Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  If McClellan hoped that Pope would support him in a new attack on Richmond, he would be disappointed. Pope’s eyes were fixed on the Virginia Central Railroad, which ran through Gordonsville, Charlottesville, and Staunton, linking Richmond to the West. If he were successful, he would isolate Richmond and severely increase the problem of supplying Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Lee worried about this, especially since McDowell’s line was less than thirty miles from Gordonsville, on the northernmost bend of the Virginia Central Railroad. Lee had already understood a basic fact about protecting railways: that scattering small pockets of infantry along the tracks was both ineffective and wasteful of troops.* Instead, Lee ordered Jackson to advance from Richmond to Gordonsville, to be in a position to strike hard against the flank of any force sent south to cut the railway.

  Pope himself had been ordered to remain in Washington until Halleck arrived, and his army was still widely spread out. Perhaps under the circumstances it was impossible for Pope to move with any speed. He sent a cavalry brigade to cut the Virginia Central Railroad, but it was so “encumbered” with artillery and a wagon train that it was still ten miles from Gordonsville when its commander learned that Jackson had occupied the town “in considerable strength.” The initial movements of the rest of Pope’s army all seem to have been similarly slow and uncoordinated, as if Pope had not yet made up his mind what he intended to do with it. Through no fault of his own Pope was obliged to remain in Washington while Halleck made his way slowly east.

  Lee was left in an uncomfortable position. To his east McClellan’s army was encamped only eighteen miles away, with 101,691 men and an enormous mass of artillery. As Lee looked toward the northwest, Pope had at least 49,000 men, spread out in a rough arc from Strasburg to Fredericksburg, and was being swiftly reinforced. Lee was thus caught between two armies. He had 69,559 men in and around Richmond, once Jackson brought two divisions, about 12,000 men, to Gordonsville. Lee might be able to count on some delay while Pope sought to reorganize his scattered army and to decide in what direction to aim, and as always Lee counted on the unlikelihood that McClellan would make a rash move. Had Lee but known it, McClellan continued to believe that he had at least 200,000 men, and to the intense annoyance of President Lincoln, did not contemplate making any move with his army until he was reinforced by 10,000 to 20,000 more men. Halleck’s first job once he reached Washington was to go to Harrison’s Landing and talk some sense into McClellan. On his return to Washington he told Lincoln that the Army of the Potomac should be evacuated from the peninsula and joined with Pope’s. It apparently did not occur to Halleck to leave the army where it was, a mere two days’ march from Richmond, and replace McClellan.

  It was not in Lee’s nature to adopt a defensive position and wait on events. Though the future Marshal Ferdinand Foch was only eleven years old in 1862, his famous comment on what to do when surrounded by superior forces could have served as Lee’s motto: “Mon centre cède, ma droite recule, situation excellente, j’attaque.”* Lee knew that his best option was a forceful rapid attack, to exploit the gap between the two principal Union armies in Virginia. Lee would hold Richmond with the bare minimum of men needed and reinforce Jackson, in whose appetite for a daring attack he continued to believe; shatter Pope’s army before it was concentrated; then bring Jackson back to join with the forces around Richmond and renew the attack on McClellan. This was bold strategic thinking, a one-two punch in which time was of the essence—only by speed and constant, unexpected maneuvering could Lee hope to defeat forces that were bigger, better equipped, and better supplied than his own. Delay would expose Richmond to attack; defeat in the field might cost the Confederacy Virginia. Lee did not hesitate.

  It is important to remember the pace of events: Lee had taken command of the Army of Northern Virginia on June 1, 1862; he fought his first major battle at Mechanicsville on June 26, then fought nine more battles over the next week, ending in the bloody stalemate of Malvern Hill on July 1; on July 12 he ordered Jackson with two divisions to advance on Gordonsville. There was hardly a day between June 26 and July 1 when Lee was not in the saddle, in blazing heat or pouring rain, leading what must have seemed like an endless series of attacks against a much larger foe. He gave himself ten days in which to reorganize his army, combing the eastern part of the Confederacy for reinforcements. Then on July 27 he made up his mind to stake everything on Jackson, and sent him A. P. Hill’s division, masking his intention by a well-planned series of “diversion operations” aimed at Harrison’s Landing. Lee did this so successfully that McClellan ordered troops and artillery back to Malvern Hill anticipating a major battle there, while all the time the bulk of Lee’s strength was being quietly shifted sixty miles to the northwest, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains. No poker player could have played a cooler hand.

