374

MCCLELLAN'S COMPLAINTS.

troops under General Wool at Fortress Monroe, he was alarmed. The use of all these troops formed a part of his plan of operations against Richmond. He knew the ability and energy of Johnston, and anticipated what really happened, namely, the movement toward Richmond of the bulk of the Confederate army when it was ascertained that the National army was in force on the Peninsula. He therefore, from his head-quarters before Yorktown, sent a remonstrance to the Government against a further diminution of his force, declaring it to be his opinion that he would have to fight all the available troops of the Confederates not far from his position. "Do not force me to do so," he said, "with diminished numbers; but, whatever your decision may be, I will leave nothing undone to obtain success." He urgently requested Franklin's division of McDowell's corps to be sent to him, and it was done.

a May, 1862.

¿April 7.

* August 9.

Two days later,' McClellan telegraphed to the War Department that it was clear that he would have the whole Confederate force on his hands, "probably not less than one hundred thousand men, and possibly more;" and in a dispatch to the President, on the same day, he assured him that his own force, fit for duty, did not exceed eighty-five thou sand men. This statement astonished the President. McClellan had wearied him with complaints that he was not properly sustained, when the Government was doing all in its power for him compatible with its paramount duty to secure the capital. "Your dispatches," wrote the kindhearted President," "complaining that you are not properly sustained, while they do not offend me, do pain me very much." He then explained why Blenker's division was withdrawn, pointed to the necessity that held Banks in the Shenandoah Valley, and reminded the General that the explicit order that Washington should, "by the judgment of all the commanders of army corps, be left entirely secure,” had been neglected, and that was the reason for detaining McDowell. "There is a curious mystery about the number of troops now with you," continued the President. "When I telegraphed you on the 6th, saying you had a hundred thousand with you, I had just obtained from the Secretary of War a statement taken, as he said, from your own returns, making one hundred and eight thousand then with you and en route to you. You now say you will have but eighty-five thousand men when all en route to you shall have reached you. How can the discrepancy of twenty-three thousand, be accounted for?" The President then urged McClellan to strike a blow instantly. "By delay," he said, "the enemy will relatively gain upon you; that is, he will gain faster by fortifications and re-enforcements than you can by re-enforcements alone. And once more let me tell you," he said, "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, at 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." The President

1 This question was not answered then, nor has it been since. In his final report, McClellan gave the President's letter, but makes no comment on the significant question.

THE SIEGE OF YORKTOWN.

375

closed with an assurance that he never had a kinder feeling toward the General than he had then, nor a fuller purpose to sustain him, so far as in his most anxious judgment he consistently could. His last words were—" But you must act."

McClellan did not heed the closing injunction. Almost a month longer he hesitated in front of Magruder's feebly manned lines, digging parallels, forming batteries and redoubts, and preparing for an assault upon Yorktown with as much caution as did the American and French armies on the same field in 1781;' and at the close of April, when his preparations were almost completed, he reported the number of his entire army on the Peninsula, exclusive of General Wool's force at Fortress Monroe, which was fully co-operating with him,' at one hundred and thirty thousand three hundred and seventy-eight, whereof one hundred and twelve thousand three hundred and ninety-two were present and fit for duty. Franklin's division, which he so much desired, and with which he promised to invest and attack Gloucester Point immediately, as the preliminary to an assault on Yorktown, was promptly sent to him; but those troops, over twelve thousand strong, were kept in idleness about a fortnight on the transports in the York River, because, as McClellan alleged, his preparations for the attack were not completed when they arrived. He afterwards complained that the lack of McDowell's corps to perform the work he had promised to assign to Franklin, namely, the turning of Yorktown by an attack on Gloucester, was the cause of his failure to attack Yorktown, and "made rapid and brilliant operations impossible." Another and more restraining reason seems to have been the inability, during that fortnight, to decide whether to attempt to flank his foe or to make a direct attack upon him, until it was too late to do either.

In the mean time the Confederates had been active. Magruder, as we have observed, had made his five thousand men deceive McClellan with the appearance of an overwhelming force, and had kept him at bay; while Johnston, so soon as McClellan's movement was developed, put his army, then on the Rapid Anna, in motion for Richmond, and there kept it well in hand for the defense of the Confederate capital. General Robert E. Lee was then Jefferson Davis's Chief of Staff, and both he and Johnston considered the Peninsula, with the probability of the York and James rivers on each flank being opened to the National gun-boats, entirely untenable.

