There they had it; he had been right all along. May Day was a time of gloom in the southern capital. Ball’s Bluff seemed far away and long ago.
One source of consolation existed, but it was unknown in Richmond, being hidden in the fog of war, far down the James and beyond the enemy lines. Johnston’s worries were balanced—more than balanced, at least in number—by the woes of his opponent, which differed as much in quality as they did in multiplicity. The southern commander’s fretfulness was based almost exclusively on strictly tactical considerations: the weakness of the Yorktown defenses and the shortage of troops to man them. But McClellan’s was the product of a variety of pressures, roughly divisible under three main headings: 1) downright bad luck, 2) Lincoln, and—as always—3) his own ripe imagination.
The first of a rapid succession of blows, like the preliminary tap of a farrier taking aim, landed the moment he stepped off the steamer at Old Point Comfort. Flag Officer Goldsborough, up from the North Carolina sounds to provide naval support for the movement up the narrow tongue of land, met him with word that the fleet would not be able to assist in reducing the enemy batteries on the York or the James. The navy already had its hands full, he said, patrolling Hampton Roads to neutralize the Merrimac-Virginia. One of the primary conditions of success, as stated by the corps commanders on the eve of departure, thus was removed before the campaign had even begun. Fortunately, McClellan had a full day in which to absorb the shock of this. But after that brief respite the blows began to land with trip-hammer rapidity.
On the second day, April 4, as he started his army forward—much gratified by the “wonderfully cool performance” of the trio of foragers who brought him the still-warm 12-pound shot—he made two dreadful discoveries. The first was that his handsome Coastal Survey maps were woefully inaccurate. The roads all ran the wrong way, he complained, and the Warwick River, shown on the maps as an insignificant creek flowing parallel to the James, was in fact a considerable barrier, cutting squarely across his line of march. To add to its effectiveness as an obstacle, the Confederates had dammed it in five places, creating five unwadable lakes and training their heavy artillery on the boggy intervals. McClellan was amazed at the river’s location and condition; “[It] grows worse the more you look at it,” he wailed.
As he stood gazing forlornly at this waste of wetness in his path, another unexpected development overtook him, also involving water. It began to rain. And from this there grew an even worse disclosure. Those fine sandy roads, recommended as being “passable at all seasons on the year,” turned out to be no such thing. What they were was gumbo—and they were apparently bottomless. Guns and wagons bogged past the axles, then sat there, immovably stuck. One officer later testified that he saw a mule go completely out of sight in one of the chunk-holes, “all but the tips of its ears,” but added, in the tall-tale tradition, that the mule was a rather small one.
No navy, no fit maps, no transportation: McClellan might well have thought the fates had dealt him all the weal they intended. Writing to his wife of his unenviable position—“the rebels on one side, and the abolitionists and other scoundrels on the other”—he said, “Don’t worry about the wretches; they have done nearly their worst, and can’t do much more.” He was wrong, and before the day was over he would discover just how wrong he was. The people he referred to could do a great deal more. If McClellan did not realize this, Lincoln’s two young secretaries knew it quite well already. “Gen McC is in danger,” one was telling the other. “Not in front, but in rear.”
Returning to army headquarters at the close of that same busy day—his first in bristling proximity to the enemy since the campaign in West Virginia, almost nine months ago—McClellan found the atmosphere of the lantern-hung interior as glum as the twilit landscape of rain-soaked fields and dripping woods through which he had just ridden. Sorrow and anger, despair and incredulity were strangely combined on the faces of his staff. Soon the Young Napoleon was sharing these mixed emotions; for the answer, or answers, lay in a batch of orders and directives just off the wire from Washington. The first was dated yesterday, April 3: Fort Monroe and its garrison of 12,000, placed under McClellan two weeks ago as a staging area and a pool from which to draw replacements, were removed forthwith from his control. Before he could recover from the shock of learning that he had lost not only that number of troops, but also command of his present base of operations, he was handed a second order, more drastic than the first. McDowell’s corps of 38,000, still awaiting sailing orders at Alexandria—McClellan intended to bring it down in mass as soon as he decided where to land it, whether on the south bank of the York, for operations against Yorktown, or on the north bank, against Gloucester Point—was detached and withheld as part of the force assigned to provide close-in protection for the capital. This action was given emphasis by a supplementary order creating what was called the Department of the Rappahannock, under McDowell, as well as another new one, called the Department of the Shenandoah, under Banks, whose corps was also declared no longer a part of the Army of the Potomac. McClellan was floored. Even without the loss of Banks, which made no actual change in dispositions, the combined detachments of Blenker, McDowell, and the Fort Monroe garrison—an approximate total of 60,000 fighting men—reduced by well over one third the 156,000 he had said at the outset would be necessary for the success of his Peninsula campaign.
