[CHAPTER XXIX]
The Second Manassas Campaign
Lee had now accomplished the first of his two purposes. He had raised McClellan's siege of Richmond. He had not succeeded in capturing or destroying McClellan's army as he had hoped to do, but he had completely baffled its endeavor. He had driven it out of its strongly fortified positions. He had kept it in an enforced and continuous retreat for a whole week. He had compelled it to fight losing battles by day, and to spend the nights in painful and exhausting efforts to escape, which McClellan himself, as his grieved and angry official reports clearly showed, regarded as efforts of extremely doubtful outcome.
McClellan's campaign against Richmond had disastrously failed. He had saved his army indeed without a repetition of the Manassas panic, but he had been baffled in all his purposes and driven for seven days and nights like a hunted stag seeking safety in flight. All his combinations had come to naught, all his elaborately constructed earthworks had failed him even as means of holding his position as an assailant. All his siege guns had proved of no avail.
But he had organized a great army so well disciplined that it could fight with determination, lose with a calm mind, and retreat before a pursuing enemy without losing cohesion or falling into panic. That service of his was emphasized during all the brilliant future history of the Army of the Potomac. It made itself manifest at Antietam, at Fredericksburg, at Chancellorsville, at Gettysburg, and later at the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor and Petersburg. But with all his splendid ability as an engineer, and his still more conspicuous gifts as an organizer of raw material into an effective force, McClellan was manifestly unfit to command an expedition in which he must try his wits against the genius of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. A historian most friendly to him, Dr. Rossiter Johnson, has written: "He was an accomplished engineer and a gigantic adjutant, but hardly the general to be sent against an army that could move and a commander that could think."
Lee had driven a splendid army, nearly double his own in numbers, to a position where it lay cowering on the river-bank, under protection of the gunboats and no longer depending upon its own prowess even for self-defense.
But Lee had not destroyed McClellan's army, or captured it, or even weakened it in any conspicuous degree. That army, splendidly organized, superbly equipped, and strengthened rather than weakened in morale, lay securely at rest on the James river, within easy striking distance of Richmond. There was no knowing at what moment McClellan might hurl it again upon Richmond or upon that commanding key to Richmond—the Petersburg position. In the hands of a capable commander McClellan's army would at this time have been a more serious menace than ever to the Confederate capital, for it now had an absolutely secure and unassailable base of operations, while its fighting quality had been improved rather than impaired by its seven days of battling.
Thus the second part of Lee's military problem remained still to be solved, and it was very greatly the more difficult part—the part that most imperatively called for the exercise of strategic genius of a high order. He must prevent a junction between Pope's army, which was now advancing by way of Manassas Junction, and McClellan's force on the James river. He must overthrow Pope on the one hand and compel McClellan to retire on the other.
For the accomplishment of this Lee relied confidently upon the positively morbid dread of the loss of Washington which at that time filled the Northern mind and inspired every order given at the Federal capital. His problem was to put Washington in peril without losing Richmond, and thus to compel the withdrawal of McClellan's army for the defense of the Federal capital and to meet a threatened invasion of the North.