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.No one in Washington could forget that the Union had had a fairly strong army in the Shenandoah when McDowell was beaten at Bull Run: its presence in the valley had not served to protect Washington in July 1861, and an unmilitary President and Cabinet could hardly be blamed for feeling that things might be no different in April of 1862.Add it up any way he tried, the President could only conclude that McClellan had not done what he had been told to do.The capital was not properly defended.The reaction to this was immediate.McClellan had barely started up the peninsula when he was officially notified that McDowell's corps at Fredericksburg had been withdrawn from his command and would get its orders hereafter direct from Washington.Which meant that his campaign started under a great handicap.McClellan himself got off the boat at Fortress Monroe on April 2 and found that he had on hand—disembarked, equipped, and ready to go—some fifty-eight thousand men: five infantry divisions, a scattering of cavalry, and a hundred guns.He at once started them up the roads toward Yorktown, with instructions that the rest of the army was to follow as soon as it arrived.The first thing he discovered was that someone had steered him wrong about those sandy roads on the peninsula.Instead of being sandy they were uniformly of pure gumbo mud, with hollow crowns so that they collected whatever water might be coming down; and the weather turned rainy, so that the roads quickly became bottomless beyond anything in anybody's imagination.Guns and wagons sank to the axles and beyond.One officer wrote later that he saw a mule sink completely out of sight, all but its ears, in the middle of what was supposed to be a main road.He added that it was a rather small mule.4McClellan's next discovery was that the Rebels had dug a line of entrenchments running completely across the peninsula from York-town, on the York River, to the mouth of Warwick Creek, on the James.Emplaced in these lines they had several dozen heavy naval guns (acquired a year earlier through capture of the United States navy yard at Norfolk) plus a number of fieldpieces, and they appeared to have all the infantry they needed.The approaches to this line led through swamps and tangled woodlands, and every foot of road would have to be corduroyed before guns could be brought up.Bewiskered old General Heintzelman, leading the advance, reported—somewhat hastily, it would seem—that a direct assault was out of the question.McClellan decided there would have to be a siege.Under his original plans he would simply have brought McDowell down from the north to take the Rebel works in the rear, thereby forcing their immediate evacuation, but McDowell was no longer his to command.To get past these lines McClellan would have to go straight over them, and that appeared to be a matter for the slow, methodical, step-by-step process of digging parallels, moving up heavy guns, and getting everything ready to blast the Rebel works off the face of the earth by sheer weight of gunfire.Concerning which there was to be great argument, then and thereafter.When McClellan got his first look at the Yorktown fines, the Confederate force there was under command of General John B.Magruder, who had no more than twelve thousand men and who felt the lines to be faulty both in design and in construction.Magruder was never especially distinguished as a combat general, but in his idle moments he had considerable talent as an amateur actor, and he now called on this theatrical ability to help him.He marched a couple of regiments through a clearing, in sight of the Federal advance guard, double-quicked them around a little forest out of sight, and then marched them through the clearing again-over and over, like a stage manager using a dozen adenoidal spear carriers to represent Caesar's legions.The device worked, and Heintzelman reported the Rebels present in great strength with many more coming up
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