Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  The wisdom of his more cautious approach was borne out on April 25, only eight days after Johnston assumed command, with the news that New Orleans had been taken by the enemy. Lee could not withdraw troops in any significant number from the Carolinas and take the risk of losing Savannah or Charleston, and after Grant’s victory at Shiloh, he could not afford to do so in the west.

  It was a measure of Lee’s skill at staff work, and of his tact, that by carefully sifting every unit of the Confederate Army he had been able to increase the number of Magruder’s troops to just over 30,000 by April 11. That was almost three times his strength when McClellan’s force had landed, though still less than a third of what McClellan thought was facing him at Yorktown. These transfers were made with such attention to detail that even General Johnston—a man of extreme sensitivity, with an eagle’s eye for any sign of interference with his army from Lee—was not moved to protest.

  Lee also had to be careful in transferring General Johnston’s four divisions (approximately 28,000 men) from Fredericksburg down to the peninsula, since he was uncovering the approach to Richmond from Alexandria and Manassas. In the words of Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee “exhibited . . . a patient persistence in attaining his object.” He advised Magruder to march his men back and forth in circles through the trees in columns to make the Federals believe he had far more troops than he did, and he kept the few men remaining on the Rapidan-Rappahannock line busy demonstrating their presence, as Johnston’s divisions were moved “in piecemeal reconcentrations” back to Richmond and on to the peninsula. He knew that a simultaneous Union attack on Magruder’s line on the peninsula and toward Fredericksburg in northern Virginia could overwhelm the Confederate forces defending Richmond, particularly in the crucial period when Johnston’s divisions were on the march and the northwestern flank of the city was exposed. Lee never expected that McClellan would give him nearly a month’s time to perfect Richmond’s defenses. Meanwhile McClellan continued to believe that Johnston’s army, which he estimated at over 120,000 men when it was in fact less than half of that, was still holding the line in northern Virginia. Considering the stakes, Lee played a poor hand with a combination of brilliance and coolness that has seldom been equaled in warfare.

  On April 21 Lee wrote his “historic” message to Jackson outlining his strategy for the Valley. He stressed that Jackson’s paramount goal must be to prevent McDowell and McClellan from uniting to attack Richmond simultaneously, and that Jackson should do this by inflicting a serious defeat on Banks in the Valley that would threaten Washington. If Jackson thought he could drive Banks’s army down the Valley toward the Potomac, he should do so at once. If he was not strong enough to do that, he should place Major General Richard Stoddert Ewell’s division in a position to support him. If on the other hand he thought that he “could hold Banks in check” with his own forces, Jackson was to send Ewell to join with Brigadier General Charles W. Field’s small force on the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad line fourteen miles below Fredericksburg, which Field had just abandoned, burning the bridges over the Rappahannock behind him. In either event, Jackson was to take the initiative with enough speed and imagination to stun Banks and to prevent McDowell from marching on Richmond.

  This was a task for which Jackson, with his emphasis on speed and secrecy, and his instinctive feel for the geography of the Valley, was eminently well suited. It is also a striking example of the way Lee clearly established his goals at the beginning of a campaign, allowing his subordinate commanders the maximum leeway in moving their own troops. Lee’s job, as he saw it, was to concentrate his forces in the right position to attack where he wanted them to, and leave their commanders to get there in their own way. Few commanding generals have ever given their subordinates more freedom than Lee. Lee wrote Jackson a longer letter on April 25, emphasizing, “The blow, wherever struck, must, to be successful, be sudden and heavy.” Characteristically, he added, “I cannot pretend at this distance to direct operations depending on circumstances unknown to me and requiring the exercise of discretion and judgment as to time and execution, but submit these suggestions for your consideration.” This was a commonsensical point of view—Lee would often qualify his orders with the phrase “if practicable,” which was merely a shorthand version of his words to Jackson. He felt that the man on the spot, knowing Lee’s intentions, should make up his own mind as to how to put them into effect. Luckily for Lee, Jackson was at his best when given such discretion.

