Johnston's force scarcely, if at all, outnumbered the detached left wing of McClellan's army, but his hope was, by determined fighting to cut off that part of McClellan's army from the main body that lay north of the river, and to crush and destroy it before it could be reinforced.
In his first assaults he was conspicuously successful, and had his expectation been realized that McClellan would be unable to reinforce his detached left wing from the other side of the river it is probable that Johnston's operation would have made prisoners of that wing of McClellan's army which lay south of the turbulent river. But two events stood in the way. One of the many frail bridges across the Chickahominy remained, in spite of the floods, as an available means of crossing. Some of its supports had given way under pressure of the waters and it was manifestly tottering to its fall. But General Sumner, ordered to support the imperiled force south of the river, heroically disregarded the danger and pushed his force across the frail and tottering structure, ordering his men to "break step" in the passage in order that the swing of the cadenced step might not cause the bridge to sway and fall. Thus perilously, he crossed, just in time to meet and defeat a Confederate effort to gain control of the bridge and destroy it, thus completely cutting off communication between the two wings of the Union Army.
The second event of importance in this battle was the very serious wounding of General Johnston. He received in his body a bullet, which incapacitated him for months to come for any active service. This was only one of thirteen wounds that Johnston had received during his military career. General Scott had described him as "a most capable officer, who has the bad habit of getting himself wounded," and here again he had indulged in that bad habit to the serious detriment of the cause he served. For when he was wounded the command passed into the hands of General Gustavus W. Smith, ex-Street Commissioner of New York City, whose fitness for so high a command was, to say the very least, problematical. Under his direction the movement by which Johnston had hoped to achieve so much came to naught.
Two days later Robert E. Lee assumed direct command of the Confederate Army at Richmond, and from that hour forth the war took on a new character. One of the two great master minds—Lee and Grant—was at last in control of the means with which the struggle was to be fought out to a finish. The other of those two great master minds was still under the control of distinctly inferior "superiors."
With the advent of Lee to direct command, the terms of the war problem were set anew. He made of the Virginia army such a fighting machine as has rarely been known in the history of the world. It was not until nearly two years later that Grant was permitted to act upon his conviction, repeatedly formulated, that the strength of the Confederacy and the danger to the Union lay, not in the possession of strategic positions, but in the fighting force of that Army of Northern Virginia which responded to every demand of Lee for heroic self-sacrifice, as the needle responds to the attraction of the pole. In the meanwhile Lee and his army were a ceaseless menace to the Federal capital and the Federal cause. From the moment of his accession to command until the hour in which he met Grant at the Wilderness, Lee dictated the course and conduct of the war, and in an extraordinary degree dominated its events.
[CHAPTER XXVII]
Jackson's Valley Campaign
No sooner had Lee come into command than he set out to change and reverse the existing conditions of the war. He was determined to drive McClellan away from Richmond, to put an end to siege operations that, if persisted in, must ultimately result in the capture of that city, and to transfer to some more distant point the scene of active hostilities. In other words, it was Lee's purpose to change a dispiriting defense into an all-inspiring offense, to raise McClellan's siege of Richmond and to institute in its stead operations that should put Washington upon the defensive.
To that end he began by strengthening his army. He deemed the time now ripe to adopt the plan which he had negatived as premature when Johnston had suggested it. He called to Richmond all the available forces that could be spared from the Southern coasts and elsewhere, swelling his army to 70,000 or 80,000 men.