ON THIS DAY ·
Seven Days Battles
25 Jun–1 Jul 1862 — Lee, three weeks in command, attacks every day for a week and drives McClellan’s hundred thousand back from Richmond’s suburbs at a cost of 20,000 of his own men. The Union’s best early chance to end the war recedes for two years.
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The moment in context
McClellan’s Peninsula campaign was designed to avoid a costly overland march by using the Union’s command of the sea. He built and supplied a great army with real skill, but his intelligence service consistently doubled the enemy’s true numbers, and his preference for a limited war of reconciliation reinforced his caution. By late May 1862 his men were close enough to hear Richmond’s church bells, yet he waited for reinforcements that Washington, suddenly fearful for its own safety, refused to send.
From Peninsula Campaign and Seven Days, chapter 6 of The American Civil War, 1840–1877 (JUL 1862).
The place: Seven Days Battles — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — McClellan’s mathematics of caution. He commanded the largest army ever assembled in the hemisphere and believed himself always outnumbered. Pinkerton’s intelligence fed him figures…
- The turn — Gaines’ Mill and the Seven Days, 25 June–1 July 1862. The hinge is psychological. McClellan was not destroyed. His army fought superbly in retreat and mauled Lee at Malvern Hill. But he wired Washington…
- What it changed — The war radicalizes. The failure before Richmond killed the limited-war school. In July Congress passed the Confiscation Act freeing the slaves of rebels. Lincoln, the…
Then ask the room: Jackson in the Valley and Lee in the Seven Days beat larger armies repeatedly. Does “the better general” actually decide wars? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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