Ever after, men spoke of the last week in June [1862] simply as The Seven Days; aptly enough, because during those days a pattern emerged from chaos, much after the manner described in the Book of Genesis. ...one batle, seven days long...changing the war...The hope that the war could be something less than a revolutionary struggle died somewhere between Mechanicsville and Malvern Hill. ...
...If, at last, Lee won less than he had hoped to win, he nevertheless won much more than had seemed possible three weeks earlier, and his victory kept the war alive for more than two and one half years. Catton, Terrible Swift Sword 325.
Why did the U.S. lose The Seven Days? "Lee" (and Jackson and Stuart) and McClellan. McClellan did have a tic when it came to numbers, always convinced that he had a much lower. I didn't know however that McClellan's tic got fed by Army Headquarters. They couldn't count. Honest to God. They counted and counted and counted and never got the right number of Confederate troops, not even close, and always overestimates. They reported their numbers to McClellan, naturally. Even years after the war McClellan was still convinced he was always outmanned. Why couldn't HQ...? I don't know, man, I don't know why they couldn't count.
Lee saw this early on. He had a gift for reading the mind of his opposite and he fed into McClellan's tic. "Quaker guns," remember those? J.E.B. Stuart ran rings around McClellan and spooked him. Stonewall was forever appearing and then disappearing just as quickly, giving McClellan the impression he was everywhere.
The Lincolns saw through this smokescreen, it was calculated distraction as the president wrote to Gen. Fremont:
Jackson's game--his assigned work--now is to magnify the accounts of his numbers and reports of his movements, and thus by constant alarms keep three or four times as many of our troops away from Richmond as his own... 320
But they couldn't get McClellan, who constantly
peppered the president and Stanton with requests for reinforcements, to see through it.
Maj. Gen. John B. Magruder, an amateur thespian, was the creator of the Quaker guns illusion and more:
Magruder would be responsible for the defense of Richmond [and he] now was told to move his men about, making a big noise and a great to-do, causing his outnumbered battalions to look both aggressive and numerous...
It really is funny.
During the first few days at Yorktown he had sprinkled 5000 men along a 13-mile front, making McClellan believe that the position was much too strong...the whole operation leading Joe Johnston, when he reached the scene, to report that "no one but McClellan could have hesitated to attack." 327