Lee's Lieutenants

by Douglas Southall Freeman

  The cavalry had been led with dash by Colonel James E. B. Stuart, but the mounted men had been too few to sweep the field. Many artillerists had won praise. Notable among them had been Reverend W. N. Pendleton, an old West Pointer and an Episcopal clergyman. With Jackson’s guns Captain John D. Imboden had challenged every eye. A gigantic young lieutenant, Thomas L. Rosser, had command of four howitzers of the Washington Artillery. Staff officers had commendation. Beauregard saw to it that his chief of artillery and ordnance, Colonel Samuel Jones, was promoted to brigadier general. Johnston mentioned first among staff officers his chief engineer, Major W. H. C. Whiting. Whiting, like Jones, was made a brigadier as of July 21. Young Captain E. P. Alexander, signal officer, had praise but no immediate promotion.

  That some of these men would acquit themselves valiantly any observer safely could predict; but none could foresee that from the 30,000 of the small Army of the Potomac (as Beauregard styled it) were to come, in a long war, so large a number of general officers. Ten men held that rank at Manassas on the day of battle. One of them, Bee, was mortally wounded. Another, Bonham, would resign at the rank he then held. A third, Johnston, already had the highest grade in the army. Of the others, Beauregard and Kirby Smith became generals; Longstreet, Jackson, Holmes, and Ewell rose to be lieutenant generals; and D. R.Jones died as a major general. Of the colonels at Manassas, A. P. Hill, Early, and Hampton ended their service as lieutenant generals, and Stuart, Elzey, William Smith, Samuel Jones, Rodes, Kershaw, and Kemper were to be major generals. Fourteen other colonels were to lead brigades, and eighteen of lesser rank at Manassas would in time become general officers.

  In short, to the nine general officers who survived Manassas, forty-two were to be added from men in the army along Bull Run that July day. Of the fifty-one, ten were doomed to lose their lives during the war. Eight, and no more than eight, were to prove plainly unqualified for the final grade they reached; nine were to show themselves of low capacity to command; seventeen could be regarded as average soldiers. The remaining seventeen were to be renowned.

  3

  THE FAME OF BEAUREGARD IS BECLOUDED

  Before the fame of any of these men of Manassas had been acclaimed, that of Beauregard was beclouded by a succession of controversies, the first of which arose over rations. During the days immediately following the battle of July 21, the poorly equipped commissaries and quartermasters were unable to supply promptly the larger army assembled at the Manassas railhead. Food ran low. Transportation was overtaxed. On July 29, Beauregard appealed directly to two congressmen who had served him as volunteer aides, revealing the fact that some regiments had been without food for more than twenty-four hours. “The want of food and transportation has made us lose all the fruits of our victory,” he wrote.

  This startling letter was not marked “Confidential,” and the recipients felt it their duty to read it to Congress in secret session. The disclosure shocked the lawmakers. They inquired of the President “information going to show a want of sufficient and regular supply of food” for the army. Davis replied that he considered the condition of the commissariat “quite as good as was reasonable to expect,” and then, on August 4, he wrote Beauregard a friendly, well-reasoned letter. The substance of it was that the emergent needs of the army had not been known, that they had been met when ascertained, and that Beauregard did himself injustice in “putting your failure to pursue the enemy to Washington to the account of short supplies of subsistence and transportation.”

  To this communication Beauregard made a somewhat apologetic reply. He had written “only for the purpose of expediting matters,” and he regretted that his letter had been read to Congress. He added that after his task of repelling the Northern invaders was accomplished, “I shall retire to my home … never again to leave it, unless called upon again to repel the same or another invader.” That final sentence evidently was written to assure Mr. Davis that General Beauregard did not intend to heed those urging him to be a candidate in the election of November 5 for the office of President under the “permanent” constitution of the Confederacy. Davis dropped the discussion, desiring, apparently, nothing more than to clear his own skirts. He was not seeking to besmirch Beauregard’s.20

