The 150th anniversary of the Battle of Malvern Hill is Sunday.
That battle was the final battle during the Seven Days’ Battle which pitted Union and Confederate forces in swampy terrain outside of Richmond, Virginia.
The Battle of Malvern Hill began when Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee unleashed a flurry of brazen assaults on the virtually impregnable Union position atop the hill. Union forces commanded by Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan fired back, mowing down Southern soldiers seeking to charge up the slope toward them, the Associated Press reports.
All told, the Confederacy suffered more than 5,300 casualties in the day’s fighting, defeated at Malvern Hill. But while the Union appeared to end the week of fighting on a strong note, McClellan was effectively withdrawing his massive army to the protection of federal gunboats on the James River.
And soon he would be pulling out of the area entirely, cutting short his long-planned Peninsula Campaign and its aim of taking Richmond. Lee would soon return to Richmond a hero, lionized in the South for successfully defending the capital of the Confederacy from the Union onslaught.
Lee later wrote that his true aim at the time was to crush the federal army as a fighting force. “Under ordinary circumstances the Federal Army should have been destroyed,” he wrote. But he noted that Malvern Hill had afforded the Union army a “position of great natural strength” to retreat. And he said bad weather and the battle-weariness of his fighters stymied attempts to pursue the enemy army on its retreat.
From 150 years: Civil War Stories