Crucible of Command

by William C. Davis

The situation was not irretrievable if Grant kept his head. He organized a few regiments into line, set officers to reforming the panic-stricken, and placed artillery around the landing, expecting that if Johnston got that far, he would be himself so exhausted that this reserve might delay him until Nelson’s division arrived that afternoon. Grant sent orders for Buell’s other divisions to follow Nelson. He knew it would take them hours to arrive, by which time his command would be even more battered, but so would the enemy, whose numbers he now gauged at 100,000 or more. “The appearance of fresh troops on the field now would have a powerful effect both by inspiring our men and disheartening the enemy,” he said. In his only acknowledgment of the seriousness of the situation, Grant added that they could “possibly save the day to us.”92 He also sent an officer to Lew Wallace to get his division moving at once down the river to come into line where Grant believed Sherman’s right flank to be. Just getting those extra troops moving boosted confidence, and when he sent another order to Nelson to hurry he said nothing more about saving the day, but gave assurance that “all looks well.”93 After barely half an hour, Grant was in command of himself, and taking command of the defense.

  He met with Sherman about ten o’clock, finding his line well in hand, then rode on to McClernand, whose division was hard pressed. Grant called up the regiments he left behind as reserve, while personally directing one of McClernand’s units to advance, and continued riding on to see his other division commanders.94 For the next hour or more he was constantly on the contracting lines. After eleven o’clock Grant grew anxious about Lew Wallace, who ought to have arrived by then, and sent a rider to find him, then rode to Prentiss’s position. He found Prentiss and perhaps 1,200 men using the cover of a wood and a sunken road to repel Confederate assaults. If the enemy pushed through they might reach Pittsburg Landing, and if they forced Grant away from that base, his army would be cut off from Savannah and all but trapped with its back against the river. Grant ordered Prentiss to hold at all costs.95

  He did, until about five-thirty, while Grant looked for Lew Wallace and Nelson. Nelson inexplicably dallied at Savannah and did not leave until one-thirty, while Lew Wallace took a wrong road and lost hours getting on the right one. Buell meanwhile showed no haste getting to a field where his command would be absorbed into Grant’s.96 Finally as Sherman, McClernand, Wallace, and Hurlbut began to give way about four o’clock, Grant saw Nelson’s column approaching the opposite river bank. He had spent much of the afternoon forming a final line to hold the landing, so Nelson’s arrival could not have been better timed. When Confederates finally surrounded Prentiss and he surrendered his position, soon dubbed the “Hornets’ Nest,” Grant had his battered divisions drawn up in a line extending three miles along the road to the landing, to protect his communications and keep the landing open for Buell’s reinforcements and Lew Wallace’s division when it arrived. When Nelson’s first brigade crossed over Grant found it led by the older brother of his childhood friend Daniel Ammen, and personally placed it in the line.97 Now fate reinforced the Federals, for Johnston fell mortally wounded sometime earlier, and the resulting lull in the action gave Grant invaluable time. When the Confederates’ second in command Beauregard took over and launched another assault, the disorganized rebels were too few and too tired to be effective. Beauregard called off the fight for the night, thinking he had a victory. Even before that, Grant personally told each of his division commanders to be prepared to attack in the morning, though he gave few details. They had been stunned but so had the enemy. The army that remained resolute and struck first would win the field.98

  He spent the night looking to his lines, reforming disrupted units, plugging Nelson’s brigades into line as they crossed the river, and Lew Wallace’s when they appeared shortly after seven o’clock. Soon the second of Buell’s divisions began to arrive, and then the third. Grant pushed his line out to gain breathing space for the landing, and that evening officers found him confident, anxious to take advantage of his reinforcements and the enemy’s condition. With his dispositions made, well after midnight he tried to get some sleep under a tree, but the heavy rain and the pain in his ankle kept him awake most of the night.99

  The next day Grant had it all his own way as he expected. His army formed the right half of his line and Buell’s the left. Halleck had made it plain to Buell that Grant, as senior, was to command, but Buell tried to act as if independent of Grant’s orders. Sensitive as always to the awkwardness of such a situation, Grant did not assert his prerogative, but simply asked Buell to make an attack simultaneous with his own, just as in the days ahead his communications with Buell all came in terms of requests and suggestions.100 Between eight and ten that morning both commands advanced and shortly after noon regained all the ground lost the day before. Late that afternoon Grant himself assembled fragments of regiments into a line and led them in a charge to dislodge one of the last enemy footholds.101 By four o’clock the Confederates were in full retreat toward Corinth. Realizing that the foe could still sting, Grant determined not to continue the pursuit.

