Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  In mid-January 1862, he paused in his travels long enough to visit Cumberland Island and see his father’s grave for the first time, dwelling only on the beauty of the garden and hedges around the grave. As late as early March he was still laboring mightily to complete the fortifications protecting Savannah, and complaining about his “slow workmen.”

  Although Lee was successful in preventing any major Federal incursion into the Department of the South, the outlook for the Confederacy was bleak everywhere else. In the west, a new and amazingly efficient new general, Ulysses S. Grant, captured Fort Henry on the Tennessee River, and shortly afterward demanded and received the surrender of Fort Donelson, capturing over 15,000 Confederate soldiers, endangering the Confederacy’s hold on Tennessee, and forcing General Floyd to abandon his command and flee, fearful of being tried for treason if he was captured. In the east, there were rumors that General McClellan, who had replaced not only General McDowell but also Lee’s old mentor General in Chief Winfield Scott, had assembled a force of as many as 130,000 men and might at any moment land his army on the peninsula between the York and the James rivers and attempt to take Richmond. Meanwhile Henry Wise, another of Lee’s vexations from the failed campaign in northwestern Virginia, was driven from the island he was supposed to defend in North Carolina, losing two-thirds of his men. Lee did not gloat, much as he had reason to dislike both these politicians turned generals, but wrote to Mary: “The news is . . . not favorable, but we must make up our minds to meet with reverses and overcome them.”

  On March 2 he received an unexpected telegram from Richmond that would call him from worthy but somewhat humdrum service to glory:

  General Robert E. Lee,

  Savannah:

  If circumstances will, in your judgment, warrant your leaving, I wish to see you here with the least delay.

  Jefferson Davis

  The moment of crisis, for the Confederacy and for Lee, had arrived.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Seven Days

  “The Power of the Sword”

  In March 1862 the outlook for the Confederacy seemed bleak from Richmond: politics as usual; retreat; shortages of everything that mattered, even gunpowder; and dissension rife among the generals, as well as between President Davis and almost everybody else. If Lee had expected to be greeted with a command in the field, he was disappointed. There was a movement in the Confederate Congress to appoint him secretary of war, but Davis saw this as an attempt to diminish his own power as commander in chief, and vetoed the suggestion, causing the Charleston Mercury, hitherto Lee’s sharpest critic, to complain that he was being demoted “from a commanding general to an orderly sergeant.” Lee’s official position was described by Davis as “the conduct of military operations in the armies of the Confederacy,” but apart from its vagueness, the definition of his duties was further curtailed by placing him “under the direction of the President.” Short of the vice presidency of the United States, it would be hard to find a position more anomalous, and with as little direct authority. It was a weak, muddled response to an emergency. Davis had ordered Lee home because the war was going badly and he hoped that Lee’s presence in Richmond would reassure the public, but he withheld from Lee the authority that any commanding general needs to form a coherent strategy.

  4. Distribution of the Confederate forces in Virginia, as of the morning of March 24, 1862, and the assumed positions of the opposing United States forces.

  {Robert E. Lee, Volumes 1, 2, and 3, by Douglas Southall Freeman, copyright © 1934, 1935, by Charles Scribner’s Sons, copyright renewed 1962, 1963, by Inez Godden Freeman. All rights reserved.}

  Lee had been away from Richmond since November 1861, and his return gave him his first opportunity since then to examine the files, the maps, and the disposition of the Confederate armies. What he found certainly required every bit of his stoic belief that the outcome of events was in the end determined by the will of God, and not by man. Defeat at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson had placed Kentucky and Tennessee at jeopardy, and it was already possible to see that Union control of the Mississippi River and its tributaries was a realistic danger, while in Virginia General Joseph E. Johnston had persuaded Davis to agree to the withdrawal of his army from Centreville, where it threatened Washington, to the line of the Rappahannock, in anticipation of a major attack by the Army of the Potomac. Retreating from the line established by Beauregard’s and Johnston’s armies after the First Battle of Manassas was huge step backward, and would certainly have a bad effect on southerners’ morale. Davis had agreed to it reluctantly, and Lee would certainly have been opposed to it, had he been consulted. He never forgot Napoleon’s answer to his own question: whether a capital should be “defended by covering it directly?” The correct answer, Napoleon wrote, was instead: “To maneuver incessantly, without submitting to be driven back to the capital.” Apparently, when Johnston and President Davis were at West Point they had been dozing during that lesson on the tactics of Napoleon, but Lee remembered it well and would put it to brilliant use himself over the next two years.

