Crucible of Command

by William C. Davis

  Unbeknownst to him, Lee had potential problems with subordinates much closer to his headquarters. There had been hints of friction between Jackson and Longstreet and their commands since the Seven Days. Then during the Antietam Campaign Jackson complained that the want of shoes and equipment hampered his movements, and after the battle he spoke privately of resigning in protest, especially when he believed Lee showed partiality to Longstreet in distributing guns and equipment. Apparently he said nothing of it to Lee, but as winter approached he remained upset with his commander.71

  Meanwhile Longstreet, whose ambition far exceeded his ability, played a secret game of his own. He preferred Joseph E. Johnston’s cautious and conservative style to Lee’s aggressive, and therefore more costly, leadership. After Lee replaced the wounded Johnston, Longstreet maintained a correspondence with his former commander, making it clear that he wanted him to come back. “The men would now go wild at the sight of their old favorite,” he told Johnston flatteringly—and erroneously—that October. “Although they have fought many battles and successfully under another leader, I feel that you have their hearts more decidedly than any other leader can ever have.” Hearing that Johnston might be sent soon to the western theater to exercise overall command of the armies of Generals Bragg in Tennessee, Pemberton in Mississippi, and Kirby Smith in Kentucky, Longstreet objected and suggested that he come take command of the I Corps instead. “You are more than welcome to it,” he wrote, “and I have no doubt but the command of the entire Army will fall to you before Spring.” Not only did Longstreet express a surprising want of confidence in Lee, but also he went on to make naively transparent his own overweaningly self-interested motive by suggesting that he would go to the West in Johnston’s place. It was seemingly a stunning display of naïveté, for Longstreet had no more authority to trade his corps command with another than Johnston did to assign anyone from Lee’s army elsewhere, especially to a position of command. Longstreet was hinting that Johnston use his presumed political influence with a small but vocal bloc in Congress to return himself to the Army of Northern Virginia, and promote Longstreet to lieutenant general and send him to take one of those western commands, probably Kirby Smith’s. Hinting that there was more he would impart, Longstreet wanted to meet with Johnston to discuss it all further, since they “cant always write what we would like to say.”72 Just days later Longstreet got his promotion to lieutenant general, a day before Jackson got his, but that only whetted his appetite for an independent command out from under Lee’s oversight.

  Unaware of these undercurrents, while not dealing with administrative problems, Lee personally examined the left bank of the Rappahannock for a dozen miles below Fredericksburg to spot the most likely places for Burnside to cross, and concluded that he might not try to cross at the town at all.73 On November 27 he finally instructed Jackson to bring his corps to join Longstreet’s, taking position downstream from town on and around Prospect Hill in extension of Longstreet’s line.74 There for nearly two weeks the army, now grown to 92,000 including Stuart, stared across the Rappahannock waiting for Burnside to move.75 The weather turned colder and early snow fell. Lee had a few comforts against the cold. A local woman sent him a mattress and some catsup and preserves, but he found little pleasure in such things when he knew so many of his soldiers suffered barefoot and ill clad in the snow. When a woman sent him a cake, he set it outside under some trees for the young men attached to headquarters to share.76 Then on December 9 the cold came even closer when he learned that Rooney’s infant daughter had died, the second child lost to him that year. “You have now two sweet angels in heaven,” he wrote Rooney’s wife the next day. “What joy there is in the thought!”77

  Those “sweet angels” would soon have a lot of company. Hours later, just before dawn on December 11, Longstreet sent word that the Federals were attempting to put down pontoons in front of town. Lee knew from the first that he could not hold the town, but with a major battle in the offing, he needed to buy time for Jackson’s troops to march upstream to link with Longstreet, and assigned a Mississippi brigade to offer a stubborn resistance to the Federal crossing, first on the riverfront, then in Fredericksburg itself, before it withdrew to Marye’s Heights. By late afternoon some bridges were complete and the Federals began crossing into the town. Lee had only moments to rush a few words to Mary, some mundane things about a bridle bit he needed, a brief description of the enemy movement, and then the hope that “we shall be able to damage them yet.”78 All that night he heard enemy infantry and artillery rumbling across the bridges, and then watched during the next day as they continued their crossing. There was little he could do but wait, leaving all initiative for the moment to Burnside. About noon he met Jackson and they rode forward to reconnoiter, satisfying themselves that Burnside appeared to be putting his whole army across. Later that day he wrote back to Richmond, “I shall try and do them all the damage in our power when they move forward.”79 He would be fighting on the defensive, which he did not like, but this was different than his stand at Antietam. There he had been on the move and McClellan just caught up to him, forcing a quick selection of ground. Here he had time to select and enhance his positions with the spade, even though he believed at the time that the south banks of the North Anna or South Anna Rivers offered more advantage.

