It would be too much to say that Lee had a death wish by this time, yet death would not have been unwelcome. His providentialism was so advanced that for years he had never spoken of the loss of a relative or friend without calling it a release from burdensome life to joyous afterlife. Convinced that he would be in Paradise with all of his loved ones past and present, he sometimes turned his thoughts from the inevitability of his passing to its manner. A soldier all his adult life, he considered how a warrior ought to die and one day mused about it on paper, remembering fragments from his boyhood classics:
The warmest instincts of every man’s soul declare the glory of the soldier’s death. It is more appropriate to the Christian than to the Greek to sing:
“Glorious his fate and envied his lot,
Who for his country fights, and for it dies.”
There is a true glory, and a true honor. The glory of duty done—the honor of the integrity of principle.68
To die as a soldier would be a good death. He might not seek it, but he would accept it should it come. Until then there was for him only the glory of duty.
By the early weeks of 1865 Lee’s patience was about exhausted, both with politicians and even with the president. One day entering the executive mansion, he met Senator Benjamin Hill of Georgia coming out. With everyone mindful of the serious danger to Richmond, Hill asked Lee what he thought of moving the capital to someplace safer and easier to defend. As was his wont, Lee politely declined to comment on a matter outside his field of responsibility, but Hill pressed him that it was Lee’s business, since if the Confederacy lasted long enough for Davis’s six-year term as president to expire in 1868, surely Lee would be chosen as successor. “Never!” Lee recoiled, and as Hill remembered his words, added that “I think the military and civil talents are distinct, if not different, and full duty in either sphere is about as much as one man can qualify himself to perform.” He would never do the people “the injustice to accept high civil office.”69 In fact, no popular groundswell to make Lee president emerged in the Confederacy as it did for Grant after Vicksburg, but with any theoretical election still more than three years distant, Confederates did not project Lee beyond his current role, and what little discussion there was about a next president centered on Breckinridge.
That suited Lee, for if anything, he was sick of presidents and presidencies. On February 25 Davis wanted to consult with Lee about rumors of the general’s views on destroying Southern crops to deny them to the enemy, and suggested that “if you can spare the time I wish you to come here.”70 Relations between them seemed slightly strained by now, and Lee usually returned irritable from Richmond. After one such fruitless visit, he complained loudly of the difficulty of maintaining his lengthening line of defenses with an army the government seemed uncommitted to increasing. Venable asked the general why he did not simply abandon the capital for the open field. Lee turned his “two-inch plank” glare on him and shot back that if he did so he would be “a traitor to his government.”71 In such a mood he got the president’s note to come talk of rumors, and replied that it would be difficult to get away at that moment, suggesting that the president send him written details and he would respond. That set Davis off. Angrily he replied, “Rest assured I will never ask your views in answer to rumours—your counsels are no longer wanted in this matter.” Feeling the president’s anger, Lee resignedly returned to Richmond, in part to mollify Davis, but also on sudden and potentially important business. He told no one what transpired at the meeting, but he returned a few days later visibly depressed.72 The president calmed in time, but until then the tone of his letters was a bit chilly.
At some indefinite moment Lee concluded that the war was lost. Of course, from the outset he acknowledged the possibility of defeat. Every recommendation he made for strengthening Confederate arms carried with it an implicit suggestion of the unhappy alternative. Over time that evolved in Lee’s mind from possibility to probability, an evolution that may have begun as early as June, when Grant began to lay siege and Lee found himself all but trapped in his defenses. Yet even after Atlanta’s fall in September, Lee did not see the cause as irretrievable. “The fall of Atlanta is a blow to us,” he told Mary at the time, but “not very grievous & which I hope we will soon recover from.”73 Then in November Lincoln’s reelection dashed the Confederacy’s last hopes of the North’s peace faction taking over, and Lee’s fear hardened toward certainty. Of course, Lincoln could still choose to make terms on the basis of Confederate independence, but why should he?
