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Extraordinary Circumstances
The Seven Days Battles
By Brian K. Burton Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2001 Brian K. Burton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-10844-9
CHAPTER 1
"The Nation Has Been Making Progress"
In May of 1862, the Civil War was just over a year old. The North was closing in on victory; on almost every front the Federals had an advantage over the Confederates. The first four months of 1862 in the western theater had been decisive ones. Brigadier General George H. Thomas had turned away a Confederate invasion of Kentucky at Mill Springs in January. In early February Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant took Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River, opening both vital arteries to the Union. Nashville was taken soon after. Marching down the Tennessee, Grant had stopped at Pittsburg Landing in southern Tennessee, where Confederates under Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston attacked him in early April. But Johnston was killed, and Grant, reinforced by Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell, repulsed the rebels, forcing them to retreat to Corinth, Mississippi. Major General Henry W. Halleck, the overall Union commander in the western theater, then combined Grant's and Buell's forces to move on Corinth, a strategic rail center.
The Mississippi River divided the Confederacy, and its importance to Midwest business and agriculture as well as its strategic importance demanded Federal attention. In late February Brig. Gen. John Pope advanced against New Madrid, Missouri, located on the river. By early April—actually, on the same day as the conclusion of the battle of Pittsburg Landing (also known as Shiloh)—Pope had taken both New Madrid and Island No. 10. This dual success opened the river to Yankee navigation nearly to Memphis. Moving inland from the south, Rear Adm. David G. Farragut ran his ships past the forts guarding the river's mouth and forced the surrender of New Orleans in late April. The city was occupied by troops under Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler. Fort Pillow, north of Memphis, and Vicksburg, Mississippi, where high bluffs contained rebel cannon, were the only real obstacles keeping the Yankees from regaining complete control of the river.
If the North controlled the Mississippi, the Confederate states of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas would be isolated from the rest of the South, and Missouri would be securely in the Union. The Yankees also had success in that theater. The battle of Pea Ridge, or Elkhorn Tavern, fought in northwest Arkansas in March, gave the North control of Missouri for the moment and opened Arkansas and Texas to invasion. In the Southwest, an engagement at Glorieta, in the New Mexico Territory, ended a Southern invasion.
Along the Gulf Coast, several harbors that could shelter ships attempting to pass through the Yankee blockade had been captured. Included were (besides New Orleans) Pensacola and Apalachicola, Florida. On Florida's Atlantic coast, Saint Augustine and Jacksonville had fallen. Fort Pulaski, a supposedly impregnable work guarding the harbor at Savannah, Georgia, was taken by Brig. Gen. Quincy A. Gillmore on April 11—one day shy of the first anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter. The forts at Port Royal, South Carolina, had fallen the previous November. Brigadier General Ambrose E. Burnside took Roanoke Island, at the northern end of North Carolina's Outer Banks, in February and New Bern, on the mainland behind the Outer Banks, in March. When Fort Macon at the southern end of the Outer Banks fell in April the Northerners had complete control of the Outer Banks.
A ray of hope for the Southerners came from the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. Major General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson attacked a Federal force at Kernstown in March. The battle did not go Jackson's way, but it got the Northerners' attention. He aimed to keep that attention and won a battle at McDowell in early May. The Union forces in the Valley were scattered, and Jackson moved toward each in turn, winning two more engagements in late May. President Abraham Lincoln then attempted to concentrate his forces there and deal Jackson's relatively small command a death blow.
The worst news for the Confederates came in the East, which most people considered the war's most important theater. The main Union army, the Army of the Potomac, had landed in Virginia and was moving inexorably up the Peninsula between the York and James Rivers—a strip of land that aimed straight at Richmond, the Confederate capital. The advance had been slow in coming. Major General George B. McClellan, brought from western Virginia to Washington after the debacle at Bull Run in July 1861, had drilled the raw soldiers into a well-disciplined army. McClellan was born in Philadelphia on December 3, 1826. His parents took advantage of the educational advantages that city offered, and he attended the University of Pennsylvania before entering West Point at age sixteen. He graduated from the academy in 1846 ranked second in his class and joined the Corps of Engineers. He was not yet twenty years old when he went to Mexico as a member of Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott's staff. McClellan was recognized for gallantry in the ensuing campaign.
After the war, McClellan taught at West Point, supervised the construction of a fort, and served in various parts of the country. In 1855 he and two other officers traveled to Europe to observe the Crimean War. McClellan visited many European military facilities and on his return wrote a report entitled Armies of Europe. He also designed a saddle that the army promptly adopted. It was the last saddle the army approved. McClellan resigned his commission in 1857 and became the chief engineer of the Illinois Central Railroad. He then switched to the new Ohio and Mississippi Railroad, where he became vice president and then president of the company. In 1860 he married Ellen Marcy, the daughter of Randolph B. Marcy.
