Crucible of Command

by William C. Davis

  Grant soon assumed command of two more ill-disciplined regiments and began turning them around as he had the 21st Illinois. Then on August 3 he saw in the local newspaper a list of officers Lincoln had nominated for promotion to brigadier general, his name included. “This is certainly very complimentary to me,” he told Jesse, pleased that he had not politicked for it.36 In fact, the Illinois congressional delegation, chiefly Washburne and recent acquaintances John A. Logan and John A. McClernand, had pushed his promotion when he proved himself effective with Illinois troops.37 Congress confirmed his commission on August 7, to date from May 17.

  That meant Grant needed a staff to run his headquarters. Throughout the war such appointments went all too often to friends or family, and his early selections were comparable. Admiring the brilliance of William S. Hillyer, an attorney in the firm where Grant and Boggs rented space, he offered him a position as an aide. Thinking that he should have someone from the 21st Illinois, he selected Lieutenant Clark B. Lagow. He also wrote to Rawlins, reasoning that he needed someone from the city that had been the base for his rapid rise. He also liked and trusted Rawlins, and respected his organizational skills. Rawlins would make a fine adjutant to run his headquarters. “I guess you had better come and take it,” he wrote his friend.38 Grant was not thinking much of managerial delegation and specialization as yet, and the fact that two of the three were lawyers probably meant he expected them to handle his paperwork, but by accident or design, Rawlins proved to be an inspired choice, one of the greatest adjutants of the war.

  Now posted at Ironton in southeast Missouri, Grant concluded by August 12 that 5,000 rebels led by General William J. Hardee at Greenville, thirty-five miles south, and another 1,500 more than a dozen miles east, posed credible threats; their goal was to cut his railroad supply line north to St. Louis and force him to withdraw.39 His response was telling. With no more experience at command in action than leading a few volunteers one afternoon in Mexico fifteen years earlier, Grant’s instinct was to strike first, even while higher-ranking new commanders like McClellan and Frémont saw nothing but reasons not to move. On August 15 Brigadier General U. S. Grant wrote his wife that “tomorrow I move south.”40 He had been planning his first campaign for several days, intending to drive off the force to his east with one regiment and then have it move south to converge with him as he marched to meet Hardee. Then both columns were to converge from north and east to attack.41 He expected to be outnumbered, but his perpetual optimism and a sense that delay favored the enemy propelled him. Here and hereafter, his instinct was to act quickly. No Union commander in this war would match his sense of urgency. He also made no plan for retreat. He expected to drive Hardee out of Missouri.

  On the eve of moving out, politics stymied Grant. Brigadier General Benjamin Prentiss arrived to supersede him. A political appointee, Prentiss had done nothing thus far. Their commissions both dated from May 17, and Frémont was yet ignorant that Grant’s prior army service gave him seniority. Grant went to St. Louis to protest being made junior to a man he actually outranked and Frémont redressed the matter, then put him in command of all of southeast Missouri and southern Illinois, with headquarters at Cape Girardeau on the Mississippi. Frémont ordered him to clear the district of the enemy by coordinating several commands, including Prentiss’s. Grant took it in stride, telling his father that “all I fear is that too much may be expected of me.” But Prentiss virtually mutinied, first failing to communicate, ignoring Grant’s orders, then trying to negotiate who should command. Finally, in a pique, he sent his resignation to Frémont.42 Grant simply arrested him and sent him to St. Louis.43 In this, his first experience handling a difficult subordinate, he was patient, at first conciliatory, swallowing his feelings of humiliation at Prentiss’s defiance, but he accepted confrontation when given no alternative. “A sacrifise of my own feelings is no sacrifise when the good of the service Calls for it,” he told Prentiss, perhaps disingenuously, but he kept a journalist from publicizing the episode, hoping just to have the whole matter “buryd in oblivion.”44

