text: Aftermath The Seven Days Battles ended the Peninsula Campaign. Malvern Hill was not a tenable position in which to stay, and the Army of the Potomac quickly withdrew to Harrison's Landing, where it was protected by Union gunboats on the James River. The army was in no condition for a renewed offensive; nearly 16,000 men and officers had been killed, wounded, or captured between June 25 and July 1, particularly in the V Corps, which had done the heaviest fighting. Also, the survivors were extremely tired after a week of fighting and marching with little food or sleep, most of the artillery ammunition had been used up, and the summer weather was taking its toll with the army sick lists getting longer and longer. Meanwhile, the equally-exhausted Army of Northern Virginia, with no reason to remain in the James bottomlands, pulled back to the Richmond lines to lick its wounds.
  McClellan wrote a series of letters to the War Department to argue that he was facing upwards of 200,000 Confederates and that he needed major reinforcements to launch a renewed offensive on Richmond. McPherson notes that the maximum number of Army of Northern Virginia troops that Lee could bring was in fact 92,000. McClellan argued that by giving him the commands in Northern Virginia, troops from the Washington garrison, and whatever forces could be pulled from the West, he might have a fighting chance. General-in-Chief Henry Halleck replied that McClellan's requests were impossible and that if the Confederate army was really as large as he claimed, trying to reinforce him with Pope and Burnside's commands in Northern Virginia would be suicide since the Confederates could easily crush either Union army with their overwhelming strength. Halleck also pointed out that mosquito season was coming up in August–September, and remaining on the swampy Virginia Peninsula at that time of the year would be inviting a disastrous malaria and yellow fever epidemic. On August 4, the order came down for McClellan to withdraw from the Peninsula and to return to the Aquia Creek area at once.