* By the 1850s the railways were replacing the old coffles of slaves on foot, and speeding up the transport of slaves westward.
* Even in the eighteenth century, while the Revolution was still in progress, many citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts would have contested this, however.
* Notable exceptions were Lee’s sister Anne Lee Marshall and her husband, who would be firm Unionists, and whose son Louis, Lee’s nephew, served with distinction in the Union Army, was decorated for bravery, and rose to the rank of colonel.
† Views Suggested by the Imminent Danger, Oct. 29, 1860, of a Disruption of the Union by the Secession of One or More of the Southern States, by General Winfield Scott (Freeman, Robert E. Lee, 418).
* Ironically, Edward Everett would give the two-hour speech that preceded Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863, at the site of Lee’s greatest defeat. Everett’s speech, a real nineteenth-century stem-winder, was thought by most people at the time to have far outshone Lincoln’s short one.
* Twiggs would surrender his entire command “to avoid bloodshed,” and would himself become a Confederate major general.
* Blair House, at 1651 Pennsylvania Avenue, has been the official state guesthouse of the president of the United States since 1942. Francis P. Blair’s daughter Elizabeth married a member of the Lee family. Blair was, among many other things, a great-great-grandfather of the actor Montgomery Clift.
* Letcher was rather unfairly punished by both sides; he was defeated in his attempt to win a seat in the Second Confederate Congress, and briefly imprisoned after the Civil War ended, as well as having his house burned to the ground by Union troops.
* Emory M. Thomas is probably correct; but in fairness it should be noted that Freeman places this temporary office either at the Richmond Post Office or “in the old state General Court building” (Freeman, Robert E. Lee, 464).
* This bowl survived the occupation and partial looting of the house by Federal troops, and is now privately owned but on exhibit at Mount Vernon.
* Davis’s first wife, who died only three months after their marriage, was a daughter of Zachary Taylor, the victor of Buena Vista, elected to the presidency in 1848.
* “First among equals.”
* Also known as the Battle of Hoke’s Run.
* There were three Confederate anthems—“God Save the South,” “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” and “Dixie,” but none of them was officially authorized. “Dixie” was by far the most popular of them.
* In the only photograph I have seen of generals McDowell and McClellan (the “young Napoleon”) standing together they look like Laurel and Hardy. McDowell, like Hardy, towers over his companion, his expansive paunch thrust forward, while McClellan, dwarfed like Stan Laurel, looks as if he would give anything to be elsewhere.
* The phrase has been squeezed from Von Clausewitz. What he actually wrote was: “War is an area of uncertainty; three quarters of the things on which all action in war is based are lying in a fog of uncertainty” (Von Kriege, Book I, chap. 3). But the “fog of war” is real and is a factor in every battle, big or small; and the term distills his meaning well enough (Wikipedia, “Fog of War,” 1).
* There is a theory that Bee was reproaching Jackson for standing there “like a stone wall” instead of coming to Bee’s help, rather than pointing him out as an example to follow, but the logic of the battle is against this interpretation. It was Jackson’s job to keep his men formed up and in line, not to abandon his position and try to move them to the left in support of Bee’s brigade while under fire.
* Winston Churchill’s phrase when he went off to confer with Franklin D. Roosevelt and the American chiefs of staff in Washington, D.C., leaving General Sir Alan Brooke, the new chief of the Imperial General Staff, behind in London. Brooke’s feelings about being left behind in London mirrored those of Lee left behind in Richmond.
* The military term “casualties” does not mean deaths; it refers to the total number of men put hors de combat. The figures break down as follows for First Manassas. Confederates: 387 killed; 1,582 wounded; 13 missing. Union: 460 killed; 1,124 wounded; 1,312 missing. In the age before high explosives, which are capable of volatizing people, “missing” usually connoted deserters.
* Loring had studied military tactics in Europe between the Mexican and the Civil wars, and after the Confederate defeat in 1865 he went to Egypt to modernize the army of Khedive Ismail Pasha, attaining the rank of fareek pasha, or major general.
