Yorktown was a Civil War engagement fought in Virginia, 1862. The outcome was inconclusive.
Marching from Fort Monroe, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan's army encountered Maj. Gen. John B. Magruder's small Confederate army at Yorktown behind the Warwick River. Magruder's theatrics convinced the Federals that his works were strongly held. McClellan suspended the march up the Peninsula toward Richmond, ordered the construction of siege fortifications, and brought his heavy siege guns to the front. In the meantime, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston brought reinforcements for Magruder. On 16 April, Union forces probed a weakness in the Confederate line at Lee's Mill or Dam No. 1, resulting in about 309 casualties. Failure to exploit the initial success of this attack, however, held up McClellan for two additional weeks, while he tried to convince his navy to maneuver the Confederates' big guns at Yorktown and Gloucester Point and ascend the York River to West Point thus outflanking the Warwick Line. McClellan planned for a massive bombardment to begin at dawn on May 4, but the Confederate army slipped away in the night toward Williamsburg.
From April 5 through May 4, 1862, Union and Confederate forces clashed at Yorktown in an engagement also known as the Siege of Yorktown, one episode within the Peninsula Campaign of the Civil War. Having marched his troops out from Fort Monroe, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan found his Army of the Potomac blocked by a much smaller Confederate contingent under Maj. Gen. John B. Magruder, positioned at Yorktown along the Warwick Line. Rather than push forward toward Richmond, McClellan halted his advance and prepared for a siege.
The first clash came on April 5, when Brig. Gen. Erasmus D. Keyes and his IV Corps ran into Confederate fortifications at Lee's Mill, a spot McClellan had assumed his men could pass through unopposed. Magruder, however, marched his men conspicuously back and forth, creating the illusion that his defenses were far more heavily manned than they actually were. Amid an artillery exchange between the two sides, scouting revealed to Keyes just how extensive and well built the Confederate works were, leading him to counsel McClellan against launching a direct assault. McClellan responded by ordering his men to dig siege works and haul his heavy guns forward. Meanwhile, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston arrived with additional troops to bolster Magruder's ranks.
A Union probe on April 16 targeted Dam No. 1, a specific weak point along the Confederate defenses. Although the assault initially succeeded, Union forces could not capitalize on the breakthrough. This squandered chance cost McClellan two more weeks, time he spent attempting to persuade the U.S. Navy to sail past the Confederate artillery guarding Yorktown and Gloucester Point, move up the York River toward West Point, and flank the Warwick Line from behind. He then set his sights on a massive artillery bombardment scheduled for the morning of May 5, but the Confederates escaped under cover of darkness on the night of May 3, retreating toward Williamsburg.
Notably, the fighting unfolded near the same ground where the siege of Yorktown had taken place back in 1781.
To reach Richmond, McClellan opted for a waterborne strike, ferrying his men to the tip of the Virginia Peninsula and putting them ashore near Fort Monroe. His Army of the Potomac, 121,500 strong, began the crossing on March 17 aboard a fleet of 389 vessels. The original scheme called for the U.S. Navy to help surround Yorktown, but that idea fell apart once the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia appeared and the two sides clashed at Hampton Roads on March 8 and 9, 1862. With the Virginia menacing traffic on the James and Confederate guns bristling at the York River's mouth, naval commanders could not promise McClellan dominance over either waterway, so he shifted to a strategy relying solely on his ground forces to push toward Yorktown.
At that point Yorktown's defenders, commanded by Maj. Gen. John B. Magruder, amounted to a mere 11,000 to 13,000 troops. The bulk of Confederate strength in Virginia, under Joseph E. Johnston's overall direction, sat scattered far off at Culpeper, Fredericksburg, and Norfolk. To close off the peninsula, Magruder built fortifications running from Yorktown on the York River back along the Warwick River, stretching all the way to Mulberry Point on the James, even reusing some entrenchments Cornwallis had dug back in 1781. Despite spanning the peninsula's entire width, this line, later called the Warwick Line, could not be fully garrisoned given the troops available to him.
McClellan's operational design assigned Samuel P. Heintzelman's III Corps the job of pinning Confederate forces in their positions near the York River, while Erasmus D. Keyes's IV Corps would swing around the Confederate right flank and sever their supply and communication routes. Neither McClellan nor his staff grasped how far Magruder's fortifications actually extended, leading them to believe Confederate forces were massed only close to Yorktown itself.
On April 4, 1862, Union forces broke through the first defensive position Magruder had established, only to run into his stronger Warwick Line the next day. Thick terrain made it nearly impossible to gauge how the Confederate forces were actually arranged. McClellan judged that somewhere between 15,000 and 18,000 rebel troops held that line. Soldiers serving under Magruder later described how he shuttled his men back and forth across the position repeatedly, a trick meant to inflate the apparent size of his army. One Louisiana soldier wr
By the morning of April 17 it was clear that an assault would not succeed anywhere along the line, and McClellan ch
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