This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [87]
This suspicion led to increasing fragmentation of the Federal forces in Virginia. In the Shenandoah Valley there was a Union army of ten thousand men under Nathaniel Banks, an important Republican leader from Massachusetts who rated a general’s commission for his services to the party (he had been Speaker of the House of Representatives) but for no other discernible reason; and farther west, in the western Virginia mountains, there were fifteen thousand more under none other than John Charles Frémont, the Pathfinder himself, uneasily resurrected this spring and given another chance to lead troops in action.
All of these bodies — McDowell’s, Banks’s and Frémont’s — had dual roles to play, and if they were ever to act in harmony the direction would have to come from the War Department, because they were not particularly answerable to anyone else. All of them were supposed, first of all, to protect Washington. In addition, McDowell was expected to march down and help McClellan capture Richmond. Banks was to maintain Union control in the valley, and Frémont was expected to do nothing less than move down the long diagonal into eastern Tennessee, occupying a portion of the vital east-west railway line, bringing aid and comfort to the pro-Union folk in that area, and ultimately capturing Knoxville.
All of this might just possibly have worked if the Confederate defenses had remained properly supine. Everybody was supposed to assume that it would work, anyway, and when McClellan got his men in line before Johnston’s entrenchments on the outskirts of Richmond he formed his army on that assumption.
Six miles from Richmond the Chickahominy River flowed sluggishly along, roughly parallel to the James; an unimpressive little stream with marshy banks and an amazing capacity for overflowing them whenever it rained, coming down through an eroded, farmed-out, pine-thicket country where all the roads were bad and no decent maps existed. Because he expected McDowell to come down at any moment, McClellan extended a wing of his army to meet him; formed his troops, that is, astride the Chickahominy, part of them on the south side confronting Johnston and part of them north of it confronting nobody much but prepared to make contact with McDowell. Militarily it was a bad position, for a sudden rain could make the Chickahominy impassable at any moment, but if McDowell showed up on schedule the risk could be taken.
Johnston quickly detected the flaw in McClellan’s position, and at the end of May, when a quick downpour turned the Chickahominy into a foaming, menacing torrent, he attacked the smaller part of McClellan’s army that lay south of the river, hoping to destroy it before it could be reinforced.
For two days the armies fought, in swamps and clearings around a farm known as Seven Pines and a railroad station called Fair Oaks, and the result was a bloody stalemate. Luckily for the Union, Confederate staff work was wildly inefficient and Johnston’s attack was not made as he had planned it; many assault units did not get into action at all, others got in one another’s way, and weaknesses in the Union position were not exploited. Also, McClellan’s engineers had bridged the Chickahominy, and the bridges held in spite of the flood, so that ample reinforcements could be rushed to the scene. In the end, neither army had lost anything of consequence — except for five or six thousand soldiers on each side, whose loss was just the small change of warfare — and life in each camp went on about as it had gone before. The one significant result of this battle was that Joe Johnston was wounded; to replace him, Jefferson Davis sent in Robert E. Lee.
The defect in McClellan’s position remained, for McDowell was still expected. But McDowell never did get there (although a good portion of his troops