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The Richmond Campaign of 1862 The Peninsula and the Seven Days Edited by Gary W. Gallagher $34.95 hardcover |
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From The Richmond Campaign of 1862: The Peninsula and the Seven Days, edited by Gary W. Gallagher. Copyright (c) 2000 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
The 1862 Richmond Campaign in Perspective Gary W. Gallagher The 1862 Richmond campaign exerted immense influence on the course of the Civil War. In the short term, its consequences reverberated through the armies that had maneuvered and fought up Virginia's Peninsula to the Confederate capital, as well as affecting the morale and expectations of untold thousands of civilians who had followed the action from behind the lines. In the broader sweep of the conflict, George B. McClellan's failure and Robert E. Lee's emergence as a successful field commander marked a decisive moment in the Eastern Theater that in turn shaped the larger direction of the conflict. A seemingly irresistible tide of Union military success between February and June 1862 receded rapidly after the Seven Days battles, opening the way for a stunning reorientation of the strategic picture in Virginia. Slightly more than two months after the battle of Malvern Hill, the Army of Northern Virginia, having won a victory at Second Manassas that built on its success at the Seven Days, stood poised to cross the Potomac River into United States territory. This reversal of northern military fortunes canceled earlier projections of victory within a framework that might have restored the Union much as it had existed on the eve of war. Because their premier army had been humbled by the rebels during the Richmond campaign, northerners had to confront the prospect of pursuing a harsher kind of war to defeat the Confederacy. That kind of war likely would bring the end of slavery and otherwise change the nature of society in a restored United States. Confederates meanwhile took heart at what they perceived as much improved chances of establishing their slaveholding republic. Anyone seeking to understand the 1862 Richmond campaign must take into account a variety of factors, some of which often are missing from studies of Civil War campaigns and battles. It is not enough to look at the immediate strategic background, examine the tactical ebb and flow once the armies engaged in combat, and count casualties and describe immediate post-battle movements to determine what had been won or lost. Civil War armies represented extensions of two democratic societies, and they operated within a complicated web of military, political, and social constraints. Although the Confederacy lacked the resources and manpower to defeat the North in an absolute sense, it could prevail if the northern people decided the war was too costly. Conversely, the North would win if the Confederate people proved unwilling to sacrifice any longer to achieve independence. The home fronts felt the impact of battles not only in terms of loved ones killed or maimed but also in the realm of political and social policy, and popular will in both societies fluctuated markedly in response to events at the military front. The most important operations, such as the 1862 Richmond campaign, cast shadows far beyond the time when armies marched away from battlefields. Historians sometimes assess the impact of battles or the efficacy of generalship by examining casualties and gauging the immediate consequences for the respective armies. A pair of arguments from two influential books will illustrate this point. In How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War, Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones argued that individual battles and campaigns counted for little during the Civil War because armies were unable to deliver knockout blows. Improved weaponry and the organizational character of the forces involved gave the defending party an advantage that guaranteed no commander would craft an American Cannae. "Understanding the indecisiveness and, therefore, the relative insignificance of battles," stated Hattaway and Jones, "is simply another way of perceiving the primacy of the defense when well-articulated and relatively maneuverable units of rifle-armed infantry dominated the battlefield." During the Civil War, "battles ceased to have their old importance and victors might well suffer proportionately or even absolutely higher casualties than the vanquished." The Seven Days fit this mold well, witnessing "attrition distinctly favorable to the Union" but being perceived as "a Confederate victory, because victory is customarily determined by who retreats from the battlefield." Hattaway and Jones observed that the 1862 Richmond campaign allowed Lee to avoid a siege for a time but only at hideous cost. The confrontation between McClellan and Lee had "resulted in frontal battles with heavy casualties on both sides and little real change in the strategic situation."[1] Alan T. Nolan's Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History focused even more than How the North Won on casualties as a crucial yardstick in evaluating military campaigns. Conceding that Lee's offensive during the Seven Days saved Richmond from McClellan's investing force, Nolan emphasized that Confederate dead and wounded totaled nearly 20 percent of the Army of Northern Virginia while in the Army of the Potomac the figure amounted to less than 11 percent. Such victories proved counterproductive because they bled precious manpower the Confederacy could ill afford to lose. Lee's devotion to the offensive during the 1862 Richmond campaign and elsewhere won headlines but in the end shortened the life of the Confederacy. "If one covets the haunting romance of the Lost Cause," asserted Nolan, "then the inflicting of casualties on the enemy, tactical victory in great battles, and audacity are enough." He went on to suggest that Lee's penchant for costly offensives, such as that waged against McClellan in June-July 1862, shortened the life of the Confederacy. Nolan quoted from Lt. Col. George A. Bruce, an early-twentieth-century critic of Lee, to buttress his argument that too many historians have heaped too much praise on Lee for his contributions to the southern war effort: "'If the art of war consists in using the forces of a nation in a way to secure the end for which it is waged, and not in a succession of great battles that tends to defeat it,' a very different assessment of Lee's martial qualities is required."[2] With casualties and the essential indestructibility of armies as analytical benchmarks, it is possible to interpret the 1862 Richmond campaign as a sprawling series of marches and battles that exacted a butcher's bill exceeding 50,000 casualties and left the contestants bloodied but intact.[3] The Federals withdrew only as far as Harrison's Landing on the James River, whence they continued to menace the Confederate capital. The South had lost irreplaceable manpower, but in many ways very little seemed to have changed and the war continued. A full appreciation of the Richmond campaign requires far more attention to the larger picture. How did it figure in the entire tapestry of war during the first half of 1862? What were expectations behind the lines? How did Union and Confederate civilian morale change as a result of the campaign? How did the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia change? Was the conflict significantly different because of what happened on the Peninsula and at Richmond during that spring and early summer? The military situation in the first half of 1862 followed a script decidedly favorable to the Union. Along the Mississippi River, United States forces made excellent progress toward the strategic goal, identified most famously by Winfield Scott in his so-called Anaconda Plan, of taking control of the great waterway and dividing the Confederacy into eastern and western parts. Well before the first shots at Mechanicsville opened the Seven Days fighting on the afternoon of June 26, Federal naval and land forces had seized Confederate strong points on the upper and lower Mississippi: Columbus, Kentucky, on March 3; New Madrid, Missouri, on March 14; Island No. 10 on April 7; New Orleans on May 1; and Memphis on June 6. The stretch of river between Baton Rouge and Vicksburg remained in southern hands, but