Lee had the game in his hand. McClellan’s army was penned in between the James and the Chickahominy, and on the map—and if Lee’s army had been what it was a year later—Lee had it in his power to destroy him. He could hang on McClellan’s rear, send his advance around to block his retreat, hit him in the flank as he moved, and win a shattering, conclusive victory. He saw it, planned it, ordered it—and learned that as things then stood he could not quite do it.

Part of the fault, as Mr. Dowdey points out, was Lee’s. He had commanded this army for less than a month and maneuvering a large army deftly was a skill he simply had not acquired. He had a staff that was almost wholly incompetent for this kind of operation, and he had not yet learned how to make certain that his principal lieutenants actually did the things they were ordered to do. Between army headquarters and the separate divisional commands there was a great deal of slippage; the Lee of the Seven Days had not become the Lee of Chancellorsville.

But most of the trouble came farther down the line. Lee’s army was not yet organized in army corps; everything depended on the work of the men who commanded divisions, and some of them just were not up to their jobs. (A singular fact, in this connection, is that the Federal government had enforced a corps command system on an unwilling army commander, but the Richmond government had refused to let its army commander have one. Some of McClellan’s corps commanders did their jobs poorly, but Lee had none at all.)

In James Longstreet and A. P. Hill, Lee had two division leaders who worked competently and aggressively. He also had such men as General Benjamin Huger, atrophied by age and long years of old-army routine; John B. Magruder, too excitable to understand what he was up against or to execute his orders properly; Theophilus Holmes, even more atrophied than Huger; and, last but not least, the famous Stonewall Jackson, who brought to the Seven Days a towering reputation and somehow failed to take advantage of any of his opportunities. Among them, the generals let McClellan get away. They made his retreat costly, they fought him in the swamps and on the hills, they left him feeling that he was lucky to be alive—but they did not destroy him, and the chance to destroy him was there.

The most spectacular failure, because it was the most unlikely, was that of Jackson. He was late in getting to the scene, and his tardiness made Mechanicsville a Confederate setback. His troops went into action piecemeal at Gaines’ Mill and failed to strike the hammer blow that was expected. He failed abysmally to hit the Federal flank at White Oak Swamp, letting a large part of the Federal army retreat unmolested across his front; the