Crucible of Command

by William C. Davis

  By this time Grant’s army was barely twenty miles from Richmond, and once again he attempted to sidestep Lee by shifting his columns south and east around Lee’s right flank toward Old Cold Harbor, where Sheridan’s cavalry awaited. Grant wanted to be there by June 1, but his legions slowed down, after almost a month of marching and fighting. The machine was grinding toward a stall, while casualties disrupted company and regimental headquarters. Grant always knew this was a risk, but still believed that the army’s stamina would be fed by pride in its performance thus far. “Fighting, hard knocks only, could have accomplished the work,” he would say soon afterward, yet even in his own headquarters the fatigue told.7 For one thing, he was never more overconfident than now, though he had some cause. Captured Confederates looked like beaten men, their uniforms ragged, their shoes in tatters, and many of them malnourished. “Lees Army is really whipped,” he told Halleck on May 26; “the actions of his Army shows it unmistakeably.” Lee would not meet him in the open field, while Grant saw his own men marching and attacking with a new morale. “I may be mistaken,” he said, “but I feel that our success over Lees Army is already insured.”8

  While Meade marched toward Cold Harbor, Grant directed that General Smith and the XVIII Corps be detached from Butler’s stymied army and transported by boats to White House on the Pamunkey River, where they began arriving May 30. Lee raced to counter but Ewell had come down with diarrhea and handed his corps over to Early, a transfer that Lee sought diplomatically to make permanent. Fearful of losing his command, Ewell protested that he would soon return, but Lee told him he could not change corps commanders while the army was in almost daily action, something that in fact he had done at least four times in the past month. Ewell refused to take the hint and kept pressing, then took his case to the president, who sent him back to a painful conversation in which Lee obliquely, but unmistakably, made it clear that he had lost confidence in the general. It was the closest thing to a face-to-face dismissal of a senior officer Lee would perform in the war.9

  By early June when the combatants reformed between the Chickahominy River and Totopotomoy Creek, neither army functioned well from the top down. Grant and Meade, already on ground unfamiliar, conducted haphazard reconnaissance. Not only was Lee’s top command in flux after four changes of corps command in as many weeks, but division and brigade commanders fumbled assignments. When Lee sought to take the initiative on June 1, his designs collapsed, and the best he could do was entrench in a strong position with the two streams guarding his flanks. Grant had scarcely enough information at the end of the day’s fighting to know its result. “The rebels are making a desperate fight,” he wrote Julia that evening. “How long it will last is a problem,” he told her. “I can hardly hope to get through this month.”10

  Grant planned a major assault for the afternoon of June 2, but postponed it until four-thirty on the morning of June 3 to give the men rest from the heat. Unfortunately, once again neither he nor Meade reconnoitered Lee’s line with care, relying on anecdotal reports that led them to think that the portion of the Confederate line they would attack was not held in depth. As a result, when the assault jumped off on time on June 3, the Federals struck an enemy line heavily reinforced by Breckinridge, and well entrenched. Lee exerted almost no influence on the fight, being behind the lines ill at his tent. This was no battle of maneuver, but the simplest and most direct kind of attack and defense. In an hour of brutal assaults, the Yankees briefly broke through before being turned back, and then kept a tenuous grasp on positions in places barely fifty yards from the enemy works. Early that afternoon Grant did not yet appreciate the extent of his bloodying, dismissing it by wiring Halleck that “our loss was not severe.”11 Shortly after noon, when Meade’s corps commanders declared that another assault would fail, Grant suspended the action.

  Lee had Malvern Hill and Gettysburg and now Grant had Cold Harbor. He had not ordered a frontal assault since the early days at Vicksburg a year before. Doing so now represented a culmination of factors. The campaign was dragging, and summer heat and humidity allied themselves with Lee. Temperatures ran consistently in the eighties, and recently spiked into the nineties.12 That sapped his soldiers’ flagging energy. He wanted to be south of the James with a new base established on that river in time to uncork Butler and move against Petersburg and Richmond with a full campaign season ahead. At Cold Harbor for the first time Lee stood in a position that offered no opportunity for a flanking movement. Grant must either strike him head on or stop in his tracks. The only other alternative was to pull back, and he had sworn to himself and to Washington that he would not retreat. He had to make the effort, but in his own fatigue and his anxiety to keep moving, he had been careless. Grant later claimed that he regretted ordering that assault at Cold Harbor. The cost had been brutal, indeed, as over the next few days reports indicated more than 7,000 casualties. A higher price may have been the hesitation some senior officers felt from then on about making vigorous assaults against defended positions.

