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Mark Grimsley, Glenn David Brasher. The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and the Fight for Freedom., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Page 856, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.856
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In early April 1862, a massive Union army under Major General George B. McClellan sailed from Washington, D.C., landed at the tip of the historic Virginia Peninsula between the James and York Rivers, and began operations aimed at the capture of Richmond and the destruction of the Confederacy in a single stroke. For the next two months, McClellan's troops pressed forward cautiously but inexorably, until by the end of May, when some of them could literally see the spires of the Confederate capitol, just five miles distant. The end of the rebellion seemed equally in sight.
In desperation, the Confederate army burst forth in a failed counterattack whose main significance lay in the wounding of its commander, General Joseph E. Johnston, and his replacement by General Robert E. Lee. Within a month, Lee planned and executed a second counterstroke, this one brilliantly successful. McClellan's army withdrew to a fortified base along the James River estuary and within a few weeks was evacuated back to Washington. The Union's once promising campaign had become a national embarrassment and a victory that had been so close was transformed into a stalemate whose duration no one could predict.
