Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  13. Longstreet’s plan for “converging fire” at Malvern Hill.

  {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.}

  Since Brigadier General Lewis Armistead’s brigade was at the far right of the Confederate line, close to the open ground where the guns on the right were being placed, Lee decided that Armistead would be the first to judge the effect of the bombardment on the Federal gunners. At 1:30 p.m. Lee sent a written order to his divisional commanders to inform them of his decision.

  July 1, 1862

  Batteries have been established to rake the enemy’s lines. If it is broken, as is probable, Armistead, who can witness the effect of the fire, has been ordered to charge with a yell. Do the same.

  R. H. Chilton,

  Assistant Adjutant-General

  It is worth noting that this order is at once optimistic and misleading. The batteries were not yet in place, and in fact were still being hauled through felled woods, heavy brush, and swamps to the two sites Longstreet had chosen. It also doesn’t explain how the commanders on the far left would hear Armistead’s men giving the rebel yell from over a mile away in the middle of a thunderous artillery duel. The Army of Northern Virginia was a formidable fighting force, but it was still being commanded in a relatively amateurish fashion by officers many of whom were not yet accustomed to Lee’s ways, while Lee himself was trying to command an army of 55,000 men with the same small staff he had brought with him from his headquarters in Richmond. By comparison, command and control in McClellan’s army were tighter, more professional, and better organized. Indeed, this was the major factor in keeping the Army of the Potomac from destruction, and saving its artillery and its wagon trains during its retreat.

  It was not until two o’clock that the first of the Confederate guns were in place, and then the results were disappointing. Volume—that is, the sheer number of guns firing simultaneously from different points at the same target—is an integral part of “converging fire,” but no sooner were the first few Confederate guns unlimbered than the Union artillery opened fire on them. The neat lines of converging fire shown in the drawing were never achieved, but Lee could not simply disengage and allow the Federals to retreat to safety. His entire army was poised to attack, and Lee was confident that if pushed home hard enough, the attack would break the Union line, bringing about a headlong, panicked flight, a rout. He was certain that his men’s spirit, dash, and bravery would achieve what his artillery could not, and if he believed it, his men would too. This is the side of Lee’s character that makes him a great general: his bold and ruthless determination to attack even in the face of greatly adverse odds, as well as his mystic bond with his troops that carried the South to the very end of the war. If “Marse Robert” believed they could break the Union line, they believed it. “When the hunt was up, Lee’s combativeness was overriding,” Longstreet wrote long after the war, though by then he no longer meant it as praise. Still, it was the most remarkable part of the character of this calm, reserved, and gentle man—that once committed to battle he would fight with the utmost ferocity and would never back off.

  At first Lee sought a way to outflank Porter’s formidable position. He rode to the left and decided to shift two reserve divisions, those of Longstreet and A. P. Hill, to that side, for an attack aimed at cutting off Porter’s line of retreat. This was a bold move that might have succeeded—Longstreet certainly thought so—but about 4 p.m., while the two divisions were still in motion, Lee received a report that Federal supply and ammunition wagons were on the move, an indication that Porter might be retreating. At the same time Magruder, who had been delayed by his guide’s choice of the wrong road, arrived to take up his position on the far right, where he found that Armistead had already advanced his brigade and was heavily engaged. Lee feared that “the enemy was getting away from us,” as Longstreet put it. Trusting that all his commanders had received and were still prepared to carry out his order of 1:30 p.m., Lee changed his mind about the “turning movement” on the left, and quickly dictated a second order, calling on all his commanders “to advance rapidly,” that is, for a general assault on the Union center and right, hoping to catch the Federals as they retreated.

  But they were not retreating. Magruder, who had received Lee’s 1:30 p.m. order while he was still on the road, saw that Armistead’s brigade was fighting, and in keeping with that order took it as the signal to advance immediately, even though his artillery was still far behind. Soon the entire center and right of Lee’s army, reacting to the noise of heavy fighting on the right, moved forward to assault the Union positions despite the unbroken line of Federal artillery facing them.

  The result was a protracted catastrophe, one that continued well into the evening. D. H. Hill later wrote, “It was not war—it was murder.” The repeated charges of Confederate regiments against an unbroken line of guns, though “grandly heroic,” horrified even the Union gunners. A Union soldier wrote home that a gunner had told him “it was horrible to see the rebels advancing in a line of ten deep. . . . He said that it made his heart sick to see how it cut roads through them some places ten feet wide.” Malvern Hill was remembered by those who survived it as the most terrible battle the Army of Northern Virginia ever fought, worse even than Antietam and Gettysburg. Once the assault began it was a battle out of Lee’s control, continuing on until night fell on the “heart-breaking calls from agonizing boys on the hillside.” Descriptions of the battle and the gory aftermath, whether by reporters or from the soldiers in letters home, are invariably horrifying. Years later a cooler judgment was written by Longstreet, who had been in favor of the attack, but afterward changed his mind: “The result of the battle was a repulse of the Confederates along the entire line and the sacrifice of several thousand brave officers and men.” Confederate casualties were three times higher than those of the Federals,* and Porter managed to move his men and artillery to safety on the James River during the night.

