One of the haunting riddles of the American Civil War is the question of identifying its real turning point. It began as a simple struggle between two sections, and it became enormously complex, involving a lasting change in American society; as it changed, it ceased to be a war in which the Southern Confederacy could win its independence by one decisive stroke of arms and became one in which Confederate success depended on a dogged tenacity that would finally induce a war-weary North to give up the contest. To the end, the war remained one which the North could always lose, but somewhere along the line it became one which the South of its own efforts could no longer win. When and where did this change occur?
The natural place to seek an answer, of course, is in the mind of the soldier who knew most about it, General Robert E. Lee. This man of keen military intelligence never deceived himself in the least degree, and he obviously knew, long before the end, that the power to force a decision had passed out of his hands. But he kept his own counsel, then and thereafter.
On the painful retreat to Appomattox, Lee did say that he had never believed the Confederacy could win without help from Europe, but he did not enlarge on the remark and it is possible to suspect that it meant less than it seems to mean. To destroy the Army of the Potomac in one blow would of course have brought European recognition, but that recognition would have been a by-product of climactic victory rather than a cause. Once it had been possible to hope for such a victory; finally it was not; and although Lee must have known when the change came, he never told anyone about it. He just kept on fighting.
Clifford Dowdey, the able student of the history of Lee’s great Army of Northern Virginia, considers the riddle in a thoughtful new book entitled The Seven Days: The Emergence of Lee, and suggests that the one great moment of Confederate opportunity came earlier than is generally supposed—not at Antietam and not at Gettysburg, but in the tangled, bloody series of battles fought in front of Richmond at the end of June, 1862, the battles that are referred to now simply as the Seven Days.
Actually, the Seven Days were six, running from June 26 through July i. There was a skirmish on June 25 and a smaller one on July 2, and nobody really counted either one. The reverberating battle is remembered as “The Seven Days” and it might as well be accepted that way. An extra day’s violence somehow got inserted.
During these seven days Lee won a prodigious victory, repulsing the powerful offensive of the Federal General George B. McClellan and compelling McClellan’s Army of the Potomac to retreat to a cheerless camp at Harrison’s Landing, on the James River, thirty miles downstream from the Confederate capital. The victory had far-reaching consequences—it may well have kept the war going two years beyond its natural course—and it was so startling that McClellan soon persuaded himself that simply by escaping destruction he had accomplished something remarkable; but it left Lee disappointed. This one time he had thought that he could sweep the opposing army clear off the board, and he probably was right. It could have happened. The trouble was that neither Lee nor his army was quite ready for it.
Lee’s objective in the Seven Days, in short, was vastly different than it was at Antietam and Gettysburg; which is to say that it was unlimited. Both of his invasions of the North actually had rather limited aims. They were planned as moves that would take the war for a time out of Virginia, throw the Federals on the defensive, open the opportunity for successful maneuvers, and, just possibly, lead to an important victory on Northern soil. But in the Seven Days Lee went all out. Here there was a chance to destroy the Army of the Potomac root and branch, and from the moment of its inception Lee’s strategic plan tried to exploit that chance to the uttermost. The chance never quite returned. To win the war with one blow was impossible once this chance was gone.
Background for Crisis
By BRUCE CATTON
Naturally, Mr. Dowdey addresses himself to the question of how it all happened. Here, although he is working ground familiar to most Civil War students, he brings to an encyclopaedic knowledge of the facts a freshness of insight that makes the story seem new. If the tale has been told before it easily bears retelling, and although he does not labor his point unduly Mr. Dowdey never loses sight of the fact that behind his account of troop movements, bloody combats, and the errors of commanding generals there lies a picture of the nation’s greatest war reaching and passing its high moment of change. Here, not quite recognized at the time, was the moment of crisis. After McClellan’s beaten army retired to Harrison’s Landing, there was a different kind of war.
It was different chiefly because it was going to be longer. If McClellan had dispersed Lee’s army the war would have ended then in a final Northern victory, and if Lee had destroyed McClellan’s army there would have been a Southern victory, but either way the war would have been over. The revolutionary overturn that always lay just beneath the surface could have been averted, or at least muffled, and whether they remained one country or split into two, the people of America might have gone on much as they had gone before. But the thing had to end. If it went on, the war (having generated its own terrible pressures) would become harder, grimmer, more all-consuming, turning into something that could not be settled by a compromise but that must be fought out to a finish, continuing until one side or the other could fight no longer. The steamy June days that made soldiers of both sides so uncomfortable in the Chickahominy swamps were probably the last days in which the Civil War could have been kept an incident rather than an explosion.
Mr. Dowdey traces it from the beginning. Early in the spring of 1862 McClellan had taken his army to the tip of the Virginia peninsula and had begun to move up toward Richmond. Opposing him was the Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston-courtly, winsome, able to get along with everybody except his lawful superiors—commanding a much smaller army. Like McClellan, Johnston distrusted his government and was by it distrusted, and he faded back before the invasion without bothering to tell Jefferson Davis what he finally proposed to do. At the beginning of June, with his army arrayed along the Richmond suburbs, Johnston lashed back in the dual battle of Seven Pines-Fair Oaks: a bungled battle that settled nothing, its chief result being that Johnston was wounded in action and was replaced by General Lee.
