Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  Neither Wilbourn nor Lee had any reason to suppose that Jackson’s wounds would prove fatal, but Wilbourn later wrote that Lee “moaned audibly” at the news, and “seemed about to burst into tears.” In the meantime the left wing of his army was without a commander, except for A. P. Hill, with whom Jackson had not shared his plans. Shortly afterward, Hill was wounded and, as the ranking major general on the spot, Jeb Stuart assumed command. At 3 a.m. Lee wrote to Stuart urging him to press forward “with utmost vigor” and to “dispossess” the enemy of Chancellorsville “which will permit the union of the whole army.”

  It was evident to Lee that the “glorious victory” Jackson had won on May 2 was now in the balance. Hooker had been badly shaken, but he still had 76,000 men to Lee’s 43,000; his center and left were well dug in; and any attempt to drive him out was bound to be bloody.

  Jackson’s wound continued to worry Lee. He called for Traveller, but just as he had mounted, Hotchkiss appeared with a further report. Lee listened patiently until Hotchkiss described Jackson’s wound, at which point Lee gently silenced him: “I know all about it, and I [do] not wish to hear more—it is too painful a subject.” It was clear to Lee that he and Stuart would have to fight their way forward to join the two wings of the army. Failure to do so would render Jackson’s previous victory pointless. Lee was helped at this point by another of Hooker’s mistakes, which was to withdraw his artillery batteries from a raised clearing that offered a commanding field of fire to both the west and the east. It would have been difficult or even impossible for the Confederate infantry to take if Hooker had held it with determination.

  The Union line now consisted of a horseshoe around Chancellorsville as well as a straight line running from there to the Rappahannock. About five-thirty the next morning Lee and Stuart simultaneously attacked both sides of the horseshoe, in some of the heaviest fighting of the war. Lee remained in the thick of it, though he could not have known that a Confederate cannonball had hit a pillar of the Chancellorsville house against which Hooker was leaning. A large part of it fell “violently” on Hooker’s head, knocking him unconscious. Hooker refused to give up command, probably because he disliked his second in command, Major General Couch. It had been Couch who said that Hooker was “whipped” before the battle even begun. Perhaps as a consequence, by ten o’clock that morning he withdrew his artillery batteries from Fairview Hill, effectively giving up any attempt to hold Chancellorsville, and thereby condemned his army to a panicky race for the far side of the Rappahannock. In less than five hours both sides took casualties that were second only to those at Antietam—over 17,000 Union casualties, and over 13,000 Confederate—but Lee had achieved his objective, and won what Fuller has described as his “perfect battle.” Also at 10 a.m. the two parts of Lee’s army were joined within sight of the Chancellorsville Tavern. Lee rode forward on Traveller to a tumultuous welcome described by Major Charles Marshall, his military secretary:

  Lee’s presence was the signal for one of those uncontrollable bursts of enthusiasm which no one can appreciate who has not witnessed them. The fierce soldiers, with their faces blackened with the smoke of battle, the wounded crawling with feeble limbs from the fury of the devouring flames, all seemed possessed with a common impulse. One long, unbroken cheer . . . rose high above the roar of battle and hailed the presence of a victorious chief. He sat in the full realization of all that soldiers dream of—triumph; and as I looked at him in the complete fruition of the success which his genius, courage, and confidence in his army had won, I thought it must have been from such a scene that men in ancient days ascended to the glory of the gods.

  Marshall was a levelheaded man and a lawyer, but he worshipped Lee, as millions of other men did. As Lee rode through the carnage, a gray man on a gray horse, he appeared the perfect hero.

  But once again, the Army of Northern Virginia was in no position to advance and cut the bulk of Hooker’s army off from the United States Ford. Dazed and humiliated Hooker might be, but Lee had lost nearly 25 percent of his force. His victory brings to mind the words of King Pyrrhus, “Another such victory and we are undone.” Longstreet echoed the thought when he rejoined the army: he considered that by taking the offensive instead of the defensive Lee cost the Confederacy more casualties than it could ever hope to replace. Lee himself took little pleasure from his victory. He dictated the following to the wounded Jackson: “Could I have directed events, I would have chosen for the good of the country to be disabled in your stead.”

