A rough balance was restored with the arrival at Yorktown of
John Bell Hood’s Texas brigade from Johnston’s army. Hood’s men had a sizable
number of British-made Enfield rifles and knew how to use them. When the Yankee
sharpshooters grew too bold, the Texans would slip into the forward picket line
for what they liked to call a little squirrel shooting. Soon their fire would
drive the Federals out of the trees and other hiding places they favored and
back into their fortifications, where sharpshooting continued but on more even
terms. The marksmen on both sides at Yorktown considerably exaggerated their
prowess, especially to credulous newspaper correspondents, yet there was no
doubt that because of them the prudent learned to keep their heads down. The
story quickly got around, for example, of the Confederate soldier who woke up
one morning in his cramped trench and unthinkingly stood up to stretch and was
instantly shot through the heart.
In spite of the sharpshooters’ threat the siege had its
lighter moments. One day a Louisiana soldier searched out his colonel in the
trenches to report “an awful thing has just happened!” What was it, the colonel
demanded: were the Yankees attacking? It was worse than that, the man said. A
Yankee shell had just struck the colonel’s camp tent and smashed a barrel of
whiskey stored there. The colonel rushed to his tent in the hope that something
might be salvaged, but he was too late. His men had already crowded in with
their tin cups to rescue whatever had survived the wreck.
One particularly novel form of entertainment in the
Confederate ranks was electioneering. For months Richmond had been struggling
with what General Lee termed “the fermentation of reorganization”—keeping its
army in being beyond the one year that the volunteers had signed up for in the
first rush to the colors in 1861. To encourage re-enlistments it had tried
bounties and furloughs and even allowed men to change their branch of service,
but with indifferent results. Finally on April 16 the Congress, acting on a
bill drafted by Lee, took the ultimate step and decreed conscription. Men
between eighteen and thirty-five would be subject to military service, and the
one-year volunteers had their enlistments extended to three years or the
duration of the war. Regiments had forty days in which to reorganize under the
new system and to hold elections for their officers.
For those who had seen enough of soldiering, even the
thought of changing the rules this way was a betrayal. “I have no respect for a
government that is guilty of such bad faith,” an Alabamian complained. Private
Jesse Reid of the 4th South Carolina thought Congress was taking the law into
its hands unjustly; if volunteers were kept on for two more years, he asked,
what was to prevent the lawmakers from keeping them on for ten more years? With
conscription, he warned, “all patriotism is dead, and the Confederacy will be
dead sooner or later.”
Most of the men accepted the new law more philosophically,
recognizing that there was nothing they could do about it anyway. At least
electing their officers would break the monotony of their days, and they
followed the campaigning with interest. Certain candidates found one
time-tested electioneering tactic that worked as well in the army as it had
back home. “Passed the Whiskey round & opened the polls,” Private John
Tucker of the 5th Alabama wrote in his diary on April 27. It was very much a
“Big day” when his brigade elected its field and company officers, he wrote,
“& a great many of the men got gloriously tight.”
Resourceful Federals found ways to vary the monotony of
their days as well. It did not take them long to discover that the tidal creeks
emptying into the York below Yorktown contained the most succulent oysters they
had ever tasted, and that the gray squirrels infesting the thick woods made a
delicious stew (wearing the enemy’s colors, it was said, made them fair game).
The hogs that roamed the woods were also declared contraband of war and subject
to capture, although the headquarters prohibition on firing guns behind the
lines forced a resort to the bayonet; it was admitted that considerable effort
was required for the enjoyment of roast pork. Pennsylvanian Oliver W. Norton
felt obliged to justify such foraging by explaining that whatever they found in
Virginia “is nothing else than a secesh, and when Uncle Sam can’t furnish food,
I see nothing wrong in acquiring it of our enemies.” A Virginia woman who lost
most of her pigs and chickens to the light-fingered Yankee cavalrymen encamped
on her farm near Yorktown had taunting advice for her guests. Want to get into
Yorktown did they? “General Magruder’s thar, an’ he kin drink more whiskey nor
enny general you’uns got, but he won’t be thar when you git
thar. . . .”
