In June 1862, the Confederate capital was within sight of the Union Army. More than one hundred thousand federal troops camped only a few miles from Richmond, close enough that their campfires smudged the night sky and their forward pickets could hear the toll of the city’s church bells. The man newly charged with saving Richmond was a general almost nobody wanted. Robert E.
Lee had failed in the mountains of western Virginia the year before, and his own soldiers had taken to calling him Granny Lee. When he ordered them to dig trenches instead of march out and fight, they gave him a sharper name: the King of Spades. In seven days in late June and early July, that ridicule was erased. Lee drove a larger army away from the gates of Richmond and turned himself from a doubted replacement into the most feared field commander of the war.
When Lee took command, the situation looked close to helpless. His predecessor, General Joseph E. Johnston, had been carried off the field badly wounded at the Battle of Seven Pines on May 31. The officer who briefly replaced him, Major General Gustavus W.
Smith, faltered under the strain within a day. The Confederate capital, the seat of the rebellion and home of the Tredegar Iron Works, was a single bad week from falling. Richmond’s survival, the morale of the entire Confederacy, and Lee’s own future as a soldier all rested on what he chose to do next. Almost everyone expected him to dig in and hold on.
Instead, Lee did something stranger and more dangerous. He dug, and then he used the digging as the launchpad for an attack. The Union threat had come from George B. McClellan, whose Army of the Potomac had been ferried down the Chesapeake to Fort Monroe at the tip of the Virginia Peninsula.
From there, McClellan drove northwest toward Richmond, using the Navy to guard his flanks and supply line. It nearly worked. Union soldiers reached positions where they could see the spires of Richmond over the treetops. But McClellan carried a fatal flaw onto the peninsula.
He was convinced he was outnumbered. His intelligence, drawn largely from the detective Allan Pinkerton, badly inflated Confederate strength, and McClellan padded the fear further in his own mind. In reality, his army of well over one hundred thousand men was larger than the force defending Richmond. McClellan did not believe it.
Instead of striking, he moved with heavy caution and wired Washington for more men. There was one more piece that would matter most. As McClellan closed on Richmond, his army straddled the sluggish, swampy Chickahominy River. Three of his five corps lay north of the river, two south of it.
Heavy June rains had swollen the river and turned its bottomlands into mud and standing water, which meant one wing could not easily rush to help the other. McClellan had, without quite intending to, split his own army along a flooded river. While Richmond’s newspapers grumbled and the public braced for a siege, Lee put his soldiers to work with shovels. He ordered extensive earthworks thrown up across the eastern approaches to Richmond.
His men considered the labor beneath them and grumbled that their engineer general was the King of Spades. The Richmond press joined the mockery, sneering that all of Lee’s ditches were not worth one good fighting general. Lee felt the sting. In a letter to President Jefferson Davis in early June, he wrote that his own troops, officers, and the press were all opposed to the work and ridiculed it.
But the digging was not the opposite of fighting. It was the precondition for fighting. A strong, continuous fortified line meant Richmond could be held by a relatively small portion of the army, freeing the rest to strike elsewhere. The ditches that earned him scorn were quietly solving his central problem.
They were the engine of an offensive, not a confession of weakness. Lee still needed one more thing. He needed to know where McClellan was vulnerable. In the second week of June, he sent his cavalry commander, Jeb Stuart, on a daring reconnaissance.
Stuart took roughly twelve hundred horsemen and rode completely around McClellan’s entire army in about three days. He confirmed what Lee had suspected: McClellan’s right flank, and the railroad supply line that fed it, lay north of the Chickahominy, exposed and thinly protected. Lee’s plan was audacious to the edge of recklessness. He would divide his outnumbered army in the presence of a larger one and attack.
South of the river, between McClellan’s main body and Richmond, he would leave only a thin holding force under Generals John B. Magruder and Benjamin Huger. They were to make noise and act aggressively enough to convince the powerful Union corps in front of them that the entire Confederate Army still stood there. The earthworks made the bluff believable.
Meanwhile, Lee would mass the bulk of his army north of the river and drive it into the exposed Union Fifth Corps under Fitz John Porter. The plan leaned heavily on Stonewall Jackson. That spring, Jackson had run a brilliant campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, marching his small army hundreds of miles, tying down tens of thousands of federal troops. Lee’s plan called for Jackson’s men to swing wide and come down on Porter’s flank.
But the valley legend was about to fail him. Worn down by the long campaign and the punishing forced march east, Jackson would be slow, late, and strangely passive through nearly the entire week. The week did not open on Lee’s terms. On June 25, McClellan launched a small probing attack near Oak Grove south of the river.
