Hess Earl J. Field Armies and Fortifications in the Civil War: The Eastern Campaigns, 1861-1864

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88 The Peninsula

to explode when stepped on. Upon entering the works, the Federals were

shocked to ﬁnd primed shells concealed in a variety of places. They were

planted in the streets of Yorktown, near springs and wells, under shade trees,

near telegraph poles, under coats that appeared to have been discarded on

the ground, or inside carpetbags and ﬂour barrels. ‘‘In some cases,’’ reported

McClellan’s artillery inspector, Brig Gen. William F. Barry, ‘‘articles of com-

mon use, and which would be most likely to be picked up, such as engineers’

wheelbarrows, or pickaxes, or shovels, were laid upon the spot with ap-

parent carelessness. Concealed strings or wires leading from the friction

primer of the shell to the superincumbent articles were so arranged that the

slightest disturbance would occasion the explosion.’’ The most ingenuous

arrangement was in a house in Yorktown, where a coffeepot under a table in

one corner of a room was attached by string to a weight that would fall on a

torpedo when moved. Several shells were placed at the foot of the cellar

stairs, and another room of the same house had a large shell on the table. No

one could see how it was to be detonated, so everyone avoided entering the

room. Rains used some large projectiles for the 8-inch Columbiad and ar-

ranged for them to explode when someone stepped on a small piece of wood

that would snap the percussion cap.

∂∂

Several Yankees were injured or killed by these devices. A telegraph oper-

ator attached to Third Corps headquarters was blown to bits when he en-

tered Yorktown to send a message, touched the instrument, and exploded a

shell. The 40th New York entered one of the gun emplacements around

Yorktown and assembled inside. The command was given to ‘‘order arms,’’ so

the men grounded their riﬂe muskets. One of the butts came down on a

percussion cap and detonated a torpedo. Two soldiers were killed instantly

and seven were wounded; ‘‘the torn limb of one was thrown thirty feet from

the body,’’ according to the regiment’s assistant surgeon. The New Yorkers

immediately evacuated the work and posted guards to keep everyone out.

Col. Edwin C. Mason of the 7th Maine went ahead of his column to look for

torpedoes and crushed a percussion cap with his foot. Fortunately the shell

failed to explode. When Mason moved the dirt away, he saw the ‘‘red wax at

the top of the buried shell’’ and counted himself an extremely lucky man.

Mason then called for volunteers, who scoured the road on their hands and

knees and found more than a dozen torpedoes. Mason saved his men, but

McClellan estimated that at least ﬁve Federals were killed and more than a

dozen were wounded by these ‘‘infernal machines.’’

∂∑

The Federals quickly learned how to deal with this novel threat. ‘‘Wher-

ever you could see the dirt thrown up loosely, look out for your feet, or else

they would be catching in some string . . . under the dirt, and then shells

The Peninsula 89

would explode,’’ wrote Peleg W. Blake of the 5th Massachusetts Battery.

Once located, the shells were marked with small red ﬂags. Oliver Otis How-

ard shouted himself hoarse telling his men not to stray off the road or to

touch any small boards lying on the ground. As awareness of these devices

spread and more were located and marked with ﬂags, the casualties less-

ened. After the ﬁrst day, no one around Yorktown was injured by Rains’s

land mines.

∂∏

Even as the troops chased Johnston toward Williamsburg, they discovered

some torpedoes planted in the road. Many mines had a foot or two of tele-

graph wire sticking out of the ground, apparently designed to catch a foot or

a horse’s hoof and ﬁre the shell. The red ﬂags were brought out, and the

ofﬁcers detailed men to stay behind and warn upcoming columns when clus-

ters of shells were found. Rains toyed with the pursuing Federals. They found

several heaps of dirt on the road to Williamsburg and wasted an hour care-

fully digging them out but uncovered no torpedoes. Rains installed a more

deadly surprise on the road near Williamsburg. He found an abandoned

ammunition wagon with ﬁve loaded shells and planted four of them, armed

with his sensitive primer, near some trees that had been cut to fall across the

road. The shells were exploded ‘‘with terriﬁc effect’’ by the ﬁrst Federal

cavalry to arrive on the scene. William F. Barry witnessed the ‘‘horrible

mangling’’ of a Yankee cavalryman and his horse on Williamsburg Road.

