[CHAPTER XXVI]
McClellan's Peninsular Advance
We have already seen from his own reports what McClellan thought of the force he was called upon to command at and near Washington after the disastrous defeat of McDowell at Manassas. There was, he said, "no army to command—a mere collection of regiments, cowering on the banks of the Potomac, some perfectly raw, others dispirited by recent defeat, others going home.... Washington was crowded with straggling officers and men absent from their stations without authority."
Slowly, patiently, painfully, McClellan brought order out of this chaos of demoralization. Out of the broken and utterly dispirited fragments of McDowell's army and out of the new, raw levies sent to him he created that Army of the Potomac which fought the great campaigns of the war.
In the meantime an ignorant and impatient popular clamor and an unintelligent press "opinion"—for there is a certain type of newspaper editor who is apt to regard his own hasty and ill-informed judgment of things that he knows little or nothing about, as an "opinion"—hounded and persecuted the man who was expected to retrieve the Manassas defeat. Even Mr. Lincoln, with all his patience, became impatient of McClellan's inaction—which was excessive perhaps—and almost angrily urged him to action. He called the general's attention to the fact that he had under his command a force greatly superior in numbers to any that the Confederates could muster and that the country was impatient for an advance.
McClellan seems to have had no thought of making his way to Richmond by the route of Centreville and Manassas, where Johnston lay behind impregnable fortifications. He knew the easier road of approach up the James river from Fortress Monroe as a base of operations. But, at all hazards, the Government, the press and the people insisted, Washington city must be covered and protected, and so McClellan's first care was to feel of the works at Centreville and Manassas before transferring his army down the Potomac and the Chesapeake to Fortress Monroe. Accordingly, on the tenth of March, 1862, he pushed a column forward toward Centreville and Manassas only to find those strongly fortified positions already abandoned. General Johnston had interpreted McClellan's plans aright, and was transferring his army to the Peninsula east of Richmond in order to meet his adversary's confidently-expected advance in that quarter.
There was nothing now, neither defended works nor an opposing army, to forbid McClellan's march upon Richmond by the Manassas route, while it was certain that Johnston was fortifying Williamsburg and other defensible points upon the other route and concentrating his forces there to meet McClellan's advance when it should come.
But McClellan was above all things a man of orderly and methodic mind, a man not to be turned from a pre-arranged plan of action by the offering of any opportunity, however advantageous it might be. So instead of pushing on towards Richmond by the route which his enemy had thus left undefended, he turned about, sent his army by water to Fortress Monroe, and confronted his adversary where that adversary was best prepared at all points to meet him.
In the meanwhile General Burnside had completed the occupation of the southern coast by the seizure of Beaufort, Roanoke, Newberne and Fort Macon, and another Federal force a little later, on the eleventh of April, captured Fort Pulaski, near the mouth of the Savannah river.
After great urgency on the part of Mr. Lincoln, who, in his homely phrase, feared that McClellan's army might "take root" around Washington, that officer at last transferred one hundred and twenty-one thousand men to the neighborhood of Fortress Monroe, with every adjunctive aid that an army could require or make useful. His force outnumbered the Confederates nearly two to one, but it was McClellan's habit of mind to exaggerate the strength of his enemy. It was also his bad habit, as it was Halleck's, to proceed with an exaggerated respect for military "regularity." So instead of pushing forward up the peninsula that lay between the James and the York rivers, and simply running over the vastly inferior forces of his enemy, as a general of enterprising mind would have done, he advanced "scientifically" and with scientific slowness.
The first point of contact was at Yorktown, where General Magruder lay with 13,000 Confederates, McClellan's army of assault—i.e., his advance force—numbered no less than 58,000 men and 100 guns. According to his custom McClellan enormously overestimated the strength of his adversary, and instead of hurling his superior force upon the Confederate works, or using his fleet to pass them by, as General Johnston expected him to do, he sat down before Yorktown and instituted a regular siege approach by parallels.