  He incorporated two brigades from North Carolina into his own army, and took the risk of sending A. P. Hill and his division to join Jackson. This was a considerable gamble. It stripped Lee of a first-rate, battle-tested division, and he knew that A. P. Hill and Jackson were like oil and water. Hill “was high spirited, impetuous and proud,” an aristocrat who brought out the worst in Jackson, who could be surly, impatient, and stern. The two men had disliked each other since they were West Point cadets, when Hill had been something of a rake and had made fun of Jackson’s backwoods ways. Jackson’s repeated failure to reach the battlefield on time during the Seven Days campaign had further inflamed Hill’s dislike, so putting him under Jackson’s command was a calculated risk on Lee’s part, and came about only because Lee could not at first part with Longstreet.

  He did, however, write tactfully to Jackson, suggesting how to handle A. P. Hill, but in fact it is a good example of his reluctance to knock heads together where his generals were concerned. He still had not confronted Jackson over the latter’s repeated failures during the Seven Days campaign, and he did not now order him to put aside whatever animosity he might feel toward Hill. “A. P. Hill you will find a good officer,” Lee wrote hopefully, as if the two had never met, “with whom you can consult, and by advising your division commanders as to your movements much trouble will be saved you in arranging details, as they can act more intelligently. I wish to save you trouble from my increasing your command.” This was at once sensible advice and wishful thinking. Jackson was a genius, but a moody and erratic one, and secrecy was a part of his nature. He despised “councils of war,” expected his orders to be instantly obeyed without questions, and seldom consulted anyone except Lee himself. “None of his Division commanders were informed of his intentions.” General William B. Taliaferro would later complain, “and it was a source of much annoyance to them to be ordered blindly to move without knowing whither, or to what purpose.” Lee’s attempt to correct this problem was so politely phrased as to be worthless, and had no effect on Jackson, whose suspicion of A. P. Hill remained as strong as ever.

  Just as Lee’s grand strategy depended on keeping the Union armies separated, advancing between them, and attacking whichever seemed the weakest, so his plan for Jackson depended on the latter’s ability to maneuver and defeat parts of Pope’s army before Pope could concentrate them. Lee comes in for criticism from military historians for not enlarging his staff, for not providing an adequate supply of up-to-date maps, and for many of the other deficiencies in the Army of Northern Virginia, but these failings must be placed in the context of his realistic appreciation of the situation facing the Confederacy. His greatest enemy was time. The Union’s armies could be reinforced, enlarged, and supplied almost at will, but the armies of the Confederacy were already stretched to the limit. The only way Lee could win—even if “winning” merely meant forcing the North to sit down at the negotiation table—was to strike hard again and again, before he was overwhelmed by sheer numbers. “We cannot afford to be idle,” he wrote. There was no time to perfect his army, even had there existed the resources with which to do it. From mid-July on he would set the Army of Northern Virg
inia in motion to fight a whirlwind succession of major battles one after the other, with little or no time for rest. Because the distances involved were not enormous—Lee’s battles all took place in a relatively small half circle with a radius of less than 100 miles drawn from the northeast to the southwest around Washington, most of them close to each other, several of them fought in the same place—Lee had admittedly none of the long-distance logistical problems that Napoleon had to contend with (one thinks of the Egyptian or the Russian campaign, for instance). Also, most of Lee’s battles were fought in places where the local population was all or partly Confederate in sympathy (Gettysburg is the notable exception); but as one looks at the dates it is still an extraordinary achievement.

  The problem of maps would soon be soon be helped by Jackson’s gifted topographer Jedediah Hotchkiss; the greater problem of finding food and forage would be solved by keeping the army on the move before it laid waste to the area around it—a partial explanation for Lee’s forays into Maryland and Pennsylvania. Although Lee deplored the “miscreant” Pope’s order to seize food and forage from civilians in Confederate territory, and insisted that his own quartermasters pay for supplies, it is only fair to note that they paid in Confederate dollars, which were declining in value inside the Confederacy and worthless outside it.