as a conduit for transporting goods and an outlet to the Gulf of Mexico for exports, the Mississippi had ceased to be part of the Confederacy. Federal gains in the Western Theater rivaled those along the Mississippi. Henry W. Halleck, a much maligned and too often dismissed figure, presided over a spectacular run of victories in Middle Tennessee and northern Mississippi. With Ulysses S. Grant as Halleck's principal field commander, Union forces captured Fort Henry on February 6 and Fort Donelson ten days later, opening the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers respectively, and stopped a Confederate counteroffensive in the horrific struggle at Shiloh on April 6-7. Don Carlos Buell's army occupied Nashville, with its crucial manufacturing, transportation, and distribution facilities, on February 25; just more than three months later, on May 30, Halleck himself led a mammoth northern force into the railroad center of Corinth, Mississippi. In less than four months, Federals had seized control of a vast swath of the Confederate heartland between Kentucky and Mississippi, a region rich in iron, industry, agricultural products, livestock, and other vital resources. Thomas L. Connelly has underscored the magnitude of this loss to the Confederacy, a judgment southern ordnance chief Josiah Gorgas rendered at the time. The failure to muster all available troops to defend Middle Tennessee before the fall of Henry and Donelson, wrote Gorgas on June 12, 1862, "was the great mistake of the War."[4] Confederate failures at the margins joined those in major theaters. On the New Mexico frontier, Federals repulsed a small southern army of invasion in the battle of Glorieta on March 28. Three weeks earlier, Samuel R. Curtis had defeated Earl Van Dorn and Sterling Price at Pea Ridge in northwestern Arkansas. In North Carolina, Roanoke Island fell on February 8, New Bern on March 14, and Fort Macon near Beaufort on April 26. None of these actions by itself would have been terribly significant, but as small pieces of a large mosaic they merit attention. No part of the puzzle loomed larger than Virginia, and Confederates could find little there to counter depressing news from west of the Appalachians and along the Carolina coast. Joseph E. Johnston's army, the largest rebel force in the Eastern Theater, abandoned its lines near Manassas Junction early in March and retreated from a second position along the Rappahannock River a month later. The action shifted to the Peninsula, where George B. McClellan and his Army of the Potomac landed at Fort Monroe and moved slowly toward Richmond. Confederates gave up Yorktown on the third of May, Williamsburg on the fifth, and Norfolk on the ninth. The ironclad CSS Virginia (popularly called the Merrimac), which had raised hopes in many a Confederate breast after its historic victories over several wooden warships on March 8, was scuttled on May 11. "No one event of the war," remarked Josiah Gorgas from his post in Richmond, "not even the disaster of Ft. Donelson created such a profound sensation as the destruction of this noble ship."[5] By the last week of May, 100,000 Federals under McClellan had reached the outskirts of Richmond, more than 30,000 under Irvin McDowell stood at Fredericksburg, and thousands of others lay in the Shenandoah Valley and western Virginia. The battle of Seven Pines or Fair Oaks closed the month with yet another southern failure, as Johnston's ill-executed assaults produced several thousand casualties but left intact the strategic status quo. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's Shenandoah Valley campaign supplied the only significant bright spot in this dismal Confederate picture. Between May 8 and June 9, against a group of minimally talented opponents, the dour Virginian won several small victories that cheered Confederates hungry for good news from the battlefield. Jackson's reputation soared among a populace that typically exaggerated the military, as opposed to the psychological, importance of what he had accomplished. The Valley campaign was consequential but in no way offset the larger reality that McClellan's army was closing in on Richmond. One last point about the military situation in early 1862 bears mention. Operations in the Eastern Theater almost certainly carried more weight than those elsewhere. This is not to say everyone looked to the East as the theater of decision--that surely was not the case. But a majority of civilians North and South, members of the United States Congress, and foreign observers almost certainly formed their primary impressions about how the war was going by reading accounts of eastern operations. Several factors explain this phenomenon. The centers of population clustered in the East, as did newspapers with the highest circulations. The largest and most prominent armies commanded by the most celebrated generals fought in the East, and they campaigned in the shadow of the respective national capitals. Some observers at the time, including Abraham Lincoln, lamented what they considered an undue focus on the East, as have a number of modern historians. Yet the fact remains that what happened during the 1862 Richmond campaign would exert all the more influence because of where it occurred.[6] Fighting near Richmond would administer a major jolt to the northern political front. As the first year of the conflict closed and the second began, the northern political scene featured cautious optimism about prospects for victory amid debate and flux concerning war aims. The Republican Party made progress on its legislative agenda, passing the Homestead Act on May 20 and preparing to enact Senator Justin Morrill's land grant college legislation, a transcontinental railroad bill, and an internal revenue bill (the last three would become law on July 2-3, 1862). The Republican vision of moving the United States toward the late nineteenth century as an industrial and agricultural giant driven by free labor seemed to be on track. But the northern public and Congress divided bitterly over emancipation and the question of what kind of Union they sought to restore. Most Democrats vociferously insisted they would risk lives and treasure to save the Union but not to free enslaved black people. The notion of striking at the South's social system by destroying slavery alienated Democrats, virtually all of whom would have seconded George B. McClellan's adamant opposition to adding freedom to Union as a northern war aim. As one student of Democratic politics during the Civil War has observed, the party "forcefully challenged the government's policies, particularly the administration's determination to use whatever means necessary to destroy the South and inflict blows against a social system in the name of winning the war."[7] The Republican majority overcame Democratic opposition, prohibiting the use of military power to return fugitive slaves to rebel owners on March 13, abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia on April 16, and prohibiting slavery in all Federal territories on June 19. Black and white abolitionists, Radical Republicans, and some moderate Republicans supported more sweeping legislation, and Abraham Lincoln, who wanted to control the issue himself, considered calling for emancipation as a measure necessary to defeat the Confederacy. McClellan's Richmond campaign served as a major wild card in this debate over emancipation. A Federal victory and the capture of Richmond, coming on the heels of so many northern successes elsewhere, might convince white southerners to abandon their cause. That in turn could end the war before the North decided to insist on emancipation as a precondition to restoration of the Union.[ill 1] The northern public expected success from the Army of the Potomac as summer approached in 1862. This expectation derived from the many triumphs on battlefields from New Mexico to the Atlantic coast, the cumulative effect of which prompted newspapers to indulge in lavishly optimistic projections about McClellan's prospects for a decisive victory. Editors across the North claimed that Confederate morale had plummeted, as when a New York Times headline described "®MDSD¯a panic throughout the south" in late April. Eric T. Dean's examination of northern press opinion during the Richmond campaign revealed startlingly naive articles and editorials: "Toward the beginning of the [Peninsula] campaign, the New York Tribune predicted the end of the war in sixty days, the New York Herald in seventy-five days, and the Indianapolis Daily Sentinel within a few months." No paper exceeded the recklessly upbeat writings of the New York Times, which as early as March 12 assured readers that the "final blow may now be struck which shall annihilate the rebel army as an organized force, and crush the Government of the rebel Confederacy at its Capital."