This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [93]
Last act came on July 1. The army was getting away clean by now, the van coming to the James at Harrison’s Landing, where there were wide fields for camps, fine mansions for headquarters, deep water for supply vessels and protecting gunboats. Lee was following hard, furious because his enemy was getting away alive, and it was going to be necessary to fight one more rear-guard battle. The road to Harrison’s Landing led up over a broad, undulating height called Malvern Hill, and McClellan told Porter to take his own corps, as much of the rest of the army as he thought he would need, and all of the reserve artillery, and make a stand there.
Porter did as he was told. His position was immensely powerful — so much so that he needed few troops besides the men of his own hard-fighting corps. He had long ranks of artillery ranged hub to hub where they could sweep every field of approach, he had siege guns farther back, and in the river there was a naval squadron that could toss horrendous large-caliber shells into the Confederate ranks. If Lee had one more attack in his system, the army was going to be ready for him.
The attack came late in the afternoon. Lee had had much trouble getting his army into position — the roads were bad, the maps were poor, and officers and men alike had been worn to a frazzle by a week of fighting and marching — and when the Confederates tried to move up their artillery to soften the Yankee line with gunfire, Porter’s gunners all but murdered them; fifty Federal guns, at times, would turn on one Confederate battery trying to get into position, killing horses and men, smashing caissons, knocking guns off their carriages, and leaving a horrible pile-up of wrecked wood and metal and torn bodies. On no other field in the war did artillery have such dominance as the Federal guns had here at Malvern Hill.
Yet Lee’s assault was made; made, finally, by fourteen brigades, which struggled to cross open ground covered by one hundred guns, with solid Federal infantry waiting with musket fire for close range. Some of the men did reach the Union lines, briefly. Others managed to hold advance positions long enough to inflict a painful fire on Porter’s men. But most of the attacking columns were simply destroyed. The Confederate General D. H. Hill, who led one of the divisions in this attack, wrote afterward of his amazement at discovering that more than half of the six thousand casualties the Confederate army suffered that day were caused by cannon fire. This fight, he said, was not war, it was just plain murder; and on reflection he added that with Yankee artillery and Confederate infantry he believed he could whip anybody on earth.6
Murderous the fight had been, and when night came and the hot cannon were quiet at last, the Union position on Malvern Hill was wholly unshaken. Lee’s army, in fact, had had something like a disaster. The important factor, however, here as in the fight at Mechanicsville, was that neither McClellan nor Lee was prepared to act as if there had been anything but a Confederate victory.
McClellan conceivably might have resumed the offensive next day. He had a firebrand of a division commander, one-armed Phil Kearny, who stormed and swore in great fury because McClellan would not make a drive for Richmond the next morning, and even Porter — very careful and intensely loyal to McClellan — wondered if the army might not have won a great victory on the heels of Malvern Hill. But McClellan would not hear of it. He had Porter bring his men and guns down off the hill after dark, and by the morning of July