Kitabı oku: «The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct. Volume 1 of 2», sayfa 23
CHAPTER XXVIII
The Seven Days' Battles
It was explained in the last chapter that Lee's first object when he took personal charge of the army defending Richmond was to raise McClellan's siege of the Confederate capital, drive him away, and transfer the scene of active operations to some more distant field.
To that end, first of all, he had strengthened the army at Richmond by calling to it every man that could be spared from coast defense and from the regions farther south. Next he had set Jackson at work in the Valley, to occupy the forces there and in West Virginia, and by threatening Washington to divert from McClellan's reinforcement an additional army of 40,000 men which had been intended to strengthen him into irresistibility.
When Jackson, beset by four armies, had escaped from two of them and had defeated the other two, Lee sent strong reinforcements to him in a conspicuous way, so that he might seem about to advance down the Valley, cross the Potomac and in strong force occupy the region north of the Potomac and threaten the capture of Washington itself.
By this strategy Lee had managed to detain 65,000 Federals in the Valley, and 20,000 or 30,000 more in and around Washington, whose fighting force must otherwise have been added to McClellan's already superior army before Richmond. Then he had managed to have Jackson suddenly and secretly quit the Valley, with the force that had there achieved such spectacular results, together with the troops that had been ostensibly sent to reinforce him for an aggressive campaign and by a rapid movement to join the army at Richmond and assist it in a supreme endeavor to dislodge McClellan.
The situation then was this: Relying upon a reinforcement of 40,000 men under McDowell, McClellan had dangerously divided his army, keeping about half of it north and about half of it south of the Chickahominy river. His desire was to press forward his siege operations on the east of the Confederate capital and at the same time to maintain a threatening force north of the city. It was his purpose so soon as McDowell should add his 40,000 men to this army on the north, to sweep forward with the combined forces and irresistibly to push a conquering column into Richmond.
But Lee had baffled all these plans by his masterful strategy. He had compelled the diversion of McDowell to the Valley, and while the authorities at Washington were nervously expecting Jackson to swoop down upon that city, Jackson with his whole force, which had slipped out of the Valley, suddenly appeared at Ashland, about a dozen miles northwest of Richmond and immediately upon McClellan's right flank.
In the meanwhile Lee had sent Stuart – perhaps the most daring and enterprising of the Southern cavalry leaders – with a body of 1,200 or 1,500 horsemen and two guns, to the rear of McClellan's position, there to find out the disposition of troops, the condition of the roads and bridges, and whatever else might open the way to that gigantic operation of offensive defense which Lee intended presently to undertake.
Stuart moved promptly into McClellan's rear and swept around it like a whirlwind. Finding that a tardy resistance was taking the form of an organized effort to cut off his retreat by the route over which he had come, the gaily enterprising cavalier of the South, instead of turning back and trying to retrace his steps as his enemy expected him to do, decided to ride on all the way around McClellan's army and thus spectacularly to emphasize the imperfection of McClellan's precaution for the protection of that rear which Lee was planning presently to assail tempestuously. He rode completely around McClellan, crossing his line of communications, rebuilding a bridge which had been destroyed for the purpose of cutting him off and entrapping him, and returning to Richmond with a loss so small as to be scarcely worthy of mention in an official report.
This raid was made on the twelfth and thirteenth of June, and equipped with the detailed information secured by it Lee planned to assail McClellan on the twenty-sixth of June with a force sufficient to dislodge him from his besieging positions, to break his line of communication and supply by way of the White House on the York river, and to compel his retreat from the front of the Confederate capital to some point on the James river, where his gunboats could afford him needed protection.
For the purposes of this operation Lee had a force somewhat inferior in men and guns to McClellan's, but not greatly inferior. On the other hand McClellan's army was badly placed, with half of it on the north and half of it on the south of the Chickahominy, neither half being within easy supporting distance of the other, while the line of communication and supply by way of the White House was peculiarly vulnerable in case of an attack from the rear.