[8] Northerners who read such accounts and followed the advances of United States armies understandably developed positive views about how the war would end.[9] Typical were Maria Lydig Daly, the wife of a Democratic judge in New York City, and Benjamin Brown French, a bureaucrat in Washington. On May 11, Daly reacted in her diary to a spate of good reports: "What splendid news! Norfolk taken, Portsmouth captured, the Navy Yard saved, the Merrimac ours, President Lincoln with the army before Norfolk! . . . Now there may be truth in what Mrs. McClellan told us yesterday, that the war would be over by the Fourth of July." A few weeks earlier, French had noted that the "Nation has been wonderfully excited, & Washington has, of course, been in a tumult. The news of victory after victory over the rebels has come and over them we have all rejoiced, and appearances indicate that the game of secession is nearly played out." French characterized the Confederate press as "despondent," adding that "every prestige of success is now with the Union-loving portion of the people." Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a Radical Republican who did not wish the war to end without emancipation, expressed mixed feelings in a letter to the Duchess of Argyll dated June 9. "It seems pretty certain that the military power of the rebellion will be soon broken," he noted. "What then? That is the great question. Seward assured me yesterday that it would 'all be over in 90 days.' I do not see it so."[10] Sentiment in the Confederacy contrasted sharply with that in the North. Every Union military success had bred a southern failure, promoting war weariness and an almost frantic need for victories to raise civilian morale. Shortages of food, territory lost to northern invaders, and stringent governmental actions added to a gloomy situation. By far the most important, and divisive, national legislation was the Conscription Act passed on April 16, 1862. The first comprehensive draft in American history, it sought to keep Confederate ranks filled at a time when enlistments had dwindled and thousands of twelve-month volunteers neared the end of their terms of service. Many adherents of state rights and individual freedom decried what they saw as a grotesque perversion of the ideals that had animated secessionists in 1860-61; others labeled the measure necessary to Confederate success. The debate raged as George B. McClellan inched inexorably toward Richmond. "There was a variety of opinion concerning conscription," one historian of the Confederate draft rather drolly observed. "Fundamentally, however, it did not harmonize with the individualistic instincts of Southerners and with their conception of genuine manhood."[11] The fact that Confederate armies had been losing ground in every quarter overshadowed conscription as a cancer eating at southern morale and will. The southern populace yearned for victories--especially offensive ones delivered by generals who took the initiative rather than merely countering Union movements. Testimony from six witnesses touches on themes present in a mass of letters and diaries. John Beauchamp Jones, a clerk in the War Department whose famous diary recounted myriad aspects of life in wartime Richmond, often described civilians impatient with a defensive strategy. Throughout the month of May, he carefully noted each of the milestones along the road that carried McClellan's army to Richmond without a major battle. For example, on the eighth he wrote that "Norfolk and Portsmouth are evacuated! Our Army falling back! The Merrimac is to be, or has been, blown up!" Six days later he used fewer exclamation points in an equally dreary entry. "Our army has fallen back to within four miles of Richmond," he wrote. "Much anxiety is felt for the fate of the city. Is there no turning point in this long line of downward progress?" Comments by a refugee in Richmond echoed Jones's language. "A gentleman, high in position, panic-struck," observed Judith W. McGuire in her diary, "was heard to exclaim, yesterday: 'Norfolk has fallen, Richmond will fall, Virginia is to be given up, and tomorrow I shall leave this city, an exile and a beggar.' Others are equally despondent, and, as is too frequently the case in times of trouble, attribute all our disasters to the incompetency and faithlessness of those entrusted with the administration of public affairs."[12] Two South Carolinians voiced similar concerns about the trajectory of Confederate military affairs. "Oh! Hattie, how many, many, sad reverses we've had since I received your letter," wrote Anna E. Kirtland to Harriet R. Palmer from Memphis on May 14. "It is useless to enumerate them. Of course you've read all about them. New Orleans was the saddest blow to us." Although Kirtland had heard that the fortifications at Vicksburg were invulnerable and would stop Yankee gunboats ascending the Mississippi, the long list of lost Confederate strongholds left her uncertain: "I've heard of so many impregnable forts that I have almost lost all faith in them." Henry William Ravenel placed his impressions on paper with no thought of sharing them with anyone. "When I think of our late disasters, I feel cast down, & almost at times disheartened," he admitted in his journal on May 17. Thanking God for what he termed "a sanguine & hopeful temperament," Ravenel added that he soon recovered "my buoyancy of spirits, & my strong unquenchable Faith in our ultimate success." Still, he foresaw a difficult road ahead that would demand an extreme effort. "We must fight on," he concluded, "for at the worst it can only end in ruin, & that is already announced to us as our portion by our insolent and boasting foe."[13] From Caroline County, Virginia, Helen Stuart Bernard spoke for many of the thousands of Confederates who had seen Union forces overrun their locales by late spring 1862. "The record of the past fortnight would contain only the outpourings of a vexed spirit," she wrote bitterly. "The enemy are in full possession of the country all around us. . . . I am weary & sick with grief, indignation & excitement." Cut off from Richmond, Bernard and her neighbors had to "read Yankee papers," which were "jubilant over the fall of N[ew] O[rleans] & Norfolk, the destruction of the Merrimac & the retreat of our Army on the Peninsula." A banker in Lynchburg betrayed anger toward the Confederate government as well as disappointment when bad tidings arrived from the Peninsula. "News that Norfolk had been evacuated and the navy yard destroyed," recorded William M. Blackford in his diary on May 12: "The Merrimac was blown up. This is almost incredible, and yet so fatuous has been the course of our policy that it may be true."[14] The absence of an army commander around whom the Confederate people could rally deepened the crisis. The first year of the war had seen four officers rise above their peers: P. G. T. Beauregard, the "Hero of Sumter" and co-victor at First Manassas; Joseph E. Johnston, who shared the laurels of Manassas and led the primary army in Virginia thereafter; Albert Sidney Johnston, the president's favorite, who directed affairs in the massive Western Theater; and Robert E. Lee, who brought to his Confederate service an impressive Revolutionary heritage and a reputation as Winfield Scott's favorite soldier. By the time of the Seven Days, Sidney Johnston lay dead of wounds at Shiloh after a decidedly mixed career in the field, and Beauregard had fallen out of favor with Jefferson Davis and gone into temporary exile after the fall of Corinth. In Virginia, Joe Johnston had retreated so often that many had come to question his abilities before he suffered a disabling wound at the battle of Seven Pines. Robert E. Lee stepped into Johnston's position with his public image much diminished because of controversial service in western Virginia and along the South Atlantic coast in 1861 and early 1862. Lacking an untainted general commanding a major army, Confederates made Stonewall Jackson their paramount military idol. Jackson seized headlines by leading his demi-army in the Shenandoah Valley to victory in five small battles. A pair of newspaper accounts suggest the fervor of southern reaction. On June 1, the Memphis Daily Appeal remarked that "the hopeless may look upon Jackson's banner and feel their energies renewed, their hearts cheered, and their souls reinvigorated." Eleven days later the Richmond Whig reacted to news of Jackson's victories at Cross Keys and Port Republic: "[Jackson's] little army is the pride of the South and the terror of the North. . . . Oh, for a dozen Jacksons!" Typical of those entranced by Jackson's exploits, South Carolinian Emma Holmes breathlessly described the battle of First Winchester: "Stonewall Jackson has achieved another glorious victory near Winchester, or rather succession of them after three days fighting--each day defeating a portion of Bank's army & finally completely routing it 'in worse than Bull Run style'--large numbers of prisoners and immense quantities of camp equipage and stores of every kind have fallen into our hands."