If what he saw by that time did not convince Lee that the cause was lost, the rumblings reaching him from political back rooms should have. Davis’s opposition was essentially impotent, rarely able to be more than nettlesome, if loud. By January 1865 they were calling for Davis’s impeachment. The speaker of the state house in South Carolina went further, proposing that Congress leave the president in office, but remove the commander-in-chief function from his powers and install Lee as “the military head of the Government.”74 In fact, rumors about making Lee a dictator surfaced at least as early as January 1864, and sporadically thereafter.75 Later that year another South Carolinian, Robert Barnwell Rhett, actually proposed to Vice President Stephens that Congress remove Davis from office immediately without resorting to the impeachment process. Stephens ought then to step aside from succeeding to the presidency, allowing Congress to install Lee virtually as military dictator.76 By November 1864 Charles Minnegerode, the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church where both Davis and Lee attended when possible, heard whispers in Richmond loud enough that he feared that “the idea of a military dictator in the person of General Lee seems to be predominating here.”77 In his newspaper the Charleston Mercury, Rhett hammered on into 1865 for Davis’s replacement by a “high toned gentleman in the land, like General Lee.”78
Stephens apparently ignored Rhett, and in any event Lee would never countenance such a plot. Still, though he carefully avoided correspondence with dissident politicians, some of their scheming was surely known to him, especially since by the end of 1864 two Richmond papers openly called for his installation as supreme leader. Lee said nothing in the matter, but it all spoke eloquently to him of the spreading rot within the Confederacy’s civil authority.
In a half step toward crippling the president’s power, the Senate on January 16 passed a bill creating the office of “general in chief of the armies,” there being never any question who they expected the president to appoint. On the last day of the month Davis submitted Lee’s nomination, which the Senate confirmed the next day.79 Northern pundits thought Lee got the position as a reward for his “alliance” with Davis in supporting the war in spite of the desperate state of things.80 That was nonsense, for Lee had been in effect general-in-chief since 1862, though he acted only in an advisory capacity on affairs beyond his immediate departmental command. Now Congress put him and Davis on notice that it expected him to manage all of the Confederacy’s military operations actively, something that Lee himself protested as impractical.81 Still, he assumed the command on February 9, complaining only slightly that he had no instructions and no idea what Davis wanted him to do.82 Henceforth, orders to other department and army commanders did come from Lee for the most part, but the working relationship between the two men did not change, Lee remaining as deferential as ever. He continued watching events elsewhere, but other than putting Johnston again in command of the Army of Tennessee in February, and advising Beauregard on the defense of Mobile in March, his exercise of his office bore only a slight resemblance to Grant’s as he made little effort to exert influence beyond Virginia, which had always been his Confederacy.83
In 1861 Lee’s fealty to the Old Dominion clearly overrode allegiance to the Union. Though it was never tested, the question remained of whether that same fealty might take precedence over his loyalty to the new nation. In North Carolina and Georgia there had been discontented rumblings of seeking a separate peace in the face of defeat, perhaps to exa
ct better terms. No such movement emerged in Virginia, but still, though Lee might not be a dictator, he did now have the power to act unilaterally for all Confederate land forces, which made him the only warrior who could make a peace. Lincoln had been under pressure repeatedly to make overtures to Davis to end the war, and several inconclusive feelers followed. Most recently Francis Preston Blair Sr. came as unofficial agent to meet with Davis in Richmond on January 12, but to no avail. Lincoln’s insistence on reunion and Davis’s on independence were mutually exclusive. No sooner did Blair leave than on January 17 another even less official person arrived: James W. Singleton, a Virginia native now a prominent Illinois Democrat and friend of Lincoln.84 He had been active in the peace movement, despite which in early January Lincoln gave him a pass to go to Richmond ostensibly to try to purchase Southern produce to ship north, but unofficially to approach Confederate leaders about reunion.
