Here McClellan stood at bay. Here a wise direction should have made an end of the Confederate pursuit of him. To assail him there was to invite needless slaughter with no hope of any result commensurate with the inevitable sacrifice of human life.
But the Confederates were flushed with a week of continuous victories, and they hurled themselves recklessly upon Malvern Hill, hoping there to retrieve their lost opportunity of destroying or capturing the army that a week earlier had besieged and threatened Richmond.
The assault upon such a position ought not to have been made at all. Still worse, it was blunderingly made. The Confederates were not ready to bring their whole force into action when the first advance occurred, or in any wise to support the assailing force. Seven thousand men, with six guns, charged up the slope. There were thirty guns in position to sweep them away as with a broom, and many times seven thousand men to resist their advance. There was also the terrific fire of the gunboats to tear their columns into shreds and to throw their men into confusion. Still more important perhaps was the fact that the Confederate artillery had not yet been organized as a separate arm of the service. Each brigade had its battery, but there was nowhere any authority to bring these scattered batteries together and make them effective by massing them. Six guns in the presence of thirty were quickly put out of action, and throughout the day there was a like disproportion, due to the mistaken system which assigned batteries to brigades instead of organizing the whole artillery force into a single arm of the service and placing each corps of it under a commander of its own who could mass it at will and make it effective by concentration.
McClellan had massed his artillery; Lee had not massed his. The result was that McClellan's artillery fire quickly dismounted Lee's guns and rendered them useless.
After this first fruitless assault was repelled, there was nothing but artillery dueling for some hours. It was not until late in the afternoon of July 1 that Lee was ready to assail his enemy with his entire force. Then there was a strange lack of concert. One division after another attacked without support and was beaten back for want of it. At no time did the Confederates hurl their whole force upon their enemies. They fought gallantly, but in detail, and therefore without effect.
The fighting was continued till nine o'clock in the evening. Its net result was that the Confederates had failed to dislodge McClellan from his strong position. But they had so nearly accomplished that object that McClellan dared not risk another day's trial of the issue, even in his supremely advantageous position. He withdrew during the night to Harrison's Landing under cover of his gunboats, and the Seven Days' battles were done.
No military operation was ever more dramatic than this. At the beginning of that fateful week McClellan, with about 120,000 men, was closely besieging the Confederate capital. His heavy guns were almost within shelling distance of the city, and an army of 40,000 men or more, was marching to his reinforcement. At the end of that week's fighting the broken remnant of his army was thankfully cowering under cover of a resistless gunboat fire, with siege abandoned, works deserted, millions of dollars worth of stores destroyed, and such a record of daily defeats as falls to the lot of few armies in the field.
But one thing had been demonstrated, McClellan had made an army out of the exceedingly raw material furnished to his hand. He had converted "a mere collection of regiments cowering on the banks of the Potomac, some perfectly raw, others dispirited by recent defeat, some going home," into an army capable of meeting and fighting Lee at Mechanicsville, Frazier's Farm, Gaines's Mills, Savage's Station and Malvern Hill.
Henceforth the war was to be fought out by armies of seasoned soldiers and not by raw recruits and panic-stricken volunteers.
This great series of battles had cost the Confederates about 19,000 men and the Federals 15,249. It had made an end of the second attempt to conquer Richmond and in that way to finish the war. It had left the Confederates as conspicuously victorious in the east as they were conspicuously defeated in the west.