To The Gates Of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign – Stephen W. Sears, 1992 ★★★½

An Overlooked Bloodbath

Even for many American Civil War buffs, the Peninsula Campaign and its climactic Seven Days Battles are undiscovered country.

For concentrated blood and fury stretched out over an entire week, the Seven Days’ intensity is unrivaled. The Peninsula Campaign saw the first armored engagement – between the Merrimack and the Monitor – and the origin of “Taps,” yet people know the name “Bull Run” more than “Malvern Hill,” despite the latter’s higher body count and import.

Perhaps the campaign eludes easy comprehension because there wasn’t a clear winner. The North lost most of the battles, but the South lost most of the men. Fear trumped opportunity, while leaders of varying abilities all to varying degrees wilted under the spotlight.

Gettysburg it was not.

To The Gates Of Richmond employs letters and journal entries as well as official reports to explain how the largest army yet assembled by the United States pushed so far only to fail so fast, leaving behind many thousands dead on both sides.

Author Stephen W. Sears mostly blames Northern commander George McClellan: “He anticipated calamitous defeat and martyrdom... His first thought was not of seeking victory in the coming battle but of salvaging what he could from defeat.”

Few generals looked the part better than George McClellan, or proved less worthy in the field. "No one but McClellan could have hesitated to attack," his opponent Joe Johnston would later say of the Peninsula Campaign's opening moves.
Image from https://www.americanhistorycentral.com/entries/george-b-mcclellan/

Before the Seven Days, there were those like General McClellan who still thought winning a simple matter of investing Richmond. For the South, winning was also seen as simple: attack, attack, and attack. Both mindsets were proven wrong.

Sears starkly presented McClellan’s ineptitude in his earlier Landscape Turned Red, about the battle of Antietam, and in his biography, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon. So I was surprised to find the opposing commander drawing much of Sears’s scorn in this book. The Seven Days were the debut of Robert E. Lee as the Confederate commander in chief; as Sears explains it, largely a catastrophic one.

After taking over just as McClellan pushed toward Richmond, in June 1862, Lee gave his subordinates difficult orders to follow and decimated his troops in bloody charges that failed more often than not.

Said one of his division commanders, Daniel Harvey Hill:

“We were lavish of blood in those days, and it was thought to be a great thing to charge a battery of artillery or an earth-work lined with infantry.”

Robert E. Lee took command of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia after his predecessor Joe Johnston was wounded at the Battle of Seven Pines. "For Robert E. Lee, a weapon in war was only as good as the use made of it." Sears writes.
Image from https://emergingcivilwar.com/2021/03/02/two-distinct-legends-george-washington-and-robert-e-lee/ 

This approach did not win wars, but it gave Lee the initiative he needed to drive the Feds back. Sears notes the Virginian’s real objective had been to destroy McClellan’s army, not push it away. Hardly expected from a general of outnumbered forces, defending a capital so close Northern troops heard its church bells, but Lee was no ordinary general – even if he wasn’t proving himself particularly competent.

At Mechanicsville on June 26^th, Lee’s second day of command, he failed to bring more than a fifth of his available troops against a fortified and superior-numbered foe, taking over three times as many casualties. At Malvern Hill on July 1, he managed to inflict even more carnage on his army thanks to poor positioning of artillery and lack of coordination.

But Lee did learn from his mistakes, Sears notes. And his constant pressure against a retreating McClellan had other benefits:

On the defensive in every battle but the first one at Oak Grove, the Federals suffered losses in dead and wounded of just over half those of the Rebels; on the retreat after every battle but that first one, they experienced losses in prisoners more than six times as great.

Calling out McClellan’s ineptitude is a Sears trademark, which here happens before the campaign is even underway. Instead of taking an overland route to Richmond, McClellan chose to ship his Army of the Potomac to Fort Monroe, poised on a thin sliver of Virginia cut off from the rest of the state by the Warwick River and Yorktown.

By choosing to approach Richmond via Union-held Fort Monroe on the Virginia coast, McClellan gave his foe a bottleneck to defend. What followed was the month-long Siege of Yorktown.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peninsula_campaign

This tricky crossing was complicated by the debut of a new weapon, the Southern ironclad Merrimack, which threatened the Northern fleet. While the North sent over their own ironclad, the Monitor, McClellan dawdled for weeks. Southern general, “Prince” John Magruder, held Yorktown with fake wooden artillery, a handful of men, and playacting. Confederate commander Joe Johnston used this time to gather a larger force around Richmond itself.

