The Second Siege of Yorktown: Painted Logs and Lost Weeks

Eighty-one years after Cornwallis surrendered here and the American Revolution ended, another army dug in at Yorktown. This time the roles were almost reversed, but the outcome was just as consequential.

It was April of eighteen sixty-two. George McClellan had landed his enormous Army of the Potomac at Fort Monroe and was marching up the Virginia Peninsula toward Richmond. Blocking his path was the Warwick Line, a chain of Confederate earthworks stretching across the Peninsula, held by Major General John Magruder and roughly thirteen thousand men. McClellan commanded more than one hundred thousand.

Magruder should have been crushed. Instead, he performed one of the great deceptions of the war. He ordered logs painted black, what soldiers called Quaker Guns, and positioned them in redoubts to look like artillery. He marched his troops back and forth in plain sight to make his small force appear much larger. McClellan, cautious by nature and prone to overestimating Confederate strength, saw what Magruder wanted him to see: a strongly held position that demanded a formal siege.

So instead of assaulting, which his generals urged, McClellan dug in for a month. He dragged in massive siege artillery. He built earthworks of his own. He waited.

For four weeks, the Confederates bought exactly what they needed: time. Troops from across the South poured into Richmond. By the time McClellan's guns were finally ready to open in full, the Confederate lines had gone quiet, and the army, by then under General Joseph Johnston, had slipped away overnight, the window for a quick Union victory had closed permanently.

The entire Peninsula Campaign, which had started with such promise, unraveled from that delay forward. McClellan's siege of Yorktown is remembered as a masterclass in being outmaneuvered without a battle, won by Confederate theater and Union timidity.