  Lee was well aware he had failed. When he came to write his report on the campaign, he noted, “Under ordinary circumstances, the Federal army should have been destroyed,” which was true enough—both at Gaines’s Mill and at Frayser’s Farm there was an opportunity for a decisive victory, which slipped through his fingers. Most historians and biographers, particularly southerners, are loath to saddle Lee with the blame. They tend to attribute blame to larger and better-supplied Federal forces, and the peninsula campaign is no exception—even Malvern Hill is seen through the filter of southern heroism (ragged infantry charging Northern artillery again and again), but the defeat there was very clearly the result of muddled and contradictory orders from Lee, the almost complete absence of coordination between divisions and brigades, poor maps, and the lack of a clear plan to concentrate all of Lee’s forces in a single, powerful thrust. Once again, Jackson’s men, all 18,500 of them, virtually sat out the battle as observers, placed facing the far right of the Union line where they could do no good, almost as if, having placed them there, Lee simply forgot all about them. Rather typically, General Richard Taylor, who was there, later wrote that the morning found McClellan’s army “in an impregnable position” at Harrison’s Landing, on the James River, and then goes on to say, “The strategy displayed on the Confederate side was magnificent,” without noting the contradiction.

  It is often alleged that Lee learned from General Winfield Scott that a commander’s job was merely to get his army in the right place at the right time to fight, after which it was up to the corps commanders on the spot to decide what to do, but Scott was a good deal more involved in making decisions on the battlefield than Lee at Malvern Hill, and his orders were a lot more specific once the battle had begun. Lee had been Scott’s most daring and gifted scout, and his talent for carrying out reconnaissance behind the enemy’s lines was what first brought him to Scott’s attention; but now he had no such
person to rely upon himself. It is Lee’s tragedy that while his staff was loyal, admiring, even worshipful, it contained no such person as the young Captain Robert E. Lee.

  That night, when Lee rode through the Confederate lines, he passed General Magruder, just preparing to “lie down on the blankets that had been spread for him.”

  Lee reined in his horse and asked, “General Magruder, why did you attack?”

  Magruder replied: “In obedience to your orders, twice repeated.”

  Lee is not reported to have said anything more. What, indeed, could he say? Magruder had his faults, and had forfeited any confidence Lee may have had in him, but he was not wrong. A wiser or more prudent general might have questioned whether Lee wanted him to assault an unbroken Union line with its artillery still intact, but since Magruder was already late in arriving on the field—thanks to Lee’s change of orders—he would hardly have wanted to add to the delay by sending an aide to find Lee and ask whether he still wanted an assault made.

  Despite Lee’s flawed attempt to destroy the Army of the Potomac, the South still considered that he had achieved a triumph. In just one week he had lifted the threat against Richmond; captured 10,000 Federal prisoners, 52 guns, and over 30,000 small arms; and driven the Army of the Potomac back to a spit of marshy ground where, to be sure, it was safe from attack, but from which it could no longer threaten Richmond. This was an extraordinary achievement, but it was not the victory that Lee wanted, or that the Confederacy needed.

  The New York Times noted that despite the fact that McClellan had been fighting continuously for six days, he had managed to save his “grand army, with its immense artillery and wagon train . . . his ammunition; its cattle-drove of 2,540 head; in fact, the entire matérial, horse, foot and dragoons, bag and baggage, have been transferred. This maneuver, however—one of the most difficult and dangerous for a commander to execute in the face of the enemy—has been accomplished safely, though under circumstances of difficulty and trial which would have taxed the genius of Napoleon.”

  Although in the South headlines proclaimed “A Great Victory,” the New York Times’ “Special Correspondent” on the James River echoed Lee’s own view exactly. Lee had become a southern hero, in fact the southern hero, eclipsing every other general, including Stonewall Jackson (whose performance in the campaign had been problematic, to put it very mildly indeed), but he been unable to strike the blow that would end the war.

  In just five weeks—hardly any time to rest himself, let alone his battered army—Lee would try again, with a series of brilliant marches and assaults that would have astonished even Napoleon.

  CHAPTER 8

  Triumph and Tragedy—Second Manassas and Sharpsburg

  “You must consider that no wars may be made without danger.”

  —Sir Roger Williams* to the

  Earl of Leicester, Siege of Sluys,

  1557

  Napoleon observed, “The most dangerous moment comes with victory,” and history bears him out. With victory come a natural slackening of effort and a period of self-congratulation, but Lee was immune to all such temptations. He had freed Richmond, a seemingly impossible feat, but he had failed to destroy McClellan’s army.