Singleton met, or claimed to have met with, Stephens, Virginia senator R. M. T. Hunter, Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell, Robert Ould, chief of the Bureau of Prisoner Exchange, and others, all of whom admitted that the war was lost. They also told him that Longstreet and Ewell, and even Lee, felt the same. The day after Singleton’s arrival the Senate passed the resolution making Lee general-in-chief, which suggested to Singleton that Lee now had the power to make peace himself if he would order all Confederate land forces to lay down their arms. Coincidentally, General Breckinridge arrived in Richmond at the same time as Singleton, to be offered the position of secretary of war. Singleton knew Breckinridge and called on him, revealing his secret agendum, and Breckinridge arranged for him to meet with Lee.
On January 19, Lee’s birthday as it happened, they met at army headquarters. When Singleton declared that further fighting only postponed the inevitable, Lee responded that he was “in the hands of Providence,” and that though a soldier, he was a man of peace who wanted to stop the bloodletting, “and would go as far as any man in the Confederacy in his efforts to do so.” The last thing he wanted to do was leave an unfinished war as a legacy to his children. It was his duty to fight on if he must—his only admission that he fought now out of duty, not expectation of success—but he would be glad to be spared that by a permanent peace. Lee left Singleton believing that a sixty-day armistice could produce a negotiated “reconstruction” on liberal terms, and that the South would give up slavery immediately in return for “fair compensation” and constitutional amendments protecting other rights of person and property. To that end he said he would be willing to meet with Grant to discuss a platform for peace.85
Singleton called Lee “the man with whom to treat,” and others realized that as well.86 Breckinridge assumed his portfolio as war secretary on February 7, and soon met frequently with Lee on matters relating to supplies and defense. Then in late February Longstreet came to Lee with a surprising proposal. During a meeting under flag of truce to discuss prisoner issues with General Ord, one of them changed the subject to how the commanding generals might end the war. Ord suggested that if Lee wanted to discuss the matter with Grant, he was sure Grant would agree to meet. It was this, as well as making his peace with the offended president, that brought Lee to Richmond on February 26 to see Davis, as well as Breckinridge. Three weeks earlier Lee had stated for public consumption that he did not see how the Confederacy could “by any compromise or negotiation” with the enemy abate any of the rights they claimed “without a surrender of the liberties we derived from our ancestors.”87 Privately, he now endorsed such a meeting, hoping there might be a possibility of peace without defeat if he and Grant could negotiate the points at issue and submit their recommendations to a military convention.88
For some time Breckinridge had believed the war was lost and reunion inevitable. Lee felt the same by now, and also Longstreet. Davis was not nearly ready to yield, but seized any hope for negotiation as a means of buying time. Lee wrote to Grant on March 2 suggesting a meeting, though he expected Grant to refuse any discussion not predicated on reunion. As Lee told Davis, he doubted that the Confederate people would accept reunion “yet awhile,” a clear implication that he believed it must come eventually.89 As expected, Grant replied that he could only meet with Lee on matters of a military nature. Still, he wrote in terms almost cordial, carefully explaining matters without the sarcasm and posturing that often infused communications between opposing army commanders. Mindful that such an approach could have been a ploy to postpone the commencement of active operations, still Grant believed that “peace must Come some day,” and no peace feeler should be rejected out of hand.90 The day that Lee received Grant’s response, he met with Breckinridge and the quartermaster general and commissary of subsistence at the War Department to discuss the prospect for sustaining his army in the field that spring, and it was gloomy. Then they turned their conversation to peace. Davis was the obstacle, but Breckinridge believed that a strong and determined push from the Senate could force the president to address the issue, and Lee knew Hunter, the head of the Virginia delegation, well enough to approach him. They met and Lee suggested that Hunter introduce in the Senate a resolution calling on Davis to open negotiations with Lincoln looking toward an honorable surrender. Lee’s own role, he told the senator, would be publicly to recommend opening negotiations, which he believed the armies and the people would regard as “almost equivalent to surrender.” A later visit from Breckinridge emphasized the power of the general’s personal prestige. This was no palace coup, but rather a design by constitutional means to nudge Davis to action. Unfortunately, Hunter refused.91
Set back but not beaten, the secretary and the general took a suggestion from Campbell, who agreed with them that any peace would inevitably come on terms of reunion and emancipation. On March 6 or 7 Lee and Breckinridge discussed it, and then on March 8, in his official capacity as war secretary, Breckinridge asked Lee to give him a written and candid statement of the military situation, to be handed to Davis and Congress. If Lee went on record publicly declaring that they were beaten, then surely the president would yield. The following day Lee delivered a report saying that their case was “full of peril.” Confederate forces were ill equipped, ill fed, and outnumbered everywhere, and he entertained little hope of standing up to the foe in the coming spring. “It is not worse than the superior numbers and resources of the enemy justified us in expecting from the beginning,” he added. The Confederacy had already held out “longer than we had reason to anticipate.”