  Still, Grant gained something. Five weeks of bludgeoning produced no victory and really no defeat since Grant always either held his ground or left it to advance farther. Yet he was now poised barely ten miles northeast of Richmond and just two days’ march from the James. Generations later Winston Churchill, another warrior with intimate experience of winning and losing, quipped that “success is going from one failure to the next with no loss of enthusiasm.” Stymied, Grant rested the army for a few days and then implemented a plan he had in mind all along. A position northeast of Richmond was impractical and difficult to supply. “My idea from the start has been to beat Lee’s army, if possible, North of Richmond,” he told Halleck, and then to transfer his army south of the James and move against Richmond from below, better supplied via steamers on the river and reinforced by Butler. Then he would steadily cut off the enemy capital and Lee’s army from all sources of supply and communications.13 Unless that movement brought on a fight, he reckoned the rest of the campaign would be a siege, which he would avoid if he could, but accept if he must.14 Lee had sensed the same eventuality for some weeks. “We must destroy this army of Grant’s before he gets to the James River,” he told Early in May. “If he gets there it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time.”15

  Grant “got there.” Commencing after dark on June 12, Meade’s army stealthily left its positions and marched by night east then south toward Wilcox’s Landing on the James, the first elements arriving late in the afternoon June 13. The crossing began the next day by ferries, and meanwhile engineers built a 2,100-foot-long pontoon bridge in just eight hours. By June 16 Grant had four army corps on the south side of the James, with another transported down the York and up the James to land in support of Butler. And Lee had no idea what had happened. In fact, the day the Yankees began pulling out of their lines, Lee was feeling more confident than for some days, since he had Grant where he thought the enemy could not move. A Confederate surgeon who saw him that day found him cheerful and confident. “I have never seen Gen. Lee look more tranquil or cheerful than he does at present,” he wrote. “Until I see anxiety and restlessness manifested in our great leader I shall be perfectly satisfied that all is going well.”16

  Within hours that anxiety would be there to be seen. Lee discovered the Yankees’ departure on the morning of June 13, when advance Union elements were already just miles from the James. By noon the next day Lee suspected Grant might be intending to cross the James, but thought it just as likely that he would go into the old fortifications at Harrison’s Landing left by McClellan two years before and assume the defensive. Still, he also suspected that Grant might send some force directly up the James to try to take the transportation and industrial hub at Petersburg.17 A few hours later he felt sure that Petersburg was the target, but even then hesitated and kept the main army in place throughout June 15, by which time the crossing was already well under way.18

  In fact, by that time Petersburg had a
lmost fallen. General Smith got there with his corps that afternoon and heavily outnumbered the scant 3,000 Confederates in his way, but he stalled, then launched an attack that broke through and promised Petersburg as his for the taking until he stopped to await reinforcements. They came too late and Smith postponed the attack until the following day. Then Grant and Meade arrived with two full corps and attacked that evening, but the defenders were reinforced, and though outnumbered more than three to one, held their ground. More attacks on June 17 were turned back, and when Grant ordered a maximum effort the morning of June 18 with close to 100,000 men on hand, Lee was coming into the defenses before him. That afternoon Grant launched one more attack, but his men were tired and uneasy about going against earthworks, and headquarters was too rushed to properly reconnoiter and coordinate their efforts. Grant was satisfied that all that could be done had been. A magnificent opportunity was lost by a matter of hours, but he still had the upper hand; his supply line via the James was secure and he could start spreading his left gradually south and westward to begin severing the rail links connecting Petersburg and Richmond with the rest of the Confederacy. “Now we will rest the men,” he told Meade, “and use the shade for their protection u[ntil] a new vein can be [s]truck.”19 In the wake of this latest disappointment, he lost none of his enthusiasm. He was still “Sam” Grant the Pacific Coast potato entrepreneur, looking to make his next opportunity.

  One of the best weapons a much-relieved Lee had at his command by this time was Jefferson Davis. After three years of working together they had forged a model civil-military partnership. Lee likely had little to do with Davis at West Point, where the future president was a year ahead of him, for the Mississippian was no model cadet. Court-martialed and dismissed once, then reinstated, and nearly dismissed again for participating in a drunken revelry called the “Egg Nog Riot,” Davis was not the sort of cadet with whom the rigidly disciplined Virginian would associate. In the war with Mexico they might have met each other briefly in early 1847 before Lee transferred from Taylor’s to Scott’s army, but neither thought it worthy of later mention. In 1850 Davis was a senator from Mississippi. Approached by Cuban revolutionaries wanting him to lead them in revolt against Spain, Davis begged off, but referred them to Lee, then in Baltimore. He also declined, but evidently Davis held him in some regard already. Of course, when serving as Pierce’s secretary of war, Davis created the 2d United States Cavalry and made Lee its second in command. For his part Lee left little to suggest any opinion at all of Davis at this time other than a postwar declaration that he had thought the Mississippian “one of the extremist politicians,” which put Davis in company that Lee largely disliked.20

  During the first year of the war, the two men became better acquainted through almost constant association, though nothing suggests that they spent time together socially. Lee established the bedrock of their relationship early on when he made no issue of losing his seniority as major general of state forces by becoming a brigadier in the Confederacy. Self-effacement always marked Lee’s character, but in working with this president in particular it became an asset, which Lee surely saw as he watched Davis’s relations with Johnston and Beauregard progressively topple on the generals’ egos and ambition. Beyond question, the president could be prickly, and had an outsized ego of his own, but he was also very intelligent, in some degree insightful, and possessed a grasp of military science and policy second to few. More to the point, he was also the commander-in-chief of a civil democracy, making it his generals’ duty to get along with him rather than the other way around. No one understood or accepted that better than Lee. He had spent his entire professional life subordinate to someone, and not always to a superior he liked, especially in his early years. Yet his concept of duty fully encompassed subordination. Hence, from 1861 on he might disagree with the president, and freely voice that dissent in the give and take of open discussion, but he never challenged or dealt with him other than with respect and deference.