  Soon satisfied that the enemy were concentrating back in Corinth and that his own position was secure, Grant hinted to Halleck on April 9 that this was the time to press on, unwilling to stop at one victory if a wounded foe could be struck again, perhaps decisively. He needed fresh troops, but believed the rebels could not make a strong resistance for two or three weeks.102 Halleck’s answer was to come to Pittsburg Landing two days later to assume command of both armies. This could be his time to lead an army and claim victory for himself.

  Grant was always at his most frank with Julia. The day after the battle he told her he believed there had been no battle on the continent to match Pittsburg Landing—or “Shiloh” as some were calling it—and he was right. He believed the number killed and wounded on both sides could total 20,000, a fair estimate since the real number was close to 24,000.103 His own were 13,000, virtually one-fourth of those engaged. Again his performance had been mixed. His calm demeanor gave courage to some of his dispirited soldiers on April 6. Knowing that, he consciously put himself at risk, especially in leading a charge on April 7. He let division commanders do their jobs and only managed in detail in isolated instances. His verbal orders to Lew Wallace, repeated through intermediary officers, became muddied, but his written orders were clear and concise, communicating what he meant as economically as possible.

  Grant was not ready for the ferocity of the Confederate assault when it came. Twice now he had been taken off guard by enemy attacks. His measure hereafter would be settled if it happened again. Yet his response had been instant, positive, and decisive. He read the situation and went from reaction to stabilization, then consolidation of resources, reinforcement, and finally counterstroke, and accurately read the effects on the enemy of their own success. Thus far no other commander in the war had done that even once, let alone twice. The cost was heavy, but the gains dramatic. Johnston was dead, the cautious Beauregard commanded the Confederates, and the initiative was Halleck’s to seize. “I am looking for a speedy move, one more fight,” he told Julia, “and then easy sailing to the close of the war.”104

  Lee could well fear the same thing in the aftermath of Shiloh. “If Mississippi Valley is lost Atlantic States will be ruined,” he telegraphed Pemberton on April 10 when the scale of the disaster began to be known in Richmond, and in his customary passive style asked Pemberton to send regiments to Beauregard “if possible.”105 President Davis gave Lee a free hand in dealing with his old department and he used it, relieving the troublesome Ripley of command and addressing the poor discipline reported in the Charleston garrisons. Frankly he told Governor Pickens to “let it be distinctly understood by every body, that Charleston and Savannah are to be defended to the last extremity.” Should the Yankee gunboats enter their harbors, then “the cities are to be fought street by street and house by house as long as we have a foot of ground to stand upon.”106 Shiloh stamped urgency on all theaters of the co
nflict.

  Lee had less patience with the living General Johnston, and adopted an almost peremptory tone on May 18 when he forwarded Davis’s request for him to come confer on his immediate plans. The meeting produced nothing, and when three days later Lee conveyed Davis’s renewed request for some statement of “the programme of operations which you propose,” Lee suggested that Johnston do so in person. That would defeat any excuse of having no time to write, and allow Davis to respond immediately. To avoid a meeting, Johnston finally reported that he had 53,600 men in four divisions commanded by Major Generals G. W. Smith, James Longstreet, Magruder, and Daniel H. Hill, and cavalry under Brigadier General James E. B. Stuart.107 As to his plans he remained mute, and Lee discovered yet again that he lacked a facility for managing difficult subordinates. To be fair, no one had ever managed Johnston. Nor would Lee have gotten further by opting for peremptory orders by raw authority, for Johnston never accepted that Lee was rightfully his senior. If anything, Lee’s position as an intermediary only weakened him. The fact that the two Virginians had known each other since West Point counted for nothing, and Lee’s distaste for Johnston’s history of politicking for rank may have shown when they met, though he generally concealed all such feeling behind an iron mask. Lee had found a solution of sorts for difficult officers when he transferred Ripley, admittedly an indirect and incomplete remedy, for it merely shifted his ache to another head, but it was Lee’s way of coping. Distance allowed him to remove conflicts he could not resolve.