[15] But Robert E. Lee rather than Stonewall Jackson would coordinate the defense of Richmond in June. He undertook his new duties without enjoying the nearly universal confidence among his fellow citizens that would be his hallmark a few months hence. Many civilians and soldiers who hungered for aggressive action doubted that Lee was up to the task. They thought he had performed timidly in western Virginia during the autumn of 1861 and deplored his penchant for entrenching while in Charleston during the winter of 1861-62. With vitriol typical of his writings, Edward A. Pollard described Lee in western Virginia as "a general who had never fought a battle . . . and whose extreme tenderness of blood induced him to depend exclusively upon the resources of strategy, to essay the achievement of victories without the cost of life." A North Carolinian who later would become an almost slavish admirer of Lee sounded a skeptical note upon learning that he had replaced Joseph Johnston. "I do not much like him," she wrote dismissively on June 2, "he 'falls back' too much." According to this woman, he had acquired a pejorative sobriquet even before his assignments in the fall and winter of 1861-62: "His knick name last summer was 'old-stick-in-the-mud'. . . . There is mud enough now in and about our lines, but pray God he may not fulfil the whole of his name."[16][ill 2] These brief summaries of events and opinion during the first half of 1862 indicate how much was at stake as the armies on the Peninsula moved toward their climactic battles outside Richmond. Flushed with military success, the North confidently expected McClellan to deliver a crowning triumph that would crush the rebellion. How such a victory would influence the debate over emancipation remained to be seen. Confederates struggled to maintain hope in the midst of economic hardship, turmoil over the draft, a relentless drumbeat of failure on the battlefield, and the absence of an army commander in whom they could invest their hopes. The Seven Days dramatically altered the military and nonmilitary elements of this picture. Although space prohibits a detailed review, a few observations will highlight the campaign's impact on the armies and the home fronts. Evidence of this impact, in turn, will serve as a reminder of the powerful connections between the military and civilian spheres during the Civil War. The Army of the Potomac is a good place to begin to assess the Richmond campaign's ramifications. George B. McClellan's reputation suffered among those officers and men in the army who believed he had retreated unnecessarily, given up favorable ground after repelling Lee's attacks at Malvern Hill, and fumbled a brilliant opportunity to capture the enemy's capital. Months of hard work spent pressing the rebels toward Richmond's defenses had come to nothing when the powerful Union host withdrew to Harrison's Landing, there to set up camp along the humid banks of the James River. No one expressed greater outrage at this result than Brig. Gen. Philip Kearny, the combative commander of the Third Division of Brig. Gen. Samuel P. Heintzelman's Third Corps. McClellan's cautious approach to warfare frustrated Kearny, who poured out his unhappiness in letters to his wife. Writing from Harrison's Landing on July 1, Kearny charged that "McClellan's treasons or mismanagement has thrown on us a great many partial Battles, of much severity, which he should have spared us. But all of which he invited by his bad arrangements." Nine days later, Kearny claimed that "McClellan's want of Generalship, or treason, has gotten us into a place, where we are completely boxed up. . . . And out of which nothing short of most bold and dashing moves can extricate us to be of any service." A sergeant in the 19th Massachusetts used less inflammatory language to make a similar point: "We are at a loss to imagine whether this is strategy or defeat." Mixing sarcasm with disgust, a junior officer in the engineers noted how some of McClellan's admirers "deify a General whose greatest feat has been a masterly retreat."[17] Far more numerous were soldiers whose disappointment at not taking Richmond failed to undermine their morale and confidence in McClellan. Three pieces of testimony will illustrate this point. A private in the 15th Massachusetts credited rebel generals with movements that compelled McClellan to retreat from the Chickahominy to the James, adding that the withdrawal "was one of the most brilliant achievements of the War." This soldier retained "the utmost confidence in George B. McClellan. No Gen. can expect to be successfull in each and every undertaking." A staff officer from Michigan alluded to diminishing hopes for success between May and late June. "At Yorktown I felt the most unbounded confidence," wrote Charles B. Haydon. ". . . After Fair Oaks & Stewart's raid the thought of beating them was less prominent in my mind than that it was impossible for them to beat us. The general feeling seemed to be let them come." As for the Seven Days and the Union retreat, Haydon conceded, "Few expected what has followed." Yet he insisted that "perfect confidence & good feeling" prevailed, describing how "we all cheered most heartily for country, cause & leader" on July 4 when McClellan "came around to see us." Hannah Ropes, a matron at Union Hospital in Georgetown, D.C., spoke with some of the wounded from Fitz John Porter's Fifth Corps. "None of our men feel defeated at all by the battles near Richmond," she stated, "and those who are not disabled for life wish to go back as soon as they are well enough."[18] Many Federal soldiers believed their government had failed to provide the men and material necessary for victory. Frederick Law Olmsted, general director of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, conversed with officers and enlisted men at Harrison's Landing immediately after the Seven Days. He concluded that the army believed it had fought well against a superior foe and only needed reinforcements to go after the rebels again. Some in the army were "utterly despondent and fault-finding," but "there is less of this than ever before, and fewer stragglers and obvious cowards. . . . Of what we saw after Bull Run there is not the slightest symptom." In a letter dated July 6, Olmsted urged Lincoln to send 50,000 fresh men to the Army of the Potomac. "Without these," he observed pessimistically, "the best army the world ever saw must lie idle, and, in discouragement and dejection, be wasted by disease."[19] The Richmond campaign exacerbated the already poisonous distrust between Democratic generals in the Army of the Potomac and Republicans in Washington. Radical Republican senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, a member of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, attacked McClellan unsparingly in the committee and on the floor of the Senate. Privately, Chandler called McClellan "an imbecile if not a traitor" who had "virtually lost the Army of the Potomac." Democratic newspapers defended the general, as when the New York Herald called for congressional committees to refrain from meddling in military affairs and opined that "only traitors and fools" would support Chandler.