  It helped that the two found common ground in their strategic thinking. He and Davis agreed in 1862 that Richmond must be defended at all costs. They also agreed that an opportunistic approach to defending the Confederacy was the best practical course: holding as much as possible while seizing any chance for an offensive to damage the enemy and sow consternation in the North. Both implicitly understood that the only likely path to Confederate independence lay in defeating not Northern armies, but the Northern population’s will to continue. Moreover, to that end both accepted that all other considerations, state and local, must be subordinated to the one paramount goal. In what professed to be a conflict to preserve state sovereignty, Davis and Lee were willing to accept virtually total central control.

  Other facets of Lee’s personality strengthened that unity, for he was perfectly suited to work in accord with a man like Davis. He already distrusted newspapers, largely because of the business of the slave whippings at Arlington, and disliked seeing his name in print. Hence, he made no effort to court a favorable press. Davis appreciated that, though he had to deal with other generals who happily got involved with his opposition in the fourth estate. At the same time, Lee’s mistrust of politicians kept him aloof from the political morass, even as he watched generals like Joseph E. Johnston, Longstreet, and others become unwitting tools for Davis’s opponents. Lee also refrained from disputes with Davis’s friends, starting with the barely capable Judah P. Benjamin, with whom Lee worked uncomplainingly during his western Virginia and South Carolina stints.

  This was all part of the professional code he had followed all his life. In dealing with the president he took this two steps further based on his reading of the man. He set the tone at the cabinet meetings in May 1862 when Davis asked him to present views on Richmond’s defense, and Lee concluded by asking the president for his ideas. Weeks later in June, when he assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee again asked Davis what he thought should be their strategy, and thereafter did so again and again. As commander-in-chief, of course, Davis had the constitutional right and authority to dictate military policy, which he preferred not to do unless a general gave him no alternative. Still, being asked his views flattered him. Moreover, in communicating his own ideas, Lee routinely closed with qualifiers like “do you think anything can be done” and “I shall feel obliged to you for any directions you may think proper to give.”21 They reinforced Lee’s awareness of his subordinate position, while flattering the president.

  Seeing Davis’s frustration with a man like Joseph E. Johnston, who all but refused to share his plans for a campaign, Lee divulged his own thinking fully, sometimes as it developed over a period of time as with what became the Gettysburg raid. “You should know everything,” Lee assured the president, even if he felt he had to apologize for communicating too much.22 Once Lee had the army in motion, he also wisely communicated with Davis as often as possible, keeping him informed of developments. During the march to Antietam Lee wrote almost once a day, sometimes just to say he had nothing to communicate. “When you do not hear from me,” he told the president, “you may feel sure that I do not think it necessary to trouble you.”23 Lee understood that Davis had a right to be kept fully apprised, and that the better informed he was, the less likely he was to interfere. Despite a reputation for meddling with his commanders, Davis rarely did so if a general was actually in motion, and kept him abreast. During the march into Maryland in 1862 Davis wanted to join the army on the campaign, but by gentle persuasion and constant communication Lee kept him in Richmond and out of the way.

  In return, Lee brought Davis victories, one after another, and more than all other Confederate commanders combined. More eloquent, however, were his defeats. When Johnston or Beauregard failed, it was everyone’s fault but theirs. When Lee failed to destroy McClellan he told Davis that “I blame nobody but myself.” After Gettysburg he offered to resign. “To ask me to substitute you by some one in my judgment more fit to command,” the president responded, “is t
o demand an impossibility.” Even then Lee asked him to keep his resignation, and invoke it anytime he thought necessary.24 Already Davis addressed Lee as “My dear friend.”

  The chief executive’s growing respect for Lee impelled him repeatedly to ask him to take over the troubled Army of Tennessee, and then weighed heavily in his decision to reinstate Johnston instead. The president was unwilling to order Lee to unwelcome duty, and placed enough confidence in his judgment to appoint instead a man Davis detested. Now, as Lee and Grant battled each other, Davis left the campaign in Lee’s hands with confidence, devoting his own efforts to providing every support and succor. To Davis, by 1864 Lee stood alone, and when he spoke of him, it was clear all others were, in comparison to him, beginners.25 No general and chief executive ever worked better together, and the credit belonged primarily to Lee, who never forgot the position of the military in a democracy, and who “read” the man in charge with unerring perception. If at times Lee’s demeanor seemed flattering, verging even on the sycophantic, it was never for self-advancement, but done knowing that Lee’s weapons were stronger with the president behind them, rather than in front.

  Lee’s need for the president’s support grew increasingly desperate after the armies reached Petersburg and what became known as the Overland campaign ended in the growing stalemate of a siege. Three years of war, long separation from families, and months of inadequate rations and clothing, not to mention little or no pay, worked their evil on morale, and almost immediately his army began a slow disintegration. Or rather, the steady problem of desertion accelerated as discouragement and desperation set in.