The Master of Warlock: A Virginia War Story

by George Cary Eggleston

Baillie's progress toward recovery was necessarily slow, but it was steady and continuous, and after many weeks, when he was permitted to sit up for awhile each day, he begged to hear about the progress of the war.

It was now September, 1862, and what she had to tell him was one of the most dramatic stories that the history of our American war has to relate.

McClellan had proved himself to be a great organiser and a masterful engineer, and he had at last tried to prove himself to be also a great general.

He had so perfectly fortified the city of Washington that a brigade or a division or two might easily hold it against the most determined hosts. He had organised the "regiments cowering upon the Potomac," and the scores of other regiments that had come pouring into the capital, into one of the finest armies that had ever taken the field in any country in the world. He had multiplied his artillery, and swelled his cavalry force to proportions that rendered it numerically superior to Stuart's "Mamelukes." He had so perfected his supply departments—quartermaster's, commissary's, medical, and ordnance—that their work was accomplished with the precision, the certainty, and the smoothness of well-ordered machinery.

He had brought under his immediate command a perfectly organised army, numbering nearly or quite two hundred thousand men.[1] The Confederates had in Virginia about one-fourth that number available for the defence of Richmond. Nor could this army of defence be reinforced from other parts of the South, for during the long waiting-time in Virginia, events of the most vital importance had been occurring at the West. Chief of these in importance, though the government at Washington was slow to recognise the fact, was the discovery there of a really capable commander—General Grant. He had captured Forts Henry and Donelson, thus gaining control of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, breaking the Confederate line of defence, and pushing the Southern armies completely out of Kentucky, and almost out of Tennessee. He was preparing, when McClellan moved, to complete that part of his work by fighting the tremendous battle of Shiloh.

Thus the Confederates could not afford to draw so much as a single regiment or battery from that field for the strengthening of Johnston's force in Virginia. Finally, early in March, Johnston had withdrawn from Centreville and Manassas to the immediate neighbourhood of Richmond.

It was in such circumstances that McClellan at last undertook to use the great army he had created, for the purpose it was meant to accomplish. Early in the spring, he transferred 120,000 men by water to Fortress Monroe, leaving seventy thousand at and near Washington, to hold that capital secure. Somewhat more than half of this force at Washington was to advance upon Richmond by way of Fredericksburg, and add forty thousand men to McClellan's great army when he should sit down before the Confederate capital. He, meanwhile, was to march up the peninsula formed by the York and James Rivers, supported by the navy on either side.

Richmond was seemingly doomed, and everywhere at the North the expectation was that McClellan, with his overwhelming forces and his well-nigh perfect organisation, would make an end of the war before the first anniversary of the battle of Manassas.

If McClellan had been half as capable in the field as he had proved himself to be in the work of organisation, this might easily have happened. But he was cautious to a positively paralysing degree. It was his habit of mind to overestimate his enemy's strength to his own undoing. Thus when he began his advance up the peninsula, with nearly sixty thousand men, to be almost immediately reinforced to one hundred thousand and more, he found a Confederate line stretched across the peninsula at Yorktown. It consisted of thirteen thousand men under Magruder, and with his enormous superiority of numbers, McClellan might have run over it in a day, while with his transports, protected by gunboats, he might easily have carried his army by it on either side, compelling its retreat or surrender. But in his excessive caution he assumed that the entire Confederate force was concentrated there, and his imagination doubled the strength of that force. He confidently believed that the Yorktown lines were defended by an army of eighty thousand or more, and instead of finding out the facts by an assault, he wasted nearly a month in scientifically besieging the little force of thirteen thousand men, with an army six or eight times as great, and a siege train of enormous strength.

When at last he had pushed his siege parallels near enough for an assault, he found his enemy gone, and discovered that the great frowning cannon in their works were nothing more than wooden logs, painted black, and mounted like heavy guns.