Away from his family, he continued to worry about every detail of their lives. Mrs. Lee, together with two of her daughters, Mildred and Agnes, had accepted the hospitality of friends of the family at their estate on the James River, west of Richmond, leaving her daughter Mary Custis behind “to regain strength and weight.” Mrs. Lee had no sooner arrived than she slipped on a polished wooden floor and injured herself. Despite pleas from her husband and her doctors, she refused to take to her bed, and in fact seems to have been none the worse for the accident. Lee’s letters were always loving and full of good advice, most of which Mrs. Lee ignored, as did, increasingly, her daughters. Though he urged Mildred (“Precious Life”) to keep knitting, she spent a good deal of her time playing the piano and reading instead. He urged Mary Custis to join her mother and sisters in the country, but she stayed in Richmond for much of the summer to be with her friends, until the heat finally obliged her to leave. Both Mrs. Lee and the girls knitted a good deal, mostly socks, for which their enthusiasm may have been dampened by the fact that Lee gave these away to soldiers who needed them more than he did. The Lee women were not alone. All over the South women knitted presents and sent them to General Lee, who gave them all away, to the troops or to the wounded in hospitals. To the despair of his mess steward and his aides, he gave away countless gift baskets of delicacies. It is interesting to note that when the general’s undergarments needed replacing, new ones were cut and sewn by Mrs. Lee despite her arthritis, although Lee, in his usual mild teasing way, suggested that the more “nimble fingers” of Agnes might have been employed to make them instead, presumably as a preparation to marriage. This too seems to have fallen on deaf ears.
When Lee had meetings in Richmond he always visited 707 Franklin Street, the modest house that his oldest son, Custis (“Boo”), had rented from Mr. John Stewart, and in which his wife Mary and his daughters now usually lived as well. These brief glimpses of domesticity were a great comfort to Lee and, judging from the comments of visitors to the house, even Mrs. Lee, despite her infirmity and the pain of losing Arlington, was in better spirits than before—“she seemed to grow in courage and tranquility as the news from the front grew worse.”
The autumn of 1864 brought little good news. Grant had not broken through Lee’s lines around Petersburg, but there was now virtually no chance that Lee could break out, nor was there any way to supply enough food and forage to do so. Lee’s nephew Major General Fitzhugh Lee* described his uncle’s soldiers as “ragged, gallant fellows . . . whose pinched cheeks told hunger was their portion, and whose shivering forms denoted the absence of proper clothing.” Like Richmond, the Army of Northern Virginia was under siege. Defeat was only a matter of time, short of a miracle. In November it became clear that there would be no miracle—Lincoln was reelected with a margin of 400,000 in the popular vote and carried all but three states, the first president to win a second term since Andrew Jackson.
Lee’s letters to the secretary of war and to President Davis were full of complaints about the lack of rations and of clothing for his men—in some regiments, he pointed out, “not fifty men” had shoes; and tiny amounts of rancid bacon and moldy cornmeal were all he had to feed his troops. The complete lack of soap, he complained, was a cause of great suffering; and perhaps not surprisingly as winter set in the number of deserters grew “alarmingly.” Four days before Christmas, General Sherman completed his march through Georgia to the sea by taking Savannah. It was only a matter of time before he turned his army north to join Grant outside Petersburg. The situation was too critical and the suffering of his troops too great for Lee to spend Christmas Day with his family.