  Lee’s grasp of the strategic opportunities (and the dangers) of his position was immediate. With a Union army of over 90,000 men only a few miles from Richmond, he could make no move until he was certain that McClellan would not take the initiative. At the same time, to remain on the defensive was to invite attack. He shrewdly realized that the Federals suffered from one major weakness—Lincoln’s fear of a Confederate attack on Washington. Even a successful “raid” on Washington would constitute a political disaster. Any Confederate move in the direction of Washington would cause Lincoln to reinforce the Union forces south of the Potomac immediately. As if in a chess game, Lee could rely on Lincoln’s instinctive countermove to any move he made in force toward Washington. This would remain the core of Lee’s strategy until May 1864, when Grant crossed the Rapidan and at last put him on the defensive.* Lee did not expect to take Washington—only a disaster of unimaginable proportions to the Union armies could make that possible—but he understood that the best way of protecting Richmond and northern Virginia was to threaten the Federal capital. Lee had not the troops to defend Richmond and the Valley, and in any case he always remained conscious of Frederick the Great’s famous maxim. “He who attempts to defend everything, defends nothing”; but he had enough men to mount a serious attack toward Washington, and could count on the fact that much of McClellan’s army would be shifted to its defense the moment Confederate forces advanced to cross the Rappahannock and threaten Pope’s lines of communication. Lee’s dislike of Pope was visceral—his order to Jackson of July 27, along with his decision to send him A. P. Hill’s division plus a brigade of Louisiana Volunteers, comprising all told more than 18,000 men, contains the interesting (and for Lee, unusual) instruction, “I want Pope to be suppressed.” It was rare for Lee to refer to an enemy general and fellow West Pointer as if he were vermin, but Pope’s bullying orders about the treatment of Confederate civilians offended all that was most chivalrous in Lee’s nature. He not only wanted Pope “suppressed”; he knew that Jackson was exactly the right man to do it.

  At the same time Lee simplified the composition of the Army of Northern Virginia by dividing it effectively into two “wings”: the “right wing” under the command of Longstreet, the “left wing” under the command of Jackson. Longstreet’s sparring with McClellan’s army around Harrison’s Landing persuaded Lee that he had less to fear there than he had initially assumed, although he continued to worry that McClellan might take advantage of Union naval strength to cross to the southern bank of the James and advance toward Richmond via Petersburg. He also worried that Burnside might succeed in joining his force to that already at Harrison’s Landing, giving McClellan more than enough men to resume his siege of Richmond. Despite these concerns, Lee moved quickly and boldy with his plan for Jackson to “strike [his] blow.”

  Major Walter Taylor, Lee’s “indispensable” aide, was perhaps closest to the mind and thoughts of the man he sometimes referred to as “the Tycoon” during the two weeks when Lee prepared for a campaign that would at once “suppress Pope” and remove McClellan’s army from the peninsula altogether. “It required great confidence in his own judgment,” Taylor wrote, “to carry out a campaign apparently so bold and fraught with such possibilities to the enemy, should events prove that the estimate put upon their sagacity was at fault. It required, also, great confidence in his lieutenants and his troops to place them where the odds would be greatly against them, and where courage and endurance of the highest order would be required to assure success.” Lee had at his back over 100,000 Union troops and faced an adversary with over 43,000 men, against both of which he had only 65,000 men to secure Richmond and threaten Washington; but he still seized the initiative. On July 13 he ordered Jackson to advance twenty miles northwest following roughly the path of the Virginia Central Railroad to Louisa Court House and “if practicable to Gordonsville, there to oppose the reported advance of the enemy from the direction of Orange Court-House.”

  On July 18 Lee ordered J. E. B. Stuart “to send some cavalry at least as far north as Hanover Junction,” and to send scouts close enough to Fredericksburg to ascertain Pope’s “intention, strength, &c.” Typically, Lee urged Stuart: “Endeavor to spare your horses as much as possible, and charge your officers to look to their comfort and that of the men.”

  He could not have picked two generals better suited to what he had in mind than Jackson and Stuart, both of whom were aggressive and fearless and had an intuitive grasp of Lee’s intentions. By July 25 it was clear to Jackson that Pope’s army was still divided into two parts: the right wing advancing south toward Gordonsville and the left, under McDowell, preparing to cross the Rappahannock. Jackson knew that he had to strike Pope’s right before McDowell could join it.