  Jackson replied that he wanted 5,000 more men, but Lee could not provide them. He wrote to Jackson explaining this, and further defining his plans, on April 29:

  HEADQUARTERS, RICHMOND, VIRGINIA,

  April 29, 1862.

  Major-General T. J. JACKSON, commanding, etc.,

  Swift Run Gap, Virginia:

  GENERAL: I have had the honor to receive your letter of yesterday’s date. From the reports that reach me that are entitled to credit, the force of the enemy opposite Fredericksburg is represented as too large to admit of any diminution whatever of our army in that vicinity at present, as it might not only invite an attack on Richmond, but jeopard[ize] the safety of the army in the Peninsula. I regret, therefore, that your request, to have five thousand men sent from that army to reënforce you, cannot be complied with. Can you draw enough from the command of General Edward Johnson to warrant you in attacking Banks? The last return received from that army shows a present force of upward of thirty-five hundred, which, it is hoped, has been since increased by recruits and returned furloughs. As he does not appear to be pressed, it is suggested that a portion of his force might be temporarily removed from its present position, and made available for the movement in question. A decisive and successful blow at Banks’s column would be fraught with the happiest results, and I deeply regret my inability to send you the reenforcements you ask. If, however, you think the combined forces of Generals Ewell and Johnson, with your own, inadequate for the move, General Ewell might, with the assistance of General Anderson’s army near Fredericksburg, strike at McDowell’s army between that city and Aquia, with much promise of success; provided you feel sufficiently strong alone to hold Banks in check.

  Very truly yours,

  R. E. Lee.

  Major General Edward Johnson with 3,000 men was covering Staunton against a possible Union attack on the Virginia Central Railroad by General R. H. Milroy with the advance guard of General Frémont’s army, and Stonewall Jackson’s instinct was identical to Lee’s—an early example of the way their minds worked in harmony. On May 1, informing no one of his intentions, Jackson disengaged his men and marched them through a gap in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and then on to Staunton to join Johnson. Instead of following Lee’s suggestion to “draw” Johnson north toward him, Jackson moved swiftly south to join him. This was typical of Jackson. He simply disappeared with his army, his whereabouts a mystery both to Lee in Richmond and to Banks in Harpers Ferry. This was the opening move in Jackson’s famous “Valley campaign,” a series of swift marches, countermarches, and attacks, carried out so successfully that it has been a staple on the curriculum of every major staff college in the world. The British military historian Major-General J. F. C. Fuller, in his enormously influential book The Foundation of the Science of War, published in 1926, complained—although he was a fervent admirer of Jackson—that students at the British Staff College learned everything about the Valley campaign by rote until they could recite what Jackson ate for breakfast on every morning of it, whereas in Germany’s staff college Jackson’s Valley campaign was studied with much greater intellectual curiosity and imagination, and would become the basis for blitzkrieg, the lightning-fast use of armor, mechanized artillery, and mobile infantry to break through the enemy’s line, strike a devastating blow, then vanish overnight to strike again elsewhere unexpectedly.

  Jackson’s weary, footsore infantrymen were proud to call themselves his “foot cavalry,” because of the speed with which they covered the roads, good
and bad, of the Valley. They created, as Lee had foreseen, a new kind of warfare, one which Fuller described very aptly as “an electric campaign,” and which still stands today as an example for every general who wants to avoid the dangers of being forced into fixed positions. Jackson’s solution was to fight a war in which speed is more important than superiority of numbers.

  A week after he vanished into the Blue Ridge Mountains, Jackson reappeared to join General Johnson’s small force of 3,000 before Staunton, giving himself a total of nearly 10,000 men. He then went on to defeat General Milroy at the village of McDowell on May 8, a day’s battle that began with a Union attack and ended in a Confederate victory. Afterward, Jackson marched nearly sixty miles to the north. His plans were temporarily delayed by General Johnston’s attempt to order Ewell to fall back toward Richmond with his 8,000 men, which Jackson quickly thwarted by a direct plea to Robert E. Lee, who intervened in his favor. With a combined force of 17,000 he won a major victory at Front Royal on May 23 and retook Winchester on May 25, sending Banks’s army reeling back across the Potomac in chaos. By the end of the month Jackson’s cavalry was threatening Harpers Ferry. It was an extraordinary achievement: “In a classic military campaign of surprise and maneuver, he pressed his army to march 646 miles . . . in forty-eight days . . . and [won] five significant victories with a force of about 17,000 against a combined force of over 50,000.” Even when outnumbered three to one, Jackson managed time and again to avoid being surrounded by marching his army through the gaps in the mountains and then up or down the Valley roads to fight again, always on ground of his own choosing. Jackson also prevented 40,000 men from joining McClellan’s forces on the peninsula—exactly what Lee had intended from the beginning.

