This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [89]
The result of all of this was that McDowell never did make his move down to help McClellan, and by the middle of June the Army of the Potomac was still waiting, part of it on one side of the Chickahominy and part of it on the other, in a position that fairly invited attack. And the Confederates in front of Richmond were now under General Lee, to whom nobody ever had to extend such an invitation more than once.
4. Delusion and Defeat
The real trouble was away down inside somewhere. McClellan had his problems, to be sure. His government had interfered with his plans, it had promised troops that were not sent, and it had all but openly accused him of wanting to lose the war — or at least of not wholeheartedly wanting to win it. But the tragedy that was about to unfold in the steaming swamps and pine flats around Richmond came mostly from within the man. At bottom, it was the tragedy of a man who could not quite measure up.
McClellan had nearly all of the gifts: youth, energy, charm, intelligence, sound professional training. But the fates who gave him these gifts left out the one that a general must have before all others — the hard, instinctive fondness for fighting. Robert E. Lee was one of the most pugnacious soldiers in American history, and McClellan himself did not like to fight. He could not impose his will on the man who stood opposite him. He was leading an offensive thrust that had taken him to the suburbs of the southern capital, yet it was just a question of time before the initiative would be taken away from him.
By the end of the third week in June, McClellan had an effective strength, present for duty in front of Richmond, of approximately one hundred and five thousand men. They were arrayed in secure fieldworks, safe from any direct counterthrust, and although the humid lowland heat was so oppressive that many men had fallen ill and the air was hideous with the odor of bodies still unburied from the Fair Oaks-Seven Pines battles, morale was high. The men understood McClellan’s plan and believed in it: to advance by slow stages, fortifying each gain, wheeling the heavy siege guns forward until finally they could blast the Confederate works out of the way and go on into Richmond.
Lee understood this plan, too, and on the surface it did not appear that there was much he could do to stop it. When he had scraped together the last possible reinforcements (including Jackson’s men, who finally slipped down from the valley to join him) he had perhaps eighty thousand men. During most of June his total was far short of that, and it could never go any higher. His defensive works were not nearly as powerful as they were to become two years later. If he was to drive McClellan away he would have to work something like a military miracle.
McClellan’s own hopes were high. During the first three weeks of June his dispatches to the War Department and his letters to his wife (as revealing a set of documents as any general ever wrote) were full of promises. He was always going to make his big move in just two or three more days — as soon as the rains stopped, as soon as so-and-so’s division joined him, as soon as this or that or the other thing was all ready. The two or three days would pass, the rains would stop, the other things would work out right, but nothing would happen. Never could he bring himself to the point of action.1
He believed that he was horribly outnumbered. He had always believed it — even in the fall of 1861, when Johnston waited in his works at Manassas with no more than half of McClellan’s strength. He had believed it on the peninsula in April, when Johnston was writing scornfully that “no one but McClellan would have hesitated to attack.” He believed it now. Lee, he was convinced, had between one hundred and fifty thousand and two hundred thousand men, possibly more.
These figures came mostly from Allan Pinkerton,