantities measured out for them, the way it
usually happened, they were simply given all they could put in their
haversacks. The 5th New York was directed to wagons containing the brigade's
knapsacks; instead of being allowed to look for their own, the men were told to
take the first ones they came to and be quick about it, and as soon as every
man had one, provost guards set fire to the rest. The 4th New Jersey, to its
amazement, got sudden orders to dig pits and bury all knapsacks. Up and down
the camps the men began to look at each other and mutter: "It's a big
skedaddle."

It
was. By a painfully narrow margin Lee had beaten McClellan to the punch.
Leaving twenty thousand men on the south side of the river—twenty thousand to
face some seventy thousand Federals—he had marched everybody else to the north
side for a vicious attack on Porter's isolated corps. The first blow, struck at
Mechanicsville on the afternoon of June 26, had been rebuffed, but the next day
Lee threw fifty-seven thousand men at Porter's new lines back of Boatswain's
Swamp, near Gaines's Mill, and after a crunching, grinding struggle in which
some Confederate brigades were all but torn apart he broke the lines in and
drove Porter back across the river, forcing McClellan to order a retreat.

The ominous noises which the Federals south
of the river had been hearing in their front throughout the two days were
simply the contribution of the Confederacy's distinguished amateur actor, General
Magruder, who was having just the kind of time for himself he had had at
Yorktown. Magruder had been exceedingly nervous. His twenty thousand men were
all that stood between McClellan and Richmond for forty-eight hours, and
Magruder was very much aware that if the Yankees once caught on there was little
he could do to keep them from rolling right over him and going into the
capital. So he had played the old Yorktown game with every variation he could
think of. Regiments had gone out into open spaces to march and countermarch and
look numerous; officers had stood in the woods, shouting commands to completely
imaginary brigades; picket lines and patrols and advanced batteries had been
kept effervescently active, as if making final preparation for a huge attack.
In the end, it had worked.

It
had worked, partly because Magruder skillfully imposed on the Union commanders
facing him—or on most of them, at any rate— and partly because McClellan and
his corps commanders were already convinced that Lee had close to two hundred
thousand men on the field, so that it was possible for him (as it seemed to
them) to use sixty thousand or more to crush Porter north of the river and
still retain overwhelming numbers on the south side. Pinkerton's fantastic
reports, believed like the writ of the true faith, were worth a couple of army
corps to the Confederacy that week. Heintzelman, under whom the preparatory
advance had been made on June 25, had been worried all along; told McClellan
that night that he hardly thought he could hold his advanced position unless he
could be reinforced, and when the attack on Porter was at its height and McClellan
messaged his corps commanders to see if they could possibly spare any men,
Heintzelman replied that in a pinch he could send two brigades, "but the
men are so worn out I fear they would not be in a condition to fight after
making a march of any distance." Sumner had been imposed on equally; his
messages back to army headquarters told about "sharp shelling" all
along his lines and predicted a heavy attack on his right. Franklin notified
the commanding general that the enemy was "massing heavy columns" in
his front, and the remaining corps commander, Erasmus Keyes (who was to drop
into military oblivion at the end of this campaign), reported it would take all
the men he had to hold his position.

McClellan stayed in his headquarters tents,
pitched under trees on a pleasant hill by a farmhouse a mile or more south of
the river, his uniform coat folded over a camp chair, standing in the open now
and then to listen to the firing, totting up the reports from his subordinates.
The situation on both sides of the river, he wrote, was so ominous that he
could not tell where the real assault was going to be made; at night he wired
Stanton that he was "attacked by greatly superior numbers on this
side."

He
did not visit the battlefield. Indeed, in all of the great fights which the
Army of the Potomac had while under his command, McClellan stayed close to
headquarters. His physical courage was high enough—many of his soldiers have
commented on his extreme coolness when making reconnoissance under fire—but
there seems to have been in him a deep, instinctive shrinking from the sight of
bloodshed and suffering, an emotional reaction to the horrors of the front
lines that was more than he could stand. He wrote to his wife, about this time,
that "every poor fellow that is killed or wounded haunts me," and the
army's profound confidence that McClellan was anxious to spare his men's lives
was solidly based on fact. He was anxious to spare them, and when he had to send
them to their deaths he did not like to watch it. So, in any case, he remained
at headquarters, where he took counsel of his caution: dangerous to send heavy
reinforcements north of the river lest the lines to the south be broken; dangerous
to strike boldly for Richmond, on the south side, lest disaster take place on
the north; hold on, then, as well as may be, on both banks, make Porter's fight
a holding and delaying action, withdraw to some good point on the James River,
get reinforcements, refit, and prepare for a new offensive at a later date. On
the night the Gaines's Mill fight ended McClellan called in his corps
commanders and gave orders for the retreat.

The
corps commanders agreed that this was the only thing to do. Not so the two
firebrand division commanders who held the lines nearest Richmond, Phil Kearny
and Joe Hooker. They were indignant at the news, for it appears that Magruder
had not fooled them very much; they knew the Rebel lines in front of them were
thin and they believed they could and should be broken at once. They pressured
their corps commander, Heintzelman, and late in the evening dragooned him into
taking them to see McClellan, accompanied by a few of their brigade commanders.
At the headquarters tent Kearny demanded permission to make an attack at once.
He and Hooker, he said, could march straight into Richmond: if the general felt
that they couldn't stay there (the disaster north of the river had broken the
army's supply line) they could at least free the fourteen thousand Union prisoners
of war in the city, disrupt all of Lee's strategic plans, and get back safely.
Hooker agreed; in his opinion one division could do the job, but to play safe
they might use two—let Kearny make the attack with his division and let Hooker
support him with his. Heintzelman, under pressure, said that he felt the
generals' proposal was sound.