Informal truces, usually arranged when no officers were
around, also served to break the siege routine. These sometimes produced odd
coincidences. The men of the 2nd Rhode Island discovered that the Rebel pickets
opposite them had haversacks and canteens stenciled “2nd R.I.” that they had
picked up when fighting the Rhode Islanders at Bull Run nine months earlier.
(One of the Rhode Islanders got a big laugh from the Rebels when, called on for
the name of his regiment, he shouted back, “150th Rhode Island!”) The men of
the 2nd Michigan found that the Georgians posted in their sector were from the
same regiment they had faced the previous fall at Munson’s Hill near
Washington. They talked this over at a parlay between the lines and agreed that
as old acquaintances they would refrain from firing at each other when on
picket duty.
In places where the lines were close together there was a
good deal of bantering back and forth. “As they have only a large swamp between
them,” a man in the 61st Pennsylvania wrote his family, “they can talk as well
as if in a room together, they throwing up Bull Run to our boys & we Fort
Donaldson & other places.” At the James River end of the Warwick line,
where tidal marshes 300 or 400 yards wide made the prospect of any attack
highly unlikely, informal truces might stretch on for as long as the stints of
duty lasted. When one side or the other was due to be relieved, the pickets shouted
across to watch out and everybody keep their heads down, for they could not be
responsible for what the new men might do.
Federal general Philip Kearny was struck by the ironies of
the situation. “Is it not odd to think,” he wrote his wife, “that Magruder, one
of my best friends, is one of the chief men here. This is surely a most
unnatural war.” At one of the nearby farms, Kearny went on, he had the
disconcerting experience of talking to an elderly slave of at least ninety who
distinctly remembered, as a child, hearing cannon fire once before at
Yorktown—during the first siege in 1781. Union engineers examined old maps made
by Cornwallis’s army for clues to the Confederates’ Yorktown defenses.
Whenever the weather was good Professor Lowe’s war balloons—by
April 10 he had the Constitution as well as the Intrepid at the front—soared
high in the air over Yorktown like great yellow soap bubbles, searching out
information about the enemy positions. Generals frequently went up with the
professor, to cast a professional eye on what the Rebels might be doing.
Confederate artillerists did their best to shoot down the intruders, and while
they scored no hits they did force Lowe to keep his distance and thus limited
what he could see. For all the drama of these ascensions, balloon
reconnaissance brought very little real enlightenment to General McClellan;
certainly they furnished him nothing that brought any reality to the way he was
counting the Army of Northern Virginia.
Indeed, the Intrepid very nearly deprived him of his
favorite general. On April 11, in Professor Lowe’s absence, Fitz John Porter
went up alone, and the balloon broke free of its moorings and began drifting
straight toward the enemy lines. Fortunately for Porter, a last-minute wind
shift carried him back to Union territory, and he managed to reach the gas
valve and bring himself to the ground. General McClellan termed the episode “a
terrible scare,” and Professor Lowe admitted that it was some time before he
could persuade any other generals to go up with him.
Determined not to be outdone in aeronautics, the
Confederates countered with a balloon of their own. Lowe was scornful: it was
nothing but a hot air balloon—he called it a fire balloon—and could only stay
aloft a half hour or so before the air in the envelope cooled and lost its
aerial buoyancy. Lacking a portable hydrogen generator of the sort Lowe had
developed, the Rebels had to stoke a hot fire of pine knots soaked with
turpentine to get their aeronaut, Captain John Bryan, off the ground. Captain
Bryan had the same visibility problems as the Yankee aeronauts, complicated by
the fact that his balloon had but a single mooring rope whose strands tended to
unwind and spin him around dizzily like a top. On his third ascension he
duplicated General Porter’s experience. His balloon broke loose, drifted over
the Federal lines, then was finally blown back to safety by a Confederate
breeze. “This was indeed luck of the greatest kind,” Captain Bryan observed,
and never went up again.
Easily as unusual as the war balloons were the coffee-mill
guns, a Yankee invention getting a tryout in General Keyes’s Fourth Corps. This
crank-operated prototype machine gun fired cartridges rapidly from a hopper
mounted atop the barrel; President Lincoln, an enthusiast for new weapons,
coined its name. Its promoters called it “an Army in six feet square.” Rhode
Islander Charles E. Perkins, for one, was impressed. “And we have got 4 other
guns that shute a ball a little larger than our muskets do and thay can shute
it a hundred times a minit,” he wrote home. “Thay are drawed by one horse and
are very handy and I should think that thay might do a grate work.” A newspaper
correspondent was sure this example of Yankee ingenuity “must have astonished
the other side.” No Confederates recorded any reaction to the novel weapon,
however. In any event, as well sheltered as the Rebels were from the Federal
artillery it is doubtful that the coffee-mill guns claimed any victims during
the siege.
On April 16 General McClellan took his first aggressive
action against the enemy since arriving in front of Yorktown. He ordered Baldy
Smith to stop the Rebels from strengthening their defenses behind the Warwick
River at a place called Dam No. 1—the “weak spot,” as it happened, that General
Hancock had wanted to seize ten days earlier. There was no truly pressing need
for the operation—it was not the spot McClellan had selected to pulverize with
his siege guns to force a breakthrough—and he hedged his orders with cautions.
There was to be no general engagement; his last words to Smith were to “confine
the operation to forcing the enemy to discontinue work.” Smith dutifully
advanced his divisional artillery close to the dam, along with the Vermont
brigade—five regiments from his native state, including the 3rd Vermont that he
had led at Bull Run back in 1861—for infantry support. For most of the day the
Yankee gunners and skirmishers blazed away at long range at the enemy across
the millpond.
The Confederates prudently took shelter from this barrage
(“Break ranks and take care of yourselves, boys,” one of their officers
shouted, “for they shoot like they know we are here”) and nothing could be seen
of them, and presently an adventurous Yankee lieutenant waded across the
waist-deep pond and came back to report he thought the enemy’s works could be
taken. Four companies from General Smith’s old regiment, the 3rd Vermont,
holding their rifles and cartridge boxes high, splashed across the pond on a
reconnaissance. As the Rebel pickets scattered, the Vermonters rushed into the
rifle pits on the far bank and opened a steady fire into the woods beyond.
Having gained this much, no one in the Federal high command seemed to know what
to do next.
Baldy Smith was victimized by an unruly horse, which twice
threw him and left him stunned and incapable of “seeing the advantage I had
obtained.” General McClellan, who had come to observe the operation, offered no
advice and then left, having concluded that “the object I proposed had been
fully accomplished. . . .” After clinging to their foothold for
forty minutes, the Vermonters were counterattacked by a brigade of Georgians
and Louisianians and sent flying back across the pond, losing men at every
step. “As we waded back,” one of them wrote, “. . . the water fairly
boiled around us for bullets.” Of the 192 who began the ill-fated
reconnaissance, 83 were killed, wounded, or captured. The Vermont brigade’s
commander, William T. H. Brooks, belatedly sent in reinforcements, but their
assault was shot to pieces before it fairly began. Recalling McClellan’s
injunction not to bring on a general engagement, Brooks finally ordered
everyone back. The day’s Federal casualties came to 165.
The operation left a sour taste. “This Battle took place at
Dam No. 1 in Warwick creek,” a Federal diarist wrote, “and was a Dam failure.”
It was rumored that General Smith had not been thrown by his horse but was in
fact drunk and had fallen off. In Washington a Vermont congressman introduced a
resolution calling for the dismissal of any officer “known to be habitually
intoxicated by spirituous liquors while in service,” and left no doubt who it
was aimed at. Smith’s defenders, and Smith himself, hotly denied the charge and
eventually a congressional investigating committee found it groundless. It was
clear enough that the operation had been bungled, but less clear where the
fault lay. All he could see, General Brooks remarked ruefully, was that his
brigade had gotten itself involved “in something we did not exactly finish.”
“The roads have been infamous,” General McClellan wrote Winfield Scott, his predecessor as general-in-chief; “—we are working energetically upon them—are landing our siege guns, and leaving nothing undone.” His sense of accomplishment was understandable. The complex arrangements for commencing siege warfare were proceeding on schedule. Two weeks into the siege, he already had 100,000 troops under him. He had persuaded the president to let him have the First Corps division commanded by a favored lieutenant, William B. Franklin, and he was promised the second of McDowell’s three divisions, under George A. McCall, as soon as “the safety of the city will permit.”
Prospects for naval cooperation were improving. A new
ironclad warship, the Galena, was slated for his use, to break through between
Yorktown and Gloucester Point and cut the enemy’s communications on the York.
Critics were muffled by the release to the press of “official” estimates of
Confederate strength that ranged up to 100,000 men and 500 guns. “The task
before Genl McClellan, reduction of fortified entrenchments, is that for which
he is held specially qualified and the result is not doubted,” one
correspondent wrote.
A suddenly docile Secretary Stanton even volunteered to put
General Franklin in command of the Fourth Corps, in place of the ineffectual
Erasmus Keyes, an offer McClellan was quick to accept. Although nothing finally
came of this idea, it at least suggested a thaw in his chilly relationship with
the contentious secretary of war. There was a strong gleam of optimism in the
letter McClellan wrote his wife on April 19. “I know exactly what I am about,”
he told her, “& am confident that with God’s blessing I shall utterly
defeat them.”
He grew increasingly confident the next day as a result of
new intelligence about the enemy’s high command. He had heard, he told
President Lincoln, that Joe Johnston was now under the command of Robert E.
Lee, and that greatly encouraged him. “I prefer Lee to Johnston,” he explained.
To his mind, General Lee was “too cautious & weak under grave
responsibility . . . wanting in moral firmness when pressed by heavy
responsibility & is likely to be timid & irresolute in action.” (He
added the opinion, a few days later, that “Lee will never venture upon a bold
movement on a large scale.”) McClellan did not elaborate on how he had arrived
at this singular appraisal; mercifully for him, it was never made public during
his lifetime.
The Yankees pursued their siege operations with great energy
and according to the latest principles of military science. However much he
overestimated Confederate numbers, General McClellan never doubted his own
superiority in artillery, especially heavy artillery. His confidence in
ultimate victory rested on his guns. His siege train contained no fewer than
seventy heavy rifled pieces, including two enormous 200-pounder Parrotts, each
weighing more than 8 tons, and a dozen 100-pounders, all of which greatly
outgunned any cannon the Rebels had at Yorktown. The balance of McClellan’s
heavy rifled pieces were 20-pounder and 30-pounder Parrotts and 4.5-inch Rodman
siege rifles. For vertical fire he had forty-one mortars, ranging in bore size
from 8 inches up to massive 13-inch seacoast mortars that when mounted on their
iron beds weighed almost 10 tons and fired shells weighing 220 pounds. Once
they were finally all emplaced and opened fire simultaneously, as McClellan
intended, these siege guns would rain 7,000 pounds of metal on Yorktown’s
defenders at each blow. Such firepower dwarfed even that of the Sevastopol siege.
Fifteen batteries for these heavy guns were dug and
fortified. “It seems the fight has to be won partially through the implements
of peace, the shovel, axe & pick,” a New Hampshire soldier observed. To
reach the battery sites new roads had to be cut through the forest and bridges
built and old roads made passable by corduroying them with logs. The best at
this road-making proved to be the 1st Minnesota regiment, whose skilled
woodsmen could clear a mile of road and corduroy a quarter of it in a day. According
to a Minnesota diarist, the Rebel gunners heard them felling the trees and
fired at the sound. The heaviest pieces in the siege train had to be carried
forward in canal boats on the York and then up Wormley’s Creek to the front. To
mount one of the great seacoast mortars in battery, the side of the canal boat
was cut down, tracks were laid to the bank, and the piece was raised by a
hoisting gin and dragged ashore on rollers and finally hauled to its platform
suspended under a high-wheeled sling cart. Simply to stock the battery
magazines required 600 wagonloads of powder and shot and shell.
Much of the digging for batteries and trenches and redoubts
was done at night and under fire. “Night work in the trenches is a sight to be
remembered,” a man in an engineer battalion wrote in his journal, “to see a
thousand strung along like a train of busy ants in the night, shoveling away,
with now and then a shell bursting near. It is strange . . . to have
a piece of shell come so near you, you can feel the wind. . . .”
Although Fitz John Porter was put in direct command of the siege operations,
General McClellan, a military engineer by training, visited the batteries
constantly, directing construction, planning for the final assault, encouraging
the troops. “Gen. McClellan & staff have just rode along the line,” a
Pennsylvanian recorded in his diary on April 16. “Took a view of the rebel
fortifications, gave some orders to the Gen. & passed on. While riding
along he stopped and lit his cigar from one of the private’s pipes.” Such
homely touches by the general sent morale soaring.
The import of all this immense effort was not lost on Joe Johnston. As the siege dragged on and the Yankees continued to fire only their field artillery in the periodic exchanges, it became obvious that McClellan was holding back his big siege guns until all were emplaced and ready to open simultaneously. General D. H. Hill, now in command of the Confederate left at Yorktown and Gloucester Point, observed that with his control of the water McClellan could “multiply his artillery indefinitely, and as his is so superior to ours, the result of such a fight cannot be doubtful.” One of his lieutenants, Gabriel J. Rains, predicted that when the enemy opened fire it would be with 300 shells a minute. One day Hill was discussing their prospects with Johnston. Johnston asked him how long he could hold Yorktown once the Federal siege batteries opened. “About two days,” Hill said. “I had supposed, about two hours,” Johnston replied.
Scouts and spies reported evidence of the rapidly
multiplying Federal batteries and sightings of numerous transports entering the
York, suggesting preparations for a drive up the river. It was reported too
that the Yankees now had one or two more “iron-cased” war vessels in addition
to the Monitor. To the trained military eye, a certain sign of impending attack
was the appearance of parallels, the advanced trench lines from which the final
assault would be launched once the siege guns had battered down Yorktown’s
defenses.
On April 27 General Johnston warned Richmond that thè
enemy’s parallels were well along and he would be compelled to fall back to
avoid being trapped in his lines. On April 29 he made it official: “The fight
for Yorktown, as I said in Richmond, must be one of artillery, in which we
cannot win. The result is certain; the time only doubtful. . . .
I shall therefore move as soon as can be done
conveniently. . . .” Once Yorktown and the line of the Warwick
were abandoned, Norfolk could not be held for long; it too must prepare for
evacuation.
Johnston sent an appeal for the Merrimack to come to his aid by attacking the Federal shipping in the York and upsetting McClellan’s best-laid plans. (He also repeated his earlier call for a strike on Washington so as to distract his opponent further.) This idea of a sortie by the Merrimack had already caught General Lee’s imagination, and he several times urged the navy to send the big ironclad by night past Fort Monroe and the cordon of Federal warships to get in among McClellan’s transports in the manner of a fox in a henhouse. “After effecting this object,” he explained, “she could again return to Hampton Roads under cover of night.” For Robert E. Lee, a weapon in war was only as good as the use made of it.
Flag Officer Tattnall complained that too much was expected
of the Merrimack. Her fight in March in Hampton Roads, in which her first
captain, Franklin Buchanan, was wounded, had raised expectations too high,
Tattnall said; “I shall never find in Hampton Roads the opportunity my gallant
friend found.” The truth of the matter was that the Merrimack was altogether a
dubious proposition—unseaworthy except in a flat calm and ponderous to
maneuver, inadequately armored, powered by engines that constantly broke down.
In truth too the adventurous spirit that had marked Josiah Tattnall in long-ago
battles against the Royal Navy and the Barbary pirates had cooled. Now, at age
sixty-five, his first impulse was to catalogue all the possible risks in any
plan, and certainly here was a plan freighted with risks.
Tattnall was appalled at the thought of navigating the
Merrimack by night across Hampton Roads and up the York. To attempt such a
sortie by day would mean running the gauntlet of Fort Monroe’s guns and those
of the Monitor, the forty-seven-gun frigate Minnesota, and assorted other
Federal warships, not to mention the threat of being “punched” by the Yankee
rams. Even if he somehow reached the York safely, McClellan’s transports would
probably find shelter from his guns in shoal water and in the tidal creeks.
Flag Officer Tattnall could see only hazard in the operation. General Johnston
would have to manage without any aid from the Merrimack.
Evacuating an army of twenty-six brigades of infantry and
cavalry and thirty-six batteries of field artillery—56,600 men all told—and
their equipment, and carrying out the evacuation secretly in the face of the
enemy, was a truly challenging task. It was also a complicated task, and
Johnston had to endure delays caused by every imaginable complication. “I am
continually finding something in the way never mentioned to me before,” he
complained. He finally set the withdrawal for the night of May 3 and made it a
“without fail” order. Anyone and anything not ready to move by that night would
be left behind. And unlike the earlier Manassas evacuation, this time the
entire Federal army was only a few hundred yards distant.
Perfect security proved impossible, and hints of the
movement leaked out. Northern newspaper correspondent Uriah H. Painter, for
example, interviewed an escaped slave from Yorktown who had seen the Rebel
wagon trains pulling out behind the lines. When Painter reported this to Chief
of Staff Randolph Marcy, however, he was told it could not be so; headquarters
had “positive intelligence” the enemy was going to put up a desperate fight at
Yorktown.
That was indeed the message in most of the intelligence
reaching General McClellan. On May 2 another contraband reported the
Confederates were 75,000 strong and intended to hold out until 75,000 more men
reached them. On May 3 detective Pinkerton announced the enemy’s strength to be
between 100,000 and 120,000, and since that was merely a “medium estimate” it
was very likely “under rather than over the mark of the real strength of rebel
forces at Yorktown.” McClellan was thus confirmed in another of his intuitive
leaps of logic. Just as he had been sure in early April that Magruder would
never attempt to hold a line all the way across the Peninsula with a mere
15,000 men, he now concluded that with eight times that number the enemy would
certainly stay and make a showdown fight of it. “I can not realize an
evacuation possible,” he told Baldy Smith.
He pressed ahead with his plan for the grand assault. The
heavy batteries would simultaneously open fire at dawn on Monday, May 5, the
thirty-first day of the siege. Once the enemy shore batteries were silenced,
gunboats and the new ironclad Galena would run past to take Yorktown’s defenses
in reverse. General Franklin’s reinforcing division from Washington, held on
shipboard for ten days while McClellan debated what to do with it, was brought
ashore to add weight to the attack. After a day or two of unremitting bombardment—or
only a few hours, some predicted—it was supposed that every gun and
fortification between Yorktown and the headwaters of the Warwick would be
demolished. Heintzelman’s Third Corps would then storm the position. “I see the
way clear to success & hope to make it brilliant, although with but little
loss of life,” McClellan told President Lincoln.
After nightfall on May 3, a Saturday, the Confederates
opened a tremendous bombardment with their heavy guns. The shells were not
directed at any one spot but seemed rather to be aimed at random, driving the
Yankees to ground everywhere. Their burning fuzes traced brilliant red arcs
across the dark sky. The surgeon of a New York regiment called it “a
magnificent pyrotechnic display.” At last the guns fell silent, and for the
first time in a month it was utterly still. At first light General Heintzelman
went up in the balloon Intrepid with Professor Lowe. “We could not see a gun on
the rebel works or a man,” the general would write in his diary. “Their tents were
standing & all quiet as the grave.” He shouted down that the Rebel army was
gone.
The Yankees on picket duty rushed forward and clambered into
the empty redoubts, and the color bearer of the 20th Massachusetts laid claim
to being the first to plant the Stars and Stripes over Yorktown. “The soldiers
gave tremendous cheers,” wrote the 20th’s Lieutenant Henry Ropes, “and it was
altogether a glorious occasion.” Another Massachusetts soldier, wandering
through one of the abandoned Rebel camps, was struck by the message scrawled in
charcoal across one of the tent walls: “He that fights and runs away, will live
to fight another day. May 3.”
