Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [287]
McClellan’s catalogue of gripes and concerns was endless. There were bridges to be built, bad roads, regiments to be reorganized. When Lincoln eventually ordered McDowell to reinforce him, the general continued to protest that “if I cannot fully control all his [McDowell’s] troops I want none of them, but would prefer to fight the battle with what I have and let others be responsible for the results.” Finally, he confided in his wife, “utmost prudence” was essential. “I must not unnecessarily risk my life—for the fate of my army depends upon me & they all know it.”
McClellan’s chronic delays allowed General Lee to take the initiative once again. During the last week in June, the Confederates launched a brutal attack on Union forces that became known as the Seven Days Battles. The bloody series of engagements on the plains and in the swamps and forests surrounding the Chickahominy River left 1,734 Federals dead, 8,066 wounded, and 6,055 missing or captured. At the end of the first day’s fighting, McClellan telegraphed Stanton to warn that he was up against “vastly superior odds.” He calculated that the rebels had 200,000 troops when in fact they had fewer than half that figure. He would carry on without the reinforcements he had repeatedly requested, but, he continued, if his “great inferiority in numbers” caused “a disaster the responsibility cannot be thrown on my shoulders—it must rest where it belongs.” Irked, Lincoln replied that McClellan’s talk of responsibility “pains me very much. I give you all I can…while you continue, ungenerously I think, to assume that I could give you more if I would.”
As the fighting intensified in the days that followed, neither McClellan nor Lincoln was able to sleep. Success alternated between the two forces during the first two days. Then, on June 27, the Confederates scored a critical victory at Gaines’ Mill, forcing McClellan to retreat. “I now know the full history of the day,” McClellan telegraphed Stanton shortly after midnight. “I have lost this battle because my force was too small. I again repeat that I am not responsible for this.” The president “is wrong in regarding me as ungenerous when I said that my force was too weak. I merely intimated a truth which to-day has been too plainly proved.” Finally, he vindictively added: “If I save this Army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army.” When the supervisor of telegrams at the War Department read this defiant message, he was so appalled by the insubordinate tone and the extraordinary charge against the government that he directed his staff to strike the last sentence before relaying it to Stanton.
Even the revised telegram conveyed the accusation that would be leveled by McClellan and his supporters for years to come: victory would have been achieved but for the government’s failure to reinforce an overpowered McClellan. Even after the defeat at Gaines’ Mill, however, McClellan’s troops remained a strong and resilient force. In the days that followed, they fought hard and well, inflicting more than five thousand casualties at Malvern Hill while suffering only half that number. In truth, McClellan was psychologically defeated. “He was simply out-generaled,” Christopher Wolcott concluded. Instead of counterattacking, he continued to retreat from Richmond until his exhausted troops reached a safe position eight miles down the James at Harrison’s Landing. Equally depleted, Lee’s troops returned to Richmond, and the Peninsula Campaign came to an end. The Confederates had successfully secured their capital and gained an important strategic victory. It would take nearly three more years and hundreds of thousands more deaths for the Union forces to come as close to Richmond as they had been in May and June 1862.
CHAPTER 17