  At this time Lee learned of a Confederate disaster at Fredericksburg, less than ten miles away, where he had left Jubal Early, ordering that if Early was attacked by a much stronger force he was to retreat toward Richmond. Then on May 2 Early received an oral order from a member of Lee’s staff sending him to support Lee. After starting his march Early learned that Sedgwick was crossing the Rappahannock to take Fredericksburg. He immediately countermarched back and throughout May 3 fought a desperate battle to prevent Sedgwick from succeeding where Burnside had failed. Owing to a muddled order, Lee found himself having to pay for the same piece of real estate twice, with the additional threat of Union troops coming down Plank Road to attack his rear. Lee at once sent Major General McLaws’s division rushing pell-mell for Fredericksburg, again dividing his forces. He quickly followed to make sure there were no further misunderstandings about his orders. May 3 saw intense and bloody fighting, as Sedgwick’s troops once again assaulted the Confederate line on Saint Marye’s Heights, succeeding at one point in taking the sunken road where so many had been killed in December. By late afternoon the Federal troops had advanced more than four miles until they were halted at Salem Church by a stout, well-organized Confederate defense.

  Hooker still remained, unable to decide whether to advance or retreat. He had the manpower for another attack, but neither the will nor the plan. Although fighting continued around Fredericksburg all day on May 4, Hooker was in no position to support Sedgwick, who was already making plans of his own to retreat north of the Rappahannock. On the night of May 5 “Fighting Joe” held a council of war with his commanders, most of whom wanted to renew the battle. By then, however, Hooker had taken counsel of his own fears. Despite his superior strength in numbers and artillery, he chose to end the campaign and retreat to lick his wounds. It was an ignominious end to what had started out as a serious threat to the Army of Northern Virginia, prompting Lincoln to ask, “My God! My God! What will the country say?” Hooker’s generals were unanimous in their complaints about him, while he in turn blamed them, undermining whatever little confidence Lincoln and Halleck still had.

  Southerners’ enthusiasm for Lee’s greatest victory was considerably dampened by the death of Stonewall Jackson and by the frightful casualties. The chronology of Lee’s battles was almost unique in military history—he fought battle after battle in close succession, without giving himself or his army any time to rest. Since August 1862, he had fought four of the major battles of the Civil War. No Union general had proved to be his equal in boldness and tactical genius. No Federal troops had managed to achieve the level of ferocity and determination in the face of adverse odds as his half-starved, poorly equipped men. All through 1862 the Confederacy faced dire problems—the Federal blockade of southern ports; the loss of New Orleans, its most important city; Grant’s relentless descent down the Mississippi River toward Vicksburg and the very heart of the Confederacy; the South’s inferiority not only in wealth and numbers, but in terms of all kinds of manufactured goods. The Confederate government had to rely on the hard-won victories of the Army of Northern Virginia as its best means of survival.

  Even now, after almost a week of fighting and 13,000 casualties, the best that could be said, strategically, was that Lee had held his ground and forced an enemy more than twice his size to retreat. Now he was planning to resume the northward march into Pennsylvania. The pace of the fighting was astounding—in less than two months, hardly time for his army to recover, Lee would fight the most dec
isive battle of the war.

  CHAPTER 10

  Gettysburg

  “If We Do Not Whip Him, He Will Whip Us”

  “General Lee is without exception, the handsomest man of his age I ever saw. . . . He is a perfect gentleman in every respect.”

