The 20 Most Significant Events of the Civil War

by Alan Axelrod

  Alexander’s signal did not come a moment too soon. Evans immediately grasped that he was in danger of being rolled up, and he immediately ordered most of his men to block the advance of McDowell’s flanking column. This left very few of his troops to hold Tyler at bay, but the danger from McDowell’s column was both imminent and great. Evans commanded but a single brigade. The advancing flanking column consisted of two entire divisions. Determined to make the best of a precarious situation, Evans deployed his men on the high ground, the slopes of Matthews Hill.

  In the tradition of classic commanders, Brigadier General Barnard Bee followed the sound of the guns into the heart of the battle. Hearing firing early in the day, he led his brigade, in concert with Francis Bartow’s brigade, toward the Confederate left. The two brigades marched up Henry House Hill, high ground east of Matthews Hill, and there encountered the head end of the Union flanking column, led by Ambrose E. Burnside. It was engaged in an armed exchange with Evans’s line. Bee and Bartow arrived just as that line was beginning to break under pressure from Burnside. Bee and Bartow now advanced from Henry House Hill to Matthews Hill in an effort to take the pressure off Evans’s beleaguered line. This transformed the exchange into a slugging match, and the arrival of a fresh Union brigade under Colonel William T. Sherman tipped the balance toward the Union. The Confederates began to retreat from Matthews Hill.

  Suddenly, it looked as if the battle and the day would go to McDowell. Survivors from three Confederate brigades poured down Matthews Hill and retreated eastward. Responding rapidly to this development, Johnston and Beauregard bolstered the Confederate defensive position by sending more troops to the left to resist the Union onslaught. McDowell’s correct move would have been to pursue the retreating brigades. Any military formation is most vulnerable in retreat. For unknown reasons, however, McDowell held his men back, declining to give chase. This gave Colonel Thomas J. Jackson the opening he needed to form up a new defensive line along Henry House Hill. Seeing this, Barnard Bee sought to rally his faltering brigade on Jackson. He called out to his men, “There’s Jackson, standing like a stone wall. Rally to the Virginians!” Bee would not survive the battle that day, but Jackson would enter history as “Stonewall.”

  Henry House Hill became the focal point of an increasingly intense battle. Onto this prominence, each side sent more troops. The combat became chaotic, and since neither side had yet standardized the familiar Union blue uniforms versus Confederate gray, friendly fire was a major killer on both sides. It was in just such friendly fire exchanges that both generals Bee and Bartow were killed. Nevertheless, thanks to the timely arrival of Stonewall Jackson, the Confederates reached the verge of triumph at Henry House Hill. McDowell responded by advancing against Chinn Ridge, a high-ground position southwest of Henry House Hill. His hope was to flank the Confederate position, but since this was the obvious thing to do, the Confederates anticipated the move and preempted it. Arnold Elzey and Jubal A. Early took up blocking positions that arrested the Union advance on Chinn Ridge.

  Checked in his attempt to flank Henry House Hill, McDowell decided he was out of options and ordered a withdrawal. He summoned his Regulars—his most disciplined soldiers—to cover the general retreat of the Union army.

  All began as well as could be expected until some soldiers started yelling that they were about to be attacked by Confederate cavalry. Exhausted and dispirited, McDowell’s troops panicked, and what had begun as an orderly withdrawal dissolved into a rout. In reality, Beauregard and Johnston had little available in the way of cavalry. They used what they had to harass the stricken Union troops, but they could do little material damage. Nevertheless, the emotional toll was heavy. By the time the Union troops reached Centreville, they constituted a broken army. McDowell had planned to regroup, but, recognizing that his command had crumbled, he decided to continue the withdrawal—all the way to Washington, DC. Popular myth portrays this second phase of the retreat as another rout. It was, in fact, orderly. But the sight of Union soldiers returning in something very like shame was shocking to onlookers who had expected to cheer a triumph. Suddenly, the reality of the Civil War made itself known in the capital.