  About nine o’clock December 13 Burnside launched his attack, first on Jackson’s position, where the fighting went back and forth throughout the morning as Jackson held his ground. Then about eleven o’clock four Federal divisions formed lines in the town and one after another marched up the slope of Marye’s Heights to hurl themselves at Lee over and over for more than two hours without breaking through. Lee himself watched the fight with Longstreet from the top of Telegraph Hill just to the right rear of Marye’s Heights, where he had a fair view of the terrible grandeur of Burnside’s doomed assaults.80 When Lee learned that the Federals in front of Jackson showed no sign of renewing their assault, he transferred several brigades over to bolster Longstreet, and that afternoon when fresh Union divisions repeated the effort to storm Marye’s, the Confederates repulsed them with terrible losses. One last assault at dusk met the same fate, and the battle was done. Burnside suffered more than 12,500 killed, wounded, or captured, the majority of them on the bloody slopes of Marye’s Heights. Lee’s losses were 4,600, and most of those came when his men pursued the retreating Federals down the heights onto the plain below Prospect Hill where the Union artillery had full play on them.81

  Lee hoped that Burnside would try again the next day, since he had fresh units and ammunition in readiness. When the Yankees made no move, he still hoped for a renewal on December 15, and again the 16th, but found that morning that the Federal army had pulled back across the river and removed its bridges. Lee confessed his disappointment. “They suffered heavily as far as the battle went,” he wrote Mary that day, “but it did not go far enough to satisfy me.”82 More than a week later he still nursed his discontent. “I was holding back all that day,” he said on Christmas, expecting that the attack on December 13 was but prelude to a bigger effort. “Had I devined that was to have been his only effort, he would have had more of it.” Still, since he might himself have suffered greater losses, he concluded that “I am content.”83

  But contentment did not mean complaisance. Just hours after finding the enemy gone from the south side of the river, Lee warned Richmond of “the contest which will have to be renewed, but at what point I cannot now state.” Even after losing more than one-tenth of his army, Burnside still outnumbered the Army of Northern Virginia. There were several other places besides Fredericksburg where Burnside could cross, and if the weather allowed, Lee expected him to do it. In the event, Lee preferred to withdraw to the line of the North or South Anna Rivers to draw Burnside that much farther from his base, extending a line of supply and communications that ought to be vulnerable to Stuart’s troopers.84

  Now, at least, he could find moments to grieve for his lost granddaug
hter, as well as the one who died before her, and his poor daughter Annie. “I have grieved over the death of that little child of so many hopes,” he wrote Mary when the Yankees had left the town. At least they were spared “the pains & sorrows of this world.” Still, though this fresh victory might not be as complete as he hoped, “God has been so merciful to us in so many ways,” he said, “that I cannot repine at whatever he does.” Lee attributed Burnside’s withdrawal to divine “interference.”85

  Then, writing even as his men removed the dead, the dying, and the wounded from the field, Lee turned in one of those abrupt transitions so characteristic of the tight compartments of his mind, from the burden of one overwhelming responsibility momentarily lifted to another. Eighteen months of war and incessant responsibility had not displaced from his mind an old duty yet unfulfilled. Arlington might be overrun and other Custis plantations disrupted, but the emancipation of his father-in-law’s slaves still weighed on him. One point remained unclear to him, and that was whether or not Custis’s legacies to Lee’s daughters were considered debts of the estate. If they were, then his reading of the will meant that the slaves must keep working until those legacies were funded even if it took more than five years from Custis’s death. If the legacies were not debts of the estate, then the slaves must be freed whenever all other debts of the estate were paid or by the end of 1862, whichever came first. The Arlington slaves were beyond reach, of course, and any hire due for them could never be collected. “Nothing can be done with them,” he told Custis in January 1862, but the slaves at White House and Romancoke could still produce revenue, and he advised Custis to keep them out at hire if possible.86 Two weeks later he finally got a court ruling that the legacies were not part of the estate’s debts, so the slaves must be emancipated at the end of five years. In June 1860, nearly three years after Custis’s death, not a cent had yet been credited to the legacies as Lee retired debts.87 That had meant the only way to fund his daughters’ legacies was by sales of small properties, but he was far too occupied to be able to get them in shape for sale, and at the moment no one was buying land. At least one Custis property was occupied by the Yankees, so there was nothing to do with it, and as for its slaves, he confessed to Mary that he did not know what to do with them.88 Many had already run away during the enemy occupation, panicked when Federals told them during the Seven Days that Lee was coming to cut their throats.89

  Now on December 16, the day after the close of the battle, and midway through a letter describing the battle, Lee turned abruptly to the subject of the Arlington slaves. Custis died October 10, 1857, so the five years had already passed, but these recent months had been too filled with activity and movement to take action. Now he would have a respite. Almost miraculously all of Custis’s debts were paid, and a start had been made on his daughters’ legacies. He was the estate’s only creditor now. “I wish to close the whole affair,” he told Mary. “Whether I can do so during the war I cannot say now, nor do I know that I shall live to the end of it.” He wanted now to advance that as much as possible. Many were already hired out in Richmond and the countryside, and might continue their employment in their own right once he gave them their emancipation papers. “I hope they will all do well and behave themselves,” he said. As for the slaves at White House and Romancoke, he would give them their papers, too, and try to ensure they could support themselves there, but any who chose to leave would either have to find jobs elsewhere or leave the state, which did not permit unemployed free blacks. He knew the men could find jobs, but was concerned for the women and children not supported by husbands. “I desire to do what is right & best for the people,” he added. Ideally he would like to ensure that they were employed at good wages and living conditions, but the war’s demands on him made that impossible. The best he could do was give back to them any residue of their hire for the year after the debts and legacies were retired, and to increase that amount a little he would cancel the estate’s debt to himself. As for the Arlington slaves, they were beyond his reach and already presumably free, but still he would get their papers to them if he could. It was time for “the liberation of the people.”90