The case against McClellan here isn’t as strong as it was with Antietam, where Tardy George had the enemy plans in hand. Here, at least, there was reason for hesitancy, though Sears does not agree.

McClellan did have a bigger army, but not so much that it made victory a given. Sears acknowledges this backhandedly: “Robert E. Lee would never again command an army as large as this, nor ever again come as close to parity with the enemy, nor would the Confederacy ever again assemble so many men in one place.”

McClellan was more at fault attacking and defending in piecemeal fashion, and damningly in his decision to absent himself from the battlefield for all but a few hours during the Seven Days.

A key part of McClellan's strategy was to outmaneuver the enemy, then pulverize them with artillery, But his big guns proved slow to move, and often impossible to situate properly.
Image from https://quotesgram.com/civil-war-artillery-quotes/

At Oak Grove on Day One, Sears notes wryly, “McClellan was attempting the novel tactic of managing a battle from three miles away…by telegraph.” After deciding on retreat, McClellan hustled to escape Virginia before his men, boarding the ironclad Galena while his men were left fighting for their Army’s life. McClellan left them leaderless, too, as he didn’t like his Lincoln-appointed deputy.

Sears notes some belatedly caught on to McClellan’s uselessness:

“Curiously enough,” [20^th Massachusetts veteran Francis W.] Palfrey wrote, “there was almost always something for McClellan to do more important than to fight his own battles.”

McClellan should have been dismissed after the Peninsula Campaign for attitude alone. He sent a telegram all but accusing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton of treason. A clerk’s decision to remove the passage was unfortunate, especially for those who later died at Antietam.

Ultimately, McClellan and Lincoln were fighting two different wars. McClellan wanted a neater, less bloody fray in which the rebellious states were coaxed back, their precious institution of slavery untouched. Lincoln was not yet ready to make the war about slavery (which would wait until Antietam and McClellan’s removal that fall) but he was determined not to reward the successionists by respecting the status quo.

Malvern Hill, July 1, 1862. McClellan would later claim he planned for the battle to end this way, defending with advantage in both height and numbers. Sears argues his army ran out of room to run with the James River blocking its final escape.
Watercolor by Sneden from https://www.nps.gov/rich/learn/historyculture/mhbull.htm

In letters to his wife, McClellan claimed Lincoln’s reluctance to send him more troops was, as Sears puts it, “to make sure he would not have force enough to capture Richmond and end the rebellion before the abolitionists could enlarge the conflict from civil war to revolution, from the reuniting of the sections to the forcible abolition of slavery in defiance of the Constitution.”

Stanton was similarly vociferous in his suspicion about McClellan’s motives, especially when he learned the general tried to broach peace terms with Confederate leaders. Tentative and furtive as they were, such talks were well outside a general’s domain.

In 1864, when McClellan was running to replace Lincoln as president, much was made of his fleeing to the Galena in the last hours of the Peninsula Campaign. Sears pushes back on this a bit:

Although McClellan boarded the Galena on the morning of July 1 with the all-but-certain knowledge that his army would be attacked that day and then steamed away ten miles downriver, at the time the attack finally came he was back on the field – if as far as possible from the scene of combat.

The Merrimack, renamed the Virginia, sunk two Union warships before meeting the Monitor, seen here attacking the Virginia from the left. Neither vessel could defeat the other.
Image from http://www.civil-conflict.org/civil-war-weapons/ironclads.htm

The main focus of Sears’s criticism against McClellan is that his want of firmness cost the North a chance to end the Civil War three years early. Of the Southern leaders, from Lee on down, Sears notes their dithering and confusion in the face of opportunity, a common problem among all the leaders portrayed here.

But they were brave. Sears notes how the Southerners managed assault after assault against larger, entrenched foes: General [Richard] Ewell went himself right to the front to gauge the action, and had his horse killed under him. He continued to command on foot, pausing only long enough to shake a spent Yankee bullet out of his boot.

There is a lot of combat portrayed in To The Gates Of Richmond, which becomes exhausting as battles happen on successive days with only the briefest respites. Sears wants the reader to know something of what it was like to watch a swirling cavalry battle between Southern legend Jeb Stuart and opposing troopers commanded by his own father-in-law, or to assault Malvern Hill at dusk, its crest lit up by answering cannon fire.

Sears’s ability to portray such scenes, along with delve into long-simmering strategic questions, make this a fine read. For those who like military histories served up with generous helpings of personality and an eye for grand strategy as well as battlefield tactics, Sears is your man. And the Peninsula Campaign certainly deserves some attention.