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| BREVET MAJOR-GENERAL JOHN G. BARNARD. | BREVET BRIGADIER-GENERAL J. J. ABERCROMBIE. |
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The last stand made by McClellan for delivering battle was at Malvern Hill. This is a plateau near Turkey Bend of James River, having an elevation of sixty feet, and an extent of about a mile and a half in one direction and a mile in the other. It is so bordered by streams and swamps as to leave no practicable approach except by the narrow northwest face. Here McClellan had his entire army in position when his pursuers came up. It was disposed in the form of a semicircle, with the right wing "refused" (swung back) and prolonged to Haxall's Landing, on the James. His position was peculiarly favorable for the use of artillery, and his whole front bristled with it. There were no intrenchments to speak of, but the natural inequalities of the ground afforded considerable shelter for the men and guns. It was as complete a trap as could be set for an army, and Lee walked straight into it. Under ordinary circumstances, both commander and men would properly hesitate to attack an enemy so posted. But to the confidence with which the Southerners began the war was now added the peculiar elation produced by a week's pursuit of a retreating army; and apparently it did not occur to them that they were all mortal.
In the first contact seven thousand Confederates, with six guns, struck the left of the position. They boldly advanced their artillery to within eight hundred yards of the cliff; but before they could get at work, a fire of twenty or thirty guns was concentrated upon their battery, which knocked it to pieces in a few minutes; and at the same time some huge shells from a gunboat fell among a small detachment of cavalry, threw it into confusion, and turned it back upon the infantry, breaking up the whole attack.
Lee was not ready to assault with his whole army till the afternoon of July 1st. An artillery duel was kept up during the forenoon, but the Confederate commander did not succeed in destroying the National batteries, as he hoped to: on the contrary, he saw his own disabled, one after another. The signal for the infantry attack was to be the usual yell, raised by Armistead's division on the right and taken up by the successive divisions along the line. But the Confederate line was separated by thick woods; there was long waiting for the signal; some of the generals thought they heard it, and some advanced without hearing it. The consequence was a series of separate attacks, some of them repeated three or four times, and every time a concentrated fire on the attacking column and a bloody repulse. The men themselves began to see the hopelessness of it, while their officers were still urging them to renewed efforts. "Come on, come on, my men," said one Confederate colonel, with the grim humor of a soldier; "do you want to live forever?" There were some brief counter-charges, in one of which the colors were taken from a North Carolina regiment; but in general the National troops only maintained their ground, and though fighting was kept up till nine o'clock in the evening, the line—as General Webb, then assistant chief of artillery, tells us—was never for one instant broken or the guns in danger. This battle cost Lee five thousand men, and at its close he gave up the pursuit. The National loss was less than one-third as great. That night McClellan withdrew his army to Harrison's Landing, on the James, where he had fixed his base of supplies and where the gunboats could protect his position. This retreat is known as the Seven Days, and the losses are figured up at fifteen thousand two hundred and forty-nine on the National side, and somewhat over nineteen thousand on the Confederate.
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| GRAPEVINE BRIDGE. |
From that time there was an angry controversy as to the military abilities of General McClellan and the responsibility for the failure of the campaign, and partisanship was never more violent than over this question. The General had won the highest personal regard of his soldiers, and they were mostly unwilling or unable to look at the matter in the cold light of the criticism that simply asks, What was required? and What was accomplished? The truth appears to be, that General McClellan, like most men, possessed some virtues and lacked others. He organized a great army, and to the end of its days it felt the benefit of the discipline with which he endowed it. But with that army in hand he did not secure the purpose of its creation. He was an accomplished engineer, and a gigantic adjutant, but hardly the general to be sent against an army that could move and a commander that could think. There can be no doubt that the Administration was over-anxious about the movements in the Shenandoah, and should have sent McDowell's corps to McClellan at once; but neither can there be much doubt that if Little Mac, the Young Napoleon, as he was fondly called, had been a general of the highest order, he would have destroyed Lee's army and captured the Confederate capital with the ample forces that he had. It was not General McClellan alone that was in a false position when his army was astride the Chickahominy, but the Administration and the people of the loyal States as well. Their grand strategy was radically vicious, for they stood astride of the great central question of the war itself.
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| GENERAL McCLELLAN'S ARMY BETWEEN BIG BETHEL AND YORKTOWN. |
To a student of the art of war, this disastrous campaign and the many criticisms that it evoked are exceedingly interesting. Nearly every military problem was in some way presented in it. Two or three quotations from the best sources will indicate its importance and the complicated questions that it involved. General McClellan himself says in his report: "It may be asked why, after the concentration of our forces on the right bank of the Chickahominy, with a large part of the enemy drawn away from Richmond, upon the opposite side, I did not, instead of striking for James River fifteen miles below that place, at once march directly on Richmond. It will be remembered that at this juncture the enemy was on our rear, and there was every reason to believe that he would sever our communications with our supply depot at the White House. We had on hand but a limited amount of rations, and if we had advanced directly on Richmond it would have required considerable time to carry the strong works around that place, during which our men would have been destitute of food; and even if Richmond had fallen before our arms, the enemy could still have occupied our supply communications between that place and the gunboats, and turned their disaster into victory. If, on the other hand, the enemy had concentrated all his forces at Richmond during the progress of our attack, and we had been defeated, we must in all probability have lost our trains before reaching the flotilla. The battles which continued day after day in the progress of our flank movement to the James, with the exception of the one at Gaines's Mill, were successes to our arms, and the closing engagement at Malvern Hill was the most decisive of all."
One of General McClellan's severest critics, Gen. John G. Barnard, in an elaborate review of the campaign, wrote: "It was a blunder unparalleled to expose Porter's corps to fight a battle by itself on the 27th against overwhelming forces of the enemy. With perfect ease that corps might have been brought over on the night of the 26th, and, if nothing more brilliant could have been thought of, the movement to the James might have been in full tide of execution on the 27th. A more propitious moment could not have been chosen, for, besides Jackson's own forces, A. P. Hill's and Longstreet's corps were on the left bank of the Chickahominy on the night of the 26th. Such a movement need not have been discovered to the enemy till far enough advanced to insure success. At any rate, he could have done no better in preventing it than he actually did afterward. … He has spent weeks in building bridges which establish a close connection between the wings of his army, and