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

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128 From Seven Pines to the Seven Days

portion of the line that faced Kimage’s Creek had several gun emplacements

with ﬂank protection to ﬁre on an enemy approaching over the cleared ﬁelds

to the west. Trees were slashed in front of the line, except across the open

ﬁelds of Westover.

The connecting infantry trench was soon ﬁnished, but the redoubts took a

couple of weeks. The regular and volunteer engineer troops did the special-

ized work on them, but infantry were employed in the rough construction.

Alfred Bellard, a soldier in the 5th New Jersey, worked on one redoubt for

seven guns and on another for six guns. He and his comrades cut all the trees

for 200 yards in front of the line. The next day, the slashing caught ﬁre, and a

strong wind blew the ﬂames across the works. The blaze scorched logs in the

revetment and burned a lot of equipment and personal belongings in the

unit’s camp, located just behind the line. The redoubts, with parapets double

the thickness of the infantry line, had embrasured artillery emplacements.

∏≤

These works prevented Lee from attacking the Federals. He scouted Mc-

Clellan’s position on July 4, even before the fortiﬁcations were complete, and

decided it was not worth chancing an attack. Yet the Seven Days campaign

ended with a Southern victory and the saving of the capital. Curiously, Lee

suffered tactical defeats at Beaver Dam Creek, Savage’s Station, White Oak

Swamp, Glendale, and Malvern Hill, but his only tactical victory, at Gaines’s

Mill, was the turning point of the campaign. The price was high on both

sides. Lee lost 20,204 men, or 22 percent of his army, while McClellan posted

losses of 15,855. An additional 10,246 Confederates were lost from Yorktown

to the beginning of the Seven Days, and McClellan lost 9,515 men during that

period.

∏≥

Much more than the end of the Peninsula campaign and the saving of

Richmond had been accomplished by July 1, 1862. Lee had established him-

self as the preeminent Southern general of the war, and the Army of North-

ern Virginia had been transformed into the most effective ﬁeld army of the

Confederacy. During the next six months, Lee would win spectacular vic-

tories exceeding the costly, blundering triumph of the Seven Days. During

this period the morale of his men soared to extraordinary heights; they and

their commander would disdain all fortiﬁcations, whether their own or the

Federals’. Troops could hardly learn that ﬁeldworks are important if they

futilely attacked them one day, only to have the enemy abandon them in the

night. Lee’s men went to battle in the last half of 1862 having learned from

the Seven Days that digging was not necessary, and that enemy fortiﬁcations

were not impregnable.

The Peninsula campaign was representative of how ﬁeld armies used

fortiﬁcations during the ﬁrst half of the war in the East. They used them both

From Seven Pines to the Seven Days 129

offensively and defensively; they dug semipermanent works to defend major,

ﬁxed assets; and they experimented with hasty fortiﬁcations to meet a spe-

ciﬁc tactical need. More commonly, both sides constructed ﬁeldworks that

lay somewhere between these two categories, works that were made with

relative leisure for defending one stage in a strategic advance or defense, and

that were occupied for several days or weeks at a time. The quality of engi-

neering, the seriousness with which soldiers approached this work, and the

reliance that commanders placed on fortiﬁcations varied widely. Both ar-

mies consisted of green volunteers who were learning the art of war by hard

experience.

6:Second Manassas, Antietam, and

the Maryland Campaign

he Seven Days battles saved the Confederate capital for

the time being, but McClellan’s large army was still

entrenched only twenty miles from the city. Lee refused

to accept that his own army had to remain inert in the

outskirts of Richmond to guard against another Union

thrust. He intended to take the war northward, to enlarge the area of opera-

tions, and to confront another Union force, the newly created Army of Vir-

ginia under Maj. Gen. John Pope, which was hovering north of the Rap-

pahannock River. This move would shift the focus of the war away from

Richmond for some time to come.

Defenses of Richmond

Lee had to arrange for the city’s defense while he was away. He ordered in-

creased work on its growing ring of fortiﬁcations. The southern approaches

were strengthened, more guns were ordered for Drewry’s Bluff, and works at

Petersburg, an important rail junction thirty miles south of the capital, were

also pushed forward.

