This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [84]
Yet the march was not quick. McClellan got his army to the peninsula before Johnston did, and for a few crucial days there was nothing much there to stop him. Yorktown was fortified, and a sketchy line of works ran across the peninsula from York River to the James, but there were no more than fifteen thousand armed Confederates present. McClellan had fifty-three thousand men with him, more were coming down on every boat, and one hard smash would probably have settled things. But McClellan was an engineer and he wanted to study the situation with an engineer’s careful eye, and while he was at his studies the local Confederate commander played a game on him.
This officer was General John Bankhead Magruder, an imposing-looking gentleman whose military talents were limited but who for years had been an enthusiast for amateur theatricals, and the show he put on now had a sure professional touch that completely baffled McClellan. Magruder marched his skimpy forces back and forth and up and down, making a great show, behaving as if his force was unlimited, and McClellan was greatly impressed; he concluded presently that the Confederate line was too strong to be stormed, and so he halted his army, began to wheel up a ponderous array of siege guns and heavy mortars, built works for their protection — and, in the end, lost an entire month, during which time Johnston and his army showed up and the invasion came to a stalemate.1
Other things went wrong, military errors being cumulative.
The Union navy ruled the waters, and it had been supposed originally that any Rebel line on the peninsula could easily be outflanked: warships could steam up either of the rivers, hammering down any fieldworks that might exist and landing troops in the Rebel rear. But just at this time the navy had utterly lost control of the waters around Hampton Roads, and the flanking device McClellan had counted on was not available. This had happened because when the Federals evacuated Norfolk navy yard in the spring of 1861 they had done an imperfect job of destruction on one warship which they had been obliged to leave behind — U.S.S. Merrimac, a powerful steam frigate, temporarily immobilized because of defective engines.
Merrimac had been burned and scuttled, but when the Confederates took over the yard they raised the hulk, found it largely intact, and with vast ingenuity created a new marine monster that almost won the war for them. Merrimac was cut down to her berth deck and was given a slanting superstructure with twenty-four-inch oaken walls covered by four inches of iron plating, with ports for ten guns. For Merrimac’s bow the unorthodox naval architects devised a four-foot iron beak. The defective engines, not at all improved by having spent some weeks at the bottom of the harbor, were more or less repaired, the vessel was rechristened Virginia, and early in March this unique creation came steaming out into Hampton Roads to upset Yankee strategy.
She looked like nothing anybody had ever seen before. Before and abaft her superstructure, her decks were just awash, so that from a distance the craft looked like a derelict barn adrift on the tide, submerged to the eaves. She drew twenty-two feet of water, her decrepit engines wheezed and creaked and frequently broke down, she was so unhandy it could take half an hour just to turn her around — and at that moment there were not more than three warships in the navies of the world that would have been a match for her. She cruised about, sinking two wooden warships with ease and driving another ashore, and the frustrated Yankee gunners who fired whole broadsides at her at point-blank range discovered that they might as well have been throwing handfuls of pebbles: the missiles bounced high in the air when