  Though the Valley campaign was a military miracle, it had produced no corresponding victory on the peninsula, where General Johnston warned Lee constantly that he wanted to abandon Yorktown and move his forces closer to Richmond. This was, perhaps, the most serious crisis of the Confederacy to date—Johnston was as convinced that Yorktown could not be held as McClellan was that it could not be turned, and had reverted to his earlier idea, rejected by Lee and President Davis, of concentrating all Confederate forces for an attack across the Potomac and into the North, even at the risk of leaving Richmond virtually defenseless. Lee understood Johnston’s reasoning. The Army of the Potomac was encamped on the lower peninsula, and McDowell and Banks were preoccupied with Stonewall Jackson. If Johnston could move his army quickly enough he might be able to march north between the two Union armies. It was a bold concept, but it risked losing the capital and abandoning large supplies of ammunition and equipment at Norfolk. Lee used every effort to slow Johnston down, but Johnston thwarted these attempts by simply not reporting his movements to Lee. Although Lee did not mention the matter in his messages to Johnston, which went unanswered, he was of course aware that a retreat down the peninsula, if McClellan pursued Johnston, as he surely must, would soon place White House plantation, where his wife Mary, his daughters, and his grandchild were living, directly in Federal hands. He had warned Mary of this as early as April 4, and added that if she were caught up in a Federal advance, the consequences would be “extremely annoying & embarrassing.” Lee’s phrasing, characteristically, politely conceals anxiety, but “she wanted to remain on the property to protect it,” and as usual ignored her husband’s advice when she did not agree with it.

  Worry about his family was nothing compared with Lee’s conviction that Johnston was wrong. The two men admired and respected each other, they were friends of long standing, and neither doubted the other’s courage or skill, but Johnston’s character was marked by a troubling combination of stubborness and sensitivity. He could not brook interference and, unlike Lee, he did not have the full confidence of Jefferson Davis and knew—and resented—that fact.

  Johnston abandoned Yorktown on May 4, but did not inform Lee of this until May 7. From Lee’s point of view, Johnston had simply vanished for three days with 55,000 men, the largest army in the Confederacy. A determined advance by the Federals might have caught Johnston’s rear guard, but Johnston had surprised McClellan, who was still preparing for a siege of Yorktown, as much as he had Lee.

  Captain the Comte de Paris—the Orléans pretender to the French throne and a grandson of King Louis-Philippe*—who was one of McClellan’s aides, reported the astonishment of the Union Army outside Yorktown on finding that “the Confederate army had disappeared.” The count, like the troops, was “stupefied” and “disappointed” by Johnston’s decision. Much as he admired McClellan, he reported in detail the extreme slowness of the Army of the Potomac to pursue the Confederates, whose retreat was being carried out “in the greatest order.” Everything, the count complained, “had to be organized for an advance, which had not been contemplated,” with the result that the Confederacy’s Major General James Longstreet was able to occupy and hold Williamsburg, though unable to hold it for long under the weight of the Federal advance. The leisurely quality of the Union advance was in part a consequence of the weather, but even more of poor maps and inadequate reconnaissance. McClellan needed multiple roads—his large army could not move effectively on a single narrow, muddy lane—but again and again his generals took a wrong turning and got hopelessly lost. Still, numbers eventually told, and Longstreet was forced to abandon Williamsburg after bitter fighting. Johnston withdrew his army across the last remaining natural barrier protecting Richmond, the Chickahominy River. He had preserved his army, which was now concentrated around Richmond, but in every other respect he brought about just the events Lee had feared: Norfolk had to be abandoned to the enemy, and facilities there had to be destroyed and ships burned; Union control of the James and the York rivers allowed McClellan to move his troops quickly up the York to West Point; and Union gunships steamed up the James River close to Richmond, where the government archives were “being packed for removal.”