  Had the facts been otherwise, the President could not have wished a sworn enemy to play more completely into his hands than Beauregard did by the blunders he proceeded to make. First, contrary to the plain limitations of existing military law, he did his utmost to have his troops regarded as a separate and autonomous corps. His aim seems to have been to perpetuate the conditions that existed on the day of the Battle of Manassas. Correspondence and diplomacy alike failed to reconcile him otherwise.21

  On October 15, while controversy over this vexatious matter still was polite, Beauregard forwarded to the War Department his official account of the battle of July 21. In the amplitude of 9,000 words he presented full details and occasional excursus. After the report reached the War Department someone carelessly failed to forward it to the President. The first Mr. Davis knew either of its arrival or its content was when his attention was called to the Richmond Dispatch of October 23, which contained a digest of parts of the document, introduced by a reporter as follows: “… General Beauregard opens with a statement of his position antecedent to the battle, and of a plan proposed by him to the Government of a junction of the armies of the Shenandoah and Potomac, with a view to the relief of Maryland and the capture of the city of Washington, which plan was rejected by the President….”

  Mr. Davis sent at once for the report and read it. He found that the opening 600 words were an epitome of Beauregard’s scheme of a great strategical combination, as communicated by Colonel Chesnut and rejected as impracticable. The whole introduction, in his opinion, was an effort on the part of the general to depreciate the work of others and to portray himself as the sole designer and executant of the Manassas triumph. Davis, accordingly, on October 30 sent a stiff protest to Beauregard. It began with a chilly “Sir” and ended “Very respectfully, yours, &c.,” in pointed contrast to the “My dear General” and the “Very truly, your friend” employed in the letter concerning subsistence. “With much surprise,” the President wrote, “I found that the newspaper statements were sustained by the text of your report. I was surprised, because, if we did differ in opinion as to the measures and purposes of contemplated campaigns, such fact could have no appropriate place in the report of a battle. Further, because it seemed to be an attempt to exalt yourself at my expense, and especially because no such plan as that described was submitted to me.”22

  The President wrote to Colonel Chesnut for a statement of what he had said when he came to Richmond with Beauregard’s plan. He asked similar reports from General Lee and General Cooper, who had been present at the conference. Before answers to these inquiries were received, there appeared in the Richmond Whig for November 7 a letter in which General Beauregard acquainted the country with the fact that sharp differences had arisen between himself and the administration. He expressed his regret at the publication of the synopsis of his report, and urged his friends not to worry “about the slanders and calumnies aimed at me…. If certain minds cannot understand the difference between patriotism, the highest civic virtue, and office-seeking, the lowest civil occupation, I pity them from the bottom of my heart. Suffice it to say, that I prefer the respect and esteem of my countrymen, to the admiration and envy of the world. I hope … to answer my calumniators with new victories over our national enemies….”23

  The letter was published two days after the presidential election. For reasons that presently will appear, Beauregard’s language probably was directed at Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin rather than at the hief executive; but the general’s words could be interpreted by the friends of Mr. Davis as an effort to becloud and embarrass the new administration. Even admirers of the “Hero of Sumter and Manassas” considered the letter ill-advised. “There was a theatrical circumstance and tone about it, that displeased many pe
ople.” The Examiner called it a “very remarkable” document that would “hardly add to the General’s reputation.”24

  Davis thought the communication worse than that. Letters from General Lee and General Cooper fortified him in his contention that what Beauregard had described as a “plan of operations,” submitted on July 14, was “a message from General Beauregard, but … no plan of battle or of campaign.” As for the embarrassed Colonel Chesnut, he tried to reconcile the assertions of the President with those of Beauregard. In doing so, he disclosed the fact that on his return to Manassas from Richmond he had submitted to the general a written report on the conference. “I regret,” Davis told Chesnut, “that … I was not permitted the see the report of the interview before it became a public document.”25

