The Union Army debarked onto Virginia’s southern coast at Fort Monroe on April 4-6 and commenced its glacial, hyper-cautious advance through the swamps and summer heat towards Richmond. When confronted by just 15,000 Confederates at Yorktown, McClellan, demonstrating a paralyzing timidity, opted not to take it by force but rather lay siege. This operation took a month as he soon imagined the number of enemy troops facing him to have somehow swelled to 200,000. But ever so slowly the Army of the Potomac crept towards a panicked Richmond. In an effort to halt the Yankee advance, Joe Johnston launched a violent assault at Fair Oaks from May 30 to June 1. The battle cost the combatants 11,000 combined casualties and was a tactical stalemate and Johnston was wounded in the fighting. The Confederacy’s president, Jefferson Davis, ordered his military advisor, Gen. Robert E. Lee, to ride out from Richmond and take command of the army.
The Confederate rank and file at first was skeptical of their new commander. He brought with him a reputation for favoring entrenchments; he even had nicknames like “Granny Lee” and “The King of Spades.” But others, like Col. Joseph Ives who’d served under Lee, begged to differ, telling artilleryman E.P. Alexander that “… if there is one man in either army, Confederate or Federal, head and shoulders above every other in audacity it is General Lee! His name might be Audacity! He will take more desperate chances, and take them quicker, than any general in this country, North or South.”
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