* Lee took two slaves with him on this campaign: Perry and Meredith, the latter a cook from White House, the estate on the Pamunkey River, which G. W. P. Custis had left to Lee’s second son, Fitzhugh (Thomas, Robert E. Lee, 201–2).
* These were, from north to south the Parkersburg-Staunton Turnpike, which was dominated by Cheat Mountain, taken by the Federals during the battle in which Garnett had been killed; then a very rough and difficult road from Huttonsville to Millsboro, just west of Cheat Mountain; and finally the James River and Kanawha Turnpike from Charleston to Covington.
* Richard Adams, “Traveller.”
† Stephen Vincent Benét, “Army of Northern Virginia.”
* This would be about $5,500 in today’s money.
* I am indebted to Mary P. Coulling’s The Lee Girls for this material, and for her excellent account of the lives of Lee’s daughters.
* I owe Robert K. Krick, former historian of the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania battlefield parks and a distinguished expert on the Army of Northern Virginia, many thanks for the following illuminating explanation: “The southern (or southwestern, if you will) reach of the Valley is the ‘upper Valley’ because of how the rivers flow. The Shenandoah and its tributaries . . . flow nominally from south to north, so the farther south you go, the farther upstream, or up the Valley, and vice versa.”
* 13,047 Union casualties, 10,699 Confederate.
* The tactical problem was not unlike what the British faced in 1941 in Malaya, a much longer and very narrow peninsula, where every time they tried to form and hold a line the Japanese simply outflanked them by landing behind them on both sides. Eventually the British were forced to retreat all the way back to Singapore, where they were besieged and obliged to surrender.
* McClellan had a penchant for surrounding himself with French aristocrats—the comte de Paris’s brother, the duc de Chartres, was one of his cavalry commanders.
* Assistant Adjutant General.
* In both armies there was at first a hodgepodge of weapons (which remained the case in the Confederate Army throughout the war), some smoothbore, some rifled, and of different calibers, from .54 caliber to an astounding .69 caliber. At closer ranges the lethality of such big-bore balls or conical minié bullets was remarkably high, as was that of the “buck and ball,” a .65-caliber round ball and three .31-caliber buckshot—a formidable load (Joseph G. Bilby, “Opening Shots,” American Rifleman, July 2011, 43).
† Even the Gatling gun, the first crude machine gun, was used in the Civil War, though only in a “demonstration.”
* The burning of Atlanta in 1865 and the firebombing of Dresden by the R.A.F. in 1945 are analogous to Sherman’s march; Arthur Harris, chief of Britain’s Bomber Command, simply had more sophisticated technology than Sherman did, but the intention was the same.
* Lee’s second son, Fitzhugh (Rooney) Lee, was then serving as a lieutenant colonel under Stuart’s command.
* I am indebted to Jeffry D. Wert for his painstaking account of Stuart’s ride in Cavalryman of the Lost Cause: A Biography of J. E. B. Stuart, which succeeds in making sense of an often confused and overdramatized feat of arms.
* The British general Bernard Montgomery was often ridiculed during World War II for going to bed promptly at nine o’clock—he did not even make an exception for Winston Churchill and King George VI when they visited his headquarters—but he was not entirely wrong. A general should take care of himself, and be woken only in case of dire emergencies, requiring wh
at Napoleon called the rarest kind of courage, “Le courage de deux heures du matin,” i.e., the ability to make a critical decision when woken suddenly at two in the morning.
* Probably wrongly—the words may have been placed in his mouth, or rather George C. Scott’s, by the screenwriter of the film Patton.
* We would now refer to Dabney as a chief of staff.
* Total indifference to suffering, however, is a bad sign in a general. Talleyrand remarked that the moment he knew Napoleon was lost was when they rode over the battlefield of Eylau together—Talleyrand remarked on the number of dead and dying, and the emperor merely replied in a tone of surprise and mild irritation, “Mais ce sont de la petite espèce.” (“But they are people of no importance.”) Lee’s admiration for his soldiers and empathy for their suffering, by contrast, never wavered.