When civil war broke out, McClellan offered his services to the Union. By May 4, 1861, he was a major general in command of the Department of Ohio. He crossed the Ohio River in late May, and in June troops under his overall command defeated Confederates at several places in western Virginia. McClellan had a small part in these successes, most of the credit belonging to Brig. Gen. William S. Rosecrans. Nevertheless, McClellan's troops had won the first Federal victory, and he was a hero in the eyes of the people. He was the natural choice to restore order to the Army of the Potomac after Bull Run.
His accomplishment in restoring order should not be diminished. Soldiers in the Civil War based much of their behavior on their generals. McClellan won the admiration, almost the reverence of his men; soldier after soldier praised "Little Mac," as they adoringly called him. One, Alfred N. Ayres of the 72nd New York, said, "The Army of the Potomac almost worship their General." Another, George Kenney of the 71st Pennsylvania, wrote, "He is beloved by his army as ever Washington was." McClellan succeeded even beyond expectations in the task, becoming general in chief of all the Union armies in the process.
But the North wanted action, and "On to Richmond" was the cry. Through a combination of circumstances, McClellan had not moved south by early February 1862, so Lincoln ordered all Union armies to advance on Washington's birthday. In response, McClellan revealed his plan to land at Urbanna, located on the Rappahannock River near where that watercourse empties into the Potomac. This move would flank the Confederate lines at Manassas Junction, the site of the Bull Run battle, which McClellan considered too strong to attack.
Early in March, before McClellan could move, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston pulled his rebel army back from those fortified lines to behind the Rappahannock. This move made a landing at Urbanna useless. Any force landing there still would be more distant from Richmond than Johnston in his new lines—exactly what the Urbanna operation was designed to prevent. McClellan decided to shift the landing from Urbanna to the Peninsula. Like the Urbanna plan, it was good strategy. Both rivers, especially the James, would make good supply lines, and the Peninsula was anchored by Fort Monroe, a strong fortress.
At about the same time as Johnston's withdrawal from Manassas, the Confederates unveiled the CSS Virginia, a type of ship the Americas had never seen. Built on the hull of the scuttled Federal ship Merrimack, but with iron covering it above the waterline, the Virginia decimated the Northern blockading force at Hampton Roads on March 8. Nothing built of wood could stand a face-to-face fight with the ironclad, so it was able to prevent Union transports and supply ships from entering the James and York Rivers. Fortunately for both McClellan and the Union navy, another iron ship the likes of which no one had ever seen showed up the evening of the Virginia's triumph. This vessel, the USS Monitor, was even stranger than its Southern counterpart—and just as invulnerable. The epic battle of the ironclads the next day showed the Virginia could be neutralized, and by April 1 McClellan was at Fort Monroe.
Not all of his army was with him, however. When Lincoln agreed to the Peninsula plan he ordered McClellan to leave Washington adequately protected. McClellan and his corps commanders met in council and decided a force of about fifty-five thousand men would be sufficient for that purpose. However, in reaching that number, McClellan counted the forces in the Shenandoah Valley opposing Jackson, as well as new regiments still in Pennsylvania. Besides that, he double counted the force defending Washington, which had no field artillery and thus was of little fighting value. Whether or not Lincoln's stipulation was good military judgment, McClellan did not comply with it. When the adjutant general, Brig. Gen. Lorenzo Thomas, and Maj. Gen. Ethan A. Hitchcock, Lincoln's military adviser, confirmed that judgment, the president ordered one of McClellan's corps to remain near Washington to achieve the required number of defenders. The corps most easily detained was Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell's I Corps, the second largest in the army at thirty-three thousand effectives. McClellan also lost the title of general in chief. On March 11 Lincoln relieved McClellan of those duties because he had "personally taken the field at the head of the Army of the Potomac." McClellan, who had avoided Lincoln's messenger, former Ohio governor William Dennison, learned of the move when he read about it in a newspaper report. Lincoln then took steps to assure Little Mac of his trust and promised McClellan command of the Army of the Potomac, easing some of the tension between the two men.