Soon after McClellan's arrival before Yorktown, Johnston visited and inspected the works there, and, being satisfied that its defenses were inadequate, urged the military authorities at Richmond to withdraw the troops, for he had no doubt that McClellan would (as he easily could have done) capture Yorktown, and with gun-boats and transports push rapidly to the head of the Peninsula. Johnston's desire was to concentrate all his forces around Richmond, and give the National troops a decisive battle there. He was overruled; and it was determined to hold the Peninsula, if possible,

He established a depot of supplies at Ship Point, on the Poquosin River, an arm of Chesapeake Bay, near the mouth of the York River. His first parallel was opened at about a mile from Yorktown, and under its protection batteries were established along a curved line extending from the York River on the right to the head of the Warwick River on the left, with a cord about a mile in length. He constructed 14 batteries and 3 redoubts, and fully armed them with heavy siege-guns, some of them 100-pounders and 200-pounders.

2 McClellan's dispatch to the President, April 7, 1862.

376

RE-ENFORCEMENTS SENT TO YORKTOWN.

until Huger might dismantle the fortifications at Norfolk, destroy the naval establishment there, and evacuate the seaboard.' At that time the whole sea-coast below Norfolk to St. Augustine, excepting at Charleston and its immediate vicinity, was in possession of the National forces. For the purpose of holding the Peninsula temporarily, re-enforcements were sent down from Richmond when it was known that McClellan was intrenching,' and Johnston took command at Yorktown in person.

The spectacle was now exhibited of one party nervously hesitating to strike, while the other party was as nervously anxious to flee from the expected blow. And here began that series of tardy movements which distinguished McClellan's campaign on the Peninsula, in which disease consumed more brave men than the storms of battle swept away.3

1 Battle-fields of the South, by an English Combatant, page 169. Mr. Swinton says (Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac, page 103) that this exposition of the views and wishes of the Confederate commander was given to him by Johnston himself.

2 General Magruder, in his report, declared that he expected an attack immediately after the arrival of McClellan, and his troops slept in the trenches; "but," he said, "to my utter surprise, he permitted day after day to elapse without an assault." In a few days Magruder perceived earth-works rising in front of his, and took heart. "Re-enforcements," he said, "began to pour in, and each hour the army of the Peninsula grew stronger and stronger, until anxiety passed from my mind as to the result of an attack upon us."

3 Twenty of the thirty days, during which the army lay before Yorktown, were stormy ones. Heavy thunder-showers followed each other in quick succession. The wearied and heated men who worked in the trenches, or who were on duty under arms, were compelled to rest on the damp ground at night, by which they were chilled. Fevers followed. "In a short time," says Dr. Marks, "the sick in our hospitals were numbered by thousands, and many died so suddenly that the disease had all the aspect of a plague."-The Peninsula Campaign in Virginia, by Rev. J. J. Marks, D. D., page 138.

General J. G. Barnard, McCiellan's Engineer-in-Chief, in his report to his commander at the close of the campaign says, after speaking of the toils of the troops for a month in the trenches, or lying in the swamps of Warwick: "We lost few men by the siege, but disease took a fearful hold of the army; and toil and hardships, unredeemed by the excitement of combat, impaired their morale. We did not carry with us from Yorktown so good an army as we took there. Of the bitter fruits of that month gained by the enemy, we have tasted to our heart's content."

EVACUATION OF YORKTOWN.

377

CHAPTER XV.

THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC ON THE VIRGINIA PENINSULA.

a 1862.

ENERAL MCCLELLAN'S batteries would all have been ready to open on the Confederate works on the morning of the 6th of May; but there was then no occasion for their use, for those works were abandoned. So early as the 30th of April, Jefferson Davis and two of his so-called cabinet, and Generals Johnston, Lee, and Magruder, held a council at the Nelson House,' where, after exciting debates, it was determined to evacuate Yorktown and its dependencies. A wholesome fear of the heavy guns of the Nationals, whose missiles had already given a foretaste of their terrible power, and also an expectation that the National gun-boats would speedily ascend the two rivers flanking the Confederate Army, caused this prudent resolution. The Merrimack had been ordered to Yorktown, but it had so great a dread of the watchful little Monitor that it remained at Norfolk. Already some war-vessels, and a fleet of transports with Franklin's troops, as we have observed, were lying securely in Posquotin River, well up toward Yorktown. These considerations caused immediate action on the resolutions of the council. The sick, hospital stores, ammunition, and camp equipage were speedily sent to Richmond, and on the night of the 3d of May, the Confederate garrisons at Yorktown and Gloucester, and the troops along the line of the Warwick, fled toward Williamsburg. Early the next morning General McClellan telegraphed to the Secretary of War that he was in possession of the abandoned

May 4.