[20] In Lincoln's cabinet, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton lambasted McClellan's timid handling of the Richmond campaign and chronic pleas for more men and supplies. Three weeks after the battle of Malvern Hill, Chase "urged upon the President the importance of an immediate change in the command of the Army of the Potomac. . . . I said that I did not regard Genl. McClellan as loyal to the Administration, although I did not question his general loyalty to the country."[21] Lincoln himself journeyed to Harrison's Landing on July 8-9 for a visit to army headquarters. The Richmond campaign marked the first of several in which the president could not get his eastern commanders to use their full strength against the Army of Northern Virginia, and what he saw on the James did not encourage him. McClellan had prepared a confidential letter for Lincoln, dated July 7 and later known as the "Harrison's Landing Letter," which called for continuance of a restrained form of warfare against the Confederacy. "Neither confiscation of property . . . ," insisted McClellan, "or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment." The United States should abide by the "highest principles known to Christian civilization." David Donald has aptly described the president's reaction to "Little Mac's" suggestion: "That policy had been pursued for over a year and Lincoln was convinced that it had failed. He was ready to move on." Two days after returning to Washington, Lincoln appointed Henry W. Halleck general-in-chief, a move, wrote Donald, that "signaled a repudiation of McClellan, and of McClellan's view of the war."[22][ill 3] Lincoln thus moved much closer to the abolitionists and Radical Republicans who had demanded seizure of slaves and other property belonging to rebels. Later in July, deeply affected by the outcome of the Seven Days, Lincoln would inform his cabinet that he intended to issue a proclamation of emancipation. Congress, meanwhile, put the finishing touches on the Second Confiscation Act, a measure designed to free all slaves held by rebels. Senator Sumner explicitly tied passage of this act on July 17 to Union military failure in the Richmond campaign. "The Bill of Confiscation & Liberation, which was at last passed, under pressure from our reverses at Richmond," wrote Sumner in early August 1862, "is a practical act of Emancipation."[23] Had McClellan been the victor in July 1862, he certainly could have pressed his case for a softer policy more effectively. The consequences for millions of enslaved African Americans might have been momentous. Most northern civilians understood that the campaign had failed, though few of them believed it presaged Confederate independence. Some newspapers that had been wildly optimistic in April and May adopted a more prudent tone regarding what it would take to win the war.[24] Overall the North began to confront the unpleasant fact that enormous sacrifice and loss likely would be necessary. McClellan's retreat hit especially hard because hopes had been so high. Two well-known diarists captured the sobering impact of the bad news. Evaluating the campaign on July 4, Benjamin Brown French revealed the degree to which northerners had first been encouraged and then cast down by reports from the Richmond front. "I have been looking over my journal and am considerably amused to find how long we have all been expecting that Richmond would be taken!" he wrote. "And now the doings of the past week have driven back our immense army from within 4 miles of Richmond to 20! The loss of life has been immense. Our generals call it a strategic movement of McClellan to obtain a better base of operations! Two or three such strategic movements would annihilate our army." French did not doubt that Federal soldiers had fought well and believed they probably had been outnumbered. Although on July 4 he "almost despair[ed] of our ever taking Richmond," three days later he took heart from wounded officers in Washington who expressed complete confidence in McClellan. Those veterans harbored anger that the army had not been reinforced. As soon as McClellan received fresh troops, one officer told French, "he will take Richmond." New Yorker George Templeton Strong, a staunch Republican, concluded on the night of July 3 that McClellan had been "beat back by a superior force but not destroyed. The enemy was superior because we have been outgeneraled. The blame rests, probably, on the War Department. The remedy is speedy reinforcement." Eight days' reflection deepened Strong's melancholy: "We have been and are in a depressed, dismal, asthenic state of anxiety and irritabiliy," he wrote. "The cause of the country does not seem to be thriving just now."[25] Politics colored reaction to the Richmond campaign among many northern civilians. Democrats tended to blame the Lincoln administration and Congress rather than McClellan, stressing that the army should have been reinforced before the final battles around Richmond. Thus did Maria Lydig Daly, who had been so enthusiastic about McClellan's prospects in May, lash out at Republicans in her diary on July 3. McClellan had shown himself "an able general" during the retreat to the James and now occupied a strong position. The defeat was not his fault but "that of his enemies, who, to ruin him, would sacrifice a whole army. . . . It is time that Democrats should have something to say. Three quarters of the army are composed of them, yet every Democratic general is persecuted, and the Republicans do their best to get them out of the way." Elizabeth Blair Lee, the sister of Montgomery and Frank Blair and wife of naval officer Samuel Phillips Lee, described the army on July 3 as "disgusted with the conduct of the Govt." She understood that 20,000 men had embarked to reinforce McClellan, adding editorially, "Oh if they had been sent a month ago!! we might have been spared much sorrow on both sides of the lines--"[26] In the realm of foreign affairs, the Richmond campaign carried far more clout with French and British observers than any of the Union successes west of the Appalachians. A recent study of French newspapers during the Civil War found that as McClellan advanced on Richmond "many Frenchmen confidently expected an early end to the war." But opinion changed abruptly "when General Robert E. Lee drove McClellan away from the gates of Richmond" and followed up with other strategically offensive movements. In Britain, McClellan's repulse helped fuel support for recognizing the Confederacy during heated debates in Parliament. American diplomat Charles Francis Adams believed that the Richmond campaign had canceled the capture of New Orleans as a factor favoring the Union and persuaded many in Britain that the Confederate capital would never be taken. In a letter written July 18, 1862, French diplomat Ag‚nor-Etienne de Gasparin informed Lincoln that the "check sustained by the federal army before Richmond was certainly a situation of difficulty for the United States." The Frenchman went on to wonder why the North did not apply its greater military resources more effectively. Lincoln answered on August 4, claiming that the "moral effect was the worst of the affair before Richmond; and that has run its course downward." The president then betrayed frustration at the importance given events in Virginia compared to those farther west: "It seems unreasonable that a series of successes, extending through half-a-year, and clearing more than a hundred thousand square miles of country, should help us so little, while a single half-defeat should hurt us so much."[27] The "half-success" at Richmond had a seismic effect on the Confederacy's war for nationhood. Lee's debut as a field commander marked the most important watershed in the development of the Army of Northern Virginia--and one of the crucial turning points of the entire war. His victory during the Seven Days, however marred by tactical lapses, thrust him into the limelight as the Confederacy's only post-Manassas army commander with a major victory to his credit. That status helped solidify his hold on the field command he had long wished to exercise. Lee's leadership in June and July 1862 began an eleven-month process by which he would mold the army into a finely tuned instrument that won notable victories, rapidly became the most important national institution in the Confederacy, and helped sustain morale in the face of mounting odds and hardships on the home front. Although eclipsed in the popular imagination by Stonewall Jackson during the Richmond campaign and for a time thereafter, Lee soon rose to become the unchallenged military idol of the Confederacy. Fellow citizens began to compare him to George Washington, Lee's own model of a man and leader. The comparison was apt because Lee and his army would come to function much as Washington and the Continental army had during the American Revolution. Beginning with the Seven Days, Lee would shoulder an increasing share of the burden of sustaining morale among his nation's citizenry.