McClellan got to the Peninsula before Johnston. The Confederate commander there, Maj. Gen. John B. Magruder, had fewer than twenty thousand men, but the fortifications near Yorktown were strong, and he marched and countermarched his men to make the force seem larger. Plagued by terrible weather throughout April, and convinced that the rebel force was far stronger than it really was, McClellan settled down opposite Magruder's trenches into a siege that lasted a month. It was a situation that prompted Johnston to tell Gen. Robert E. Lee, Confederate president Jefferson Davis's military adviser, "No one but McClellan could have hesitated to attack." McClellan was ready to attack by the first week of May, but Johnston pulled back the night before the scheduled Union assault, leaving a detachment to fight a rear-guard action at Williamsburg. A few days later the Southerners abandoned Norfolk, and the Virginia was destroyed so the Federals would not capture it. By the middle of May, with improving weather, the rebel army had backed up about as far as it could go, to the settlements just east and southeast of Richmond.
The cascade of bad news in the first half of 1862 depressed many Southerners. The news from Shiloh had been "dispiriting and saddening," one visitor remembered. Albert Sidney Johnston's death saddened even those who saw the battle as glorious. The fall of Island No. 10 was "a terrible blow," a Richmond lady noted. Then came the loss of New Orleans, which the same lady called "as unexpected as mortifying and discouraging." It caused a lack of confidence in the government, and no one talked of anything else in early May.
The talk quickly turned to events closer to home after Yorktown and Norfolk were abandoned and the Virginia was destroyed. These blows were felt strongly, capping a month of reverses. The Richmond townspeople's spirits, which had risen on seeing Johnston's army march through on its way to Yorktown, sank again. Confederate cavalry colonel Williams Wickham wrote to Confederate congressman William C. Rives: "Our unhappy country appears to be completely ruined. I was in Richmond yesterday & it is almost the universal opinion that the city will be in possession of the Yankees in a few days." Another of Rives's correspondents called the Virginia's destruction "a cruel and disgraceful suicide." A Richmond tavern keeper remembered the residents' attending church every night to pray for the city's deliverance. John B. Jones, a clerk in the War Department, noted in his diary on May 9, "No one, scarcely, supposes that Richmond will be defended." Confederate secretary of war Stephen R. Mallory wrote in his journal, "The hour is dark & gloomy for our beloved South."
The Confederate Congress and President Davis did not help that attitude. Congress adjourned hastily and left Richmond in late April, sent on its way with scorn but leaving the city in despair. Davis sent his family to Raleigh on May 10, perhaps revealing his judgment that Richmond soon would be under attack. Many Richmonders followed these examples, and those who stayed kept their trunks packed. Business was suspended, and some bankers refused deposits while preparing for departure. Rural residents entered the city hoping for protection.
Many politicians and newspaper editors blamed Davis for these events, although others came to his defense. Some called for more action, but Davis already had stretched the Confederate theory of limited government by suspending the writ of habeas corpus and instituting conscription. Others, such as Southern radical Edmund Ruffin, thought Davis unequal to the current crisis. Some were willing to credit Davis for the effort the South had put forth, even as they criticized politicians in general. But the public worried more about the Unionists than Davis's actions and wanted assurance that Richmond would not be left to the Yankees. That desire was incorporated into a resolution by the Virginia legislature.
Despite their gloom, Richmond's citizens were determined to defend their city. The "wonderful composure" noted by one correspondent might have stemmed from the people's collective decision to see the city destroyed rather than surrendered. Ruffin, himself despondent but determined to see the struggle through, saw no public display of depression. Instead, the people were ready to sacrifice all. They were prepared to put the town to the torch. "Better death than subjugation," wrote one man.
Spirits rose after May 15, when the Southern determination and ability to defend Richmond was tested for the first time. Union gunboats, including the Monitor, attacked the newly constructed Confederate artillery position at Drewry's Bluff. This position, high above the south bank of the James River, was in some ways the key to Richmond. If it fell, the Northern navy could steam all the way to the Southern capital, and the city would be in serious jeopardy. Farmers, seeing the warships, ran into Richmond with the news that the Yankees would arrive in a few hours. Richmond civilians heard the sound of guns for the first time in the war, and excitement and anticipation were the prevailing emotions. But the rebel gunners, including some from the Virginia, repulsed the gunboats, and all of Richmond reacted joyfully or with "wordless thankfulness." Breaths came easily for the first time in a while, and more normal activities resumed.
Even before Drewry's Bluff, some saw what most did not. Virginia politician James A. Seddon wrote on May 10, "The last month or two has been a period of many reverses and great gloom in our public affairs, but gleams of light and hope are already streaking the Horizon and give augury of a glorious day of Triumph to ensue."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Extraordinary Circumstances by Brian K. Burton. Copyright © 2001 Brian K. Burton. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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