∂π

McClellan was outraged by the concealed torpedoes. He agreed with

Barry that such devices located in the glacis or in the bottom of the ditch of

an earthwork were legitimate tricks of war, but to sew them promiscuously

where they would kill without defending a position was barbarous. ‘‘I shall

make the prisoners remove them at their own peril,’’ he reported to Secre-

tary of War Edwin Stanton. Two companies of the 50th New York Engineers

were also detailed to dig them up.

∂∫

Johnston knew nothing of these torpedoes until he saw McClellan’s report

printed in the New York Herald. He made inquiries on May 12 and found that

Rains was responsible, but he did nothing to discipline him. Word had al-

ready ﬁltered through the Confederate command structure. While retreating

from Williamsburg to Richmond, James Longstreet made a point of writing

to Rains that he absolutely forbid him from planting shells on any roads used

by his Center Division. Daniel Harvey Hill apparently had no objections to

their continued use and neither did Rains. But Secretary of War George W.

Randolph disapproved, expressing the opinion that it was wrong to take life

for the sake of killing if no other, larger purpose could be gained.

∂Ω

Fortunately for the pursuing Yankees and for the reputation of the retreat-

ing Rebels, Rains did not plant any more infernal machines. He proved to be

90 The Peninsula

a failure as an infantry commander in the coming battle of Seven Pines, the

only engagement in which he led troops, and was soon shifted into admin-

istrative positions. His greatest contribution to the Confederate cause was

in fashioning and deploying hundreds of submarine torpedoes to protect

coastal cities such as Charleston and Mobile. Yorktown was the ﬁrst of at

least nine instances in the Civil War in which land mines were used.

∑≠

The confrontation at Yorktown ended on an anticlimactic note. Only Bat-

tery No. 1, of the fourteen Union gun emplacements, had the opportunity to

test its pieces in action. Barnard was convinced that, if all the batteries had

had a chance to pound the Rebels, the defenses would have caved in after

only six hours of ﬁring. Johnston abandoned ﬁfty-two heavy guns and mor-

tars. A total of about 500 men were lost by both sides in the siege, most in the

abortive Federal attack on Dam No. 1 on April 16.

∑∞

McClellan’s disappointment at not testing his heavy guns was overshad-

owed by his joy at forcing the Rebels out of their stronghold. He made

sure that his superiors understood the strength of the Warwick Line, telling

everyone it was ‘‘very formidable and could not have been carried without

shelling.’’ He bragged to his wife that Johnston must ‘‘have been badly scared

to have abandoned [the works] in such a hurry.’’ McClellan knew he would

be criticized for not attacking earlier and argued that it would have been

easy to order an assault at any time that would have cost at least 10,000 lives

to take the position. He assumed ‘‘the world would have thought it more

brilliant.’’ Yet the young Napoleon felt ‘‘very proud of Yorktown; it and Ma-

nassas will be my brightest chaplets in history.’’ He felt so good about these

two operations, which were overshadowed by subsequent events, because he

felt he had ‘‘accomplished everything in both places by pure military skill.

I am very proud and grateful to God that he allowed me to purchase such

great success at so triﬂing a loss of life.’’ Admirable as a humanitarian im-

pulse and indicative of why his men loved him, McClellan’s sentiment also

illustrates why he was not a great ﬁeld commander. This limitation would

eventually doom his Peninsula campaign.