  That same day Grant wrestled with a racial issue of his own. If he nurtured a hostile attitude toward Jews prior to the war, he certainly kept it well concealed. When stationed at Sackets Harbor in the early months of 1848, he shopped at the Watertown dry goods firm of J. & H. Seligman’s.91 Either then or on his return to Sacket’s Harbor in June 1851 Grant befriended Jesse Seligman in particular, a friendship he renewed later in San Francisco where Seligman started an import business, and Grant often visited while stationed on the Pacific coast.92 It was an acquaintance and mutual respect that lasted the rest of Grant’s life. A few years later, in December 1857, he pawned his watch to the Jewish broker J. S. Freligh in St. Louis, but later redeemed it, leaving no cause for a grudge against Freligh’s people.93 He was probably like many Americans of his time, at ease with the conflict between befriending Jews as individuals, while accepting stereotypical myths about them as a people.

  In December 1861 he approved dismissal of a corrupt Jewish bread contractor at Cairo, though Grant may have been unaware of the man’s ethnicity.94 In July 1862, however, when speculators began paying planters in gold for cotton that they refused to sell to the government for Treasury notes, he saw that it would result in higher costs to Northern mills, while the hard cash itself would likely find its way to the Confederacy to be used against the Union. He issued an order forbidding such transactions, then the following day advised that all speculators coming into his department ought to have their baggage searched for suspiciously large amounts of specie. “Jews,” he said, “should receive special attention.”95 Sherman, who was always outspoken in his prejudices, approved heartily, complaining of the “Jews and Speculators” and “swarms of Jews” trading gold for cotton in Memphis.96 Worse, Union officers conspired with some of the speculators to share in the cotton fortune, compromising both law and morale.97 Northern need for cotton led Washington to ask Grant to relent, which he did reluctantly.

  Contractors and speculators badgered him constantly while he tried to keep his procurement departments free of fraud. He had heard so as to believe it that a syndicate of wealthy men had formed at the opening of the war to monopolize army contracts and make fortunes, boasting that they could “remove any General who did not please them.” One of those profiteers, he believed, was Leonard Swett, with whom Grant grappled in 1861. In November he learned that Swett was close to Lincoln. Without actually saying so, Grant felt concerned that Swett would use his influence with the president to injure him.98

  The rumor was false, but Grant believed it at the moment, even as he prepared for his move south toward Holly Springs, beset by applications from speculators for permits to follow him into cotton-rich northern Mississippi. The combination of the two concerns led him just two days later to issue orders to his commanders to refuse to honor all permits for travel below Jackson, Tennessee, for the immediate present. “The Israelites especially should be kept out,” he urged, and followed the next day with an order to all conductors on the railroad above Lagrange that no Jews were to travel the road southward. They could travel north out of his command if they wished. Indeed, he encouraged that. “They are such an intolerable nuisance,” he wrote, “that the Dept. must be purged [of] them.”99 Before he left Lagrange on November 28 Grant issued orders that no cotton buyers could move with the army, but they could follow in time and buy cotton in the rear. By December 5, however, he had had enough and told Sherman that “in consequence of the total disregard and evasion of orders by the Jews my policy is to exclude them as far as practicable from the Dept.”100

  He gave no such order then. Rather, when Washington ordered that shipping cotton out of the country be encouraged, Grant rescinded a subordinate’s directive that “all Cotton-Speculators, Jews and other Vagrants” who were “trading upon the miseries of their country” without Grant’s permission had tw
enty-four hours to leave.101 At the same time, Grant allowed cotton trading to be resumed in their rear in Tennessee, but ordered that speculators trading in Holly Springs should be expelled.102 If the orders seemed contradictory, they were not. Grant’s intention was only to eject those who failed to buy at the established marketplace according to rules laid down by the Treasury Department.

  The pieces were in place for Grant to make a decision that seemed operationally reasonable and in the government’s interest, while being woefully impolitic. The problems with speculators had been coming to a head for some time. Back in August it was well known in Corinth that he intended to do something about the “sharks, feeding upon the soldiers,” as one soldier characterized Jewish peddlers.103 Now a letter forwarded from Washington arrived saying that as of December 1 “Jews are taking large amounts of gold into Kentucky and Tennessee.”104 One story in the press accused them of pretending to be peddlers while bringing forbidden contraband goods like medicines and paying local secessionists to store it for them until Union armies moved on, after which the goods were sold at inflated prices to the Confederate military.105 Even across the lines the Confederate press excoriated Jews as “vermin” for speculating in tobacco.106 The Cincinnati Commercial carried a satirical poem that lamented of Bolivar, Tennessee: “Thy cotton sold to Northern Jews.”107 That paper, never very friendly also intimated that “too much must not be expected of Gen. Grant.”108