Reckoning upon these advantages, it was Lee's plan to have Jackson move down from Ashland, assail McClellan's right wing in flank and rear, drive back his forces and thus open the crossings of the river to the other Confederate corps, which were to cross one after the other and assail the enemy in front while Jackson should attack him in rear and flank.
The plan miscarried in part. For once Jackson was not on time, and, after waiting for him until the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of June A. P. Hill grew impatient of the delay, and pushed his corps across the river at Meadow Bridge and, after a strenuous fight, drove the Federals out of Mechanicsville, without any help from Jackson. Longstreet and D. H. Hill at the lower crossings also grew impatient of delay, and without waiting for orders crossed and engaged the enemy. On the next morning Jackson was with them and he led the advance.
The plan of battle was that Jackson, with D. H. Hill for support, and keeping well in rear of McClellan's fortified positions, should push rapidly forward towards the York-river railroad, which constituted McClellan's sole line of communication and supply, while A. P. Hill and Longstreet, advancing upon Jackson's right, should attack McClellan in flank, front and rear whenever he might seriously oppose Jackson's movement.
There was some further miscarriage of plans, and in consequence of a delay in Jackson's advance Longstreet and Hill fell upon the right wing of McClellan's army posted in a strong strategic position at Gaines's Mills before the advance under Jackson was ready to strike its blow.
The Confederates here encountered a very obstinate resistance and they were not able to force the position until Jackson came up and joined in the assault. It was a critical moment of the war. Had McClellan been able to hold this position the Confederate campaign of offense must have completely collapsed, and with a superior force, the Federal general would have been free to conquer Richmond at that leisure which his engineering soul so greatly loved.
But with Jackson's force added to the commands of Longstreet and Hill, the Confederates, after a very determined and bloody contest, drove the Federals from their position and made themselves prospective masters of McClellan's sole line of communication with his only depot of supplies at the White House.
There was nothing now for McClellan to do but retreat as best he could to the James river at Harrison's Landing and make that, instead of the White House, a base of supplies. To do that was exceedingly difficult, as McClellan had open to him only one road and that a very bad one, while the Confederates on his flank had many roads by which to intercept and annoy his retreat.
During the course of that retreat, which was attended at every step by bloody contests, McClellan wrote in great bitterness of spirit to the Secretary of War in Washington (Mr. Stanton) on the twenty-eighth of June: "If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any other persons in Washington [obviously meaning Mr. Lincoln]. You have done your best to sacrifice this army."
McClellan, with an overwhelmingly superior force, had invested Richmond on the east and north. There he had strongly fortified himself. He had pushed his advance to within four miles of the Confederate capital. He had brought up tremendous siege guns and had apparently made himself complete master of the situation. Then Jackson, the two Hills, Longstreet and Ewell, under direction of Robert E. Lee, had fallen upon his flank and rear and had driven him out of one position after another with fearful slaughter, until his White House communication was cut off, and nothing remained to him but retreat to a new base on James river. The Confederates confidently calculated upon cutting off that retreat also and compelling the surrender of an army superior to their own in numbers, arms, resources and everything else except fighting ability.
This they would very probably have accomplished if McClellan had not developed in answer to a pressing need a fighting quality which he had not before shown, and his army a resolute determination to endure punishment such as none but the best of veterans are expected to show.
McClellan's one hope, one purpose, was to march his army out of the swamps and escape from the ceaseless Confederate assaults to a point on James river where the resistless fire of the gunboats might protect his men from further attack and give them a chance to rest. To that end, he retreated night and day, standing at bay now and then as the hunted stag does, and fighting desperately for the poor privilege of running away.
And the splendid fighting of his men was a tribute to the skill and genius with which he had created an effective army out of what he had described as "regiments cowering upon the banks of the Potomac, some perfectly raw, others dispirited by recent defeat, others going home." Out of a demoralized and disorganized mass reinforced by utterly untrained civilians, McClellan had within a few months created an army capable of stubbornly contesting every inch of ground even while effecting a retreat the very thought of which might well have disorganized an army. For soldiers in retreat do not usually fight as soldiers do when advancing upon an enemy. They are apt to be filled with the sentiment of hopelessness which retreat suggests and to hesitate to risk their lives in contests that seem to offer no adequate return for sacrifice.