[28] Although counterfactual speculation about what might have happened under different circumstances is usually pointless, Lee's rise to command offers a clear exception. It is easy to imagine the war taking a very different path if Joseph Johnston had escaped his wound at Seven Pines. He almost certainly would have retreated into Richmond (retreating is what Johnston preferred in almost all situations), there to be besieged and eventually conquered by McClellan. The avalanche of bad news from other theaters already had threatened to smother southern hopes for victory; the loss of its capital might well have destroyed the Confederacy. Lee's successful defense of the city reversed a downward trend and virtually guaranteed a much longer and more revolutionary struggle. James M. McPherson has ruminated about the "profound irony" inherent in Lee's victory: "If McClellan's campaign had succeeded, the war might have ended. The Union probably would have been restored with minimal destruction in the South. Slavery would have survived in only slightly modified form, at least for a time. By defeating McClellan, Lee assured a prolongation of the war until it destroyed slavery, the Old South, and nearly everything the Confederacy was fighting for."[29] Lee had pursued the kind of strategic and tactical offensive best suited to satisfy the expectations of the Confederate people. Two days before the battle of Mechanicsville, war clerk Jones noted public concern that McClellan might lay siege to the city before its defenders struck a blow. "Our people are beginning to fear there will be no more fighting around Richmond until McClellan digs his way to it," he wrote. Military inaction brought "fits of gloom and despondency" among the people, but when they "snuff battle in the breeze, they are animated with confidence." Lee's conduct during the Richmond campaign spawned such confidence and won plaudits from many who previously had groused about his timid style of generalship. The Richmond Dispatch had been among those doubtful of Lee's abilities but reversed course quickly after the Seven Days. "The rise which this officer has suddenly taken in the public confidence is without precedent," reported the Dispatch on July 9. Less than a week later, the Richmond Whig asserted that "by the brilliancy of his genius" Lee had silenced critics, "established his reputation forever, and . . . entitled himself to the lasting gratitude of his country." In far-off Columbia, South Carolina, Grace Brown Elmore thanked God for Lee's "glorious fight" at the Seven Days. "Thou hast answered our prayers," she wrote in her diary on July 25, "and given us one who is well able to guide us through this fearful time, and lead us on to freedom."[30] In the afterglow of victory, some Confederates lamented Lee's failure to achieve more. Varina Davis stood among them, complaining to her husband that McClellan's army should have been destroyed rather than merely driven back. Jefferson Davis reflected the attitude of most Confederates in replying that "our success has been so remarkable that we should be grateful and believe that even our disappointments were ordered for our gain." After all, McClellan's larger army had been forced from its entrenchments by a less well equipped Confederate force, had abandoned millions of dollars worth of supplies, and had given up on a campaign that consumed months to plan. "Our troubles you perceive have not ended," stated Davis gently, "but our chances have improved so I repeat be of good cheer." Other witnesses remarked about people who shared Varina Davis's view. A soldier who left the battle line to visit Richmond shortly after Malvern Hill found no "signs of any jubilation over our series of victories." Everyone professed to have had faith that the Army of Northern Virginia would prevail, and "all regretted the escape of McClellan." J. B. Jones mentioned "some sage critics" dissatisfied that "Lee does not follow up his blows on the whipped enemy." They were wrong, he thought; the "serpent has been killed, though its tail still exhibits some spasmodic motions." If anything, Jones worried that most Confederates were "too jubilant . . . over our recent success near the city." Overconfidence could prevent the degree of commitment necessary for ultimate victory.[31] A junior officer following events in Virginia from his station in Savannah offered an evaluation likely shared by many other Confederates. It revealed pride in the victory and a grasp of its larger implications, leavened with a wistful mention of possible opportunities lost. Lt. Charles C. Jones rejoiced in "the valor of our men and the success of our arms" that drove back "the hostile legions of the aggressor . . . in consternation and dread confusion." Sorry that Lee had not compelled the "unconditional surrender of McClellan and his boasted army of invasion," Jones understood that disadvantages of numbers and mat‚riel had worked against the Army of Northern Virginia. He knew the campaign had improved the Confederacy's chances for independence--"the tide has indeed turned," as he put it--and spoke of the depressing effect this defeat would have in the North. It would undermine civilian morale, boost the peace party, and frustrate Union diplomatic efforts. "It must teach them the utter impracticability of any theory which looks towards a subjugation," Jones predicted, and "will completely upset all the boastful schemes, and give the direct lie to all the vain promises, of their corrupt administration."[32] The Seven Days rapidly took on the aura of an unequivocal Confederate triumph. The observations of an English visitor to the battlefields in the autumn of 1862 doubtless reflected the opinions of the Confederates who accompanied him. "I had an opportunity, while at Richmond, of going over the celebrated battlefields which were the scene of the utter overthrow of the Federal army under General McClellan . . . when he was attempting to take the city," wrote W. C. Corsan. The Seven Days presented "a series of defeats inflicted on an enemy, probably succeeding each other more rapidly, and of a more crushing character, than can be found elsewhere in history." The beaten northern army fled to "a swamp--a defeated, terrified, demoralized mob." Only Federal gunboats at Malvern Hill and "consummate skill, and the greatest haste" during the retreat saved the Federals from "annihilation by their triumphant foes!"[33] The Richmond campaign also began the phenomenon of Confederates focusing progressively more on the Eastern Theater to determine the health of their cause. Lee had given them their first major victory in nearly a year, helping to erase some of the sting from losses in the Mississippi Valley, Middle Tennessee, and along the Atlantic coast. Over the next year, Second Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville would spread the impression that all good news emanated from the theater where Lee and his army operated. Under these circumstances, and with the additional importance of Richmond as a psychological, industrial, and governmental colossus, it should come as little surprise that Confederates fixed their hopes as well as their gaze on Virginia. As the armies watched each other below Richmond in July 1862, much of the recent campaign's impact already was apparent. Civilians and soldiers in the United States and the Confederacy could see the imprint of the campaign on political connections to military affairs, debate over war aims and policy, the command structures of the armies, civilian morale and attitudes, and the diplomatic front. They could only guess at some of the longer-term effects that stand out in retrospect. Modern students of the war should use that retrospective advantage to appreciate the full context within which the campaign was waged and the astonishing range of its immediate and long-range influence.