  The ostensible reason for Johnston’s caution was that if he was attacked in overwhelming force, as he expected to be, his line might be turned on the right by a simultaneous landing in his rear on the Potomac. Since retreating twenty-five miles did not solve that problem for him, he was giving up ground for no real gain in security.

  Of course what nobody in Richmond could guess was that General McClellan was not about to launch a bold frontal attack, still less to combine such an attack with a daring landing on the Potomac. On the contrary he was infuriating and puzzling President Lincoln by his procrastination and his refusal to attack in any direction, convinced that he was vastly outnumbered by the Confederate forces around Manassas—which he estimated at 180,000, when in fact they consisted of less than 60,000 ragged, hungry, poorly equipped men, less than a third the number of McClellan’s own well-fed, well-supplied forces. “McClellan is one of the great mysteries of the war,” Grant would later write, and this was as true in Richmond as in Washington. Johnston and Davis consistently overestimated not only the strength of McClellan’s army but, more important, his eagerness to fight, while Lee, perhaps because he knew McClellan better or had better intuition, thought him too cautious for his own good. As for McClellan, he badly misjudged Lee, describing him in a letter to President Lincoln as “cautious and weak . . . & is likely to be timid & irresolute in action.”

  This was a singularly poor reading of Lee’s character, in keeping with McClellan’s description of Lincoln as “nothing more than a well-meaning baboon.” McClellan, who had served under Lee as a first lieutenant in the assault on Chapultepec in 1847, had every reason to know better. And most people would disagree. “There was no hesitation or vacillation about him,” Colonel A. L. Long, who knew him well, wrote of Lee: “When he had once formed a plan the orders for its execution were positive, decisive and final.” Major-General J. F. C. Fuller, the British military historian, wrote: “In audacity, which is the mainspring of strategy as it is of tactics, Lee has few equals.”

  Lee himself found some consolation in being closer to his family. His oldest daughter, Mary Custis, was in Richmond, and he permitted her to exercise Traveller (an accomplished horsewoman, she was the only person except Lee himself who found the horse’s gaits comfortable). His daughter Mildred had courageously made her own way alone from her school in Winchester after the Federals took the city, to join her mother, who was at White House with Agnes and Annie. Lee could not see his sons, since all three were now in the army, Rob having left the university to engage as a private in the Rockbridge Artillery despite the fact that university students were exempted.

  In this brief lull in the war, Mrs. Lee and her daughters did their best to lead a normal family life. Even though White House was her son Rooney’s home and had belonged to her father and mother, it could not console Mrs. Lee for the loss of Arlington. Her arthritis had by now made her a permanent invalid, though she w
as still spirited. The girls seem to have settled down comfortably, sharing from time to time the romantic, chivalric side of Confederate life, epitomized by such daring exploits as J. E. B. Stuart’s recovery of Mary Custis’s “copybook” (or what we would now call a scrapbook), in which she had pasted poems, songs, and newspaper clippings that caught her attention during her girlhood at Arlington. Stuart, already a “dashing hero” and a brigadier general, the principal leader of the cavalry of what would soon be renamed the Army of Northern Virginia, had been out on a reconnaissance behind enemy lines with Mary’s cousin Lieutenant Colonel Fitzhugh Lee. The two paused at Kinloch, not more than a few miles from Arlington, where Mrs. Lee and the girls had taken refuge after the Federals occupied Alexandria. There Stuart found Mary’s scrapbook, which he sent back to Richmond for her. In two of the blank pages remaining at the back of the book, Stuart and Fitzhugh Lee both wrote poems to Mary in mock-romantic style, Fitzhugh “gently mocking” her “bossy ways,” while Stuart, always the Cavalier in spirit, wrote:

  It chanced tonight on outpost duty—

  I found an album with thy name in:

  So full of gems of love and beauty

  I looked it o’er till lo’ there came in—

  My muse—so long forgot—neglected—

  A form I least of all expected . . .

