Crucible of Command

by William C. Davis

  The odd man out was Robert H. Chilton, whom the War Department first appointed as Lee’s inspector general, but who became chief of staff. He was an inattentive listener whose habitually confused orders contributed to the costly debacle at Malvern Hill, and at Chancellorsville on May 2 he garbled a command that would have left Fredericksburg virtually helpless had the Federals reacted. Aware of Chilton’s shortcomings, Lee made no effort to replace him. Indeed, he seemed blind to Chilton’s failings, recommending him for promotion to brigadier in October 1862, and again in 1863, telling him that “you have always been zealous and active in the discharge of your official duties.” Perhaps it was another case of avoiding confrontation and not wishing to cause an old friend embarrassment.13 If so, it was an ill-placed concern.

  Lee accepted the officers Richmond appointed for his general staff and left them to their assigned duties. As he told Mary so often, he had to make do with what he was given. Most were competent, and some outstanding. Lee regarded supply officers as most important, and his commissary of subsistence and quartermaster stayed with him almost to the end of the war. His first inspector general monitored discipline and efficiency, qualities embarrassingly lacking in the army during and after the Antietam campaign, which led Lee to order brigade commanders to appoint their own inspectors and tribunals capable of swift punishment, but the War Department abolished them just after Chancellorsville. In Briscoe G. Baldwin, Lee had a fine ordnance officer through his entire tenure in command. He had a chief engineer but only intermittently, and while chief of artillery was not a staff position, he did have William N. Pendleton as such through the war, a well-meaning but ineffectual holdover from Johnston. Lee had no signals officer since, as recently as 1859, he thought battlefield signaling impractical.14

  When it came to how Lee used his staff, his performance was mixed thus far. As superintendent at West Point and colonel of his cavalry regiment, he had only an adjutant, a supply officer, and an aide or surgeon. To him a staff was to implement plans, not make them. Rarely did he consult the general staff on strategy. Where by now Grant’s general staff was evolving into an operations committee, Lee did virtually all planning himself.15 As for his personal staff, he would hardly seek counsel from inexperienced youths no matter how intelligent. Lee knew the value of delegation, having argued for it with Richmond, yet often he failed to use the resources at hand. No wonder that his staff nicknamed him “the great tycoon.”

  That reluctance to make full use of his staff had its origins in his personality. From youth his instinct was to do things himself to see them done well. Delegation had not worked for him as a young officer, and doing tasks himself risked no confrontation with others for poor performance. No doubt his concept of duty influenced him, too. As with the emancipation of the Custis slaves, he regarded a duty undertaken as a personal obligation to oversee every detail. By 1863 he felt increasingly that Confederate fate rested on his army, making it imperative that everything he did be done properly. Even his sense of personal and professional failure may have impelled him to do more himself. Second Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville argued that he was doing something right, yet after each he felt a failure to accomplish more.

  In the Seven Days he used staff erratically. Instructions were too complex for aides to convey verbally, and he began delivering them himself. He sent no staff to see why Jackson was tardy, or to act as guides. Giving orders to his commanders, he left no one behind to ensure they were carried out, in spite of the repeated miscarriage of his instructions.16 By the fall of 1862 Lee verbally conveyed plans to Longstreet and Jackson, and then left it to them to execute, which worked well in the main but could be dangerous, as Chilton’s garbling at Chancellorsville demonstrated. In the Maryland campaign Lee used his personal staff to communicate with separate columns, yet he did not empower them to give orders in his name to meet exigent circumstances. No one went with Jackson to Harpers Ferry to coordinate his movements, and at Antietam staff carried his verbal orders but lacked the authority to react on the spot in his name.17 Considering its importance, the famed lost order should have been entrusted to one of his staff. At Fredericksburg he used Long, Venable, and Talcott to mass artillery against the Federal advance. He had men available to perform good staff work on the battlefield, if he would use them.18 In fact, by midwar his staff, including all of the various support personnel not reporting directly to him, approached or exceeded 100 men.19 Yet he still had no intelligence officer, choosing to be his own, reading enemy newspapers, sifting scouts’ reports, and analyzing their meaning. Someone else should have been doing that.