Notes
2. Alan T. Nolan, Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 82, 84, 106. For another work that stresses the degree to which Lee's bloody battles hurt the Confederacy, see Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson, Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage (University: University of Alabama Press, 1982). This book opens with a description of the costly frontal assaults at Malvern Hill. Four historians who essentially restate Nolan's arguments without adding anything new in the way of evidence or analysis are Edward H. Bonekemper III, How Robert E. Lee Lost the Civil War (Fredericksburg, Va.: Sergeant Kirkland's Press, 1997); John D. McKenzie, Uncertain Glory: Lee's Generalship Re-Examined (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1997); Bevin Alexander, Robert E. Lee's Civil War (Holbrook, Mass.: Adams Media, 1998); and Michael A. Palmer, Lee Moves North: Robert E. Lee on the Offensive (New York: Wiley, 1998). For the counterargument that Lee's campaigns lengthened the life of the Confederacy, see Joseph L. Harsh, Confederate Tide Rising: Robert E. Lee and the Making of Southern Strategy, 1861-1862 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1998), and chapter 3 of Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). In Davis and Lee at War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), xii, Steven E. Woodworth offers a thoughtful critique of Lee, concluding that his offensive-minded approach "was in fact one of two possible ways in which the South could conceivably have obtained its independence." (Woodworth believes the other way was a "thoroughly defensive, survival-oriented grand strategy so much praised by many modern scholars."). For a pair of very well-written earlier works that placed the Richmond campaign in a broad context, see Bruce Catton, Terrible Swift Sword (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963), and Clifford Dowdey, The Seven Days: The Emergence of Lee (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964).
3. Casualties at the three largest actions of the Richmond campaign were as follows: battle of Williamsburg (May 5)--2,239 U.S. and 1,703 C.S.; battle of Seven Pines or Fair Oaks (May 31-June 1)--5,031 U.S. and 6,134 C.S.; Seven Days battles (June 25-July 1)--15,849 U.S. and 20,141 C.S. The total of 51,097 killed, wounded, and missing does not include casualties from smaller actions and skirmishing. Figures for Civil War casualties are notoriously unreliable. These were taken from E. B. Long, The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, 1861-1865 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), 207, 220, 235.
4. On the value of the Tennessee heartland, see Thomas L. Connelly, Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 1861-1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), especially pp. 3-15. For Gorgas's quotation, see Josiah Gorgas, The Journals of Josiah Gorgas, 1857-1878, ed. Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), 42-43.
5. Gorgas, Journals, 45. Many contemporary accounts attest to the importance of the Virginia. See, for example, Fanny Hume, The Fanny Hume Diary of 1862, ed. J. Randolph Grymes Jr. (Orange, Va.: Orange County Historical Society, 1994), 94, and Edmund Ruffin, The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, ed. William Kauffman Scarborough, 3 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972-89), 2:301.
6. For a useful discussion of the predominance of the East by a historian who often champions the West, see Richard M. McMurry, Two Great Rebel Armies: An Essay in Confederate Military History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 1-9.
7. Joel H. Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860-1868 (New York: Norton, 1977), ix. McClellan consistently opposed adding emancipation as a goal for the Union. In November 1861, for example, he wrote: "I am fighting to preserve the integrity of the Union & the power of the Govt--on no other issue. To gain that end we cannot afford to raise up the negro question--it must be incidental & subsidiary" (George B. McClellan, The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan: Selected Correspondence, 1860-1865, ed. Stephen W. Sears [New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989], 128).
8. Eric T. Dean Jr., "'We Live under a Government of Men and Morning Newspapers': Image, Expectation, and the Peninsula Campaign of 1862," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 103 (January 1995): 15-17.
9. Dean, "'Government of Men and Morning Papers,'" 22-23, prudently points out that it is difficult to demonstrate that "media-generated images and expectations actually influenced public opinion" in 1862. Such a connection could be proven only "if one had access somehow to public opinion surveys of the 1860s"--and even then, as the modern experience with polls has shown, the results might be debatable. While taking this into account, I believe it is safe to assume that newspaper coverage during the first five and one-half months of 1862 helped foster optimism among northerners.
10. Maria Lydig Daly, Diary of a Union Lady, 1861-1865, ed. Harold Earl Hammond (New York: Funk & Wagnall's, 1962), 126-27; Benjamin Brown French, Witness to the Young Republic: A Yankee's Journal, 1828-1870, ed. Donald B. Cole and John J. McDonough (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989), 388; Charles Sumner, The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer, 2 vols. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 2:119.
11. Albert B. Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 17. Chapter 1 of Moore's pioneering work offers a range of testimony for and against conscription.
12. John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital, 2 vols. (1866; reprint, Alexandria, Va.: Time-Life, 1982), 1:123-24; [Judith W. McGuire], Diary of a Southern Refugee during the War (1867; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 113.
