Thread 18138672

For a month after arriving on the Peninsula, McClellan did effectively nothing despite facing a much smaller Confederate force at Yorktown, the historic town where Cornwallis had surrendered his army to George Washington 81 years ago. The Confederates here were commanded by John Bankhead Magruder, an amateur soldier with limited military skills but talent in other ways. An actor in his spare time, Magruder put his skills to use by having his small army march around in circles repeatedly. Officers called out orders to imaginary brigades and regiments, and the deception worked. McClellan, convinced he was facing a considerable opponent, delayed for a few weeks, giving Joe Johnston time to bring his army down to the Peninsula. At Williamsburg on May 5, first blood was drawn when parts of the Army of the Potomac engaged Johnston's rear guard in a hard fight that cost 2,200 Union casualties and demonstrated that the clumsy maneuvering of Bull Run was long past.

The Confederate army continued to pull back down the Peninsula until it was nearly backed up to Richmond. Disputes between McClellan and the White House were already mounting. He would not attack until he felt everything was absolutely ready while Lincoln wanted immediate action. Here was the root of the problem: McClellan, like many of the West Pointers, believed in a carefully and scientifically executed war that followed the maxims of military textbooks and sought to disrupt civilian life as little as possible. Lincoln and Stanton felt instead the aim was to smash up and harm the enemy as much as possible.

The common soldiers would have agreed on that point. They were firmly in enemy country and knew it, yet regimental historians record many instances of soldiers in need of food and water only to find that sentries were posted around the property of a secessionist civilian whose son was quite likely serving in the Rebel army and not allowing them to help themselves to any edibles within. One New York regiment came across a little cemetery which contained the graves of Confederate soldiers who had died over the previous winter. Out front someone had posted a sign that read "Come on in, Yank, there's room here to bury you, too."

McClellan faced other political handicaps. The administration was forever paranoid about leaving the nation's capital unguarded against any possible Confederate thrust and so decreed that one entire army corps (McDowell's) was to be detached from McClellan and left up in the Rappahannock area. McClellan thought this was nonsense; being the trained soldier he was, he made the quite reasonable assumption that by tying down Joe Johnston's hands on the Peninsula, he wouldn't be able to detach any troops for a lunge at Washington. This was, after all, the same gamble Grant would make two years later. But the administration was still inexperienced in 1862 and could not yet grasp that point.

Thus was the root of the problem. McClellan understood military realities but had unrealistic ideas about the political aspects of the war. Lincoln and Stanton knew the political aspects of the war but failed to grasp the military elements. Further, McClellan was a Democrat and a standard-bearer for his party, and any battlefield victories he won would benefit his party. Consequently, any move McClellan or the administration made aroused the distrust of the other.

As a result, the Union armies in Virginia became increasingly fragmented. Aside from McDowell's corps, posted in the vicinity of Fredericksburg, there was another Union command in the Shenandoah Valley under Nathaniel Banks, a classic political general appointed as he had been a former Speaker of the House and an outspoken abolitionist. Further west, off in the West Virginia mountains, was a third army under John Fremont who had been resurrected this spring and given a second chance. McDowell and Banks were primarily posted to prevent any Confederate moves on Washington D.C., the former guarding northern Virginia and the latter the Shenandoah Valley while Fremont was supposed to inch southwest down West Virginia and approach East Tennessee, long a pet obsession of the administration as it was supposed this area had a large Unionist sentiment in it. All three commands had no one in particular in charge of them and were answerable only to Washington, which made coordinating their moves difficult.

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