∞

Lee’s newly appointed chief engineer, Col. Jeremy Francis Gilmer, began

to inspect the lines and suggest improvements. ‘‘The greater anxiety is felt for

pressing forward defensive works now,’’ Gilmer wrote his wife, ‘‘because a

large part of our forces in & about Richmond have been sent northward to

whip Pope, leaving the reduced forces here in need of aid from the much

abused pick and shovel.’’ When Lee shifted his army to the Rappahannock

River, he left all of his engineer ofﬁcers behind to see to the defenses of the

capital. Only one ofﬁcer returned to ﬁeld duty by August 25, on the eve of the

campaign against Pope.

≤

Much work was done at Chafﬁn’s Bluff that summer and fall as Lee or-

dered improvements on the Outer Line of the city defenses. Two brigades

and all of A. P. Hill’s division worked on the fortiﬁcations there in late July

and early August until those troops were shifted to ﬁeld duty elsewhere.

Maj. Gen. Gustavus W. Smith took charge of the Richmond defenses on

August 30, while Lt. Col. William Proctor Smith took over from William

Elzey Harrison as engineer in charge of the works at Chafﬁn’s Bluff. Re-

Second Manassas, Antietam, and Maryland 131

sponding to recommendations by Gilmer, Smith used Henry A. Wise’s Vir-

ginia brigade to improve the defenses. These troops would spend the next

several months digging earthworks near Richmond. Smith connected Bat-

teries 2 through 5 of Harrison’s line with an infantry trench, completed gun

emplacements all along the line to Williamsburg Road, and slashed timber to

create ﬁelds of ﬁre.

He also laid out a secondary line that branched off from a point on Har-

rison’s line between Battery 9 and 10 to cover the area between Battery 11

and New Market Road. W. P. Smith’s line was built in October and November

1862 and had two artillery redans. One, Smith’s Battery, was a redoubt with

ﬁve faces. The other, overlooking the valley of Coles Run, was constructed

the same way and had four gun platforms. If the enemy broke through the

left wing of Harrison’s line, Smith’s new position would still protect the bluff

batteries at Chafﬁn’s. Brig. Gen. Junius Daniel’s North Carolina brigade did

the work on Smith’s line.

≥

As troops were sent to reinforce Lee or left for garrison duty in North

Carolina and South Carolina, less labor was available to work on the Rich-

mond fortiﬁcations. Noting that Lee was ‘‘excessively anxious to push rapidly

to completion’’ the defenses around Richmond, Alfred L. Rives received au-

thority from the War Department to impress one-fourth of all male slaves in

several Virginia counties as laborers. Their masters were to be paid twenty

dollars per month for each slave, and the government was to provide rations.

Rives also enlisted the aid of the Richmond and Danville Railroad to trans-

port the workers. He rounded up shovels, picks, and axes and even im-

pressed 30,000 feet of three-inch lumber from a privately owned company

and a grove of 100 pine trees from a family farm to make revetments. In

October, Jefferson Davis called on Governor John Letcher of Virginia for

4,500 additional black laborers. Gilmer, now head of the Engineer Bureau,

worked out a system to mobilize this labor force, ﬁxing quotas for nearby

counties and assigning agents of the county governments the responsibility

of organizing the crews and delivering them to Confederate authorities.

Gustavus Smith planned to allocate at least 200 blacks to the Chafﬁn’s Farm

works, which he hoped to complete as rapidly as possible. Half of Daniel’s

brigade was at work on them all the time, and Smith urged Wise to put as

many men on the project as possible. The slaves produced some contro-

versy among local residents. Reports soon circulated that they started work

late each day and cut privately owned timber for their ﬁrewood. But the

large slave population was one of the few sources of workers the Engineer

Bureau could call on to supplement the meager number of soldiers left

behind by Lee.

∂

132 Second Manassas, Antietam, and Maryland

W. P. Smith’s line,

1862

Coles Run

Battery

Harrison’s line,

1862

Smith’s

Battery

River

batteries

Mountcastle

Chafﬁn’s Bluff Defenses, 1862 (based on maps in Dickinson, ‘‘Union and Confederate

Engineering Operations at Chafﬁn’s Bluff,’’ 17, 30, 66, RNB)

The crisis that developed when McClellan drove to the outskirts of Rich-

mond had taught Confederate authorities a hard lesson; it was foolish to

ignore a system of semipermanent defenses for the nation’s capital. Even

as Lee took the war dozens of miles from Richmond, military and civilian

leaders worked hard to perfect the ring of works guarding the city. They

wanted to be ready the next time a Yankee army threatened the capital.