  He signed his poem “Jeb,” a reminder of the more carefree days when he had so often visited Lee’s home at West Point and flirted gently with his daughters. Like Lee, Stuart was, although a devoted and faithful husband, an inveterate flirter.*

  Lee would surely have enjoyed knowing that his favorite cavalryman and his nephew were writing poetry to his daughter Mary around their campfire, but he had much else to keep him occupied in Richmond, even though White House was only twenty-five miles away, no more than a good day’s ride for Traveller. His chief concern was that the Confederate Army would simply disintegrate as men came to the end of their twelve-month enlistment. He became the moving force in persuading President Davis and the Congress to pass a Conscription Act, though it was heavily watered down by those politicians whose first concern was states’ rights, and by those who felt that conscription would undermine patriotism. In his former capacity as commander of the military and naval forces of Virginia, Lee had persuaded Governor Letcher to adopt similar legislation, so the arguments for and against it were familiar. The act as it eventually passed contained much that Lee did not like, particularly the election of officers, but it at least ensured that the Confederate Army would not simply evaporate. It also demonstrated how Lee, loath as he was to involve himself in politics, could skillfully lobby behind the scenes when it was necessary.

  Lee also was good in getting what he wanted without open confrontation between himself and the rival Confederate commanders in the field. His broader plans depended to a great degree on his faith in the military genius of that most difficult and secretive of generals, Thomas J. (“Stonewall”) Jackson. Lee’s faith in J. E. B. Stuart as a cavalry leader was that of an indulgent father toward a son; his faith in Stonewall Jackson was more complex: he perceived in Jackson the distillation of his own belief in maneuver and sudden, unexpected flank attacks as the way to overcome Union superiority in numbers and equipment. It did not hurt that both Stuart and Jackson were, though in different ways, deeply religious men, for whom God’s presence in human affairs was always a first consideration, and that both of them, like Lee, were instinctively courageous and absolutely indifferent to personal danger. With rare exceptions, Lee did not need to explain his intentions at length to Jackson, or persuade him to do what he didn’t want to do—Lee hated both explaining and persuading. Jackson developed a remarkable ability to read Lee’s mind and deduce what Lee wanted him to do from only the barest of suggestions. Not only would he become Lee’s strong right arm, but he almost always did what Lee himself would have wanted done in any situation on the battlefield.

  At first sight, it seems unlikely that the two men would forge such a close relationship. They were both graduates of West Point, but apart from that they had little in common. Lee was the descendant of generations of landed Virginia aristocrats on both sides of his family, while Jackson was born in the hardscrabble hills of what is now West Virginia, a rawboned, awkward, and ungraceful figure. Two of Jackson’s great-grandparents had arrived in Virginia as a consequence of the English penal laws of the mid-eighteenth century—both of them had been convicted of theft at a time when the sentence for even the most minor of crimes was usually hanging or transportation to work for seven years in he plantations of the southern colonies as “indentured servants.”

  The military side of Stonewall Jackson’s personality may have owed something to his great-grandfather, an Indian-fighter who was commissioned as a captain in the Revolutionary War, but it owed a lot more to his remarkable great-grandmother, who was over six feet tall, blond, muscular, determined, and a formidably good shot. Their descendants spread throughout northwestern Virginia, some of them prosperous, some not, but very different in spirit and upbringing from First Families of “Tidewater” Virginia, with their substantial slaveholdings, enormous tracts of land, and imposing mansions. Brought up in poverty, and orphaned at an early age, Thomas Jackson had a rough edge, a touch of the frontier, which he never lost. His seat on his favorite horse, Little Sorrel—the animal was to become almost as famous as Traveller in Confederate mythology—was awkward enough to draw attention during the Civil War. A tall man on a small horse, he rode with long stirrups, his upper body canted forward so that it seemed his nose might touch the horse’s neck—a great contrast to the supremely graceful horsemanship of Robert E. Lee, in an age when horsemanship still mattered.