McClellan was unmoved and insisted that the
retreat must take place as ordered. Fiery Kearny was indignant; a staff officer
who was present wrote later that Kearny denounced McClellan "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." That didn't happen, however, McClellan apparently feeling that
the thing to do with Kearny was to let him blow off steam every now and then,
and the officers went back to their posts.
⁸

So the retreat was made. It was handled, the
books say, with consummate skill. Lee never could quite find the opening he
needed to turn the withdrawal into a rout, and if the general situation gave
him a chance to destroy the invading army, McClellan prevented him from taking
advantage of it. But to the soldiers themselves the picture was never clear.
They had no maps; they only knew that after spending some weeks in their
fortified lines they were on the march again, in a confused country where none
of the narrow, winding roads appeared to lead anywhere in particular, and there
seemed to be a good deal of fighting mixed in with all the marching.

A member of the 40th New York wrote that,
when his regiment was pulled out of the line and marched off to become part of
the rear guard, the men thought for quite a time that they were actually
advancing on Richmond to capture the place and end the war. The

1st
Minnesota found itself drawn up in a field near a country railroad station,
supporting a Rhode Island battery. A Confederate battle line emerged from a
wood a mile away and advanced to the attack. Old General Sumner came galloping
up, his white head bare in the wind, his hat clenched in one fist; he put the
5th New Hampshire and the 88th New York in beside the Westerners, and they went
out into the field and drove the Rebels back. A little later a brigade of New
York troops charged and captured a section of a Rebel battery, spiking the
guns when they found they couldn't get them away. Then, after dark, the
Federals moved off down a road through a swamp. Long afterward they learned
that they had had a part in the battle of Savage Station, in which the army's
retreat was effectively protected, but at the time it was just a fight; and if
the rest of the army was in retreat, the fact was not especially evident to the
high private.

Indeed, old man Sumner himself got a little
mixed up about it. When evening came he felt that he had won a victory, and
when orders came to withdraw he cried: "I never leave a victorious field
—why, if I had twenty thousand more men I could crush this rebellion."
Staff pointed out that McClellan's orders to withdraw were explicit, and Sumner
finally obeyed, complaining: "General McClellan did not know all the
circumstances when he wrote that note. He did not know that we would fight a
battle and gain a victory."
⁷

The 15th Massachusetts knew a retreat was
going on, but had fun anyway: their job was to destroy supplies that couldn't
be moved, and they had a freight train of ammunition to get rid of. The
railroad bridge over the river had been wrecked, so they simply set the train
on fire, started it moving toward the ruined bridge, and sat back to enjoy a
grand combination of train wreck, bonfire, and Fourth of July fireworks.

Night came on, and two weary batteries of
regular artillery—Batteries A and C, 4th U.S.—went to sleep in a wood,
dead-tired. Next morning the skipper of the two batteries, Captain George W.
Haz-zard, heard bugles sounding reveille from fields which he knew had been
unoccupied the night before. He got up to look about—Rebels all around him, no
sign of any Union troops anywhere. He gave hurried orders: hitch up quickly but
quietly and get the guns away before the Rebels catch on, move at a walk so as
not to make any more noise than can be helped. He finally rejoined the army,
bringing with him a battalion of infantry stragglers who, like the artillerymen,
had gone to sleep in the wood ignorant that the army was pulling out. A similar
adventure befell three infantry regiments—104th Pennsylvania and 56th and
100th New York, which fought in front of Savage Station and weren't notified
that everybody else was leaving. They were nearly captured, made an all-night
march along bewildering roads, got entirely lost, and at last came stumbling
into camp three days later, mad enough to bite the heads off nails. It was reported
that they were the only regiments in the army which failed to cheer McClellan
after the army was safely back on the James River.

That
same night Colonel William Averell of cavalry came riding up to McClellan's
field headquarters all excited: the roads between the army and Richmond were
empty and the army might go there unopposed. McClellan smiled grimly and shook
his head; the roads would be full enough tomorrow—which was entirely correct,
since Lee was bringing every man he had to press the retreat, and the moment
for a counterblow had passed. To Averell, McClellan added: "If any army
can save this country it will be the Army of the Potomac, and it must be saved
for that purpose."
⁸

Next day there was bitter fighting late in
the afternoon around a crossroads settlement named Glendale, where Lee led
Longstreet's and A. P. Hill's divisions up to the middle of McClellan's long
column and tried to break it in half. The worst of the fighting fell to
McCall's Pennsylvania division, which met Longstreet's attack head-on, and
there was deadly hand-to-hand fighting around a Union battery, with Northern
and Southern boys savagely braining each other with clubbed muskets, driving
bayonets into human flesh. A Confederate officer slew two gunners with his
sword, went down when three Federals fell on him with bayonets. Captain
Hazzard, who had been left behind the night before, was killed, and General
McCall was taken prisoner, and the Pennsylvanians finally broke and went to the
rear fast. Going back, they met Hooker's division coming up. A Pennsylvania
colonel, riding to the rear faster than the soldiers thought necessary,
tearfully implored the oncoming troops to "hurry up and save my poor
men." Hooker's boys jeered at him, yelling: