July 1, 1862---The Seven Days' Battles: Day Seven (The Battle of Malvern Hill)

JULY 1, 1862:              

The Seven Days’ Battles (Day Seven)---The Battle of Malvern Hill (The Battle of Poindexter’s Farm).  

Robert E. Lee launched a series of disjointed assaults on the nearly impregnable Union position on Malvern Hill. 

The Confederates suffered more than 5,300 casualties without gaining an inch of ground. 

Despite this victory, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan withdrew to entrench at Harrison's Landing on the James River, where his army was protected by gunboats, ending the Peninsular Campaign. 

Malvern Hill was such an overwhelming Confederate defeat that General D.H. Hill C.S.A. wrote afterward in a postwar article, "It wasn't war; it was murder.” Despite this, McClellan described his own position as “hopeless.”

The Seven Days’ Battles are often misidentified as “Lee’s Seven Days’ Campaign,” which in fact they weren’t. Lee had no overall strategy to fight here or fight there. The battles developed organically. They were a series of engagements that ended McClellan’s Peninsular Campaign. Lee’s initial intention was to bloody McClellan’s nose in a good-sized battle (which he did at Oak Grove); it was McClellan’s own “timidity” (as Lee named it) or “cowardice” (as others have named it) that turned the Seven Days’ Battles into an ad hoc Campaign. McClellan chose to retreat down the Virginia Peninsula. Lee did not push him. Lee merely took advantage of opportunities to attack as the Union retreated. 

A critical look at the Seven Days’ Battles highlights a number of facts: Of the eight distinct battles that made up the Seven Days’ Battles, four (Malvern Hill, a Confederate killing field, Golding’s Farm, Garnett’s Farm, and Beaver Dam Creek) were Confederate losses, two (Oak Grove and Glendale) were tactical draws, one (Savage’s Station) was a badly-managed Confederate unearned success given them by a shameful Union debacle wherein the retreating Federals abandoned their own wounded, and only one (Gaines’ Mill) was a clear-cut Confederate victory.

The numbers too, tell a story: Of the 100,000 Federals involved, there were 16,000 casualties (1,700 killed). Of the 90,000 Confederates involved, there were 20,000 casualties (3,500 killed). The price of driving the Army of the Potomac from the gates of Richmond was paid in blood.

Had George B. McClellan been one iota a more aggressive commander, the Seven Days’ Battles could have turned into a disaster for the Confederacy. 

Instead, McClellan began to retreat right after Beaver Dam Creek on Day Two (even though the Union had won the day there), and never looked back. His panic was infectious, and the Federal army rolled back from Richmond like a wave from the shoreline, abandoning an army’s worth of supplies, ordnance, and wounded men along the way. By the seventh day, McClellan himself was already on the James River, having little idea of the scope of the battle. 

Given the Gray bloodletting at Malvern Hill, another commander might have regained the initiative; instead, McClellan gave up hope. So ended the vaunted Peninsular Campaign.

Robert E. Lee’s true-life legend as an aggressive commander was born at the Seven Days’ Battles (particularly in, and aided and abetted by, McClellan’s mind). He became the “Savior of Richmond” (and hence of the Confederacy), but his ability to coordinate attacks on the ground was poor, his orders were confused and confusing, and his spending of men was wasteful. In the realm of “Learn As You Go” the Seven Days’ Battles were an expensive lesson for the South. Confederate morale, however, was completely restored after a bitter Spring.

The Seven Days’ Battles and the end of the Peninsular Campaign also brought an end to the second phase of the Civil War; since just after Bull Run, the Union Army had been advancing in the Western Theater and threatening in the Eastern Theater. The Confederacy had been in decline. However, in the third phase of the war, the Confederacy would rebound dramatically.

On the other hand, Northern morale was crushed by McClellan's retreat from Richmond, as all hope for an early end to the war evaporated after the Seven Days’ Battles.   

Considering, however, that the Peninsular Campaign had begun on St. Patrick’s Day and lasted until the eve of the Fourth of July, the idea that McClellan would have bested anybody or ended the war seems ludicrous in hindsight.

And perhaps this is a good thing: A Union restored in June 1862 would have been a far different, and inferior, creature than the Union that rose out of the ashes of Petersburg and Richmond in 1865. For one thing, slavery would still be poisoning the national bloodline, and for another, secession, though a failed policy, would always be a viable threat to be used by extremists.   

It may be that McClellan’s apparent pro-Southern sympathies, or timidity, or even cowardice, or simple unwillingness to see men die, may have done more to save the Union than the downfall of Richmond in ’62.