  Johnston chose this, of all moments, to threaten to resign his command on May 8. In a sharply worded letter of complaint to Lee about the limitation of his authority—which, he wrote, “does not extend beyond the troops immediately around me,” a complaint obviously directed at Lee—he requested to be “relieved of a merely nominal geographic command.” He actually began his letter with a sarcastic complaint against Lee’s aide W. H. Taylor: “I have just received three letters from your office signed ‘R. E. Lee, gen’l, by W. H. Taylor, A. A. G.,’* written in the first person, all dated yesterday. . . . One of these informs me that certain supposed orders of mine had been countermanded by you or ‘W. H. Taylor, A. A. G.’” Lee tactfully deflected Johnston’s anger and ignored his resignation, pointing out that Major Taylor, whom Johnston knew, had only been doing his job: “Those [letters] to which you allude as having received yesterday were prepared for my signature and being unexpectedly called away, and not wishing to detain the messenger, I directed Major Taylor to affix my signature and send to you.” However much he may have disliked having to explain and justify the perfectly ordinary procedures in his office, Lee refused to be drawn into an angry correspondence. By May 9, Johnston had calmed down somewhat and dropped the threat to resign, but he still took the time to write Lee a bristling 400-plus-word letter, complaining first about his troops (“Stragglers cover the country, and Richmond is no doubt filled with the absent without leave.”), then returning to his original theme that all the troops in and around Richmond should be under his command. (“If this command [mine] includes the Department of Northern Virginia still this Army of the North is a part of it; if not, my position should be defined anew. Nothing is more necessary to us than a distinct understanding of every officer’s authority.”) This was a point that Lee was unwilling to concede, not because he doubted Johnston’s ability but because he disagreed with his strategy.

  These were anxious moments for Lee on a personal level as well. On May 11 Mary Lee and two of her daughters, Annie and Mildred, were obliged to leave her son Rooney’s home and take she
lter in a neighbor’s smaller and less conspicuous house on White House plantation. They were still less than ten miles from West Point, where the Pamunkey River joins the York, the landing point for those of McClellan’s divisions that were being shipped partway toward Richmond rather than slogging slowly up the peninsula. Before leaving White House Mary pinned a defiant parting note on the door:

  Northern soldiers who profess to reverence Washington, forebear to desecrate the home of his first married life, the property of his wife, now owned by her descendants. A GRAND-DAUGHTER OF MRS. WASHINGTON.

  On May 18 a party of Union troops led by two officers entered the house that she had moved to, and demanded to know who she was. Mrs. Lee had no hesitation about letting them know, and forcefully expressed to the officers her indignation at being confined to the house and guarded by sentries. These two Union officers were aides of Brigadier General Fitz John Porter, who, she complained, had been “a favored guest” at Arlington before the war. They patiently explained that the sentries were intended by General Porter for her own protection, and that she was in no sense a prisoner. Porter eventually allowed Mary to move farther up the river to the home of Edmund Ruffin, the famous secessionist who had fired the first gun at Fort Sumter. Lee managed to send two aides under a flag of truce to meet with General McClellan and request that his wife and daughters be allowed to join him, but it was not until June 10 that arrangements were finally completed to send a carriage across the lines and bring them back to Richmond. Outraged as Mrs. Lee was at having been “in the hands” of Federal troops, one can only be impressed at the courtesy shown to her by generals Porter and McClellan, and at the equal courtesy shown by General Lee toward General McClellan in securing her release. Lee also seems to have refrained from pointing out to Mary that this was exactly what he had warned her might happen if she stayed at White House. Still, Mary Lee’s feelings are easy enough to understand: she had now been forced to abandon two of her father’s homes: Arlington, which would soon be turned into a Union military cemetery; and White House, which Union soldiers would shortly burn to the ground, “against General McClellan’s orders,” though that can hardly have consoled her.