Second Manassas, Antietam, and Maryland 133

Second Manassas

Lee’s decision to move north represented a watershed in the eastern cam-

paigns. The Confederates had been compelled to ﬁght a desperate series of

battles close to Richmond during the spring and early summer, but they had

not been able to clear Federal troops from the vicinity of the capital. When

Lee deftly took the war away from Richmond, he kept the theater of opera-

tions either along the Rappahannock River or in Maryland and Pennsylvania

for the next twenty months.

Fortiﬁcations would play a relatively modest role in his campaigns. Lee’s

army came away from the Seven Days with a palpable disdain for ﬁeldworks.

They had beaten the Army of the Potomac despite its use of temporary

defenses, and they felt little need to resort to earthworks when an open ﬁeld

ﬁght was possible. But the dangers of ignoring fortiﬁcations became appar-

ent to many of Lee’s soldiers during the upcoming campaigns, especially dur-

ing the vicious battle of Antietam, where the Confederate army was badly

outnumbered and fought in largely open, rolling terrain. Lee’s command

probably came closest to being crushed in the ﬁeld here than at any other

time in its history, and the lesson forced a grudging appreciation of ﬁeld-

works that would become evident in the battle of Fredericksburg. The sum-

mer and fall campaigns represented a slow but real evolution toward greater

reliance on ﬁeld fortiﬁcations, at least among Lee’s hard-bitten soldiers.

As the Army of Northern Virginia set out to deal with Pope in August 1862,

the lessons of Antietam and Fredericksburg, let alone the Wilderness and

Spotsylvania, were in the future. Coming from the bloody but victorious

engagements of the Seven Days, Lee’s men were brimming with conﬁdence

in their commander and eager to capitalize on their success outside the gates

of Richmond. A hard-won victory over elements of Pope’s army at Cedar

Mountain on August 9, in the piedmont of Virginia, helped to boost their

conﬁdence. It was fought without the aid of fortiﬁcations on either side

and took place in a largely open, agricultural landscape in the shadow of

the mountain.

∑

Lee and Pope faced each other along the Rappahannock River until late

August; both commanders failed to cross and catch the other in the ﬂank.

Lee then decided to break the stalemate with a bold and powerful stroke. He

sent Jackson and 24,000 men on a wide ﬂanking movement to get well to

Pope’s rear and draw the Federals north. Longstreet was to follow, with the

two wings reuniting somewhere east of the Bull Run Mountains. Jackson

started on August 25 and marched ﬁfty-four miles in two days, crossing the

Bull Run Mountains through Thoroughfare Gap. He reached Manassas Junc-

134 Second Manassas, Antietam, and Maryland

tion on August 27 and plundered the rich store of supplies Pope had left

there. By now the Federals were fully aware of his whereabouts and were on

the move northward. Jackson assumed a defensive position near the old Bull

Run battleﬁeld and waited for the Federals to attack. He was conﬁdent his

men could hold on long enough for Longstreet to duplicate his ﬂanking

march and support him. Jackson took up a position ten miles southeast of

Thoroughfare Gap along the line of an unﬁnished railroad grade, the best

defensive ground in the area.

This risky strategy gave Pope an opportunity to strike Jackson’s isolated

corps with 50,000 men before Longstreet made it to the ﬁeld, but the Federal

commander neglected to hold Thoroughfare Gap. Longstreet reached the

pass by August 28. Jackson made his ﬁrst contact with Pope that same day.

The Confederate commander launched a surprise attack on a Federal divi-

sion as it moved eastward on Warrenton Turnpike near Groveton. The attack

was stopped by ﬁerce Union resistance as the afternoon gave way to evening.

Pope formed opposite the railroad grade, while Longstreet delayed his link-

up with Jackson until the last minute.