  The young Jackson worked as a schoolteacher and as a constable before deciding to take the examination for West Point, and got in only because the boy who won the appointment took one look at the Military Academy and decided to return home. At West Point Jackson overcame his many handicaps to graduate seventeenth in a class of fifty-nine cadets, and win the place he coveted as a second lieutenant in the Artillery Corps, graduating just in time to be sent to Mexico, where his courage and his gifted handling of artillery against overwhelming odds earned him one of the most brilliant records of the war.

  Throughout his life Jackson suffered from a wide variety of ailments, possibly magnified by intense hypochondria. Only on the subject of religion was his interest more intense than in his own health: dyspepsia, weak eyesight, deafness, rheumatic and neuralgic pains, poor digestion—reading Jackson’s correspondence with his loved ones is like reading a prolonged and deeply pessimistic medical report. He was a devotee of quack cures, homeopathic medicine, hot water spas, and strange diets, all to no effect. When invited to dinner, he invariably brought his own food with him, neatly wrapped in a napkin, and avoided alcohol and all stimulants. Despite all this he appeared to most people strong, physically fit, and in ruddy good health.

  This strange and awkward man, ill at ease among strangers and tongue-tied when asked to speak, did not do well in the peacetime army. His firm Presbyterian conscience, his inability to distinguish any shades of gray between right and wrong, and a strong dose of primness brought him into conflict with his commanding officer in Florida, whom Jackson accused of carrying on an affair with a servant girl. Hardly anything is more certain to destroy an officer’s career than accusing a superior of immoral conduct, and in the end Jackson was obliged to resign and become “Professor of Natural & Experimental Philosophy” and artillery instructor at the Virginia Military Institute, in Lexington, in 1851. Though many of the cadets ridiculed and caricatured their professor, who relied entirely on rote learning, did not seem to know very much more about science than themselves, and lacked any gift for making the subject seem interesting to his students, Jackson might have gone on to spend the rest of his life as a fierce, uniformed version of Mr. Chips. But history drew him and his students to witness John Brown’s execution in 1859, and with Virginia’s decision to sec
ede from the Union in 1861 he marched his students to Staunton and embarked on a new military career that would take him to the rank of brigadier general within less than six months and to the rank of lieutenant general and the status of legendary hero before his death in May 1863 at the battle of Chancellorsville.

  Lee was among the first to recognize the merits and the potential of this eccentric, silent genius, whose swift march to the field of First Manassas and whose boldness there had earned him the nickname Stonewall, and made him famous and admired throughout the South—indeed far more famous and admired than Lee himself was at the time.

  As Lee looked at the map, it was clear to him that wherever McClellan eventually attacked, the key to stopping him was control of the Shenandoah Valley. Running southwest to northeast from Staunton to Harpers Ferry, “the Valley” could be held only by a general whose swift movements and sudden, fierce attacks would force the Union keep a large number of men defending its northern (or lower)* end against the possibility of a Confederate attack through Maryland on Washington, and thereby prevent McClellan from achieving a concentration of Union forces sufficient to overwhelm the Confederate forces defending Richmond. Too much has probably been made of Lincoln’s concern for the protection of the capital, but it certainly preyed on his mind and made him all the more suspicious of McClellan’s constant complaints that he was outnumbered and of his occasionally underhanded attempts to transfer to his own command Federal units that the president supposed were guarding Washington. This cat-and-mouse game between President Lincoln and the commander of the Army of the Potomac was something that no general with Lee’s keen ability to judge character on the battlefield was likely to ignore. Keeping the enemy guessing about what was happening in the Valley was essential now that the northwestern corner of Virginia was in Union hands, in part because of Lee’s own failure there in the autumn of 1861, and would become even more important as strategic defeat after defeat struck the Confederacy in the west.