∑≤

The rank and ﬁle of the Army of the Potomac, however, were quite disap-

pointed that the Rebels slipped away with so little punishment. They saw all

their hard labor as wasted, forgetting that it was the key to convincing John-

ston to abandon his position. ‘‘The whole army were much chagrined that the

enemy had so cleverly ‘skipped out’ after giving us all the hard work to con-

struct fourteen batteries, corduroy numerous miles of road, etc.,’’ complained

Robert Knox Sneden. ‘‘All the ﬁne guns stood up in the different batteries with

ammunition piled in them for a forty-eight hours continuous bombardment

as monuments of Mcclellan’s imbecility and ‘fortiﬁcation on the brain.’ ’’

∑≥

The Peninsula 91

For their part, the Confederates do not seem to have been inordinately

depressed by the retreat. They knew that their digging had stopped an army

twice their strength for a month. Referring to the Federals, Magruder’s artil-

lery chief wrote, ‘‘They seemed determined to forego the gallant charge, and

went to the spade and their riﬂed guns, under the cover of intrenchments, to

dislodge us from our position. No other course could have afforded a more

ennobling tribute to our small force or a more damaging slur upon the

boastful arrogance of the enemy.’’

∑∂

McClellan’s engineers now had a chance to examine the Rebel works, and

they were impressed. ‘‘The line is certainly one of the most extensive known

in modern times,’’ thought Barnard. That was a professional opinion. The

view of volunteer ofﬁcers was less than generous. Lt. Charles A. Phillips

of the 5th Massachusetts Battery was impressed with the quantity of dirt

thrown up by the Rebels, but he denigrated ‘‘the manner in which it is

arranged.’’ The dimensions and proﬁle of the works on his part of the line

were ‘‘nothing more than those of an ordinary ﬁeld work.’’ He was convinced

that the Rebel guns would have been dismounted and the works would have

been reduced by twelve hours of concentrated ﬁre. Henry Abbott of the 20th

Massachusetts agreed, noting that the Federal heavies would have ‘‘knocked

them all to pie in no time.’’ Abbott concluded that ‘‘none of the niceties which

the books lay down as necessary for the preservation of earth works, &

which McClellan’s Report says were executed with the greatest ﬁnish at

Sebastopol, were observed here.’’

∑∑

The earthworks at Yorktown still had some useful role to play in the war.

The Federals would occupy the town for the rest of the conﬂict, and they

reworked many of the Rebel lines so that a small force could defend the area.

Many of the Union works were leveled to prevent their use in an attack on

the Federal post, but the more remote trenches were still intact in June 1863.

The Confederate works along the Warwick River were left in place by the

Federals, who knew that a Confederate force would never be able to use

them to strike at Yorktown.

∑∏

Yorktown was the ﬁrst confrontation of the eastern campaigns that in-

volved a comparatively large amount of digging, and soldiers and civilians

alike used the term ‘‘siege’’ to describe it. This would be a common occur-

rence throughout the war, for many campaigns, such as Petersburg, Atlanta,

and lesser-known operations involving extensive earthworks, would be given

that label. McClellan planned a limited attempt at reducing the Yorktown

position. He hoped to dig only minimal works to cover his heavy batteries

and relied on their ﬁrepower to compel a retreat. He never contemplated

advancing saps or attacking. He had planned a similar tactic at Rich Moun-

92 The Peninsula

tain, where he was confronted with a strong but much smaller entrenched

position and hoped to reduce it with ﬁeld artillery.

Given his desire to lessen bloodshed, this was the only course open to

McClellan. Lt. John C. Palfrey served as an engineer throughout the war. He

accurately sized up the tactical situation at Yorktown in a postwar paper

presented to the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts. He agreed

with McClellan that the navy could not have silenced the batteries at York-

town or Gloucester Point, and that landing troops to seize the works at the

latter place would accomplish nothing if the water batteries at the former

were still in operation. Palfrey believed that a concentrated attack could

have succeeded against the Red and White Redoubts or Dam No. 1 if Mc-

Clellan had had the stamina to try one. But he did not think the heavy guns

could have silenced the Rebel artillery and forced a determined commander

to abandon the line. He was convinced by the Confederate experience at

Vicksburg and Battery Wagner that they could have held out another month,

even under the heaviest Union artillery ﬁre, thus necessitating siege ap-

proaches by the Federals. McClellan was lucky, in other words, that Johnston

rather than a more resolute commander was in charge on the other side of

the Warwick River.