  He paused briefly at his new “headquarters in the grove of an old church in Louisa County” to integrate the reinforcements Lee had sent him into his small army—Lee’s good advice had not changed Jackson’s mind about A. P. Hill, or Hill’s about Jackson—which now had a total of almost 24,000 men (variously overestimated by Pope as somewhere between 35,000 and 60,000). On August 2 Jackson’s cavalry fought an unsuccessful engagement with Federal troopers in the normally quiet streets of Orange Court House, as a result of which Jackson vigorously campaigned to replace his cavalry commander, but Lee was not convinced. Jackson’s unforgiving nature created what seems to have been an inordinate number of personnel problems and courts-martial that increased the amount of paperwork with which Lee had to deal.

  Perhaps because of the great importance of “honor,” and the Cavalier self-image prevalent among the senior officers of the Army of Northern Virginia Lee had an unusual number of such headaches to deal with. As Jackson prepared to attack Pope, he was busy with two courts-martial of senior officers. One of them, Brigadier General Richard S. Garnett survived the proceeding only to be killed leading his brigade in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. Jackson would probably have started court-martial proceedings against his cavalry commander had Lee let him. For that matter General A. P. Hill had been under arrest after a quarrel with General Longstreet when Lee sent him and his division off to join Jackson. Courts-martial, arrests, and threats of duels were a constant distraction to Lee, but he usually handled them deftly and with great, though weary, patience.

  On August 7 General Garnett’s court-martial was interrupted by the news that one of Pope’s divisions—that of Major General Nathaniel P. Banks—had advanced to Culpeper Court House, less than twenty miles away. This was exactly the news for which Lee and Jackson had been waiting. It was Jackson’s intention to attack Pope’s army before it was concentrated, and here a part of it was moving straight toward him unsupported
, commanded by the man he had defeated less than four months ago at Winchester.

  Lee wrote to Jackson expressing his confidence—“Being on the spot you must determine what force to operate against,” he wrote on August 7, and urged him to “turn the enemy’s position” rather than attack frontally. Lee finished by writing, “I must now leave the matter to your reflection and good judgment. Make up your mind what is best to be done under all the circumstances which surround us.” It is very clear that Lee’s mind had already moved beyond the immediate possibilities of an attack by Jackson on Pope’s right. He had already been warned by an exchanged Confederate prisoner of war—none other than the future (and notorious) guerrilla leader John S. Mosby—that Burnside’s men were being moved from Fort Monroe to Fredericksburg to reinforce Pope’s army. Lee concluded from this, and from Stuart’s vigilant cavalry scouts around Fredericksburg, that far from ordering McClellan to attack Richmond, Lincoln and Halleck had decided to unite his army with Pope’s and attempt to take Richmond from the northwest. The threat was no longer from Harrison’s Landing but from the direction of Fredericksburg. Lee decided that the focus of the war was shifting from the peninsula to northern Virginia, and from the James River to the Rappahannock. He not only saw an opportunity for Jackson to carry out a series of bold flank attacks against the right of Pope’s army as it advanced, but also the more dramatic opportunity to shift Longstreet’s forces from the peninsula to join with Jackson before McClellan’s army could unite with Pope’s, and to deliver an unexpected and annihilating blow at the Union army.

  On August 5 Stuart fought a brilliant little cavalry action at Massaponax Church, less than five miles south of Fredericksburg—in the course of which he cut off the baggage train of two Union brigades and captured enough prisoners to complain to Lee that they were “already thronging in my presence.” Some of the Union prisoners seem to have been more than willing to tell Stuart that General Burnside’s 14,000 men had already reached Fredericksburg; this gave Lee the final confirmation he needed. If he moved swiftly and boldly he might not only stop Pope in his tracks, but also put the Army of Northern Virginia between Pope and Washington, forcing Pope to fight a battle on ground of Lee’s own choosing, and relieving the threat to Richmond at the same time. Bit by bit, he began the process of preparing to move his army to the other side of Richmond. D. H. Hill was told to be ready to move quickly. John Bell Hood, Lee’s young riding companion in Texas, now a brigadier general, was ordered to Hanover Junction, where he could protect both the Virginia Central and the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac railroads, and join Jackson if need be. The Army of Northern Virginia was being shifted westward in steps too small to attract Pope’s attention.