  After nine months in command of his army, Lee had ideas for staff reform that he believed would make his job easier, and himself more effective. He recognized the need for a systematic general staff system employing men specifically trained for their positions. “The more simple the organization of our Army the more suitable in my opinion will it be to our service,” he told the chairman of the Senate Military Committee. He wanted the position of chief of staff formalized and occupied by a brigadier general senior to all other staff, empowered to coordinate their efforts, and able to give orders directly to all subordinates instead of Lee having to send such orders through the corps commanders. “Otherwise I shall have to give all directions,” he explained, “which, in the field, in time of action, &c., may be the cause of delay and loss,” not to mention compromising much of the benefit of having a general staff.20 He admired the current French system of a permanent corps of career staff officers teaching others their duties and ensuring that orders were obeyed, and suggested it as a model for the Confederacy. “The greatest difficulty I find is in causing orders and regulations to be obeyed,” he told the president. The French model might “shape the staff of our Army” to good ends.21 Just days after Chancellorsville Lee directed that all orders from the heads of staff departments at his headquarters came with his authority.22 In other instances, however, even as he called for reforms in staff functions, he failed to enforce them himself.

  Though their numbers were lean—and no doubt Lee could have benefited from a larger military family—they were demonstrably sufficient in number and capability for the job of running the army, as evidenced by its performance to date. As for Lee’s management of that staff, he steadily learned during his first year in command. Certainly he still did too much himself but that was a function of his personality, and not inadequate staff. Though he was doing better, his communication with his top subordinates was still haphazard, often too discretionary or imprecise even when not garbled by Chilton. A larger personal staff would have made life easier for Taylor, Venable, and the others, but with Lee as the governing hand, it seems unlikely that he would have done any less, or that his staff would have been any more effective.23

  Now he was about to place greater demands on them, and himself, than ever before. Even in the flush of victory, the armchair generals complained. “We allowed the enemy to get off too easily,” carped the Richmond Enquirer. “His whole force ought to have been captured,” but the fault was not Lee’s. On one point, the editor was emphatic. The pubic should insist that “General Lee shall never hereafter again expose his valuable life to the missiles of death.” With Jackson gone, “our great hero and chieftain, owes it to us, if not to himself, to be where the shock of battle cannot reach.” Other men could be replaced, “but if General Lee should fall who could take his place?”24

  Confederates spent the weeks after Chancellorsville speculating on what Lee might do next, for they expected him to do something. “Genl Lee I believe has more brains than all the balance of our big men put together,” one man wrote his wife.25 That confidence spread steadily both in and out of the army. “What may be General Lee’s plans are doubtless known only to himself,” observed a North Carolina editor. “We are quite content that it should be so. He understands his business. We do not.”26 Certainly the Yankees expected Lee to do something. One Union observer accused him of “showing off” his ar
my at Fredericksburg “as if with the design of deceiving our military.”27 In fact, following the battle Lee did not believe he could do anything but pull back to Richmond unless reinforced. Hooker’s numbers were too great, and his own casualties had been severe, more than 10,000, with heavy losses of experienced officers aside from the irreplaceable Stonewall. Lee saw so little possibility of an offensive that he rescinded the order calling Longstreet to him.28 At the same time, he resisted Secretary of War James A. Seddon’s request that he send men to reinforce Vicksburg. Mistakenly thinking that campaign would be over by the end of May or Grant would have to give up in the summer heat, Lee rightly argued on May 10 that weakening his own army risked greater danger to Virginia, presuming that Hooker would use his numerical advantage to cross the Rappahannock River again.29