  The people who had so imperiously demanded that Lincoln crush the rebellion in its own homeland now began to understand that the Civil War would be far longer and bloodier than they had imagined. The Bull Run casualty reports confirmed this impression. The Union lost 2,708 killed, wounded, or missing. On the Confederate side, casualties were lighter—but still shocking in a nation that had never fought so massively destructive a battle: 1,982 Confederates were killed, wounded, or missing. The First Battle of Bull Run was the first major battle of the Civil War, the first major Union defeat, and, up to that time, the deadliest battle in US history. As a result, President Lincoln replaced Irvin McDowell with a general who had just won victories in western Virginia (today the state of West Virginia). They were relatively minor triumphs, to be sure, but they were wins nonetheless, and their author was a dashing figure named George Brinton McClellan. He took command of the veterans of Bull Run on July 26 and, in obedience to the president’s orders, began to build a new army, larger than any that had ever marched and fought in North America. It would be called the Army of the Potomac.

  11

  June 1, 1862

  Lee Rises to Top Command in the Confederacy

  Why it’s significant: In the title to his 1974 biography of George Washington, historian James Thomas Flexner bestowed on his subject the epithet that most adequately describes his significance to the birth of the United States: The Indispensable Man. When it comes to the military history of the Confederacy, this very tag best suits Robert E. Lee. By installing Lee as the principal commander of Confederate forces, Jefferson Davis gave the Southern cause a general who remains among the most universally admired of history’s “great captains.” During the war, the people of the South came to idolize him, while those of the North—especially in the Union army—paid him ungrudging respect. A master of battlefield topography and a bold tactical innovator, he created the only strategy that had any chance of producing victory: break the Northern people’s support for the war with a relentless series of quick offensive blows that would force Union leaders to negotiate a peace favorable to the Confederacy. In this purpose, Lee ultimately failed, but when he judged that the time for surrender had finally come, Lee revealed another dimension of the qualities that made him the indispensable man. The force of his character helped ensure that the Confederates, having laid down their arms, did not take them up again for the kind of endless guerrilla struggle into which so many of history’s civil wars inexorably degenerate.

  HENRY LEE III left the practice of law at the outbreak of the American Revolution, was elected captain of a unit of Virginia dragoons, promoted to major in Washington’s Continental Army, and earned renown as commander of Lee’s Legion, a mixed cavalry-infantry unit, made up of highly mobile light troops, capable of guerrilla warfare as well as the most disciplined mobile warfare. “Light-Horse Harry” Lee—as he came to be called—emerged from the American Revolution as one of its most universally admired military figures, a hero given a gold medal by the Continental Congress, who went on to serve as governor of Virginia and US representative from the state’s 19th district. This was the glorious and gloried father of Robert Edward Lee.

  By the time Robert came into the world in 1807, the Lees’ corner of that world was in steep decline. Light-Horse Harry’s plantation house, Stratford Hall, in Westmoreland, was no longer a magnificent showplace, and the house, the surrounding plantation, and the Lee slaves were in hock to myriad creditors. Nothing, it seemed, could stem the outflow of cash. In 1810, the hero of the Revolution was bundled off to debtors’ prison for a full year, and the rest of the family left Stratford for humbler quarters in Alexandria. When it looked as if circumstances could not possibly get worse, they did. On July 27, 1812, Baltimore newspaper editor Alexander Contee Hanson, a vigorous opponent of the War of 1812,
was set upon by an angry mob. His friend Light-Horse Harry sprang to the rescue, waded into the melee, and was gravely injured. He tried to recover in the bosom of his family, but could not, and so, in 1813, set sail for the West Indies, where he lived apart from his wife and children until 1818. In that year, he embarked for home, but died, aged sixty-two, on Cumberland Island, Georgia, before he could reach Virginia.

  The absence of husband and father had left the family even worse off financially than it had been, and Light-Horse Harry’s death meant that they were quite frankly poor. It fell to Robert to look after his ailing, aging mother. But if he was at all resentful, he never let on. With his bankrupt father gone, first to the West Indies and then to the grave, young Robert filled the void with the legend. Light-Horse Harry became in his imagination the ideal Virginian, and Virginia became Robert’s nation.

  Robert E. Lee grew determined both to live up to his father’s legend and to redeem the man’s living memory. He secured nomination to the US Military Academy at West Point in 1825 and, over the next four years, made himself an academy legend. By the end of his plebe year, he was a cadet sergeant, an achievement literally unheard of at the time. By graduation, he stood second in his class but—and of this he was proudest—he had managed to earn not a single demerit in four years. He was an officer without blemish.