  J. E. B. Stuart, with his gift for the grand gesture even when it was inappropriate, had reached the high ground that circled the Union encampment at Harrison’s Landing on July 2, but instead of riding back to let Lee know that it was still unoccupied, he had fired a single contemptuous howitzer shot into the Union camp. The Federals, alerted to his presence, drove him off, and rushed to fortify Evelington Heights with artillery and infantry, effectively preventing Lee from attacking them. He could not reach McClellan and McClellan could not reach him. By July 9 Lee was back at his headquarters in Richmond, and his army was marching back to its camps there. Only a brigade of Stuart’s cavalry was left to watch over the Army of the Potomac.

  Lee had to reflect on his losses. He had begun the campaign with 85,500 men. A week later over 20,000 of them were dead, wounded, or missing, a little less than a quarter of the total, with a disproportionately high number of officers among the dead—in the age when officers led their own troops into action, sword drawn, this was inevitable—who would be increasingly difficult to replace. But Lee did little to reorganize his army and nothing to expand or change his own staff. He continued to act as his own chief of staff, laboring over reports and orders whose drafting should have been left to someone else. When a senior officer had clearly failed him, like Huger or Magruder, Lee moved the man—always with infinite courtesy—either to a routine staff job or to someplace where there was no immediate prospect of serious fighting. Lee’s faith in the man who had failed him the most in the campaign, Stonewall Jackson, remained undiminished. This was a “mystic bond” of personality, although in the future he would take care to give Jackson the greatest possible independence.

  That Lee made little attempt to reorganize his army was not because he ignored its faults, or indeed his own or those of his staff, but because he recognized that time was his enemy. The North could quickly replace men, small arms, artillery, horses, locomotives; the South could not. Having struck a blow against McClellan, Lee had to take advantage of the fact that his adversary was for the moment stuck at Harrison’s Landing to strike a blow elsewhere.

  The Union divisions that Jackson had defeated in the Valley had been reinforced and formed into a new army, the Army of Virginia, under the command of Major General John Pope, who was one of the few officers of what Confederate West Pointers referred to as the “old army” and for whom Lee expressed scant regard, soon to be turned into outright contempt. A further Federal “column” of around 18,000 men was centered on Fredericksburg under Major General Irvin McDowell, and another of 14,000 waited “on transports” off Fort Monroe, under Major General Ambrose Burnside. Lee had to consider that McDowell and Burnside could move to join McClellan and renew the attempt to take Richmond, but he seems to have concluded that McClellan was in no condition personally to launch such an ambitious scheme. Once again, Lee chose an audacious strategy. Instead of concentrating his own forces, as Johnston had always advocated, Lee warily kept his options open, waiting for Pope to show his hand. If Pope moved toward the Valley, Lee would send Jackson there; if Pope moved toward Richmond, Lee could send the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia to defend it; if Burnside attempted to join McClellan, Lee would move to prevent that. In the meantime he devoted a good deal of effort to improving and strengthening the defenses of Richmond and of Petersburg, the crucial railway junction twenty miles south of Richmond. Jackson, his health and optimism restored, wanted to advance into the north while Pope’s forces were still scattered, but Lee was not tempted. There was danger in every direction he looked, and he preferred to let Pope make the first move.

  Pope preceded that move by a volley of ill-chosen words, which became the source of much ridicule in the South, and confirmed Lee’s personal contempt for him. Pope liked to head his orders dramatically, “Headquarters in the Saddle,” which inevitably led southerners to suggest that his headquarters were where his hindquarters ought to be. His fellow Union general Fitz John Porter dismissed Pope as “an ass.” Pope took command of his army with an address that offended all his officers and men, declaring that he had come to them “from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies, from an army whose business it has been to seek the adversary and to beat him where he was found; whose policy has been attack and not defense,” and urged them to forget about “lines of retreat,” “bases of supplies,” and “taking strong positions,” advice which “one of his own brigadiers called . . . ‘windy and insolent.’” He also infuriated Confederates with a series of draconic orders. His army was to “live off the country,” seizing crops, supplies, and cattle in “secessionist territory,” and he threatened to take hostages, to arrest “all male non-combatants” within the Federal lines, and to shoot anybody who communicated with the enemy—which, as somebody pointed o
ut, could be construed to include a mother who wrote to her son. Even the usually placid Lee referred to Pope as a “miscreant.”

  The appointment of Major General Henry Halleck as general in chief on July 11 did not particularly concern Lee—Halleck was a competent military bureaucrat whose chief accomplishment in the West had been a sustained but in the end unsuccessful campaign to undermine the reputation of Major General Ulysses S. Grant, and whose chief gift was for backstairs intrigue against his fellow generals. Lincoln, who had appointed him in the hope that Halleck could control his generals, referred to him as “little more than a first-rate clerk.” Halleck arrived in Washington on July 22, apparently in no hurry to take up his new position, but the news of his appointment was enough to further demoralize McClellan, who held Halleck in contempt and had expected to be reinstated as general in chief himself. “The President . . . has not shown the slightest gentlemanly or friendly feeling,” he wrote to his wife, on learning of Halleck’s promotion in the newspapers, “and I cannot regard him in any respect as my friend.”