Trials on the York Peninsula

It was 150 years ago this week that the Army of the Potomac was jockeying with the Army of Northern Virginia, in the midst of what would be called the Peninsula Campaign. It was an attempt by General George B. McClellan to “surprise” the Confederates by a flanking attack: going up the York Peninsula to Richmond instead of a frontal movement from Washington, D.C., to the Confederate capital.

There’s a long, seriously shaggy history to this—following the debacle for Federal forces at the first battle of Manassas, McClellan was brought in to, well, to shape up the troops. Think Patton after Kasserine Pass. And he did a good job, getting the men to drill and train, and imbuing them with a sense of being soldiers.

But from Fall 1861 on, Lincoln and the Radical Republicans (with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton taking point) were increasingly agitated that McClellan didn’t seem to want to do anything more with the army than drill and march.

(In a lot of ways he reminds me of Bernard Montgomery—who was happy to commit troops, especially Americans, to battle, but then just couldn’t follow through. I’m thinking Caen and Falaise Gap, here. McClellan was always drilling; Monty always “tidying-up”.)

Eventually he devised the Peninsula strategy—transport the Army of the Potomac to Fort Monroe and move it up the land between the York and James Rivers, take Richmond and end the war.

It was a good idea. Except for a couple of things. One of the was the Army of Northern Virginia; another the terrain of the Peninsula, which was quite marshy. (I remember one description by a Union officer of watching a mule disappear up to its ears. “It was a small mule, but still…”)

Finally, there was McClellan himself. He consistently overestimated the numbers of the opposing troops and did everything in his power to avoid engaging them. If you read any of the correspondence between him and Lincoln & Stanton—it’s all demands for more divisions and dire predictions of catastrophe of Biblical proportions if he didn’t get more men.

(And it won’t do to underestimate the machinations of the Radicals, who, while they did wish for victory, weren’t wild about McClellan being the instrument of it. He’d managed to piss them off pretty thoroughly and yet never understood the consequences of that.)

In short, in my estimation, McClellan could have been given command of the Red Army back in its heyday, but still would have claimed he was facing the People’s Republic of China and moaned that he still needed another six divisions.

Plus, he was getting his intelligence from Allan Pinkerton, who consistently fed his paranoia by providing estimates of Confederate strength that were more than double the reality. So he did indeed think he was facing the PRC.

At any rate, the campaign ran from March through May. Every time McClellan advanced he just couldn’t manage to commit fully. Eventually it petered out and the Army of the Potomac was recalled to defend D.C., which was being menaced.

Perhaps the significant event was the replacement of the wounded Joseph E. Johnston as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia by Robert E. Lee.