Nor was this all. As he took to his troubled bed that night he had something else to think about: something that seemed to him and his staff conclusive proof that the Administration, disapproving of the campaign in the first place, was determined to assure its failure before the opening shot was fired. A final order, dated yesterday and signed by the Adjutant General for distribution to the governors of all the loyal states, put an end to the recruiting of volunteers throughout the Union. All recruiting offices were closed, the equipment put up for sale to the highest bidders, and all recruiting personnel were reassigned to other duties. In some ways this was the hardest blow of all, or anyhow the most incredible. At a time when the Confederate authorities, sixty miles away in Richmond, were doing all they could to push through the first conscription law in American history—a law which could be expected to swell the ranks of the army facing him—it seemed to McClellan that his Washington superiors, twice that distance in his rear, had not only taken a full one third of his soldiers from him, but then had proceeded to make certain that they could never be replaced. The fact was, on the eve of bloody fighting, Lincoln and Stanton had seen to it that he would not even be able to replace his casualties. So it seemed to McClellan. At any rate, as he went to bed that night he could say, “They have done nearly their worst,” and be a good deal closer to the truth.
Next morning, if somewhat daunted by all the knocks he had had to absorb in one short night, he was back at the front, probing the enemy defenses with his three remaining corps. Heintzelman and Keyes, on the right and left, had two divisions each, with a third on the way down Chesapeake Bay for both. Sumner, in the center, had only one; his second was en route, and his third had been Blenker. All three of these brigadiers were hard-shell regulars—Sumner had put in seven of his forty-three years of army service before McClellan was born, and both of the others were thirty-year men or better—but after coming under heavy fire from long-range guns and bogging down in the flooded approaches, all agreed with the Chief Engineer’s report that the rebel line was “certainly one of the most extensive known to modern times.” If the navy had been there to wreck the batteries on the flanks, or if the weight of McDowell’s corps, the largest of the original four, could be added to the pressure the army could exert, things might be different. As it was, however, all felt obliged to agree with Keyes, who later reported bluntly: “No part of [the Yorktown-Warwick River] line, so far discovered, can be taken by assault without an enormous waste of life.”
If the Confederate defenses could not be broken by flanking operations, if assault was too doubtful and expensive, only one method rema
ined: a siege. McClellan would do it that way if he had to; he had studied siege tactics at Sebastopol. But he much preferred his original plan, which he now saw was impractical without his original army. As he rode back to headquarters this second night he decided to make a final appeal to Lincoln. Under the heading “Near Yorktown, 7.30 p.m.” he outlined for the President the situation as he saw it, neglecting none of the drawbacks, and begged him to “reconsider” the order detaching McDowell. “In my deliberate judgment,” he wrote, “the success of our cause will be imperiled by so greatly reducing my force when it is actually under the fire of the enemy and active operations have commenced.… I am now of the opinion that I shall have to fight all the available forces of the rebels not far from here. Do not force me to do so with diminished numbers.”
Lincoln’s reply, the following day, was a brief warning that delay on the Peninsula would benefit the Confederate defenders more than it would the Federal attackers: “You now have over 100,000 troops with you.… I think you better break the enemy’s line from Yorktown to Warwick River at once.” McClellan’s first reaction, he told his wife, was “to reply that he had better come and do it himself.” Instead, he wired on the 7th that, after the three recent detachments, his “entire force for duty” amounted to about 85,000 men, more than a third of whom were still en route from Alexandria. Lincoln took a day to study this, then replied on the 9th at considerable length. He was puzzled, he said, by “a curious mystery.” The general’s own report showed a total strength of 108,000; “How can the discrepancy of 23,000 be accounted for?”
Beyond this, however, the President’s main purpose was to point out to McClellan that more factors were involved in this war than those which might occur to a man with an exclusively military turn of mind. In other words, this was a Civil war. The general was aware of certain pressures in his rear, but Lincoln suggested in a final paragraph that he would gain more from studying those pressures, and maybe finding ways to relieve them, than he would from merely complaining of their presence. It was a highly personal communication, and in it he gave McClellan some highly personal advice:
“Once more let me tell you that it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I am powerless to help this. You will do me the justice to remember I always insisted that going down the bay in search of a field, instead of fighting at or near Manassas, was only shifting and not surmounting a difficulty; that we would find the same enemy and the same or equal intrenchments in either place. The country will not fail to note—is now noting—that the present hesitation to move upon an intrenched enemy is but the story of Manassas repeated. 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.”
That “most anxious judgment” had been under considerable strain ever since McClellan’s leading elements started down the coast in transports. Ben Wade and Zachariah Chandler were bombarding Lincoln with protests that the general’s treasonable intent was plain at last for any eye to see: The whole campaign had been designed to sidetrack the main Union army by bogging it down in the slews southeast of Richmond, thus clearing the path for a direct rebel sweep on Washingtion, with little to stand in its way. Stanton not only encouraged the presentation and acceptance of this view, but also enlarged it by assigning additional motives to account for his former intimate’s treachery: McClellan was politically ambitious, “more interested in reconstructing the Democratic party than the Army of the Potomac.”
Lincoln wondered. He did not believe McClellan was a traitor, but in suggesting that the capital was in danger the Jacobins had touched him where he was tender. “This is a question which the country will not allow me to evade,” he said. He could not afford the slightest risk in that direction; too much hung in the balance—including war with England and France as a result of the recognition both would almost certainly give the Confederacy once its army had occupied Washington. Then, as he pondered, an alarm was sounded which seemed to give substance to his fears.