It was not only Lee’s troops who deserted. With great reluctance, the Confederacy had agreed to the conscription of slaves as laborers for the army—this was a question not so much of prejudice as of the fact that slaves represented property and wealth, and also that in the absence of so many white men they were the only labor force remaining for many landowners. Not surprisingly those who were conscripted deserted at a far higher rate than white troops. Lee complained that he had requested 5,000 laborers and had received only 2,200 “in small bodies and at different intervals,” and by December he had fewer than 1,200 left. The more radical idea of arming slaves to fight for the Confederacy had been raised as early as 1861, but given the desperation of the military situation, it became a more urgent issue in the autumn of 1864. In his masterly study Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy, Albert Burton Moore sums up the “cardinal points” of those opposing this drastic move: “(1) the arming of the slaves would be a repudiation of the theories and traditions of the South; (2) it would mean the abolition of slavery, for ‘if the negro was fit to be a soldier, he was not fit to be a slave’; (3) it would be the abandonment of the ground on which the states seceded if they allowed Congress to interfere with the institution of slavery; and (4) it would be an offense to the white soldiers and many of them would lay down their arms.” Lee was the “mainstay” of those who advocated this radical step, writing to a member of the Virginia legislature, “We must decide whether slavery shall be extinguished by our enemies and the slaves be used against us, or use them ourselves at the risk of the effects which may be produced upon our social institutions.” Lee then cut the Gordian knot by pointing out that any act for enrolling slaves as soldiers must contain a “well digested plan of gradual and general emancipation”: the slaves could not be expected to fight well if their service as soldiers was not rewarded by freedom. President Davis was reluctant to confront this most sensitive of issues in the South, and both the Confederate Congress and the southern state legislatures debated and delayed action. Davis not surprisingly preferred to wait “for public opinion to ripen on this subject,” but the result was that “the end came before [Negro enlistment] was under way.” The remarkable thing is that Lee, by nature the most conservative of men and the most respectful of southern traditions and institutions, in this instance was the most radical voice in favor of enlisting blacks and promising them freedom at the same time as a musket.
On February 4, 1865, Lee was at last nominated “general in chief” of all the Confederate armies. Characteristically, he replied that he was “indebted alone to the kindness of his Excellency the President” for “this high and arduous office,” adding, more disturbingly, that he had “received no instructions as to my duties,” and did not know what President Davis desired him to undertake.
Lee formally announced that he had “assumed command of the military forces of the Confederate States” on February 9, and immediately drew attention to one of his greatest problems: he gave deserters and those absent without leave twenty days in which to return to their unit or to report to the nearest enrolling officer, after which they would be subject “to such punishment as the courts may impose, and no application for clemency shall be entertained.” In theory this meant a pardon for those who returned to the army, and the death penalty for those who did not, but in practice by this time neither the courts of the Confederacy nor the various “home guard” units charged with tracking down and apprehending deserters were up to dealing with over 100,000 deserters. In some cases imprisonment and executions occured, and there was at least one lynching, but the decline in morale, the shortage of supplies, and the anticipation of defeat made it possible for most of the men to slip back into rural life without their neighbors informing on them.
However unshaken Lee appeared before his men, he was not cheerful. Only ten days after accepting his appointment as general in chief he wrote to John C. Breckinridge, the new Confederate secretary of war, that “it may be necessary to abandon all our cities, and preparation should be made for this contingency.” He also urged concentrating “all our armies” in Virginia, “as separately they do not seem able to make head against the enemy.” This was a realistic but depressing assessment—events on the ground were now swiftly overtaking the Confederate government’s control over what remained of the Confederacy. Lee was already thinkin
g of moving supplies and ordnance from Richmond to Lynchburg, where he might be able to hold the junction of the Southside and Danville railroads “so as to retain communication with North and South as long as practicable, and also with the West.” His state of mind can best be inferred from his letter of February 21 to Mrs. Lee: “Should it be necessary to abandon our position to prevent being surrounded, what will you do? Will you remain, or leave the city?” To this, he added, knowing that Mary Lee would almost certainly do just what she wanted to, “You must consider the question and make up your mind.”
Just as Lee was considering whether or not to abandon Petersburg, his daughter Agnes, demonstrating the doughty independence of Lee’s womenfolk, decided to accept a long-standing invitation to visit the city. Her father feared she had left the visit until too late, but that did not prevent her from taking the train to Petersburg, which was under constant artillery fire, to stay with her friends the Meade family. She remarked on the fact that the citizens of Petersburg seemed to pay no attention to cannon shells exploding in the streets. On her first night, a military band “serenaded the Meade home” to honor the presence of one of Lee’s daughters, and “Agnes tossed fresh roses to the gallant musicians.” The next day Agnes went to the farmhouse where Lee’s headquarters was, only to find that he had been called away in the pouring rain. The next morning he wrote her “a hasty [but loving] note.”
My precious little Agnes,
I was so sorry I was not here to see you yesterday. I might have persuaded you to remain with me. If you had have staid [sic] or come out at four o’clock this morning I could have seen you with my weary sleepy eyes. Now I . . . do not know when I shall have the pleasure of seeing you.