  —Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur James Lyon Fremantle, of the Coldstream Guards, a British observer at Gettysburg

  Although Colonel Fremantle is sometimes described as an official British observer to the Confederate Army in uniform, he was in fact a kind of military tourist who traveled to the United States to visit the Confederacy on leave, rather in the manner of Phileas Fogg, the imperturbable hero of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. Fremantle resembles Phileas Fogg so strongly that one is inclined to believe Verne must have modeled his hero on him, except that this figure is a familiar mid-nineteenth-century English stereotype: the adventurous, unshockable, curious, courageous world traveler who observes everything from the point of view of an English gentleman. Fremantle had charm and great presence, and along his way he met and won over almost anyone of importance in the Confederacy—it is no surprise that he rose to become a major general and aide-de-camp to H. R. H. Field Marshal the Duke of Cambridge. He was also an acute observer and a first-rate interviewer, the equivalent of a Victorian Alistair Cooke. Nothing escapes Fremantle’s notice, from the fact that in Charleston the only difference in dress between Negro women and their mistresses was “that a mulatto woman is not allowed to wear a veil” to the quality of the tea served in President Jefferson Davis’s house in Richmond. Fremantle landed “at the miserable village of Bagdad” on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande and traveled from there, often in conditions of excruciating discomfort and some danger, all the way to Gettysburg, where he observed the battle from beside Lee and Longstreet. He paints a vivid picture of what was going on at the western side of the Confederacy, where Grant was about to take Vicksburg, Benjamin Grierson’s Union cavalrymen were raiding deep into Mississippi, and crossing the great Mississippi River was already a difficult and hazardous undertaking. Whatever was going on in northern Virginia, the Confederacy was collapsing like a house of cards on the Mississippi, and Fremantle was hardly the only person who noticed it—or remarked on the poverty and misery of people whose homes had been burned, their possessions destroyed, and they themselves turned into penniless refugees in their own country.

  Lee’s decision to advance into Pennsylvania in search of the grand battle that would bring the United States to the negotiating table with the Confederacy, and would also bring recognition from the major European powers, was not universally approved. General Joseph E. Johnston was against it, as were General Beauregard, Vice President Stephens, and General Longstreet. Stephens wanted to begin peace negotiations at once and thought that invading Pennsylvania was more likely to further antagonize northerners than to turn their minds toward a compromise peace. Generals Johnston, Beauregard, and Longstreet all thought that the South would be better off if Lee went on the defensive along the Rappahannock, where he had proved that he could hold the Union army back, while quickly shifting a good part of his army to the West to prevent Grant from taking Vicksburg, and to attempt to keep Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi in Confederate hands. The danger that the Confederacy might unravel from west to east, whatever happened between the Rappahannock and the Potomac, was Grant’s central strategic idea, and should have been the overriding concern of the Confederate government; but Lee’s position as the South’s most respected and admired military figure, and the high drama of his rapid marches and his victories against much larger armies, had a profound effect on southern military strategy. Lee himself was too good a general not to be aware of this, but he could never overcome a certain myopia about his native state. He remained a Virginian first and foremost; he had resigned from the U.S. Army to defend Virginia; and while he was committed heart and soul to the Confederacy if only as a matter of honor, his first love remained his own state. His strategic vision was a reflection of his personality—a strong preference for attack over defense, a belief in the superiority of his own troops over Federal troops, and a determination to remove Federal forces as “invaders” from all of Virginia. Moreover, keeping his army in Virginia inevitably meant depriving his fellow Virginians of food, forage, cattle, and horses—the army could be fed only at the expense of civilians—whereas moving it north of the Potomac would enable it to supply itself at the enemy’s expense.

  Longstreet was sufficiently opposed to this plan that he took his case to Secretary of War James Seddon in Richmond over Lee’s head, explaining that the Confederacy’s greatest opportunity lay in “the skillful use of our interior lines,” and proposing that his corps of the Army of Northern Virginia be sent to join General Braxton Bragg’s army so as to attack “in overwhelming numbers” and defeat Major General W. S. Rosecrans’s Union army in Tennessee, then “march for Cincinnati and the Ohio River” in order to draw Grant away from Vicksburg.