If McClellan conspicuously failed as an energetic commander, in this his first important campaign, he succeeded at any rate in demonstrating the perfection of that work of organization by means of which he had created the splendid Army of the Potomac out of raw recruits and panic-stricken fugitives from battle.
At Gaines's Mill they gallantly endured a loss of no less than 9,000 men, and while they were driven from their position at last, they lost nothing of their morale, but were ready two days later to fight an equally determined battle, though it was the battle of a beaten and broken army which had been driven by force out of a supremely advantageous position and was now seeking safety in a flight that knew no ceasing night or day, except now and then a pause to offer a sullen resistance to an ever-present and pressing foe, and to ward off complete destruction by the offer of battle wherever the ground gave opportunity for resistance.
Here was McClellan's reward; here was his glory. This army of his a few months earlier under such a succession of defeats would have broken into panic-stricken rout. Thanks solely to his discipline and his dominant influence, it now endured compulsory and disastrous retreat with fortitude and stubbornly contested every inch of the blood-soaked ground.
It outnumbered Lee's force and its equipment was immeasurably superior to his. Under a commander of high gift for field work it might perhaps have beaten Lee and forced its triumphant way into Richmond. Under the commander it had it did itself great honor by retreating in good order and stubbornly resisting the Confederate advance wherever it was permitted to do so.
McClellan being now in full retreat and considering only those problems which related to escape, abandoned the position at Fair Oaks and posted Sumner and Heintzelman at Savage's Station. Their sole function was to guard the flank of the hurriedly retreating Federal army. To that end they were ordered to defend the position at Savage's Station until nightfall, or, in other words, until McClellan's retreating army should have passed that point in its hurried flight.
Here the Confederates under Magruder attacked with fury and the Federal general Heintzelman was driven into retreat. But Sumner heroically held his ground until nightfall, thus accomplishing McClellan's purpose, though at cost of a fearful loss in killed and wounded. He was so hard pressed indeed that when he retired at nightfall, he was forced to leave all his wounded in the enemy's hands and make a precipitate retreat to avoid the capture of his entire force.
Fortunately his enemy was a civilized one, so that his wounded men, left in their hands, were as tenderly cared for as if Federal surgeons had had them in charge. The only difference was that Federal surgeons had all possible medicaments and surgical appliances, while the Confederates, by reason of the blockade, lacked many life-saving agents, particularly the quinine which men wounded after long campaigning in the Chickahominy and White Oak swamps needed as imperatively as a shipwrecked crew needs life-lines and breeches-buoys. The war was so far civilized that the surgeons on either side eagerly did their best for such of the enemy's wounded as might fall into their hands. But it was still so far savage, – and it remained so to the end – that the side which possessed a navy shut out from the other as contraband of war the medicines necessary to the saving of human life and the rescue of the wounded from a needless death, as resolutely as it shut out gunpowder itself. In other words, the blockade was to this extent a part of that savagery which makes war upon the sick and wounded and other non-combatants as determinedly as it does upon stalwart men with guns in their hands and cartridge boxes strapped around their waists. There is cruelly no room for doubt that during the Seven Days' battles thousands of gallant fellows on both sides were buried in the fetid mud of those swamps, who might have been saved, had the world then been civilized enough for the Federals to let the Confederates have the quinine, the calomel and the opium they needed for the salvation of the lives of those who could fight no more, whether Federal or Confederate in their allegiance.