But then he temporized. The fall of Richmond and Petersburg would be a blow, but not necessarily fatal if the army in the field could be sustained. In fact, he did not say that their case was hopeless, and he did not mention opening surrender negotiations. Instead, he said everything depended on how much more sacrifice the elected representatives believed the people could sustain, the closest thing to a hint that Congress might conceivably act in the matter.92 Lee fatally compromised the purpose of his report. Either he recoiled in the end from working with the politicians, some of them the same men whose failures brought on the war, or his loyalty to Davis and his duty trumped his conviction of inevitable defeat, which remained unchanged. Observers in the War Department and close to Davis detected an uncharacteristic caution in the report, and Campbell concluded that Lee “declined to do more than perform his military duty and would not assume to counsel much less to act upon the question of peace.”93 Davis sequestered the report, and only released a carefully edited précis that further weakened the document.
Still, Breckinridge probably showed the unexpurgated report a few days later when he met with several members of Congress to speak frankly of what he called “the final collapse.” He suggested that even in their dire condition they still had a little power to negotiate for better terms than they might expect if defeated piece by piece.94 He failed to move them to action before they adjourned on March 18, and that same day rode to Lee’s headquarters to meet in private conference through March 21.95 Their greatest bargaining chip remained a
t hand and under Lee’s command, the Army of Northern Virginia. Breckinridge had been preparing in advance for the evacuation of the capital for weeks, and that exigency had been on Lee’s mind for some time. When General Hood proposed a concentration of remaining armies in Tennessee, Lee responded doubtfully two days after his meetings with Breckinridge ended. “I believe it can be done though it would be attended with hazard & difficulty,” he told Davis, for Yankees in east Tennessee would be burning bridges to slow his westward progress, while Grant would surely pursue in the rear.
Still, he thought that “by energy & boldness the army might force its way to the borders of Tennessee.” If Johnston’s army from North Carolina and General Richard Taylor’s in the Deep South could unite with him in central Tennessee, they would still number fewer than 100,000, especially after the inevitable straggling and desertion along the way. They would be too weak to occupy the country effectively, he said; “our continuance would depend upon victory.” They would have to impress any supplies, having no means of moving their own where needed, and foraging would force them to spread out, thus lessening the advantage of concentration. He doubted they could reach the Ohio in any condition to invade the North and force Federals out of the Confederacy to meet them, and in any event their own transportation was such that they could hardly take more than enough ammunition for three battles.
In the end, he saw nothing to be gained that could not be realized with fewer complications by making the concentration in Virginia or North Carolina instead.96 If Lee held off Grant long enough to remove supplies and materiel from the city, and then get his army away intact, he could try to link with Johnston’s army now being pushed back in North Carolina by Sherman. Together they might turn on Sherman and perhaps defeat him before Grant caught up, and then turn to meet Grant. It was a plan that would have been delusional coming from any other Confederate at this stage of the war. Even coming from Lee it offered no realistic hope for more than a possible temporary advantage before the relentless Grant caught up to him. Nevertheless, Lee operating again in the open field posed a much more powerful argument in any surrender negotiations than he did bottled up in earthworks around Richmond.
Crucible of Command Page 55