  He could hardly remove Johnston. He joined Davis on his almost daily rides to the Chickahominy line to see what Johnston refused to tell them. One day they found the right wing of the army pulled back from the river virtually into the environs of the city, and one corps of the enemy actually south of the river astride the Richmond & York River Railroad with a direct avenue to the capital. Davis may have threatened on the spot to replace Johnston, and asked Lee to join a cabinet meeting afterward to offer his advice. In words likely echoing his admonition to Pickens, Lee emphatically declared that they must not yield the capital. But then Lee did something Johnston would never do, a small gesture, perhaps unconscious or perhaps cunningly calculated, that helped to cement his working relationship with the president. He knew the pressure on Davis, and shared the frustration with Johnston. That bound them perhaps more than their daily meetings. Lee asked Davis what he thought they should do. He had read the man.

  Davis agreed that Richmond must be held and that McClellan should be stopped before he crossed the Chickahominy where he could besiege Richmond. Lee’s views matched the president’s. He proposed that he make one more personal effort to glean what, if anything, Johnston proposed to do to defend the capital.108 When the two generals met, Johnston told him he had set Thursday May 29 to attack McClellan’s right flank, hoping to drive it back while more of his army crossed the river and hit the enemy center. Successful assaults should force the Yankees to pull back from Richmond, but beyond that Johnston offered no contingent plan to follow up on success. Then Thursday came and went with nothing more than skirmishing.109 Johnston rescheduled his attack for May 31 and Lee came to the field early that afternoon when he heard firing break out in the direction of a crossroads known as Seven Pines. He met with Johnston briefly, and then Davis arrived and they both rode to the scene to find Confederates had driven the Yankees a mile toward the river, where the fighting was still brisk. Then late in the afternoon a messenger informed them that Johnston had been severely wounded, and the confused and ill-coordinated attack was sputtering.

  The Confederacy’s two major army commanders, both named Johnston, were out of action in just eight weeks. That left G. W. Smith the senior major general. Lee and Davis informed Smith that evening that he must assume command, but then the army’s division commanders said they doubted they could hold a line north of the James, which meant giving up Richmond. Lee rarely played the wit, nor was he especially humorous even in easy times, but from young manhood he had the gift of what Davis’s aide William Preston Johnston called “a quaint or slightly caustic remark.” He could not restrain one now, replying sharply that pursuing their line of thought to its logical conclusion, the generals would just keep falling back “until they hit the Gulf of Mexico.”110 When he rode back to Richmond with Davis that night, neither felt easy over Smith’s capacity.111

  Lee arose early the next morning, if he slept at all, and before dawn read a note from Smith saying that he intended to renew the attack. “Your movements are judicious and determination to strike the enemy right,” Lee answered at five that morning.112 He was not up long before another note arrived, this one from Davis. Johnston’s wounding forced the president to “interfere temporarily” with Lee’s duties. He ordered him to assume field command in eastern Virginia and North Carolina, including the army on the Chickahominy.113 Spending the morning forwarding more units to the front, where Smith had renewed the attack without success, Lee rode to the field and at about two o’clock reached Smith’s headquarters. He found Davis already there, having just announced that Lee was assuming command.114

  “I wish his mantle had fallen on an abler man,” Lee wrote less than forty-eight hours later.115 Lee always assumed that modest, almost diffident, posture, yet it is hard to square that with his frequent expressions of frustration over the peripheral nature of his commands in western Virginia and Georgia. In April 1861 he began building the nucleus of this army, and he as much as anyone could claim paternity. For almost three months he had struggled to see it fully equipped and manned, and strove to get it into action. Ever mindful of forces elsewhere in the Confederacy, he knew this one best. Friends and family peppered its ranks. Its generals had been his comrades in the old army, and younger officers still remembered him as the “marble model” of their Academy days. If Lee wanted only one command in the Confederacy, it was this. He never said so, but surely he believed he could do more with it than Johnston.