  Longstreet was correct in his opinion that losing Vicksburg would be a severe setback for the South and that perhaps the only way to deflect Grant from his purpose was strike hard enough in the West to threaten a major city. But he failed to convince Seddon, who as a practical politician understood that rightly or wrongly President Davis was committed first and foremost to the aim of obtaining recognition of the Confederacy from Britain or France, and that this would hardly be achieved by a victory over Rosecrans in Tennessee, or even by taking Cincinnati, as opposed to defeating the Army of the Potomac in Pennsylvania and forcing Lincoln to evacuate Washington.

  In his patient, stubborn way Longstreet repeated his argument all over again with Lee, who “was averse to having a part of his army so far beyond his reach.” Lee made it clear that he still planned “to invade northern soil,” and Longstreet backed down, though he did not change his own opinion. “His [Lee’s] plan or wishes announced,” Longstreet wrote, “it became useless and improper to offer suggestions leading to a different course.” Longstreet managed to extract from Lee what he took as a promise that “we should work so as to force the enemy to attack us, in such good positions as we might find in his own country, so well adapted to that purpose”—in other words, to find a way to repeat Fredericksburg, rather than Antietam or Chancellorsville. No doubt Lee was following his usual course in arguments with Longstreet of politely evading the issue, rather than simply telling Longstreet to follow his orders.

  Lee’s decision on his hearing the news of Jackson’s death, to divide his army into three corps and promote R. S. Ewell and A. P. Hill to the rank of lieutenant general to command the two new corps, cannot have pleased Longstreet. Instead of being one of two corps commanders under Lee, he was now one of three, and he did not regard either of the others as his equal in military skill, competence, or vision. At the same time he continued to think of himself as a kind of second in command to Lee, as well as an adviser in the larger realms of strategy. A role as “first among equals” was not what Longstreet had in mind for himself, if the “equals” were going to be Ewell and A. P. Hill.

  Over the past century and a half in the work of historians of the “Lost Cause” school, Longstreet has come to appear as the major cause of the Confederates’ defeat. Douglas Southall Freeman accuses Longstreet, for example, of being “secretly swollen with the idea that he was the man to redeem the failing fortunes of the Confederacy.” These are harsh words, and as much ink as blood has by now been spilled on the subject of Gettysburg and Longstreet’s role in the battle, but Lee was not Lear—whatever failings he may have had, nobody has ever accused him of being a poor judge of men, particularly of soldiers. And since Lee trusted Longstreet, we have to assume that he not only valued Longstreet’s competence, which nobody denies, but also that he set a certain value on Longstreet’s stubborn determination to present him with the facts as he saw them, even at the expense of contradicting or challenging Lee’s own views. So long as Jackson was alive he and Longstreet balanced each o
ther, as the ying and yang of subordinates. Jackson was superb at guessing from a few words exactly what Lee wanted done, and setting out to do it immediately without argument or further instructions; Longstreet was as good a soldier, but he was an instinctive contrarian and stubbornly insisted on making Lee think twice, and to separate what was possible from what was not.

  Lee was a strong enough personality to bear the presence of a contrarian. Longstreet was a robust, sensible, and solid presence, and Lee had long since come to rely on him considerably. “Although reserved in speech and manner, he learned the value of blunt talk and expressing his opinions in a forthright manner,” one of Longstreet’s biographers notes; and this too was of some value to Lee, who was himself courteous to the point where “blunt talk” was almost unthinkable from him or, for most of those around him, to him. As a gruff, bearish, though kindhearted Georgian in an army where many of his fellow senior generals were Virginians and idolized Lee, Longstreet frequently appointed himself to pronounce on military reality, which is to say that his outlook on war was severely practical rather than romantic. Longstreet’s first act when he learned that Lee was not going to follow his advice was typical of him: he sent “a requisition down to Richmond for gold coin for my scout Harrison, gave him what he thought he would need to get along in Washington, and sent him off with secret orders, telling him that I did not care to see him till he could bring information of importance—that he should be the judge of that.” “Scout” was a nineteenth-century American euphemism for what we would now call a spy, and it is clear that Longstreet was acting as his own intelligence officer, and perhaps as Lee’s as well—indeed Lee had a gentleman’s dislike of dealing directly with scouts, and of the whole business of spying in general.