150-Year Anniversary · May 1862
By the first week of May 1862, the Civil War in the East had moved to the muddy, low-lying neck of land between the York and James rivers. Major General George B. McClellan had landed the Army of the Potomac at Fort Monroe in April and begun a slow, methodical march toward the Confederate capital at Richmond. His campaign — remembered as the Peninsula Campaign — promised to end the war in a single decisive stroke. Instead, May became a month of siege lines, drenching rain, and the first of the great battles fought within sight of Richmond's church spires.
General Joseph E. Johnston, commanding the Confederate forces on the Peninsula, recognized that his thin lines at Yorktown could not hold against McClellan's enormous siege train. On the night of May 3, the Confederates slipped away toward Richmond. The rear-guard action at Williamsburg on May 5 was sharp and confused, fought in driving rain through felled timber and earthen redoubts, but it bought Johnston the time he needed to continue his retreat up the Peninsula.
Through the middle of May the two armies edged closer to the Confederate capital. Union gunboats probed up the James River until they were turned back at Drewry's Bluff on May 15, where Confederate guns commanded a sharp bend in the river only seven miles below Richmond. On land, McClellan pressed forward until his army straddled the rain-swollen Chickahominy River — a position that left his corps dangerously divided, with part of the army on the Richmond side of the river and part still on the far bank.
Johnston saw his chance. On May 31, with the Chickahominy in flood and the Union wings separated, he struck the isolated Federal corps south of the river near the crossroads of Seven Pines. The attack was poorly coordinated — confused orders, tangled roads, and the difficult ground turned what should have been a concentrated blow into a series of disjointed assaults. The fighting was savage and the casualties heavy on both sides, but the Union line, reinforced across a swaying bridge as darkness fell, held.
The battle's most lasting consequence was personal rather than tactical. Late on May 31, Johnston was severely wounded by a shell fragment and carried from the field. Within days, command of the Confederate army before Richmond passed to a hitherto cautious engineer officer named Robert E. Lee. Lee would rename his command the Army of Northern Virginia, and the war in the East would never be the same.
Seven Pines settled nothing on the ground — the armies returned to roughly the lines they had held before — yet it marked a hinge in the campaign. McClellan, shaken by the ferocity of the assault, grew still more cautious. Lee, by contrast, immediately began planning the offensive that would become the Seven Days Battles at the end of June. The slow Union advance of May would soon give way to a violent Confederate counterstroke that drove the Army of the Potomac back from the gates of Richmond.
The eastern theater in May 1862 is one chapter of a larger military narrative. That narrative is collected on the American Civil War hub.