  Lee reassessed the military situation on May 11 when Longstreet visited for three days of strategic discussions. Both agreed they were winning battles but losing the war by attrition. Longstreet favored reinforcing the army in Tennessee to force Grant to withdraw from Vicksburg, but Lee thought otherwise. At the end of the day Lee wrote to President Davis that sources said Hooker was being reinforced substantially from other departments. That meant that “Virginia is to be the theater of action.” Weakening his army now courted disaster. However, if he concentrated units from the Carolinas with his own he might move north first to lure Hooker to someplace where Lee could strike to advantage.30 The noncombat losses in his ranks chagrined him more than ever. “Can not our good citizens get back to us our stragglers and deserters?” he asked brother Carter.31

  Over the next two days Lee and Longstreet framed the campaign’s objectives. They should cross the Potomac, marching as far as the Susquehanna River to draw Hooker’s army out of Virginia. Heavily outnumbered, they would avoid battle until they selected ground favoring a successful defense, and then maneuver Hooker into attacking them as Burnside had at Fredericksburg. While Longstreet’s corps defended that line, the rest of the army, emulating Jackson, would move around the Federals to strike them flank and rear. Lee’s goal was not just to defeat the Army of the Potomac, but to erase it.32

  He had few strategic blind spots, yet he persisted in the belief in the battle of annihilation, and the old Napoleonic notion of one great victory winning a war. The size, organization, and weaponry of Civil War armies, plus the heavy casualties even to victors in major engagements, made the former virtually impossible.33 As Grant had shown, an army could be eradicated by siege and surrender, but not on the battlefield. As for the latter, the North’s resilience after two years of defeat in the East ought to have taught Lee that a nation could absorb even disaster when it knew it still possessed overwhelming manpower, resources, and resolve. Lee realized that his victories crumpled civilian morale, and saw evidence of that in the Northern press, yet the seams of dissent and dissatisfaction there reported were narrower than he believed.

  He left for Richmond immediately after his meetings, and on May 15 met with Davis and Seddon to outline his proposal. His army was hungry. He might implore his brother Carter that “labor is the thing to make soldiers,” and implore the people to urge boys too young to enlist to soldier in the cornfields armed with hoes, but that could not feed his men now.34 Invading Maryland and Pennsylvania would allow the men to forage and eat well again. Hooker’s army was in flux, with scores of regiments’ terms of service expiring, and thousands of their replacements new units with no experience. Hooker himself had been beaten badly, and might be at a psychological disadvantage. Moving north would force him to follow Lee, relieving the pressure on the Old Dominion and Richmond. From his analysis of the impact of the battlefield on political will and civilian morale, Lee firmly believed that the Republicans would be repudiated at the polls in the fall if he was successful.

  Above all, he believed his men could do anything. A fortnight before Chancellorsville his spirits had been so high that he boasted openly about his army, telling a fellow general that he now commanded “the finest army” to date.35 “There never were such men in the Army before, & there never can be better in any Army again,” he wrote a congressman on May 21. “If properly led they will go any where & never falter at the work before them.” With the right officers and organization, and with the spirit of Stonewall infusing the ranks, “indeed we shall be invincible and our country safe.”36 There would have to be another major battle. Indeed, he wanted one, but on his terms. The situation facing Lee dictated that he do something. This was the moment to strike, and perhaps this time realize the Pennsylvania dream. There was nothing ill-considered about it. It was the sensible thing to do. It is what Jackson or Grant would do.