∏

The railroad grade was the proposed Independent Line of the Manassas

Gap Railroad, one of two railroads that met at Manassas Junction. The

Independent Line was meant to bypass Manassas and link Gainesville with

Alexandria. Work had started in the mid-1850s, but ﬁnancial difﬁculties

forced a postponement just before the war broke out. The grade was nearly

complete; it had a number of cuts and ﬁlls, but saplings and brush had

already begun to grow on them.

Like most civilian projects, the railroad grade was not an ideal military

fortiﬁcation. The cuts were roughly 100 yards long and ranged in depth from

1 to 10 feet. Many of the cuts were too deep for the soldiers, as they could not

ﬁre over the rim, and some of the ﬁlls were too high for them to ﬁre conve-

niently over the top. None of the cuts had ﬁring steps, and none of the ﬁlls had

revetments, so it was difﬁcult to snuggle up closely to the earthen barrier and

gain maximum coverage. Woods screened the approaches on many parts of

the line, although on others, such as that occupied by the Deep Cut, there was

open ground. The land in front of the Deep Cut was especially good for

defense, as it was level for about ﬁfty yards and then gently lowered into a

series of swales. The ground to the rear of the grade rose gently to Stony

Ridge. At a maximum elevation of 330 feet, the ridge was only about 80 feet

higher than the railroad grade. The railroad ‘‘provided an inconsistent—and

hence vulnerable—bulwark,’’ according to a recent historian of the battle.

Jackson did not put complete faith in it. Each of the three divisions divided

its strength. A. P. Hill’s on the left was arrayed in two lines. His left wing was

Second Manassas, Antietam, and Maryland 135

Railroad cut at Second Manassas. It was at this point that Fitz John Porter launched

an attack by 10,000 Federals on August 30, 1862. (Earl J. Hess)

sixty yards to the rear of the grade, while his right wing was immediately

behind it. Ewell’s division, now led by Brig. Gen. Alexander R. Lawton, also

was positioned with one line to the rear and another at the grade. Brig. Gen.

William E. Starke’s division on the right positioned its skirmishers in the

grade and its main line 200 yards to the rear on Stony Ridge. Jackson’s line

was nearly two miles long, and its right ﬂank was open, screened only by two

brigades, so that Longstreet could move up and extend it.

∫

The ﬁrst Federal attack on Jackson’s position was made on August 29 by

Brig. Gen. Robert H. Milroy’s brigade. Milroy hit a section of the grade called

the Dump, one of the larger ﬁlls that lay unﬁnished when work on the

railroad ended two years earlier. The Dump also marked the boundary be-

tween Starke’s and Lawton’s divisions. Milroy’s piecemeal attack by regi-

ments actually took the Federals across the grade, but lack of support on

either ﬂank prevented them from exploiting their success. The Unionists had

to repulse a small Confederate counterattack as Milroy’s men pulled back.

Another Federal attack, this one against Hill’s division by Brig. Gen. Cuvier

Grover’s brigade, also captured a section of the railroad grade. Grover’s ﬁve

regiments hit a gap 125 yards wide between two of Hill’s regiments, but they

had to withdraw in the face of a counterattack by Hill’s second line. A local

Rebel counterattack hastened the Yankees on their way.

Ω

136 Second Manassas, Antietam, and Maryland

Soon after Grover was repulsed on the Confederate left, Col. James

Nagle’s brigade attacked the center. His three regiments started from Dogan

Ridge and crossed several hundred yards of open ground to a patch of woods

that fronted this sector of Jackson’s line. The Federals threw out skirmishers

and pressed on to the grade. Lawton had two brigades on the railroad grade

and two more in a second line 400 yards to the rear. The cut was so deep that

Nagle’s men were able to get within point-blank range before being seen.

They marched right up to the lip of the cut and ﬁred their muskets into the

excavation. Of course, the Confederates could not stand this encounter and

ﬂed. Nagle’s elated soldiers pushed on about 100 yards beyond the grade

before they were met with counterthrusts by several Rebel units. As with

Milroy and Grover before him, Nagle was unsupported on either ﬂank. His

men had to retreat under difﬁcult circumstances, and other units back in the

Union line had to be repositioned to stop a spirited Confederate counter-

attack across no-man’s-land.