* The Confederate balloons were of the old-fashioned “hot air” kind, like those of the eighteenth century, since unlike the North the Confederacy had no means of producing hydrogen in the field. The balloons were made out of “dress silk,” though not out of women’s silk dresses contributed for the purpose, as legend has it (Richard Billies, Civil War Observation Balloons, November 28, 2011; and Balloons in the American Civil War, Web site).
* I try to relate this to my own experience in the armed forces and imagine what it would have been like if, as an Aircraftman Second Class (AC2) in the Royal Air Force, I had been obliged to argue with an Air Vice Marshal.
* The source for this incident is Dabney’s The Life and Campaigns of Lieut. Gen. Thomas J. Jackson.
* “Canister” or “case shot” is a round made of tin containing a large number of iron balls, which spread out in a wide pattern when fired, rather like a giant shotgun shell.
* Union casualties were 6,837; Confederate, 7,992.
* A pretty good description of the bridge as it was originally built by the Federals appeared in the June 13, 1862, New York Times: “It is about three-quarters of a mile long [including its approaches]. . . . Large trees had first to be cut down and made into piles, which were driven down into the swamp. . . . Others were then lashed on to these piles, forming a support for logs thrown across the road.” In photographs its approaches are surrounded on both sides by dense vegetation. Rebuilt, it resembled the original but perhaps was even more makeshift.
* Laudanum, or tincture of opium, was then still a popular (and effective) treatment for diarrhea, and there are still people today who believe alcohol relieves the symptoms. Side effects of laudanum can include euphoria, sleepiness, and anxiety.
* This is the famous and classic “nutcracker” tactic used so effectively by the German army from 1939 through 1941.
* Also known as the Battle of Glendale, Frazier’s Farm, Nelson’s Farm, Charles City Crossroads, New Market Road, and Riddell’s Shop (a blacksmith’s shop), all of which were nearby (Wikipedia).
* The actual number of Federal guns was more like 250, plus those of the gunboats on the James River, an advantage of at least two to one over the number of Confederate guns. Since batteries were rotated into and out of line throughout the battle, there was never anything like this number firing at one time.
* The gunboats would prove a mixed blessing to the Union. Their fire was directed by relays of Union soldiers with semaphore flags, but the fire direction was so erratic that the 100-pound explosive missiles dropped on friend and foe alike.
* For the reason that Willis Church was a Quaker meetinghouse.
* Union casualties were 2,100; Confederate 5,880.
* Sir Roger is thought by many people to have been the model for that prickly Welsh professional soldier Captain Fluellen in Shakespeare’s Henry V.
* This was still being ignored as late as World War I, when the Turks attempted to defend the hundreds of miles of railway that linked Damascus with Medina across the desert in exactly this way by scattering troops along it. That made it possible for T. E. Lawrence and his bedouin to ride out of the desert in 1917–1918, blow up a section of line, destroy a train, and vanish back into the desert again. As Lawrence said of the Turks guarding the railway, “They are all flanks and no front.”
* “My center is giving way, my right is retreating, situation excellent, I am attacking.” Message of September 8, 1914, from General Foch to General Joffre, the French commander in chief, during a crucial day in the Battle of the Marne.
* As late as July 1864 the rough-hewn, irrepressible Lieutenant General Jubal A. Early managed to attack the outskirts of Washington, and Lincoln came out to see the fighting, exposing himself to Confederate fire. Early himself commented to an aide as he withdrew back into the Valley, “Well, Major, we haven’t taken Washington, but we scared Abe Lincoln like hell,” which just about sums up Lee’s strategy.
* Banks had 314 killed, 1,445 wounded, and 594 missing; Jackson, 231 killed and 1,107 wounded. Jackson also took over 5,000 Federal muskets, abandoned on the field.
* Longstreet had proposed attacking Pope’s right, at the wide end of the >, but Lee’s first priority was to make sure that Pope and McClellan were kept separated. Longstreet did not react as demonstratively as Jackson to having his advice rejected, but like an elephant, he never forgot.
† And a future major general in the Spanish-American War.
