For some time after the battle of Fair Oaks, heavy rains made any movement almost impossible for either of the armies that confronted each other near Richmond. Gen. Alexander S. Webb says: "The ground, which consisted of alternate layers of reddish clay and quicksand, had turned into a vast swamp, and the guns in battery sank into the earth by their own weight." McClellan kept his men at work, intrenching and strengthening his position, while he himself seems to have been constantly occupied in writing despatches to the President and the Secretary of War, alternately promising an almost immediate advance on Richmond, and calling for reinforcements. He wanted McDowell's corps of forty thousand men, and the authorities wanted to give it to him if it could be sent by way of Fredericksburg, and united with his right wing in such a way as not to uncover Washington. But in one despatch he declared he would rather not have it at all unless it could be placed absolutely under his command. In several respects his position was very bad. The Chickahominy was bordered by great swamps, whose malarial influences robbed him of almost as many men as fell by the bullets of the enemy. His base was at White House, on the Pamunkey; and the line thence over which his supplies must come, instead of being at right angles with the line of his front and covered by it, was almost a prolongation of it. It was {151} impossible to maintain permanent bridges over the Chickahominy, and a rain of two or three days was liable at any time to swell the stream so as to sweep away every means of crossing. He could threaten Richmond only by placing a heavy force on the right bank of the river; he could render his own communications secure only by keeping a large force on the left bank. When it first occurred to him that his true base was on the James, or how long he contemplated its removal thither, nobody knows; but he received a startling lesson on the 12th of June, which seems to have determined his apparently indeterminate mind.