∞≠

The last major Union strike at Jackson on August 29 was the most massive,

involving ten regiments under Maj. Gen. Philip Kearney. It was launched just

after Nagle’s repulse, about 5:00 p.m., and it threw several units of Hill’s

division into disorder. Kearney’s men pushed the Rebel skirmishers out of the

railroad grade on the far left of Hill’s line, where Brig. Gen. Maxcy Gregg’s

brigade was positioned on a rocky knoll well behind the railroad. Farther to

the right, Brig. Gen. James J. Archer’s Tennessee brigade was positioned in

the grade itself and received a devastating volley at point-blank range. At

least a part of Archer’s command retreated in haste, and the rest held on

grimly until help arrived from Brig. Gen. Lawrence O’Bryan Branch’s North

Carolina brigade. When Early counterattacked on Gregg’s front, Kearney

was forced to retire. The railroad line continued to hold despite this very

close call.

∞∞

Pope had his best chance to crush Jackson on August 29, but he threw

away every opportunity by launching uncoordinated, small-scale assaults

and by failing to ﬁnd and exploit Jackson’s exposed ﬂank. He was given one

more day to try, because Longstreet took a great deal of time positioning his

corps to Jackson’s right. Maj. Gen. Fitz John Porter organized an assault by

10,000 men on August 30 with Starke’s division as the target. The Confeder-

ates were positioned in two lines, 200 yards apart. The open ground in front

of Starke’s division was dominated by Confederate artillery to the Union left.

This was the heaviest assault on the railroad grade, and it was not too late,

even at 3:00 p.m., to accomplish some good for Pope. Hundreds of Federals

braved the intense artillery ﬁre and lodged themselves at the foot of the

Dump, where the large earth embankment alone separated them from the

Second Manassas, Antietam, and Maryland 137

Rebel defenders. For at least thirty minutes a static ﬁreﬁght at very close

range thundered across the grade. As their ammunition gave out, many of

Jackson’s men threw rocks onto the heads of their opponents, who often

threw them back. Reinforcements arrived from Hill, and their counterattack

was enough to force the Unionists to retire. The predictable Rebel counter-

attack was launched, and it was just as predictably thrown back.

∞≤

Late that afternoon Longstreet launched his long-delayed assault. It was

unexpected and resulted in a crushing defeat for Pope. The only terrain

feature in Longstreet’s way was Chinn Ridge, and outnumbered Federal

troops fought a heroic action there that delayed the Rebels for ninety min-

utes. Another Union line was formed between the ridge and Henry Hill on

the old First Bull Run battleﬁeld, and part of the line was placed in the cut of

Sudley Road. Milroy called it ‘‘a splendid covert for my men. . . . They could

be entirely protected while loading and only expose their heads while ﬁring

over the bank.’’ A remnant of the cut today is about twenty yards long and

ﬁve feet deep, with a ravine in front of it. This was a better defensive position

than most of Jackson’s railroad grade, but the momentum was on Lee’s side.

Longstreet’s advance broke the line, and Pope’s army conducted a ﬁghting

retreat to Washington.

∞≥

Neither side dug earthworks or constructed breastworks during the Sec-

ond Bull Run campaign. While some postwar commentators were surprised

at this, believing that the value of ﬁeldworks had already been demonstrated

on the Peninsula and during the Seven Days, the truth was that the Union

failure in the latter campaign had dispelled any illusions that ﬁeldworks

were indispensable to victory. Most of Pope’s units had not participated in

the Seven Days and, with his focus on destroying Jackson, Pope had no

intention of immobilizing his army by digging in. Longstreet, likewise, in-

tended to win through offensive action. Jackson is the one who could be

criticized for failing to fortify. The railroad grade was an imperfect defense

that needed work to be transformed into an effective fortiﬁcation. Jackson’s

men defended this position by forming two lines, by hard ﬁghting, and by the

fact that the Union thrusts were wasted in small-scale, unsupported efforts.

Although he fought a purely defensive battle, Jackson maintained his mobil-

ity, moving units from the rear line to threatened points on the front line,

something that would have been difﬁcult if he had dug in.

∞∂

Defenses of Washington

In early September, when the glow of Rebel victory still burned brightly

after Second Manassas, the Confederate Map Bureau in Richmond prepared

a series of maps of the area around Washington, D.C. Alfred L. Rives also