  Of these unhappy exchanges, nothing at the time was made public after the appearance of Beauregard’s letter to the Whig, but that communication itself had been sufficient to pique curiosity concerning his official account of the battle. At length, after considerable wrangling in secret session, the Congress decided to publish the report without its strategical prologue and without the correspondence it had engendered. This halted the controversy between Beauregard and the administration.26

  Almost simultaneously, the command of General Beauregard in northern Virginia was terminated. This was not solely—perhaps not even primarily—because of Beauregard’s injudicious correspondence. As will be plain in the next chapter, his relations with General Johnston, marked on the surface by comradeship, had a deeper aspect of jealousy that threatened the efficient handling of the army. Nor was that all. Differences between Beauregard and Secretary Benjamin had become irreconcilable. During one of their disputes Beauregard told the President that his “motives must not be called into question” by Benjamin, and that he was being “put into the strait jacket of the law.” Davis replied in the sternest terms: “… you surely did not intend to inform me that your army and yourself are outside the limits of the laws…. I cannot recognize the pretension of any one that their restraint is too narrow for him.”

  There had been, also, revival of the dispute whether Beauregard commanded a semi-independent corps or was second in command of the entire army. On the last day of 1861 the general telegraphed the President: “Please state definitely what I am to command, if I do not command a corps….”To this the President made no reply, but the War Department ascertained that Beauregard was willing to accept service in Kentucky under Albert Sidney Johnston and, on January 26,1862, ordered him thither.27

  Very different was his departure from his arrival in Virginia. No less different was his place in the respect of the President and in the admiration of a large element in the South. His star had waned. Many still looked at Beauregard in the afterglow of Sumter and Manassas, but the South, perplexed by his egotistical writings, no longer believed unanimously that in him it had found its Napoleon. The search for a leader had to be directed elsewhere and, naturally, first to Beauregard’s colleague, Joe Johnston.

  CHAPTER 4

  Johnston Passes a Dark Winter

  1

  CONFLICT WITH THE ADMINISTRATION

  During the weeks of Beauregard’s controversy with the administration, Joseph E. Johnston had been exercising uninterrupted, if not undisputed, command of the army around Centreville. It had few skirmishes and no major battles to fight. On October 21 there was a handsome affair at Ball’s Bluff, which ended in the rout by Shanks Evans’s troops of a Federal force that had ventured across the Potomac. Otherwise little occurred to divert Johnston from what he considered his main task, that of “preparing our troops for active service by diligent instruction.”1

  As Johnston rode daily through their camps, his men soon came to know a figure which, once seen, was recognized always. Johnston was of erect, trim figure and of middle height. His head was well molded, his hair was grizzled; his short side whiskers of kindred color set off his florid complexion. In his glance there was more of questioning than of suspicion; his thin lips were as capable of smiling as of sneering. If Beauregard was likened by his admirers to an eagle, Joe Johnston seemed a gamecock.2

  His essential quality, which was not disclosed at first, was contradiction. Those of his subordinates who had demonstrated their faith in him and had won his confidence found him warm-hearted, affectionate, and loyal. In his dealings with his military peers and his civil superiors Johnston was unpredictable. Ere long Jefferson Davis was to find that any letter from Joe Johnston might smoke with wrath as it lay on the executive desk. Love was not easily destroyed in his heart; hate once inflamed always was cherished.

  Toward the President, at the outset, Johnston’s manner had been friendly. While the general’s withdrawal from Harper’s Ferry had been regretted, nothing occurred during the early summer to indicate any scorn on his part of fixed positions, any weakness as a military administrator. Scarcely a shadow had fallen across the council table when Johnston and Davis met at Manassas after the battle. Until August 31, 1861, all went well between the two. On that date Mr. Davis sent to the Senate for confirmation the names of the five officers who, under the act of May 16, were to be given the rank of full general. First on the submitted list, to rank from May 16, was the adjutant general, Samuel Cooper; second was Albert Sidney Johnston, as of May 30; third came R. E. Lee, ranking as of June 14; fourth stood Joseph E. Johnston, with the grade of general from July 4; fifth was P. G. T. Beauregard, to date from July 21, Manassas Day.3