  The best cadets were always routed into the Corps of Engineers, not only the most demanding army branch but, in an era when the mission of the United States Army was mainly to defend against invasion by sea, arguably the most important. The engineers designed and built seacoast forts, and Lee was assigned to oversee the laying of the foundation of Fort Pulaski on Cockspur Island, Georgia, and to work on Fort Calhoun and Fort Monroe—the “Gibraltar of the Chesapeake.” While assigned to Fort Monroe, he began his courtship of Mary Anna Randolph Custis, daughter of George Washington Parke Custis, Martha Custis Washington’s son, whom George Washington had adopted. They wed in 1831, a marriage of Virginia royalty.

  Lee was a truly promising young officer. But there were any number of promising young officers in the American military, who generally struggled financially when there were no wars to fight. West Point graduates of Lee’s vintage typically served for a time before resigning their commissions in order to pursue some more profitable civilian enterprise. For the army at peace could offer very little. Lee was an exception. As an engineer in a time of national expansion, he had much to do. He directed the survey of the Ohio-Michigan state line, and he drew up a successful plan to arrest the Mississippi River’s movement away from the St. Louis levees. By this, he saved the river economy on which the city depended. He went on to other major civil engineering projects, which earned him acclaim and revealed a genius for strategic thinking. It was in 1842, while serving as post engineer at Fort Hamilton, in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, that Captain Lee met Lieutenant Thomas J. Jackson, who, as Stonewall Jackson, was destined to become Lee’s “right arm” in the victory that has been called his military masterpiece, the Battle of Chancellorsville (April 30-May 6, 1863).

  Lee could justifiably take great satisfaction in his achievements as an engineer, but, with a heart and mind always dedicated to his father, he longed for glorious combat. Opportunity approached in the spring of 1846 when Major General Winfield Scott named him to his staff during the US-Mexican War (1846–1848). As part of the most ambitious military campaign the US Army had ever attempted up to this point in its history, Lee’s staff service was no cushy rear-echelon job. As an engineer officer, he led topographical reconnaissance in advance of Scott’s army as it invaded Mexico, bound for Mexico City following an amphibious assault (the first in US Army history) on Veracruz. Lee’s mission was to determine the most advantageous routes of inland march and attack, as well as the best schemes for positioning artillery and field fortifications. There were no accurate maps to work from; therefore, there was no substitute for endless riding far in advance of the main columns. The hazard was extreme. Lee embraced it, and throughout the long march from Veracruz to the Mexican capital, it was Robert E. Lee who essentially commanded—and often personally carried out—the most important reconnaissance missions. At Cerro Gordo (April 18, 1847) and Chapultepec (September 12–13, 1847), his battle intelligence enabled Scott to plot overwhelmingly effective flanking attacks executed through terrain so rugged that the Mexican commanders had left them undefended on the assumption that no army could negotiate such ground.

  For gallantry, Lee was breveted to the rank of major after Cerro Gordo. He fought at Contreras (August 19–20, 1847) and Churubusco (August 20, 1847) after this and received a brevet to lieutenant colonel. Wounded—though not seriously—at Chapultepec (September 12–13, 1847) in the assault on Mexico City, Lee was brevetted to colonel. It brought as well high praise from fellow Virginian Winfield Scott, who called Lee the “very best soldier I ever saw in the field.” When the Civil War erupted, Scott, as general-in-chief-of the US Army, tapped Lee to assume field command of Union forces. Lee not only turned him down, but resigned his commission, writing to General Scott on April 20, 1861, of his indebtedness to him for “uniform kindness & consideration” and promising to “carry with me to the grave the most grateful recollections of your kind consideration, & your name & fame,” but expressing his own desire “never … again to draw my sword … [s]ave in the defence of my native State.”

  The US-Mexican War gave Lee and a generation of American military officers their first experience of battle against a large opposing army. Lee took more away from the experience than most. He honed an already acute sense of how “the ground”—landscape, topography—shapes battle. This was essential to his tactical genius. He also repeatedly saw that frontal attacks, when victoriously executed, could be overwhelmingly effective. Perhaps he called upon the memory of such attacks when he proposed a frontal infantry assault over nearly a mile of open fields against well-defended Union positions on Cemetery Ridge on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg (July 3, 1863). “Pickett’s Charge” would prove catastrophic for the Army of Northern Virginia and, ultimately, the Confederacy.