  Lee brought with him a special order assuming command, exhorting the ranks to steel their resolve to win. He addressed it to the “Army of Northern Virginia,” an unofficial appellation he had used occasionally.116 The next day he gathered his generals and was disappointed to hear many say they should retreat before McClellan’s advance. Once again Lee asked Davis what he suggested they do, but the president left the decision to him. The speed with which Lee then took charge and proposed a strategy suggests that, like Grant, he had devoted much thought to what he would do if given the chance.117 On June 5 he outlined his plan. He proposed supporting Jackson’s suggestion to “change the character of the war” by reinforcing and sending him across the Potomac into Maryland, even Pennsylvania, to create such panic that the Yankees would recall forces to protect Washington. Meanwhile, Lee read McClellan’s treaclelike advance as evidence that he wanted to avoid battle and batter Richmond to submission by siege. Lee intended to counter that by having his own engineers create a defensive line to be held by a part of his army, while he kept the rest mobile to lure the Federals into the open where he could strike. Drive McClellan away from his Richmond & York Railroad supply line, and he could force him back to Fort Monroe. In the next four weeks that is precisely what he did.

  First Lee had to overcome his reputation. When McClellan retreated from his front without Lee trying to stop him, some of his officers heard echoes of western Virginia and South Carolina, one Carolinian declaring that it “must forever stamp upon him the reward of an ignoble mediocrity.”118 When he set his soldiers to work digging on the current line and another to the rear should the army have to retreat, many remembered the great entrencher of Carolina, “Granny” Lee, the “King of Spades,” “Old-stick-in-the-mud,” as one diarist called him.119 There was resistance and he protested to Davis that “our people are opposed to work.” He warned against a spirit that ridiculed labor to preserve lives in earthworks, while extolling the inevitably higher cost of open field fighting. There would be enough of that, but better that it should come when he needed to ta
ke the risk. Moreover, thousands of his men were new recruits in regiments raised that spring, while the army as a whole had not yet fought a major engagement, and the performance of some division and brigade commanders at Seven Pines had been tentative, confused, and largely ineffective. Defenses, especially against McClellan’s sloth, would buy Lee time to mark the good leaders, remove the bad, train the men, and then use them to best advantage. Fortunately, McClellan gave Lee ample time. By late June he had four corps below the Chickahominy, and only one above the river and extending northwest to Mechanicsville.

  As his army dug and drilled, Lee left the stage to Jackson. They scaled down his plan of operations and set him to further disrupting Federals in the Shenandoah. Jackson “is a good soldier,” Lee told the new secretary of war George W. Randolph, “I expect him to do it,” and so he did.120 On June 8 and 9 Stonewall won stunning victories that cleared the Shenandoah of Federals, leaving him free to join Lee should he wish, and that is precisely what Lee wanted. Then Lee made a show of reinforcing Jackson, believing correctly that McClellan would conclude that Stonewall was to cross the Potomac rather than swoop down on his right flank above the Chickahominy.121 Lee was perhaps ungrateful in fooling Little Mac, for on June 10 the Union general politely sent Mary Lee under escort through the lines. As her husband predicted, the Federal advance caught her, but contrary to his fears, the Yankees did not molest her, posting a guard for her protection.122 Lee had sent a message to McClellan asking him to allow her to pass, and Little Mac agreed after cordially receiving Mary at his headquarters.123

  Before he was ready for that, Lee reorganized his army. Instead of Johnston’s two “wings” of two divisions each, plus a reserve, Lee produced six distinct divisions commanded by Major Generals A. P. Hill, Longstreet, Benjamin Huger, W. H. C. Whiting, Magruder, and Theophilus H. Holmes. In the offing he dissolved Smith’s division, which left Smith without a command, Lee’s way of removing him from his army.124 Nearly 20 percent of the infantry units found themselves in new brigades or divisions. Reinforcements came from both Carolinas, and by late June there were regiments from every state in the Confederacy as well as Maryland and Kentucky. The Army of Northern Virginia had become a national army.