Lee could see all the signs of Grant’s preparations to attack the Confederate lines, and knew that at this point there was little he could do to stop the inevitable. Still he was determined to fight on. He had predicted that Grant was going to “draw out by his left with the intent of enveloping me,” exactly what Grant had in mind, and urged on his officers the importance of discipline. “The appearance of a steady, unbroken line is more formidable to the enemy and renders his aim less accurate and his fire less effective,” Lee wrote, emphasizing that discipline counts for more on the battlefield than “numbers or resources.” However, he noted that his ability to move the army rapidly was severely hampered by the fact that “the cavalry and the artillery . . . are still scattered for want of provender, and our supply and ammunition trains, which ought to be with the army in case of sudden movement, are absent collecting provisions and forage.” An even more serious problem was that the “state of despondency that now prevails among our people is producing a bad effect upon the troops.” There was not much Lee could do about that. On February 24, in a long letter to Governor Vance of North Carolina, he pointed out that the troops were influenced “to a considerable extent by letters . . . written by their friends at home” representing “to their friends in the army that our cause is hopeless, and that they had better provide for themselves.” Deserters usually took their weapons with them, often joined large bands of other armed deserters, and in many places were difficult for the home guard to round up. On March 9, in response to Governor Vance’s reply, Lee agreed to provide two detachments of troops, with orders “to take no prisoners among those deserters who resist with arms the civil or military authorities.” Lee still hoped that by concentrating all the remaining Confederate forces in Virginia, he might be able to fight one last battle there and defeat Grant, perhaps winning for the Confederacy a new lease on life. This in fact was exactly what Grant feared most. If the protracted campaign around Petersburg and Richmond was not concluded quickly, public opinion in the North might turn against the war, which seemed to many to have been dragging on forever.
Lee’s hopes were never fulfilled. Events made it impossible for him to concentrate the number of troops he needed, or to feed them and supply them with ammunition. On March 17 he wrote to Secretary of War Breckinridge that he could no longer “sustain even our small force of cavalry around Richmond,” for want of forage. On March 27, he wrote with a touch of bitterness, considering how long he had urged the government to form armed black units, “I have been awaiting the receipt of the order from the Department [of War] for raising and organizing the colored troops before taking any action in the matter. I understand that orders have been published in the newspapers, but have not seen them. In the mean time, I have been informed that a number of recruits may be obtained in Petersburg if suitable persons be employed to get them to enlist.”
At 4 a.m. on April 2, Grant began his long-expected attack with “an assault along the whole of the Petersburg front” by 125,000 men against Lee’s long, far-stretched line of no more than 33,000 half-starved fighting men. Whether or not Mrs. Lee and her daughters Mary Custis and Mildred could see and hear the preliminary bombardment that turned the early morning sky above Petersburg red, Lee saw it and knew what it portended, and he “dispatched a paroled officer to fetch Agnes from the Meade home and take her to the railroad station.” Her father had warned her that she might be trapped in the city, and arranged for her rescue at the last minute, doubtless with a profound sigh of relief on his part that she was on board the last train out of Petersburg. He then turned to the task of writing to Secretary of War Breckinridge. “I see no prospect of doing more than holding our position here till night. I am not certain that I can do that; if I can I shall withdraw tonight north of the Appomattox. . . . Our only chance, then, of concentrating our forces is to do so near the Danville Railroad, which I shall endeavor to do at once. I advise that all preparations be made for leaving Richmond tonight.”
On Sunday, April 2, Mrs. Lee and her daughters attended communion service at St. Paul’s Church, where they saw the sexton walk down the aisle and respectfully bend over to whisper to President Davis. Davis rose from his pew, followed one after the other by “other important military and government figures.” Lee’s lines at Petersburg had been broken, and Richmond was lost. By the time Mrs. Lee left church after the service, wagons were already lining up to remove the archives and what remained of the Confederate government’s gold bullion. By early afternoon she and her daughters watched as panic spread through the city. The members of the Confederate government were now fugitives, wanted men, in flight to nowhere. “All of Richmond, rich and poor, highborn and lowly, seemed to be scrambling to leave the city. Wagons and carriages piled high with furniture and barrels jostled the endless stream of heavily laden pedestrians, all intent on getting away, somewhere, anywhere, to escape the dreaded Yankees. Through the open casements the family listened to the sounds of flight, the tramping of feet, the creak of wagon wheels, the cries of children, and the whinnies of frightened horses, as ‘grim terror spread its wild contagion.’”