No nation is even yet civilized enough for this. "War is all Hell," said General Sherman, and its hellishness is nowhere so aggressively manifest as when it denies to a hard-pressed adversary the medicines necessary to the salvation of human life, the rescue from death of those who are already incapacitated, either by wounds or by disease, from further fighting. It is quite legitimate and logical to forbid the sending of food supplies to your enemy, because food is the foundation of every army's resisting power. But when a starving army surrenders, as Lee's did at Appomattox, the first care of its conqueror is to issue rations to the men who have ceased to fight, as Grant issued them on that historic occasion, even before the terms of capitulation could be written out. But it is a very different and a very much more barbarous thing to deny to surgeons in the field the means of saving human life whether the subjects of such life-saving happen to belong to the one army or to the other. The people of the United States are to-day paying princely sums as pensions to the families of those who died under Confederate surgeons' hands simply because the laws and usages of war forbade to those surgeons the medicines necessary to their life-saving work, and treated life-saving appliances as they treated gunpowder and arms, as contraband of war. Why should this hideous wrong have existed after the middle of the nineteenth century? Why should it continue to exist at the dawn of the twentieth? Are we, after all, only savages under a thin veneer of pretended civilization?
On the thirtieth of June the Confederates again assailed McClellan's retreating columns at Frazier's farm. A fearful contest ensued, for so superbly had McClellan organized and disciplined his army that even after days of disaster and depressing retreat it stood ready still to resist and to fight for every inch of ground.
Here the Confederates confidently expected to overwhelm and capture McClellan's army, compelling its surrender. And there is small doubt that such must have been the outcome of the action had Lee's lieutenants accomplished that which he had set them to do. But Magruder and Huger failed Lee at the crisis. It was his plan that they should assail the Federals in flank with all possible vigor, while Jackson, Longstreet and A. P. Hill should press them upon the rear of their retreat which now became their front for purposes of battle. The destruction of McClellan's army seemed a certainty. But neither Magruder nor Huger arrived in time to make Lee's plan of assault successful. There was a bloody battle, but by reason of the delay of these two lieutenants it was an abortive one, failing utterly to accomplish that final and decisive overthrow and capture of McClellan's army upon which Lee had reckoned as the crowning achievement of this Seven Days' campaign.
The failure of these two generals to fulfil their obligations – a failure which resulted in the baffling of Lee's supreme purpose at the very moment when their presence must have given him quite all that he desired of victory – might well have been made the subject of an inquest by court martial or by a court of inquiry. But as Lee in the exceeding gentleness of his nature omitted to order any such inquest, the matter presents no authoritative basis of fact on which the historian may rest an award of blame. This much, however, seems to be certain – that if Huger and Magruder had done what Lee had ordered them to do, and what they might easily have done, McClellan's army must have been destroyed or captured on that thirtieth day of June, 1862.
As it was, McClellan fought all day and at night resumed his retreat, still doggedly intent upon that one difficult problem of "saving this army," concerning which he had written so doubtfully and so despairingly and so bitterly in his heart-wrung protest to Secretary Stanton.
After a fearfully bloody struggle the Federal army was able during the night to retire toward Malvern Hill, a position which the Confederates could not assail without exposing themselves to the destructive cross fire of the Federal fleet in the James river.
McClellan had now been completely dislodged from his position on the east and north of Richmond. He had been defeated in battle day after day, and driven out of his fortifications into a helpless retreat to the cover of his gunboats in the James river. His base of supplies at White House had been utterly broken up. He had lost in this series of battles no less than 15,249 men. The Confederates, being the assailants, had suffered even greater losses.
The Confederates at this point made one disastrous mistake. They had believed that McClellan would retreat by the route by which he had come, and in that belief they had remained where they were for twenty-four hours. During that precious time McClellan had moved his enormous wagon train and his great herd of 2,500 cattle towards his new base.
At White House General Casey loaded all the supplies he could upon transports and sent them to the new base. But he was obliged to burn millions of pounds of food and destroy hundreds of tons of ammunition which he could not remove. Trains of freight cars were loaded with food and ammunition and deliberately switched off the railroad tracks and into the river to prevent them from falling into the possession of the Confederates.
In brief McClellan's defeat was disastrous in the extreme; but by reason of the failure of Lee's lieutenants to do their proper part at the critical time the Federal commander was spared the humiliation of a surrender. He escaped instead to Malvern Hill after a succession of bloody defeats and after sacrificing the greater part of his reserve stores of food and ammunition at what he had established as a secure base of supplies.