  With his command and responsibility expanded, Grant moved headquarters to Cairo on September 2, where he shifted his gaze to Kentucky, which for the moment adopted an anomalous neutrality. He posted a company at Belmont, Missouri, to watch the bluff at Columbus, Kentucky, across the Mississippi. It was the highest ground north of Tennessee and artillery placed there could make a naval advance down the river impossible. The next day Grant learned that Confederate Major General Leonidas Polk had violated Kentucky’s neutrality and occupied the place, commencing a buildup that would make it the most heavily fortified spot on the continent. Poised to respond, Grant recalled his company from Belmont and proposed to attack and take Columbus before Polk could consolidate his position. Then he would move down the Missouri riverbank to drive Confederates out of New Madrid to give Federals control of the river there.45 Grant appeared to plan on taking one enemy position after another, using each in turn as a base to move on the next. Frémont withheld permission, but meanwhile Grant seized on the violation of Kentucky neutrality as pretext for what he intended to do next.

  On September 5 Grant occupied the Kentucky side of the Ohio opposite Cairo to protect his base, then moved on Paducah thirty-five miles upriver. Paducah commanded the mouths of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, the former flowing westerly from above Nashville, then north across most of west and middle Tennessee, and navigable all the way; the latter came out of the Appalachians above Knoxville and coursed south to Chattanooga, then across north Georgia and Alabama, turning northward across west Tennessee and Kentucky. It, too, was navigable along most of its length. Both were highways into the bowels of the Confederacy.

  Grant knew Frémont would want Paducah, but he acted on his own initiative without orders, again demonstrating an instinct to move decisively. He put two regiments and a battery of artillery under the command of now–brigadier general McClernand aboard transports and two gunboats provided by Captain Andrew H. Foote, and only sent word of his action to St. Louis when it was too late for Frémont to recall him.46 At eight-thirty next morning, in the war’s first amphibious operation, Grant simply stepped ashore at Paducah. He ordered defenses established around the town, issued a proclamation assuring civilians of nothing to fear so long as they did not abet rebellion, and returned to Cairo by noon to find Frémont’s authorization awaiting him.47 In a bloodless stroke he had achieved one of the most significant strategic movements of the war.

  The occupation made headlines across the North, rare good news for the Union that season. Newspapers put Grant’s name in bold type and for a moment he was a man of minor note. He distrusted popularity and the press. “I do not let newspaper correspondents come about me,” he told Julia, but that was going to be more and more difficult.48 Three days after taking Paducah, Grant believed that the action “was of much greater importance than is probably generally known.” He could have added that his own position was little short of incredible. In May he had been a civilian in a shabby coat and battered hat helping out on a $2 per diem, so insignificant that Washington did not bother to respond to him. Now he was a brigadier general, and thanks to geography and his own initiative, he commanded the most strategic point east of the Appalachians. By early October, Frémont reinforced Paducah until Grant had more than 20,000 men, the largest Federal force in Confederate proximity outside Virginia.49 If not surprised, he should have been, but he focused now on what came next. “I would like to have the honor of commanding the Army that makes the advance down the river,” he told Julia. His command, next to Virginia and Missouri, was the most important in the country. He knew there were envious unassigned senior generals, feared a higher-ranking officer might supersede him, and wanted to move quickly before that could happen.50 A month after taking Paducah he was framing another campaign, proposing to Frémont to prepare for “a southern expedition.”51

  A delegation from the House of Delegates met Lee’s train on the evening of April 2
2 and escorted him to the Spotswood Hotel where a crowd awaited. Lee spoke briefly, pledging to do his “duty and his whole duty to the land of his birth,” and local press expected him to assume a high post.52 That same day Confederate president Jefferson Davis wired to ask Letcher of Lee’s intentions.53 The governor offered Lee command of Virginia state forces and the rank of major general, and hardly needed to tell him that if Virginia joined the Confederacy, Davis would surely offer him an important post in the national army. The next day Lee appeared at the state house for unanimous confirmation of his appointment. In a few words he affirmed his gratitude, his doubt as to his capability, and his trust in the aid of the almighty, promising to “devote myself to the defence & service of my native State.”54 He assumed his command at once.

