Battle of Seven Pines

Today, May 31, marks the 150th anniversary of the first day of the battle of Seven Pines (or Fair Oaks) - and another of my occasional posts on the Civil War. I'm back to reading about the war (after taking the spring to take that WWII class) - in the middle of Shelby Foote's first volume right now. There's a great host of material to read, and I hope to get through a lot of it in the next couple years. Not just battles, either - though so far, I have tended to stick to the military side of things. (Last year, largely Stephen Sears.) There's time...

So today - Seven Pines. It's a significant battle - the first really big fight of the Peninsular campaign - and the battle where Joe Johnston was wounded, and Robert E. Lee took over the Confederate army in front of Richmond. We all know how that turned out.

But I want to stick to the battle for now. It's interesting in itself - it's rather startling to read about the early battles of the war, especially in a detailed account, like Sears' (in To The Gates of Richmond). It's one thing to talk about the fog of battle - but those early Civil War fight are mind-boggling in their confusion and the ineptitude of their leaders. It's not just old fashioned tactics, or the time it took to realize the killing power of Civil War rifles - it's the complete lack of control generals had in those days. It took a long time for the armies to figure out how to maintain any sort of battlefield organization - and more, it took them a long time to figure out marching coordination. And it took them a long while to figure out what they could and couldn't do. In those early days, generals were constantly formulating elaborate plans, flanking attacks and coordinated assaults and feints and bluffs and what not, out of the school books - and getting them completely wrong. No one seemed to know how to write an order - no one seemed to take into account things like roads and terrain and the like when they planned these attacks. And when they started moving - no one seemed to know how to keep in touch with anyone else. Battle after battle in the first couple years turned into complete chaos, units disappearing, getting tangled up, units not getting into the fight, or coming in at the wrong time or place - and when they got there - just piling in en masses, to die. It happened at Shiloh, where the Confederates marching order got their units all snarled up on the roads and delayed the fight for two days; it happened with a vengeance at Seven Pines, where Johnston's plan - advance along three roads that converged at Seven Pines itself, to attack simultaneously at daybreak - turned to hash. Generals took the wrong road (good generals - James Longstreet); at least one general (Huger) didn't even know there was supposed to be a fight until someone else (not Johnston) told him; units got in each others way, got lost, bogged down in swamps - and the whole thing ended up starting at 2 in the afternoon (not dawn), involving half the forces arranged to attack, and failed generally.

Now - there are reasons for this, I think, and when you read about battles in order, you can start to see the armies learning as they went. Later on, armies could, occasionally, perform some pretty effective maneuvers - Lee and Jackson at Chancellorsville; Grant at Vicksburg, and during a couple of the stages of his invasion of Virginia, say... They learned - they developed the staff work and command structures to move and fight a bit better. Though - technology being what it was - there were always delays and confusion and mistakes, at every level. But in the early days - it's not surprising what happened. The United States did not have large scale armies before the Civil War. Washington never had more than 20,000 men (including the French) under his command; Scott in the Mexican-American war had some 12,000, at most. A good number of officers in the Civil War had experience fighting Mexico - but most were junior officers, hardly in a position of command, and not of 1000s of men. Even in peacetime - who had had to control even 10,000 men at a time? But by the second year of the Civil War, they were called on to do it. They knew warfare from books, from studying Napoleon's campaigns - they were trying to execute that sort of thing with no experience at it, with predictable results. It was a war where people had to learn as they went. It was a young man's war - it's startling to realize how young most of the major leaders of the war were. Lee, 54 when the war started, was something of a grizzled oldster - Grant was 39, McClellan 35 - shoot, Henry Halleck ("old brains") was 46 - Longstreet 40, Jackson 37, Jeb Stuart 28 - and so on...

The result of all this confusion and learning on the job was mainly slaughter. It happened at Shiloh - all the complicated marching orders that confused things so badly leading to the fight that turned into a simple free for all when the shooting started. Troops were piled in on top of one another, with no regard for organization, with no orders or consideration of how to maneuver on the battlefield - just pile in and try to overwhelm the enemy. It happened at Seven Pines - when DH Hill had too much waiting he sent his men in directly and blasted it out with the Yankees for a few hours, with whatever troops Longstreet could bring up supporting him, and whatever reinforcements the Union could find bolstering their lines. (Not a lot - the Union didn't handle this fight very well either. Keyes' corps (the IV) was in front, and got shot up pretty bad - Heintzelman's III corp was behind them, 2 of the bets divisions in the army at that time, but only one ever got called into the fight... McClellan of course was nowhere to be found - though at least this day he was on the other side of the flooded Chickahominy river, and had malaria, for his absence is understandable.) After a few hours of this, Johnston got the left wing of his army moving, but just in time to get smacked by reinforcements from Sumner's II corp. They all blasted away at each other for a while, and that was that. Except they did it again on the 1st, for a while, without a lot of enthusiasm...

And so it goes. I'll come back to this - the Seven Days battles, in particular, ought to be an inspiration for another post... This time, tactics - maybe then, more strategy - though I do want to note the strategy of the Peninsular campaign. It gets a bad reputation - since it failed, and Grant ignored the possibility when he was charged with winning the east - and because it fits so neatly with McClellan's failures as a general. He could plan and scheme, but he wouldn't fight - and this attempted end run of the rebel army looks like yet another way to avoid fighting. But the fact is - it wasn't all that bad a plan. It came pretty close to working, even with McClellan in command. If he had had an ounce of initiative, no the battlefield - if he hadn't decided to besiege an imaginary army at Yorktown; if he had pressed the pursuit up the peninsular when the confederates retreated; if he had noticed the weakness of the lines in front of Richmond, or the times the rebels divided their army - he could have gotten somewhere. But it was not in his nature to fight, and it was in his nature to imagine dangers, and to overreact to them, and so the campaign turned into a caricature of its general - a wild goose chase, designed more to avoid battle than to win the war. And a campaign that, in fact, cost a lot of lives - since if McClellan didn't want to fight, his enemies were surely willing....