∑π

Williamsburg

While Johnston was retiring to the outskirts of Richmond, an unintended

battle took place to his rear. McClellan’s subordinates launched a vigorous

pursuit and caught up with the Confederates at Williamsburg, ten miles

north of Yorktown, where the third line of Rebel works crossed the Penin-

sula. It was an unﬁnished line consisting of a string of thirteen redoubts and

one large fort, but Johnston had long before decided not to defend it. Subor-

dinate commanders took it upon themselves to make a stand and blunt the

Federal pursuit on May 5, resulting in the ﬁrst battle of the campaign. They

made full use of the large earthwork, called Fort Magruder, but ignored the

other, smaller works in the line.

The Williamsburg Line was started in the early weeks of the war when

Col. Benjamin Stoddert Ewell assumed command of the area. Ewell, the

older brother of Richard Stoddert Ewell, a future corps commander in Lee’s

army, had graduated from West Point in 1832. He taught mathematics and

engineering at the academy and also worked as a railroad engineer. In 1848

he became president of William and Mary College. Professor Nathaniel Bev-

erly Tucker led him in a thorough study of the topography around Williams-

burg; Ewell knew that the town lay on the spine of the Peninsula, the divide

that separated water drainage between the two rivers. At this point two

The Peninsula 93

creeks started to ﬂow toward the James and the York. Thus the main road

linking Yorktown and Richmond ran through the streets of Williamsburg.

When Lee put Ewell in charge at Williamsburg on May 1, 1861, he in-

structed him to build a defense line across this spine of land between the

heads of Queen’s Creek and College Creek. Ewell asked mathematics pro-

fessor Thomas T. L. Snead to survey the land and then decided to place the

works along the north side of both creeks to minimize the length of the line.

Lee approved the plan after a cursory inspection, and Ewell issued a call to

the citizens of James City, York, and Warwick counties for the use of their

slaves. He also asked civilian ofﬁcials to notify free blacks in the three coun-

ties that they were expected to work, too, and he threatened that ‘‘a severe

penalty’’ would apply if they did not show up. Ewell also called for spades,

hoes, and axes.

But the plan was altered by Lt. Col. Alfred L. Rives, who was sent by Lee to

inspect the project in late May. Rives disapproved of Ewell’s plan because it

ran the line through the northern part of town and would have led to the

destruction of many private houses. He advised keeping the right wing intact

but moving the center south of Williamsburg and extending the left wing

along a line farther south than originally planned. This nearly doubled the

length of the line, but it avoided the town and still found advantageous

ground. Lee and Magruder approved, and the work was commenced. Hun-

dreds of slaves and free blacks helped the available infantrymen to dig the

redoubts. They also rebuilt a mill dam on the left of the line to create a water

obstacle and felled trees to make abatis where possible. Fort Magruder and

the other works were nearly ﬁnished by August. Two months later, Magruder

planned to use this line as his last defense on the Peninsula, but Johnston

never considered such a possibility when he took charge in April.

∑∫

The line, as altered by Rives, was four miles long. Some of the redoubts

were enclosed, but others were redans, consisting of two parapets that joined

at an angle. Each was about 600 to 800 yards from its neighboring works.

Redoubts 1 through 4, on the right wing, lay behind a deep ravine formed by a

tributary of College Creek called Tutter’s Neck. Fort Magruder was located at

the junction of the James City and Yorktown roads south of Williamsburg and

thus blocked the major route along the spine of the Peninsula. Redoubts 7

through 14 were on the north side of Jones’s Mill Pond, a tributary of Queen’s

Creek. The line formed a giant Z across the breadth of the Peninsula.

∑Ω

The redoubts were mostly square works with sides forty yards long and

raised platforms for two or three ﬁeld guns. Except Fort Magruder, there

were no cannons in any of them when Johnston’s army passed through on its

retreat from Yorktown. Apparently there were some small, scattered infantry

94 The Peninsula

Redoubt No. 1

Redoubt No. 2

Redoubt No. 3

Three gun emplacements

and a small traverse

protecting the sally port

Three gun emplacements,

a large traverse on the

front face,

and a small traverse

protecting the sally port

Two gun emplacements

and a magazine

’

Road

Williamsburg Line, May 1862 (based on ﬁeld visits, 1994 and 1995)

trenches in front of a few redoubts and redans, but there were no connecting

lines between the works. While the Confederates who fought there hardly

noticed the fortiﬁcations, Union observers found them ‘‘well built. . . . The

line in itself I think as strong as the one they held at Yorktown save

that the ﬂanks can be turned by water,’’ thought artillery ofﬁcer Charles

Wainwright.