  Davis and Seddon agreed. Lee commenced a flurry of preparations, starting with the army’s organization. Since taking command and organizing it into two corps he had come to believe that each was too unwieldy for a single commander to manage. However, he postponed doing something about it because he did not know suitable men for any new corps created by another reorganization. Jackson’s death and a pending campaign prompted him to do it now. Longstreet would stay at the head of a reduced First Corps. Since Ewell was the senior major general in the army and senior officer in Jackson’s corps, he would succeed to its command as the logical choice, though Lee’s recommendation of him as “an honest, brave soldier, who has always done his duty well” hardly glowed. Then elements of both corps joined by a few brigades brought up from the South were to be combined into a new Third Corps for a recovered A. P. Hill to command. Lee told the president that he thought Hill the best major general in the army. If Lee did not think him ready for corps command before, why now? In the end, his elevation, like Ewell’s, was chiefly a matter of seniority. He thought division commanders John Bell Hood and Richard H. Anderson were “improving,” and would one day make good corps commanders.37 To Hood himself Lee confided that capable commanders were scarce. “Where can they be obtained?” he asked.38 One thing Lee did not do was reorganize his staff.39

  “It is time I was in motion,” he told the president just five days after their conference.40 While asking that the capital’s reserves be put in order for its defense, he continued concentrating his army.41 Shifting regiments and brigades from the Shenandoah to the Carolinas, deciding which outposts he could leave undefended, Lee counted on the coming summer heat to discourage the enemy from active campaigning farther south. He was so busy at the task that he was short with Mary when she chided him for not writing. “You are relapsing into your old error,” he scolded, “supposing that I have a superabundance of time & have only my own pleasures to attend to.”42 He also lost his patience with D. H. Hill, commanding southeast Virginia and northeast North Carolina. Lee gave him an order with discretion to select units to send north, but Hill refused it and asked for a specific instruction. “I cannot operate in this manner,” Lee complained to Davis. Avoiding conflict once again, the general asked the president to send Hill an order.43 A day later, Lee asked Davis to remove Hill’s department from his command so he would not have to deal with him again. Having transferred Hill once to get him out of the way, Lee would now transfer territory to achieve the same end.44

  Days moved too swiftly with too little being accomplished, and Lee’s discouragement showed. “I fear the time has passed when I could have taken the offensive with advantage,” he told Davis on May 30. Expecting Hooker to make some form of two-pronged advance, he feared he could not handle both and might have no choice but to stay in his defenses, or else “there may be nothing left for me to do but fall back.”45 He still felt unwell, and the old sense of creeping mortality gripped him again when he told his daughter Agnes that if ever their family was together again, he feared that “it may be for a short time.”46 He turned a corner by the end of the month, and in a better mood told Mary that “I pray that our merciful Father in Heaven may protect & direct us.” If the Almighty stood by him once more, “I fear no odds & no numbers.”47

  A few days later on June 3 the march began. He p
rayed that Providence “will watch over us, & notwithstanding our weakness & sins will yet give us a name & place among the nations of the earth.”48 Longstreet moved first, then Ewell, while Hill remained in the works at Fredericksburg to persuade the enemy that the whole army was there. Lee coordinated a host of elements ably, from having Richmond send reinforcements to meet the army on the march rather than via Fredericksburg, to establishing a line of couriers to keep Hill in constant communication.49 He continued to argue that this was the right step. “There is always hazard in military movements,” he told Seddon, “but we must decide between the positive loss of inactivity and the risk of action.”50

  Being on the move buoyed Lee’s spirits. “What a beautiful world God in His loving kindness to His creatures has given us,” he wrote on arriving in Culpeper. “May He soon change the hearts of men.”51 What he read in Northern papers reinforced his hope for the power of Lincoln’s opposition, and he told Davis that they should “neglect no honorable means of dividing and weakening our enemies” to encourage the peace faction. He counseled subtlety, and made no distinction between those who wanted peace with no conditions and those who saw it as means to reunion. If the belief became widespread that peace would restore the Union, the war would lose its supporters “and that after all is what we are interested in bringing about.” Lee felt so strongly in the matter that he wrote Davis of it twice on the same day.52 The only damper on his spirits came on the evening of June 9, when he reached Brandy Station at the close of a major cavalry battle with the Federals to see his son Rooney carried from the field with a saber wound in his leg. Lee expected him to recover, happily. “He is young & healthy & I trust will soon be up again,” he wrote Mary. “God takes care of us all & calls to him those he prefers.”53