Such an incendiary place had to be well secured; and on the 1st of May it was put into the firm charge of the Union Butler, who occasionally uncorked its riotous effervescence, and bottled up some of the more fermenting qualities. Meanwhile the long waiting public called for the fine drilling party in front of Washington, numbering nearly two hundred thousand, faithfully schooled for eight months, to take the intensely desired trip to Richmond. Early in April, headed by General McClellan, it reached the old Revolutionary camping-ground at Yorktown. Although, in fact, only five thousand Confederates were stationed there, the Federal leader suspected traps ahead, and so went for a month to vigorous spading, road-making, and mining, resuming in this way his early occupations and tastes. These gratified, and no traps found, the army began on the 3d of May to move towards the Chickahominy,—a sluggish, soupy stream, thickened by swamp muds and miasma,—which was reached May 20th and crossed. There was now more spading, and in sight of the Richmond spires. For six weeks, alas! the spade was busy, not for the living only, through this Golgotha of the war; for now commenced a series of death-dealing combats seldom equalled in our well-mounded planet: May 27th the battle of Hanover Court-House, the Confederates losing; followed by four days of severe skirmishes; succeeded by the gigantic struggle of forty-eight unceasing hours of death-heaping on both sides, at Fair Oaks Station, between the corps of Sumner, Heintzelman, Kearny, and Hooker, on one side, and Joseph E. Johnston, the Confederate commander, Longstreet, and the two Hills, on the other; then three weeks of intrenching, sickness, and decimation; and then on the 25th of June, the retreat to the James, crowded with six days of ceaseless combats, embroidering in gloriously ensanguined characters on the shredding flag of the Potomac the well-fought but disastrous battles of Mechanicsville, Gaines’s Mills, Savage’s Station, White-Oak Swamp, and Malvern Hill, in which fifteen thousand Union lives were spent. General Lee was placed in command of the Confederates in the place of General Johnston, wounded at Fair Oaks; and General Halleck displaced General McClellan, wounded before he left Washington in his military reputation, and, though unhurt bodily, more severely injured by his Peninsular campaign. General Pope was assigned to the head of the Army of the Potomac, but showed in fifteen days of fighting along the Rappahannock that, like another Pope on the Tiber, he was not at all infallible. In September General Lee took a trip into Maryland, which he hoped to extend to Philadelphia. He was, however, followed by General McClellan, reinstated to the leadership of his old army. Their meetings at South Mountain and Antietam swept thirty thousand Confederates under ground or into hospitals, largely counterbalancing the Peninsular losses.