∏≠

Given its size and location, Fort Magruder was the only fortiﬁcation that

was occupied by the Rebels. It was ‘‘a large work,’’ thought Union engineer

Lt. Miles D. McAlester, but ‘‘irregular in traci,’’ with ‘‘two fronts being bas-

tioned.’’ Trees had already been cut down for 100 yards in front of the work

and constituted a superb abatis with limbs and trunks piled 10 feet high in

places. The ditch around the fort, 9 feet deep and 9 feet wide, was ﬁlled with

water from the incessant rains. The parapet was 6 feet high on the interior

The Peninsula 95

and 9 feet thick. The interior crest of the parapet measured a total of 600 feet

in length. Fort Magruder was far bigger, more complex, and stronger than

any other work on the Williamsburg Line. The rest had good ditches and

parapets but no traverses for the artillery emplacements. Normally a small

traverse was placed inside the work to cover the sally port in the rear, and

most of the fortiﬁcations had a magazine.

∏∞

The engagement at Williamsburg was a bloody, pitched battle. Long-

street’s division, acting as Johnston’s rear guard, turned and took position.

The Federals moved up to skirmish with the Rebels who held Fort Magruder,

but they soon found that the earthwork was too strong to attempt an assault.

Longstreet launched an attack on the Union left, south of the fort, and

the Federal Second Corps responded with an assault on the Rebel left by

Brig. Gen. Winﬁeld Scott Hancock’s brigade, which easily occupied the area

around Redoubt No. 11 north of Jones’s Mill Pond. Jubal Early’s brigade

counterattacked from the center of Williamsburg, exposed to a galling infan-

try and artillery ﬁre, and was repulsed by Hancock with heavy losses. Long-

street’s assault on the Union left, held by the Third Corps, was stopped in

brutal ﬁghting. This was enough for both sides. As the Confederates con-

tinued their retreat, the Federals were content to remain on the battleﬁeld.

More then 1,600 Confederate and 2,200 Federal casualties were the result,

and Johnston was able to continue his retreat in peace.

∏≤

Benjamin Stoddert Ewell, who apparently did not participate in the bat-

tle, was convinced that his original plan for the Williamsburg Line had been

better than Rives’s alteration. He lamented the Union occupation of the town

and argued that if ‘‘Fort Magruder had been where it ought the force in

possession of it would necessarily have held Williamsburg.’’ Given that John-

ston had no intention of holding Williamsburg in any case, the question of

how the line was placed was moot. Rives’s line was just as strong as Ewell’s

line would have been, and it saved a good part of the old, historic town.

Nevertheless, Benjamin easily convinced Richard, who bemoaned the inter-

ference with his brother’s plan.

∏≥

By the morning of May 6, McClellan’s army had marched, dug, and fought

its way along the length of the Peninsula. It took more than one month

to pass through the three lines of defense Magruder had constructed. This

gave the Confederates time to reposition Johnston’s army more than seventy

miles to meet the developing threat to the capital. Arguably, McClellan could

have made faster progress and increased his chances of capturing Richmond

that spring, but he was by no means too late to achieve that goal. It would

depend on how he approached the city during the coming few weeks.

5:From Seven Pines to the Seven Days

hen Johnston evacuated the Peninsula, he also aban-

doned a large number of Confederate forts, water bat-

teries, and defensive lines. The Rebels had expended a

great deal of labor for many months perfecting several

kinds of earthworks on the Peninsula and along the

banks of the James River. Only the Warwick Line proved its mettle in a direct

confrontation with McClellan’s army. The engineering skill, time, and labor

invested in most of the others were ultimately wasted.