It gained only a few hundred yards at a cost of around a thousand casualties and was nowhere near strong enough to disturb Lee’s offensive. On the morning of June 26, north of the Chickahominy near Mechanicsville, thousands of Confederate soldiers waited for the sound of Jackson’s guns. The morning passed, the summer heat climbed, and the guns did not come. Jackson’s column had fallen hours behind schedule.
By mid-afternoon, A. P. Hill could not stand the waiting. Around three o’clock, he sent his division forward without Jackson and without clear orders.
Porter’s men were dug in on high ground behind Beaver Dam Creek, a boggy stream that broke up every formation that tried to cross it. Hill’s soldiers were hit hard by infantry volleys and artillery from above. The attack failed. Confederate casualties came to roughly fifteen hundred men.
Porter lost only around four hundred fifty. Yet the mere fact of Lee attacking confirmed McClellan’s deepest fear. That night, he decided his supply line north of the river was too exposed to hold. He would abandon his base on the York River and shift his whole army southeast toward the James River and the protection of the Union Navy.
He called it a change of base. In plain language, the larger army had decided to retreat, pushed into it by an attack that had just been beaten. The next day, June 27, brought the hardest fighting of the week. Porter pulled back to a new position behind Boatswain’s Swamp near a mill owned by a man named Gaines.
Lee pursued, but the day went wrong from almost the first hour. His maps were poor, and his movements were aimed at the wrong ground. Jackson was late again. Through the long afternoon, Confederate divisions threw themselves at Porter’s line one at a time and were shattered one at a time.
Then, near dusk, it finally came together. Lee gathered his forces for one massive assault of more than thirty thousand men, the largest frontal attack of the entire Civil War. At the center of it, John Bell Hood’s brigade of Texans broke through the Union line. Porter’s defense gave way in place after place, and the Fifth Corps fell back across the Chickahominy under cover of darkness.
Gaines’ Mill was Lee’s first clear victory as an army commander, but it cost on the order of fifteen thousand casualties between the two armies in roughly six hours. After Gaines’ Mill, McClellan’s whole army retreated southeast across the difficult ground of White Oak Swamp toward the James. Lee tried to trap it, but his army could not close its hand around the prize. On June 29 at Savage’s Station, Magruder struck the rear guard weakly and was checked.
On June 30 at Glendale, Lee’s best chance, Confederate columns failed to converge in time. Jackson, halted at the crossing of White Oak Swamp, spent the day strangely inert and failed to bring his men into the decisive fight. In the night, the Union army slipped past and reached Malvern Hill. On July 1, 1862, the full cost of Lee’s offensive came due.
Malvern Hill was a natural fortress. A broad open slope rose to a crest, with a steep drop on one flank and a swamp on the other. McClellan packed the crest with artillery, batteries arranged so dozens of guns could sweep the bare ground below in interlocking fire. Lee, believing the Union army was beaten and ripe to break, sent his divisions up that long slope into the massed guns.
Wave after wave climbed the hill and was driven back before it could close. The assaults cost the Confederates more than five thousand men and gained nothing. One of Lee’s own division commanders, D. H.
Hill, gave the day its lasting verdict: it was not war, it was murder. By the evening of July 1, the ledger was clear. McClellan had been driven back roughly twenty-five miles, had abandoned his campaign to capture Richmond, and would reach Harrison’s Landing on the James under the cover of naval guns. The Union’s best and closest chance to take the Confederate capital that summer was finished.
But the Army of Northern Virginia had suffered around twenty thousand casualties in seven days, more than the Union total of roughly sixteen thousand. The campaign had not been won cheaply or cleanly. Lee was honest about what the week had and had not achieved. In his official report, he wrote that under ordinary circumstances, the federal army should have been destroyed.
He had wanted annihilation, not merely a retreat. He knew his plans had been too intricate, his maps poor, his coordination broken again and again. But the South read the result. The man mocked as Granny Lee, ridiculed as the King of Spades, had driven a larger army away from the capital it had been about to besiege.
The ridicule simply stopped. The army and the public finally understood what the digging had been for. The earthworks had shielded Richmond with few men so that Lee could gather the many and strike. The spades had made the sword possible.
Lee reorganized his army into two wings under Jackson and James Longstreet and removed the generals whose performance had not measured up. The Army of Northern Virginia that marched away from the Seven Days was leaner, harder, and certain of one thing above all: it had found a commander who would fight. A reputation built not on a perfect victory, but on a hard, bloody, imperfect week paid for in the lives of thousands of the very men who had dug those ditches and then climbed out of them to attack.