As the mists lifted, they looked with grim
foreboding but still desperate courage to the heights. Every rampart was
deserted. Not one of those three hundred and forty guns remained.
McClellan had withdrawn his army under the cover of the night to
Harrison's Landing.
It would be difficult to tell whose men were better satisfied.
"Thank God, he's gone from there anyhow!" the men in grey cried with
fervor.
Now they could get something to eat, bury their dead and care for all
the wounded. McClellan's Peninsula Campaign had ended. His Grand Army
had melted from a hundred and ten thousand fighting men in line to
eighty-six thousand. The South had lost almost as many.
From the wildest panic into which the advance of his army had thrown
Richmond, the Confederate Capital now swung to the opposite extreme of
rejoicing for the deliverance, mingled with criticism of their leaders
for allowing the Federal army to escape at all.
The gloom in Washington was profound.
An excited General rushed to the White House at two o'clock in the
morning, roused the President from his bed and pleaded for the immediate
dispatch of a fleet of transports to Harrison's Landing as the only
possible way to save the army from annihilation.
The President soothed his fears and sent him home. He was not the man to
be thrown into a panic.
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