Defenses on the James River

The lower James was defended by numerous works. The Confederates

fortiﬁed six major positions: Fort Boykin at Day’s Point, Fort Huger at Har-

den’s Bluff, Mulberry Island (the western anchor of the Warwick Line),

Jamestown Island, Fort Powhatan (near the mouth of the Chickahominy),

and Drewry’s Bluff. The works at Jamestown Island were the most extensive,

while the defenses at Drewry’s Bluff were the most important. The latter

place was the last river defense site capable of preventing Yankee gunboats

from steaming to Richmond.

∞

On Jamestown Island, as at Yorktown, the Rebels were digging in hal-

lowed ground, the site of England’s ﬁrst permanent colony in North America.

A small island off the mainland, on the north side of the James River about

ﬁfty miles downstream from Richmond, it was also the site of several colo-

nial fortiﬁcations. The ﬁrst was merely an abatis shaped like a half-moon,

which was replaced by an earthen fort in June 1607. It was triangular in

shape, mounted artillery, and enclosed one acre. The wooden components of

James Fort burned in January 1608 and were rebuilt later that year. Capt.

John Smith soon after enlarged the fort into a pentagonal shape. A block-

house was added in 1609 to guard the isthmus that connected the colonists

to the mainland. This isthmus eventually eroded, and the settlement was left

on an island.

Two other colonial fortiﬁcations were built to protect the colony. About

1663 a detached work with four sides was constructed east of the settlement

but was dismantled within twenty years. A second fort, built in the 1670s,

From Seven Pines to the Seven Days 97

mounted twenty guns within its crescent-shaped parapets but was deserted

by 1716. Jamestown barely survived Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, and the colo-

nial capital of Virginia was moved to Williamsburg by 1699. A battery mount-

ing two guns was constructed on the island during the Revolution.

≤

Nearly three miles long, Jamestown Island was a strategic location be-

cause its bulk narrowed the width of the James River. The channel is almost

four miles wide at the island’s downstream end but narrows to slightly more

than half that width at the upstream end. By 1861 there were only a few

reminders of the colonial past. A church tower, the remnants of one of the

forts, and a magazine were still there when Rebel engineers began to plan

their own fortiﬁcations.

≥

They decided to place their major work 20 yards from the church tower

and 100 yards from the site of the blockhouse built in 1609. Andrew Talcott

was aided by Capt. Edmund Trowbridge Dana Myers and Lt. Catesby ap

Roger Jones of the Virginia navy in laying out the work on May 3, 1861. It had

six sides and was large enough for eighteen guns. Jones supervised the more

than 100 slaves who built the fort. The workers dug up pieces of body armor

and found timbers that probably were part of the colonial fortiﬁcations.

Remnants of the fort show a raised, continuous platform on two sides facing

downriver, with embrasures for three guns. There was an additional gun

embrasure to the rear, pointing upriver. A long traverse in the middle of the

work had a magazine in one end, and the ancient church tower stood directly

in the line of ﬁre. Jones christened the work Fort Pocahontas.

∂

Five other works were constructed on the island. The Sand Battery, sited

by Talcott in late May near the river midway along the island, was built for

ﬁve guns. The Square Redoubt was constructed in part by the 14th Virginia in

early June. Two works were built that same month to guard the bridge

connecting the island to the mainland. The Bridge Redan had three faces

and mounted one gun, while the Bridge Lunette was designed for an infantry

garrison alone. Finally, the Point of Island Battery, a semicircular emplace-

ment for two guns, was built in July and August at the eastern tip of the

island. It had two sides and connecting infantry trenches to left and right for

a short distance.

∑

Fort Pocahontas is partially intact today, although the river has eroded

the land close to its remaining parapet. The Square Redoubt, however, is

magniﬁcently preserved about three miles from the church tower. Its para-

pets are about ﬁfty yards long and have deep, wide ditches. There are no

remnants of traverses, magazines, or bombproofs in the work. A small tra-

verse inside the redoubt covers the sally port, and four raised gun plat-

forms are intact. Robert C. Mabry, an ofﬁcer in the 6th Virginia, marveled at