* Responsibility for leaving Raccoon Ford unguarded fell on Brigadier General Robert Toombs—a vigorous and outspoken critic of President Davis, a successful lawyer, but an amateur soldier. Toombs had countermanded Longstreet’s orders and removed the guard, apparently determined to demonstrate his own authority over his men.
† There is no guarantee that these are Lee’s exact words. Longstreet was writing many years after the event, and by that time he had become the bête noire of many of Lee’s most fervent admirers, and the person responsible, in the minds of many former Confederates, for Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg. All the same, it has the formal ring of something Lee might have said, and certainly expresses what must have been his disappointment.
* Three divisions of Jackson’s (17,309 men); three divisions of Longstreet’s (16,051 men), with G. T. Anderson’s division serving as the rear guard (6,117 men); 2,500 cavalrymen; 2,500 artillerymen; plus at least two more brigades. These figures are from Walter H. Taylor (Four Years with General Lee, 61), whose job it was to keep count of these things. One would think all this would be hard to miss.
* King himself was not present, having suffered an epileptic seizure earlier in the day (Wikipedia, “Second Battle of Bull Run,” 4). Brigadier John Porter Hatch replaced King as acting commander of the division.
* This may be a version of a much older piece of military advice, possibly that of Sun Tzu, who recommended in 500 B.C., “You must reinforce success and starve failure.”
* Pope charged Porter with disobedience and misconduct, and Porter was court-martialled, found guilty, and dismissed from the army—a controversial decision against which he fought for twenty-three years. Eventually, he was exonerated, and restored to his substantive rank of colonel by President Chester A. Arthur.
* “Monsieur, you have cost me France!” This was after Ney’s failed attack at 4 p.m.
* Scheibert was a Prussian. Foreign military observers were attached to both the Confederate and the Union armies to report on the lessons of the war to their own army. Perhaps the most famous of them was the (unofficial) British observer Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Fremantle of the Coldstream Guards, who was present at Gettysburg and wrote a successful book about his experiences in the South.
* The bore of a muzzle-loading cannon had to be swabbed down with a wet sponge after each round fired, to prevent a spark or burning ember from the last shot from igniting the next charge of powder as it was loaded.
* This famous remark has been attributed to both Frederick the Great and Napoleon, though the likelihood is that the latter borrowed it from the former.
* Most “ambulances” of the day were windowless, basically a box with doors at the rear, the rear wheels mo
unted on springs and the front wheels mounted on a transverse spring, although these merely added a pronounced swaying motion to the bumping up and down on rough roads.
* He is also one of only two soldiers whose graves are marked by equestrian statues in Arlington National Cemetery (on ground once owned by Robert E. Lee and his wife), the other being Field Marshal Sir John Dill, CMG, DSO, GCB, former chief of the Imperial General Staff and Britain’s senior military representative on the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington, 1941–1944.
* Like General Leboeuf in 1870, McClellan prided himself on having an army that was “ready down to the last button on its gaiters.”
* This would place the number of stragglers and deserters from Lee’s army at about 7,000, a alarmingly dangerous figure. Where possible, they were being rounded up and detained at Winchester for return to the army, but in the meantime Lee’s units were seriously below strength.
* This story curiously resembles the famous, but probably apocryphal, incident of Stonewall Jackson and Barbara Fritchie at Frederick, Maryland, which inspired John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem, once known by heart by all American schoolchildren (and not a few in England)—“‘Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, / But spare your country’s flag!’ she said.” When Winston Churchill visited Frederick, in 1943, he sought out Barbara Fritchie’s house, went upstairs, opened the famous window, and recited the entire poem from memory to those in the street below.
* Douglas Southall Freeman marks this as Lee’s first ride on Traveller since he injured both hands at Second Manassas (Robert E. Lee, Vol. 2, 369) but from accounts of Lee’s entry into Hagerstown on September 11, when he raised his hat to the woman singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” it sounds as if he was already riding then. However, somebody may have been walking beside Traveller with a lead rope, since Lee could not yet have held the reins.
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