13. Louis P. Towles, ed., A World Turned Upside Down: The Palmers of South Santee, 1818-1881 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 323-24; Henry William Ravenel, The Private Journal of Henry William Ravenel, 1859-1887, ed. Arney Robinson Childs (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1947), 140-41.
14. Rebecca Campbell Light, ed., War at Our Doors: The Civil War Diaries and Letters of the Bernard Sisters of Virginia (Fredericksburg, Va.: American History Company, 1998), 32-33; Susan Leigh Blackford, ed., Memoirs of Life in and out of the Army in Virginia during the War between the States, 2 vols. (1894; reprint, Lynchburg, Va.: Warwick House, 1996), 1:145.
15. J. Tracy Power, "'There Stands Jackson Like a Stone Wall': The Image of General Thomas J. 'Stonewall' Jackson in the Confederate Mind, July 1861-November 1862" (M.A. thesis, University of South Carolina, 1984), 66, 83; Emma Holmes, The Diary of Miss Emma Holmes, 1861-1866, ed. John F. Marszalek (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 168-69. Power argues that Confederate newspaper editors deliberately sought to transform Jackson into a national hero: "The major Confederate newspapers, particularly the influential quartet of the Richmond Dispatch, the Richmond Enquirer, the Richmond Examiner, and the Richmond Whig, established and embellished Jackson's reputation, and by their portrayal of him insured that the public perception of Stonewall would be as the preeminent hero of the Southern cause" (p. 81). Other scholars would counter that Jackson's accomplishments needed no boost from newspaper puffery to create a groundswell of public acclaim.
16. Edward A. Pollard, Southern History of the War: The First Year of the War (1862; reprint, New York: Charles B. Richardson, 1864), 168; Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, "Journal of a Secesh Lady": The Diary of Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, 1860-1866, ed. Beth Gilbert Crabtree and James W. Patton (Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1979), 189.
17. Philip Kearny, Letters from the Peninsula: The Civil War Letters of General Philip Kearny, ed. William B. Styple (Kearny, N.J.: Belle Grove Publishing, 1988), 116, 125; Stephen W. Sears, To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992), 347.
18. Roland E. Bowen, From Ball's Bluff to Gettysburg . . . and Beyond: The Civil War Letters of Private Roland E. Bowen, 15th Massachusetts Infantry, 1861-1864, ed. Gregory A. Coco (Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1994), 109; Charles B. Haydon, For Country, Cause and Leader: The Civil War Journal of Charles B. Haydon, ed. Stephen W. Sears (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993), 263; Hannah Ropes, Civil War Nurse: The Diary and Letters of Hannah Ropes, ed. John R. Brumgardt (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), 56.
19. Frederick Law Olmsted, The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, vol. 4, Defending the Union: The Civil War and the U.S. Sanitary Commission, ed. Jane Turner Censor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 389, 392-93.
20. Bruce Tap, Over Lincoln's Shoulder: The Committee on the Conduct of the War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 122-26.
21. On Chase and Stanton, see Salmon P. Chase, The Salmon P. Chase Papers, ed. John Niven, 5 vols. to date (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1993- ), 1:350; Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles: Secretary of the Navy under Lincoln and Johnson, ed. Howard K. Beale, 3 vols. (New York: Norton, 1960), 1:95-97. Welles recounted a meeting in August 1862 at which Stanton heavily criticized McClellan's handling of the entire Richmond campaign.
22. McClellan, Civil War Papers, 344; David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 360-61. On Lincoln's change of policy, see also Mark E. Neely Jr., "Lincoln and the Theory of Self-Emancipation," in The Continuing Civil War: Essays in Honor of the Civil War Round Table of Chicago, ed. John Y. Simon and Barbara Hughett (Dayton, Ohio: Morningside, 1992), 46-50, 56-58. Neely concluded that by mid-July, Lincoln had decided that the "formidable power and dimensions of the insurrection" obliged the United States to take "extraordinary measures" against the Confederacy.
23. Sumner, Selected Letters, 2:122. On the relationship between the Seven Days and Lincoln's decision to push for emancipation, see Welles, Diary, 1:70-71. For a perceptive discussion of how the Richmond campaign fit into the movement toward a harsher northern war effort, see chapter 4 of Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
24. Dean, "Government of Men and Morning Newspapers," 18.
25. French, Witness to the Young Republic, 400-401; George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 3:236-37, 239. In Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861-1865 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 99, Michael C. C. Adams argued that McClellan's failure to defeat a smaller rebel army promoted a widespread belief in the North that Confederate soldiers and generals might be superior to their Union opponents. "McClellan's contribution to Southern prestige in the North is easily stated," wrote Adams. "He was given a huge and splendidly equipped army, which he handled co clumsily as to make the military machine look impotent. . . . More serious was the failure of the Peninsula campaign. McClellan had acted so haltingly that he made his enemies look brilliant, even when they often were not."
26. Daly, Diary, 157; Elizabeth Blair Lee, Wartime Washington: The Civil War Letters of Elizabeth Blair Lee, ed. Virginia Jeans Laas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 160.
27. George M. Blackburn, French Newspaper Opinion on the American Civil War (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997), 57-58; Howard Jones, Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 133-36; Abraham Lincoln, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953-55), 5:355-56.
28. For a fuller development of the themes in this paragraph, see Gallagher, Confederate War, especially chap. 3; and Gary W. Gallagher, "The Idol of His Soldiers and the Hope of His Country," in Gallagher, Lee and His Generals in War and Memory (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998).
29. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Era of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 490-91.
30. Jones, Diary, 1:135; Richmond Dispatch, July 9, 1862; Richmond Whig, July 15, 1862; Grace Brown Elmore, Heritage of Woe: The Civil War Diary of Grace Brown Elmore, 1861-1868, ed. Marli F. Weiner (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 35.
31. Jefferson Davis, The Papers of Jefferson Davis, ed. Haskell M. Monroe, James T. McIntosh, and Lynda Lasswell Crist, 9 vols. to date (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971- ), 8:280-81; [Thomas E. Caffey], Battle-Fields of the South, from Bull Run to Fredericksburgh; with Sketches of Confederate Commanders, and Gossip of the Camps (1864; reprint, Alexandria, Va.: Time-Life, 1984), 380; Jones, Diary, 1:141, 144.
32. Robert Manson Myers, ed., The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 923-24.
33. W. C. Corsan, Two Months in the Confederate States: An Englishman's Travels through the South, ed. Benjamin H. Trask (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 87-88.
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