1 This was a large brick house in Yorktown, which belonged to Governor Nelson, of Virginia, and was occupied by Cornwallfs as head-quarters during a part of the period of the siege of that post in 1781, when, at the instance of the owner, who was in command of Virginia militia engaged in the siege, it was bombarded and the British General was driven out. When the writer visited Yorktown in 1848, the walls of that house exhibited scars made by the American shells and round shot on that occasion. When he was there in 1866 the house, which had survived two sieges more than eighty years apart, was still well preserved, and the scars made in the old War for Independence were yet visible. At his first visit he found the grave-yard attached to the old Parish Church in Yorktown, and not far from the Nelson House (in which two or three generations of the Nelson family were buried), in excellent condition, there being several fine monuments over the graves of leading members of that family; but at his last visit that cemetery was a desolation-those monuments were mutilated, and the place of the steeple of the Church (which the Confederates used for a quarter-master's depot, and whose walls and roof only were preserved) was occupied by a signal-tower, erected by Magruder. The Nelson house was used as a hospital by the Confederates.

378

CONFEDERATE WORKS AT WILLIAMSBURG.

post, and added: "No time shall be lost. I shall push the enemy to the wall."

At that hour a vigorous pursuit of the fugitives had begun by the cavalry and horse-artillery under General Stoneman, followed along the Yorktown road by the divisions of Generals Joseph Hooker and Philip Kearney, and on the Winn's Mill road, which joins the former within two miles of Williamsburg, by the divisions of Generals W. F. Smith, Darius N. Couch, and Silas Casey. Those of Generals Israel B. Richardson, John Sedgwick, and Fitz-John Porter, were moved to the vicinity of Yorktown, to be ready to go forward as a supporting force, if required, or to follow Franklin's.division, which was to be sent up the York River to West Point, to co-operate with the pursuing force on the flank of the fugitives, and to seize that terminus of the Richmond and York River railway. General Heintzelman was at first charged with the direction of the pursuit, but the General-in-Chief changed his mind, and directed General Edwin V. Sumner, his second in command, to go forward and conduct the operations of the pursuers. McClellan remained at at Yorktown, to make arrangements for the dispatch of Franklin up the York.

The Confederates had, some months before, constructed a line of strong works, thirteen in number, across the gently rolling plateau on which Williamsburg stands. These were two miles in front of that city at the narrowest part of the Peninsula, the right resting on a deep ravine near the James River, and the left on Queen's Creek, near the York River. The principal work was Fort Magruder, close by the junction of the Yorktown and Winn's Mill roads. It was an earth-work with bastion front, its crest measuring nearly half a mile, surrounded by a wet ditch, and heavily armed. The others were redoubts, similar to those cast up around Washington City. At these works the retreating Confederates left a strong rear-guard to check the pursuers, while the main body should have time to place the Chickahominy River between it and the advancing Nationals.

EDWIN V. SUMNER.

1 Yorktown presented to the victors evidences of great precipitation in the final departure of the troops, as well as deliberate preparation for a diabolical reception of the Nationals after the flight of the garrison. The Confederates left most of their heavy guns behind them, all of which were spiked. They also left their tents standing; and near wells and springs, magazines; in the telegraph office, in carpet bags and barrels of flour, and on grassy places, where soldiers might go for repose, they left buried torpedoes, so constructed and planted under bits of board, that the pressure of the foot of man or beast would explode them. By these infernal machines several men were killed, and others were fearfully wounded. Mr. Lathrop, Heintzelman's telegraph operator, had his foot blown off above the ankle. "The rebels," wrote General McClellan, "have been guilty of the most murderous and barbarous conduct in planting torpedoes here. I shall make the prisoners remove them at their peril." By his order some Confederate officers, who were prisoners, were compelled to search for and exhume them. They knew where they were planted, and it was a fitting work for such men to perform.

TORPEDO.