On the day McClellan landed at Old Point Comfort, Brigadier General James Wadsworth, the elderly commander of the Washington defenses and one of the founders of the Republican Party, came to Stanton complaining that his force was inadequate for its task, both in numbers and in training. The Secretary sent his military assistant, the hapless Hitchcock, and Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas to investigate, and when they confirmed Wadsworth’s report that the capital was in danger, Stanton took him triumphantly to Lincoln. McClellan’s note of the day before, claiming that he had left 77,456 men behind to give Washington the stipulated “entire feeling of security,” was checked for accuracy. Certain discrepancies showed at once, and the harder the three men looked the more they saw. In the first place, by an arithmetical error, the troops at Warrenton had been counted twice. Proposed reinforcements from Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York had not arrived, though they were listed. Blenker’s division, on the way to Frémont, had also been included, on grounds that Banks could interrupt its march if it was needed. All these had to be subtracted. And so for that matter did the two divisions already with Banks in the Valley; Patterson’s army, out there in July, had done nothing to protect the capital after the debacle at Bull Run. In fact, by actual count as Lincoln saw it, once McClellan’s whole army had gone down the coast, there would be fewer than 29,000 men in all to stand in the way of a direct Confederate drive on Washington: 11,000 less than the general’s own corps commanders had said were necessary.
The way to keep this from happening was to stop one corps from going to join McClellan, and that was what Lincoln did, creating in the process the Departments of the Rappahannock and the Shenandoah to give McDowell and Banks their independence. The former would make his headquarters at Falmouth, opposite Fredericksburg, and in time—conditions permitting—march overland to join his former chief in front of Richmond. That way, he would always be in a position to strike the front or flank of any rebel force that tried a direct lunge at Washington, and yet he would still be in on the kill when the time came. Lincoln did not want to hurt McClellan any more than he had to. In fact, on the day after telling him, “You must act,” he released McDowell’s lead division, under Franklin—a great favorite of McClellan’s, who asked in a final desperate plea that this, at least, not be withheld—to proceed by the water route as originally planned. Exuberantly grateful, McClellan wired on April 13: “We shall soon be at them, and I am sure of the result.”
Lincoln had heard him say such things before; they were part of what made the Young Napoleon at once so likeable and exasperating. The President knew by now not to put much stock in such expressions, which after all only meant that McClellan was feeling good again. Lincoln himself was not. The past week had been a strain, in some ways harder than the strain which had followed defeat on the plains of Manassas. His sadness had deepened, along with the lines in his face, though he still kept his wry sense of humor. A country editor called at the White House, claiming to have been the first to suggest Lincoln’s nomination for President. Lincoln was busy, but when he tried to escape by saying he had to go over to the War Department on business, the editor offered to accompany him. “Come along,” Lincoln said. When they got there he told his visitor, “I shall have to see Mr Stanton alone, and you must excuse me.” He turned to enter, but then, perhaps considering this too abrupt, turned back and took the editor by the hand. “Goodbye,” he said. “I hope you will feel perfectly easy about having nominated me. Don’t be troubled about it. I forgive you.”
As April wore on and the rains continued, so did the siege preparations; McClellan was hard at work. He had not wanted this kind of campaign, but now that he had it he was enjoying it immensely. Back in the West Virginia days he had said, “I will not throw these raw men of mine into the teeth of artillery and intrenchments if it is possible to avoid it.” He still felt that way about it. “I am to watch over you as
a parent over his children,” he had told his army the month before, and that was what he was doing. If it was to be a siege, let it be one in the grand manner, with fascines and gabions, zigzag approaches, and much digging and shifting of earth, preparatory to blasting the rebel fortifications clean out of existence. “Do not misunderstand the apparent inaction here,” he wired Lincoln on the 23d, concerned lest a civilian fail to appreciate all this labor. “Not a day, not an hour has been lost. Works have been constructed that may almost be called gigantic.”
Gigantic was particularly the word for the fifteen ten-gun batteries of 13-inch siege mortars being installed within two miles of Yorktown; on completion, they would be capable of throwing 400 tons of metal daily into the rebel defenses. Six were installed and ready before the end of the month, but McClellan held his fire, preferring to open with all of them at once. Meanwhile he neglected nothing which he thought would add to the final effect. On the 28th he wired Stanton: “Would be glad to have the 30-pounder Parrotts in the works around Washington. Am short of that excellent gun.” When Lincoln saw the request, his thin-stretched patience snapped. “Your call for Parrott guns … alarms me,” he answered on May Day, “chiefly because it argues indefinite procrastination. Is anything to be done?” McClellan replied that the Parrotts would hasten, not delay, the breaking of the enemy lines; “All is being done that human labor can accomplish.” The build-up continued. Then suddenly, May 4, it paid off. The noonday Sabbath quiet of the War Department telegraph office was broken by the brief, jubilant clatter of a message from the Peninsula: “Yorktown is in our possession. Geo. B. McClellan.”