Lee was no man for a passive defensive. He was as savagely aggressive as any soldier America ever produced, and when he took over, his one thought was to find the best way to smite this Yankee army where it would hurt most. McClellan, who was no more aggressive than Johnston had been, played into his hands. His army of more than 100,000 men was arrayed with 70,000 south of the Chickahominy, facing Richmond, and 3o,ooo-and-odd resting on the north side of the river protecting the right flank and the supply line, and for the rest of June this host remained more or less inert. Some day-when the roads dried, when reinforcements arrived, or when the phase of the moon was propitious—McClellan would mass everybody, wheel up his siege guns, and break a hole in the Confederate defenses. Meanwhile he would wait until all things were ready.
The Seven Days: The Emergence of Lee, by Clifford Dowdey. Little, Brown and Company. 265 pp. $6.75.
Lee refused to wait. He struck first, on June 26, hitting McClellan’s right at Mechanicsville. Lee had perhaps 75,000 men in all; he left between 20,000 and 25,000 south of the Chickahominy, to contain three times their number, and took everybody else across the river to crush McClellan’s right wing. The danger, of course, was that McClellan would catch on, break through Lee’s defenses south of the river, and bring the whole scheme to disaster. But McClellan let himself be deceived, and although Lee’s assault at Mechanicsville was beaten back, Lee attacked next day at Gaines’ Mill and carried the field. Now McClellan had neither a right flank nor a supply line, and since he was unable to see that what lay between his main body and Richmond was no more than a screen there was nothing for him to do but flee to the security of Harrison’s Landing and hope for the best. This he immediately proceeded to do.
The Lost Opportunity
By BRUCE CATTON
Lee had the game in his hand. McClellan’s army was penned in between the James and the Chickahominy, and on the map—and if Lee’s army had been what it was a year later—Lee had it in his power to destroy him. He could hang on McClellan’s rear, send his advance around to block his retreat, hit him in the flank as he moved, and win a shattering, conclusive victory. He saw it, planned it, ordered it—and learned that as things then stood he could not quite do it.
Part of the fault, as Mr. Dowdey points out, was Lee’s. He had commanded this army for less than a month and maneuvering a large army deftly was a skill he simply had not acquired. He had a staff that was almost wholly incompetent for this kind of operation, and he had not yet learned how to make certain that his principal lieutenants actually did the things they were ordered to do. Between army headquarters and the separate divisional commands there was a great deal of slippage; the Lee of the Seven Days had not become the Lee of Chancellorsville.
But most of the trouble came farther down the line. Lee’s army was not yet organized in army corps; everything depended on the work of the men who commanded divisions, and some of them just were not up to their jobs. (A singular fact, in this connection, is that the Federal government had enforced a corps command system on an unwilling army commander, but the Richmond government had refused to let its army commander have one. Some of McClellan’s corps commanders did their jobs poorly, but Lee had none at all.)
In James Longstreet and A. P. Hill, Lee had two division leaders who worked competently and aggressively. He also had such men as General Benjamin Huger, atrophied by age and long years of old-army routine; John B. Magruder, too excitable to understand what he was up against or to execute his orders properly; Theophilus Holmes, even more atrophied than Huger; and, last but not least, the famous Stonewall Jackson, who brought to the Seven Days a towering reputation and somehow failed to take advantage of any of his opportunities. Among them, the generals let McClellan get away. They made his retreat costly, they fought him in the swamps and on the hills, they left him feeling that he was lucky to be alive—but they did not destroy him, and the chance to destroy him was there.
The most spectacular failure, because it was the most unlikely, was that of Jackson. He was late in getting to the scene, and his tardiness made Mechanicsville a Confederate setback. His troops went into action piecemeal at Gaines’ Mill and failed to strike the hammer blow that was expected. He failed abysmally to hit the Federal flank at White Oak Swamp, letting a large part of the Federal army retreat unmolested across his front; the savage battle of Glendale was fought without him; and at Malvern Hill his men did not pull their weight. If Jackson were judged solely on his performance in the Seven Days he would have to be written off as a soldier of very moderate attainments.
His trouble, as Mr. Dowdey sees it, was simply that he was physically exhausted. He suffered from “stress fatigue” to an extent that temporarily robbed him of his mental and physical powers. Lee apparently recognized this. When he shook up his command after the Seven Days, exiling the Magruders and Holmeses and Hugers to distant fields, he retained Jackson, although for a time he reduced the size of the man’s command. But there is no disguising the fact that in this campaign Jackson was a bitter disappointment to him.
And, in the end, the seven-day battle was a disappointment also. Here was the one great opportunity to wind things up, and it came to General Lee before his army was able to take advantage of it. Winning a victory, he did not also win the war; he simply prolonged it; and because it was prolonged it became a very different war than it had been in the beginning. Abraham Lincoln had remarked, not long after the war started, that if it lasted long enough it would probably become “a remorseless revolutionary struggle,” and that is precisely what happened; after the summer of 1862 it had to be fought to a finish, so that at last it involved not merely a decision about continued union but a complete reshaping of American society. The Seven Days marked the turning point in the war, and the war itself became a turning point in American history.
So this book is more than just one more account of a bloody battle. It is an examination of one of those critical moments when history goes off on a new course. The Army of Northern Virginia was born then, tested and tempered so that it became an incomparable military instrument—in a war which it could no longer hope to win.