  For the time being Virginia could only act defensively. Lee ordered commanders along the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers to protect railroads and river crossings and rush the training of volunteers, but to leave the initiative to Lincoln. He urged Colonel Philip St. George Cocke to concentrate his volunteers along the Potomac at Leesburg and elsewhere to guard railroads leading to Alexandria. “Let it be known that you intend to make no attack,” ordered Lee, “but, invasion of our soil, will be considered as an act of war.” He feared no Yankee advance soon, but if “the enemy” did, Cocke must resist and then withdraw along the railroad to preserve his supply line. Just four days after resigning his commission, Lee’s old army comrades were now “the enemy.” On all sides he advised restraint. Virginia was not ready to fight.

  Privately he still hoped for peace but his pessimism mounted. The day he resigned the editor of the Alexandria Gazette declared that Lee’s name would make him a “tower of strength” in the crisis.55 Seizing on that, his cousin Cassius Lee said publicly that if Lee took command of Virginia forces it might result in a settlement, reasoning that he could use his close friendship with General Scott to broker a peace.56 That sparked Dr. James May of the Theological Seminary of Virginia to propose that Lee “may be raised up by God for such a time as this.” Perhaps he could negotiate an armistice leading to a compromise convention? May knew Lee was a great soldier, and at Arlington during the last war he had heard Mary Lee read aloud the Christian expressions in her husband’s letters. “God has put him in his present position to be an instrument of abating the storm,” said May. Virginia gave birth to the nation through Washington. Could the Old Dominion bring peace now through Lee, if not reunion?57

  Lee himself told May that “no earthly act would give me so much pleasure, as to restore peace to my country.” Ironically, while calling Yankees “the enemy” he could still refer to “my country,” meaning the Union. But only Providence governed events, he replied, not man, and certainly not Robert E. Lee. All they could do was “allow time to allay the passions and reason to resume her way.” As he wrote he heard that Virginia might just have been admitted into the new Confederacy. If so, her course must now conform to a higher authority, and he could only “trust that a merciful Providence will not turn his face entirely from us and dash us from the height to which his smiles had raised us.”58 Those expressions of hope for compromise and peace conflicted with what he wrote Mary the next day, when he forthrightly said “war is inevitable & there is no telling when it will burst.” She should leave Arlington and take as much as she could of the Washington silver and paintings for safekeeping. Until then she must “keep quiet” and attract no attention.59 With his distrust of polyglot Northern society, Lee feared that “among such a mass of all characters” there would be plundering of Southern holdings, including Arlington. He spoke not of if, but “when the war commences,” and forecast it lasting ten years. “May God preserve you all,” he wrote, “& bring peace to our distracted country.”60

  Lee wavered in these early days, one moment saying war must come, and the next telling a young friend on May 5 that “a merciful God, whom I know will not unnecessarily afflict us, may yet allay the fury for war.” He was still no friend of secession, nor did he as yet show any emotional stake in the confederation. That put him squarely in the camp of Vice President Alexander H. Stephens and other so-called reconstructionists who opposed secession until it became a fact, then went along in the hope that a united slave state front might impel the North to afford some compromise. Enemy or not, he maintained he felt no personal animosity toward the North. “Wherever the blame may be, the fact is that we are in the midst of a fratricidal war,” he lamented. “I must side either with or against my section of country.” He clearly foresaw that “the country will have to pass through a terrible ordeal, a necessary expatiation, perhaps, of our national sins.”61 While he had intended his April 20 resignation to be effective immediately, he learned now that Washington in fact dated it from April 25, two days after his commission from Letcher, leaving him in the equivocal position of having entered a seceded state’s service while still an officer in the United States Army. If he received any pay for those five extra days, he returned it and advised others in similar circumstances to do the same.62 If a peaceful reconstruction should miraculously come about, those days threatened to compromise his honor.