By the middle of the afternoon looting and drunkenness swept the city, and by the evening fires spread throughout Richmond as the tobacco warehouses went up in flames, “set by a misapprehension of orders.” Soon immense explosions shook the city as the remaining ordnance and naval stores were set off, either by drunken looters or by the retreating troops. Richmond was not destroyed by vengeful Union troops but abandoned to destruction by its own citizens. Just before dawn the city’s last remaining powder magazine went up in a huge explosion, and flames moved east toward Franklin Street, engulfing almost everything in their path. April 2 had been, ironically, a perfect spring day, with the scent of budding trees and flowers in the air; but as the sun rose on April 3 it illuminated dimly, through the clouds of acrid smoke and burning debris that filled the air, only the skeletons of its smoldering buildings, and charred, blackened trees. Richmond’s public and private buildings were sending up a stream of ashes, burned paper, broken furniture, and carved wood paneling, the bric-a-brac of a century of prosperity and genteel living. Mrs. Lee watched the scene from her window through her lorgnette, “attired,” as her biographer Mary P. Coulling tells us, “in her handsomest dress, her best bonn
et, veil, and gloves.” She was probably not surprised when the firestorm stopped short of her house as if by a miracle. When Tuesday morning dawned she could see, through the clouds of smoke, the “old, familiar” Union flag floating once again above the dome of the capitol, and hear the steady tread of Union troops marching through the streets to put out the remaining fires and restore order. The Union commander offered to evacuate her and her daughters to someplace where they would be more secure, but Mary Lee refused to go. A sentry was posted at her door for her protection—perhaps intentionally the first was a black soldier, but Mary Lee objected to this ultimate humiliation, and he was replaced by a succession of white soldiers. Ration cards were issued to the few civilians remaining, since Confederate money was now worthless, and the girls did what shopping they could. Since Mary Lee was an invalid, she would have missed seeing the ultimate humiliation of all, when, on April 4, only forty-eight hours after her husband had withdrawn his army from the broken Confederate lines around Petersburg, President Lincoln, looking grim and distracted, rode in an open carriage through the ghostly ruins of the former capital of the Confederacy, visiting at last the city that his army had tried to capture for four long, bloody years, and that Lee had so ably defended since June 1, 1862.
The Confederacy had begun its existence as a government without an army; it was ending as an army without a government. Lee’s intention had been to concentrate his army at Amelia Court House, and “use the Richmond and Danville Railroad to transfer his army, and hurry south to unite with [General Joseph E.] Johnston and strike Sherman,” then return victorious with both armies to strike at Grant. The failing logistics of the Confederacy thwarted him—the rations he had expected to find there had not arrived, and the resulting delay enabled Grant to cut the railroad to the south. Lee was now trapped, obliged to fight his way along country back roads in the hope of reaching the railway junction at Farmville, where he still hoped to find supplies sent from Lynchburg. In three days of bitter fighting he took over 7,000 casualties, which he could ill afford; and captured over 1,000 Union officers and men, whom he could not feed. By now, exhaustion and starvation were overcoming his own men. On April 6, there took place at Sayler’s Creek an event that could not fail to imprint itself on Lee’s mind. All the news he received was bad. Federal cavalry was advancing parallel to his own line of march and had attacked his wagon train and set fire to many of the wagons; his flanks were unprotected; Grant and the main body of Union forces were close behind him. Lee was now ahead of most of his army. As he rode along “a high ridge leading northward to the Appomattox” to get a better look at the fighting at Sayler’s Creek, he paused and drew rein at the unexpected sight of his men fleeing in panic, soldiers without their guns, groups of men in no formation without their officers—something he had never expected to live to see in the Army of Northern Virginia: a rout. “My God!” Lee exclaimed, “has the army been dissolved?” He sat there motionless on Traveller, holding in the breeze a fluttering Confederate battle flag someone had handed him, surrounded by his men, no longer part of an army, but merely exhausted fugitives halted in their flight only by his commanding presence. Some of them stood around him, perhaps out of shame, even reaching out to touch Traveller’s flanks. Major General William Mahone rode up from the battlefield and sought to explain what had happened, and to reassure Lee that there were still men left who would fight—but how many? Lee, his eyes fixed on the battle below, not deigning to look at those who had thrown away their arms and run, waved his hand brusquely to the rear as if to dismiss them, and said, in a rare flash of impatience, “Yes, there are still some true men left. . . . Will you please keep those people back.”
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