It is not easy to imagine a completer or more disastrous defeat than this of the Seven Days, or an enforced retreat more humiliating. Yet at the last moment McClellan was enabled, by the mistake or the misconduct of Lee's lieutenants, to escape to Malvern Hill, under cover of his gunboats, and there Lee mistakenly assailed him, thus giving him, at the end of a series of conspicuous defeats, the appearance at least of a compensating victory.
Malvern Hill is rather a high plateau than a hill in the proper sense of the term. It lies about sixty feet above the surrounding country. It is a mile wide and a mile and a half long. At its base is a network of streams and impassable swamp lands, constituting a natural fortification practically impassable to any army in the field except at one point where a narrow road leads up the hill. The plateau lies so close to the James river that gunboats anchored in that stream can command its one approach with deadly certainty.
Here McClellan stood at bay. Here a wise direction should have made an end of the Confederate pursuit of him. To assail him there was to invite needless slaughter with no hope of any result commensurate with the inevitable sacrifice of human life.
But the Confederates were flushed with a week of continuous victories, and they hurled themselves recklessly upon Malvern Hill, hoping there to retrieve their lost opportunity of destroying or capturing the army that a week earlier had besieged and threatened Richmond.
The assault upon such a position ought not to have been made at all. Still worse, it was blunderingly made. The Confederates were not ready to bring their whole force into action when the first advance occurred, or in any wise to support the assailing force. Seven thousand men, with six guns, charged up the slope. There were thirty guns in position to sweep them away as with a broom, and many times seven thousand men to resist their advance. There was also the terrific fire of the gunboats to tear their columns into shreds and to throw their men into confusion. Still more important perhaps was the fact that the Confederate artillery had not yet been organized as a separate arm of the service. Each brigade had its battery, but there was nowhere any authority to bring these scattered batteries together and make them effective by massing them. Six guns in the presence of thirty were quickly put out of action, and throughout the day there was a like disproportion, due to the mistaken system which assigned batteries to brigades instead of organizing the whole artillery force into a single arm of the service and placing each corps of it under a commander of its own who could mass it at will and make it effective by concentration.
McClellan had massed his artillery; Lee had not massed his. The result was that McClellan's artillery fire quickly dismounted Lee's guns and rendered them useless.
After this first fruitless assault was repelled, there was nothing but artillery dueling for some hours. It was not until late in the afternoon of July 1 that Lee was ready to assail his enemy with his entire force. Then there was a strange lack of concert. One division after another attacked without support and was beaten back for want of it. At no time did the Confederates hurl their whole force upon their enemies. They fought gallantly, but in detail, and therefore without effect.
The fighting was continued till nine o'clock in the evening. Its net result was that the Confederates had failed to dislodge McClellan from his strong position. But they had so nearly accomplished that object that McClellan dared not risk another day's trial of the issue, even in his supremely advantageous position. He withdrew during the night to Harrison's Landing under cover of his gunboats, and the Seven Days' battles were done.
No military operation was ever more dramatic than this. At the beginning of that fateful week McClellan, with about 120,000 men, was closely besieging the Confederate capital. His heavy guns were almost within shelling distance of the city, and an army of 40,000 men or more, was marching to his reinforcement. At the end of that week's fighting the broken remnant of his army was thankfully cowering under cover of a resistless gunboat fire, with siege abandoned, works deserted, millions of dollars worth of stores destroyed, and such a record of daily defeats as falls to the lot of few armies in the field.
But one thing had been demonstrated, McClellan had made an army out of the exceedingly raw material furnished to his hand. He had converted "a mere collection of regiments cowering on the banks of the Potomac, some perfectly raw, others dispirited by recent defeat, some going home," into an army capable of meeting and fighting Lee at Mechanicsville, Frazier's Farm, Gaines's Mills, Savage's Station and Malvern Hill.
Henceforth the war was to be fought out by armies of seasoned soldiers and not by raw recruits and panic-stricken volunteers.
This great series of battles had cost the Confederates about 19,000 men and the Federals 15,249. It had made an end of the second attempt to conquer Richmond and in that way to finish the war. It had left the Confederates as conspicuously victorious in the east as they were conspicuously defeated in the west.