  Visitors found Lee working in a small room on Bank Street near the capitol. After barely a week in office he lamented to Mary that “there is no rest for me to look to,” and in time the load drove him to bed briefly.63 He stayed in the Spotswood Hotel for weeks, with no time to find private lodging. Thanks to rumors of Yankee agents in the city, when he did look for something, friends advised him not to live close to the rail line north for fear he might be kidnapped and carried to Washington.64 His face still wore its Texas tan, his hair gone slightly grayer along with his mustache, though as yet he had no beard. He dressed in a plain military uniform from his former army, but with all insignia removed. Callers found him grave but cordial. Occasionally he discussed the crisis, expressing the fear that the conflict almost upon them would last long, and at great cost. He knew the North and its people and resources, and they were not to be beaten easily. With no money and no credit, the Confederacy must raise an army and somehow assemble a fleet to protect its vital ports, while the Union had vast financial resources. Europe might not be so anxious to give them diplomatic recognition of their independence, or military and financial aid, because of antipathy to slavery, and the North would exploit that for all it was worth. The South might succeed, but the time required and the cost involved would demand the utmost in dedication.65 He told friends who wrote with well wishes that “you have no cause of congratulation . . . I am sorry to say for the position I at present occupy.” “If I had the ability, I have not the means to accomplish what is desired.”66

  In addition to building an army, Lee had to build his staff, exposing him for the first time to entreaties for favors from friends and family. “Persons on my staff should have a knowledge of their duties and experience of the wants of the service, to enable me to attend to other matters,” he told an applicant.67 As adjutant he appointed the officer who had served him in the same capacity at West Point, and soon added two aides and a military secretary, all that legislation allowed him at the moment, but he would add additional clerks and aides as opportunity and demand allowed. Lee understood the need for delegation, to preserve his time for matters most urgent. How well he would practice it would depend on the men he appointed, and his own ability to escape his belief that to do something well, he must do it himself.

  He assumed that every avenue into the state could become the scene of active operations.68 “Our opponents will do us all the harm they can,” Lee wrote on May 2. “They feel their power & they seem to have the desire to oppress & distress us,” and he concluded that they would do it.69 He and Letcher looked for trouble in the western counties along the Potomac and Ohio, extending to Wheeling, havens of anti-secession sentiment, and at Norfolk near Hampton Roads.70 To protect the latter, he concentrated heavy guns in shore batteries at Gloucester Point to contest any naval advance by the Federals.71 More particularly they focuse
d on Harpers Ferry on the Potomac, which controlled the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal connecting Washington with the Ohio Valley, vital arteries for moving troops and materiel. Small companies of volunteers already gathered there needed organization, so on April 27, in one of his first personnel decisions, Lee sent Colonel Thomas J. Jackson to take command.72 A West Point graduate and veteran of the war with Mexico, Jackson had been an instructor at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, but he and Lee had only a passing acquaintance.73

  Lee also felt concern for the sensitivity of Jackson’s location. Just across the Potomac from Harpers Ferry, Maryland talked about secession, but any incident risked energizing Union sentiment, so Lee warned repeatedly against provocative acts. When Jackson crossed the river to occupy Maryland Heights, which commanded Harpers Ferry, Lee advised that “you may have been premature” and suggested that he withdraw. It was an early hint of a managerial style based on discretionary suggestions rather than emphatic orders to subordinates more familiar than he with local circumstances.74 Still he admonished Jackson to “abstain from all provocation for attack as long as possible.”75 By May 21, however, Lee rationalized that Virginians had a right to hold Maryland Heights since pro-Southern Marylanders would not do it for them, and told Jackson to make his occupiers pretend to be Marylanders holding their own ground, a neat bit of political and diplomatic camouflage showing Lee’s subtlety in areas other than military.76

  By mid-May he felt that the eastern and western flanks of Virginia’s border were secure enough that he could concentrate on its center, the line from Leesburg eastward to the Occoquan and in particular the vital rail junction at Manassas.77 Early in May Lee ordered Cocke to post volunteers there where the Manassas Gap Railroad from the Shenandoah had its terminus with the Orange & Alexandria Railroad. If the Federals took the junction, they could use the Manassas Gap line to shift soldiers northwest to threaten Harpers Ferry and the Valley.78 Meanwhile, he stationed volunteers in Alexandria where they could harass advancing Union troops and buy time for Cocke to prepare his defenses at Manassas.79