  This order of nominations, which was confirmed at once by the Senate, outraged Joseph E. Johnston. From that day forward he never was the same man in his dealings with the President. Vehemently, as if rank were the most important factor in his service to the South, Johnston argued his case. He held that he was the senior officer of the United States army to resign and join the Confederacy, that he was guaranteed this seniority under Confederate law, and that the act for the appointment of generals of full rank was simply a measure to raise the grade of those who had been brigadiers in the regular army of the Confederacy. In Johnston’s eyes the correct order should have been: himself, Cooper, A. S. Johnston, Lee, Beauregard.4

  In his wrath at what he considered a violation both of law and of justice, Johnston wrote the President a protest. The communication, some 1,800 words in length, stated Johnston’s contention clearly enough, but much that was intemperate it added. “If the action against which I have protested be legal,” said he in closing, “it is not for me to question the expediency of degrading one who has served laboriously from the commencement of the war on this frontier and borne a prominent part in the only great event of that war, for the benefit of persons”—that is, A. S. Johnston and R. E. Lee—“neither of whom has yet struck a blow for this Confederacy.”

  This letter Davis read with rising wrath of his own, not only as an insulting reflection on him but also as a display of ill temper and unreason. Further, Johnston’s complaint was, in Davis’s eyes, without basis in law or in fact. But instead of engaging, after his habit, in a long verbal controversy, he decided to rebuke Johnston in a few sharp sentences: “I have just received and read your letter of the 12th instant. Its language is, as you say, unusual; its arguments and statements utterly one-sided, and its insinuations as unfounded as they are unbecoming.”5

  Johnston made no reply to this. The issue passed, for the time, into the realm of those resentments that in private are remembered but in public are ignored. It might have remained, in Johnston’s mind, an isolated if gross example of personal injustice had not a change of large consequences in the administration of the War Department brought into office a man with whom Johnston was doomed to clash ceaselessly.

  On September 16, Secretary of War L. Pope Walker resigned and Mr. Davis named the attorney general, Judah P. Benjamin, to his place. This brilliant son of English Jews had been born in St. Croix in 1811, reared in Louisiana, and schooled at Yale. When a leader of the bar, though only forty-two, he had been elected to the United States Senate from the stat
e of his adoption, soon becoming one of the most distinguished members of that body. Short, round, rosy, and well groomed, he wore a smile that frowning disaster could dim for a moment only. He always looked as if he had just risen at the end of an enjoyed dinner to greet a friend with pleasant news.

  His optimism was equalled by his industry. Benjamin exhibited a mind that was sure both of its penetration and of its quickness. Perhaps it was a mind too quick. With his confidence in himself he combined a large conception of the scope of his duties and a loyalty to the President so complete that no argument by generals in the field could weigh against the wishes of Mr. Davis, declared or anticipated. Great were Benjamin’s powers of verbal persuasion, though in correspondence he was not so successful. His written paragraphs bristled with a palisade of “I’s.” Often he angered other men by making them seem clumsy. Most of all he maddened and baffled Joseph E. Johnston. It was not difficult to get the better of the general; Johnston’s irascibility and his lack of skill in dialectics made him appear generally in the wrong.6

  Until January the situation was embarrassed further by the fact that Beauregard, though devoted to Johnston personally, could not bring himself to regard his own command otherwise than as a separate corps. At the very time Johnston was protesting against being overslaughed, he had to notify the President that Beauregard appeared dissatisfied with a subordinate position. At that juncture Secretary Benjamin took his fellow Louisianian in hand and by a succession of flawlessly reasoned letters he so routed Beauregard that the general became willing to accept command in the West.7

  Johnston gained nothing by this, though his authority was sustained. He had accumulated woes and humiliations of his own. Whenever he erred in administration, he brought down on himself a sharp letter from the President or Secretary Benjamin. In particular, his failure to undertake promptly a partial reorganization of the army led to unpleasantness, deep and prolonged.