  It is also likely that an extended experience of war during 1846–1848 made the peacetime army unappealing to Lee. He accepted appointment as superintendent of West Point in 1852 and performed brilliantly in the job, but jumped at the opportunity that President Franklin Pierce’s secretary of war, future Confederate president Jefferson Davis, gave him in 1855 to serve as second in command of the 2nd US Cavalry Regiment in Apache and Comanche territory in Texas. His commanding officer was regimental Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, who would become one of the early generals of the Provisional Confederate army.

  At between 8,000 and 16,000 officers and men, the pre-Civil War US Army was an intimate band of brothers, and when Lee experienced a family emergency—the death in 1857 of his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis—he was readily granted leave to sort out a complex will and an estate encumbered by massive debts. At this time, Lee contemplated resigning his commission to try to save the estate, Arlington, and care for his wife, who was suffering from severe arthritis. But he could never quite bring himself to leave the army. Then, on October 16, 1859, radical abolitionist John Brown raided the federal arsenal and armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (today West Virginia), taking about sixty townspeople hostage, among them the great-grandnephew of George Washington. Lee was assigned to lead an ad hoc assemblage of Maryland and Virginia militiamen and a Washington-based detachment of US Marines to recover the armory and arsenal and to rescue the hostages. Lee carried out his mission successfully (see Chapter 19) and thus played a role in an incident often seen as a prelude to the Civil War. He himself saw it only as the “attempt of a fanatic or madman” to set off a slave rebellion. But the nation rolled on toward dissolution. On February 1, 1861, shortly after Texas seceded from the Union, Brevet Major General David E. Twiggs, commanding officer of the Department of Texas, summarily surrendered his entire US Army command to Confederate authorities,
resigned his commission, and accepted a commission as a general officer in the Confederate army. Now Lee paid attention. He immediately left Arlington for Washington. There he was promoted to full colonel in the regular army and assigned to command the 1st Cavalry on March 28, 1861.

  That promotion had come at the urging of Winfield Scott, who also advised President Lincoln of his intention to give Lee the top field command of US Army forces. When Lee turned him down, Scott was both appalled and astonished. He had heard from others that Lee scorned the very idea of secession and thought the notion of a “Confederacy” ludicrous. It is unclear whether Scott knew that Lee had declared that he would “never bear arms against the Union” while simultaneously speculating that it might become “necessary for me to carry a musket in the defense of my native state, Virginia, in which case I shall not prove recreant to my duty.” Yet Scott subsequently learned that Lee, after turning down his offer of command of Union forces in the field, had also deliberately ignored the offer of a commission in the Confederate army. Accordingly, Scott made a final, desperate attempt to give Lee command in the North. That offer prompted Lee’s resignation, to which Scott responded that it was the “greatest mistake of [Lee’s] life.”

  Three days after resigning his US Army commission, Lee accepted, on April 23, command of Virginia state militia forces. A short time later, he was transferred to the Provisional Army of the Confederate States as one of its first five full generals. But his maiden battle, in western Virginia (West Virginia today) was hardly impressive. His subordinates, who were state militia officers, were resistant to his authority, and the people of Virginia’s western counties, who never wanted secession in the first place, were openly hostile. Nevertheless, on September 11, 1861, Lee decided to attack the Union position at Cheat Mountain, which looked down on an important turnpike as well as several mountain passes. Intelligence gathered from Union prisoners revealed that four thousand Union soldiers held the mountain, substantially outnumbering Lee’s own force. The Confederate commander hesitated to attack, quite unaware that the mountain top was actually occupied by no more than 300 Union troops. His delay having lost him the advantage of surprise, Lee skirmished indecisively and then withdrew. He was denounced by the Southern press as “Evacuating Lee” and, even worse, “Granny Lee.” Bumped from field command, he was assigned to organize the coastal defenses in the Carolinas and Georgia before President Jefferson Davis named him his personal military advisor. Davis acknowledged that Lee was unpopular with the press, but he shared the opinion of Lee’s fellow officers that Lee had the makings of a great commander. Accordingly, when Joseph E. Johnston was badly wounded at the Battle of Seven Pines on June 1, 1862, Davis replaced Johnston with Lee as commanding officer of the Army of Northern Virginia.