America Aflame (42 page)

The Confederate assault at Seven Pines might have had greater success had not the mud and swollen rivers upset plans for a coordinated attack. Private Freeman and his colleagues had to wade through seventeen hundred yards of muck to reach Union defenders protected by log breastworks and artillery. Two bullets struck his right leg and he fell into the mire, where he stuck until hoisted out by retreating comrades. Union forces blunted the Confederate assault, but McClellan's advance was checked. Freeman's brigade of two thousand men suffered 50 percent casualties. Overall, the Confederates lost six thousand men at Seven Pines, the Union, five thousand men.
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Joseph Johnston received a severe wound at Seven Pines, and President Davis turned over the Army of Northern Virginia to his military adviser, Robert E. Lee. McClellan's troops prepared for an all-out assault on the Confederate capital, confident that the new Rebel commander was “
too
cautious and weak under grave responsibility—personally brave and energetic … yet … wanting in moral firmness when pressed by heavy responsibility and … likely to be timid and irresolute in action.” McClellan painted a more accurate portrait of himself than of his opponent.
12

Robert E. Lee kept three books on his writing desk: his Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and
Meditations
by the Stoic Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. He had marked these lines from the Stoic: “Erase fancy, curb impulse, quench desire, let sovereign reason have the mastery.” Compensating for his profligate father, the tarnished Revolutionary War hero Light Horse Harry Lee, the son valued order and duty. A brilliant engineer who had blazed Winfield Scott's path to Mexico City in the Mexican War, he had opposed secession, yet turned down command of Union forces for a lesser role in the new Confederate States of America. His fealty to his native state of Virginia superseded his loyalty to the Union.
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Lee cited duty to both state and family as the main reasons for his decision. Yet other members of the Lee family, citing those same responsibilities, sided with the Union. Lee was not a tragic figure any more than the Confederacy was a tragic attempt at sovereignty. Tragedy requires unmerited suffering. What we have in Robert E. Lee, and in the Confederacy, was a series of bad decisions, some startlingly impulsive, given Lee's embrace of reason, that led to predictable but not tragic destruction. We also have in Lee a bold, sometimes brilliant commander who seemed at once to relish and abhor combat and its consequences. His exterior reserve masked a gambler's soul. In the end, Lee would prove an enigma. The poet Stephen Vincent Benét captured him well:

A figure lost to flesh and blood and bones,

Frozen into a legend out of life,

A blank-verse statue—…

For here was someone who lived all his life

In the most fierce and open light of the sun …

And kept his heart a secret to the end

From all the picklocks of biographers.
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The secession crisis found Lee in Texas. He wept when the Texas convention voted to leave the Union. He vowed to protect federal property from Lone Star partisans. Like Lincoln, Lee believed that secession invited “anarchy.” Though he had little use for the Lincoln administration, he hoped Virginia would remain in the Union. When he left Texas for his native state, an officer called out to him, “Colonel, do you intend to go South or remain North?” Lee's reply reflected his internal conflict: “I shall never bear arms against the United States—but it may be necessary for me to carry a musket in defence of my native State, Virginia.” After he arrived in the Old Dominion, Lee's confusion continued: “While I wish to do what is right, I am unwilling to do what is not, either at the bidding of the South or the North.”
15

Stopping off in Washington, Lee accepted President Lincoln's promotion to the rank of full colonel of the 1st Regiment of Cavalry. When the president inquired after Lee's loyalty, fellow Virginian General Winfield Scott replied, “He is true as steel, sir, true as steel!” Lincoln would offer Lee command of the Union army.
16

The firing on Fort Sumter and Lincoln's troop call-up pushed Lee to a decision. In an emotional interview with Scott, Lee offered to sit out the conflict, which the older soldier dismissed outright. Lee then stated his intention to resign, to which Scott replied, “Lee, you have made the greatest mistake of your life.” The two men grasped hands tightly, both “too full of feeling to find utterance for one word.” The interview was over, and so was Colonel Lee's career in the U.S. Army. After the war, Lee claimed the situation presented him with no option but to go with Virginia. Yet roughly 40 percent of the Virginia-born officers in the Union army, including Scott, remained with the Federals. For these soldiers, their oath of allegiance to their country took precedence over their place of birth.
17

Lee was never flamboyant or ostentatious, and rarely eloquent. His strength as a leader was his being. Sam Watkins recalled Lee's visit to his camp early in the war, likening the general to “some good boy's grandpa.” Lee had “a calm and collected air about him, his voice was kind and tender, and his eye was as gentle as a dove's.” Without so much as a gesture or a word, he possessed a “soothing magnetism” that “drew every one to him and made them love, respect, and honor him.” Watkins confessed, “I fell in love with the old gentleman and felt like going home with him.”
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Lee did not distinguish himself in his early campaigns in western Virginia and along the South Atlantic coast, though, like most generals, he blamed some of his difficulties on the lack of adequate troop strength. He immediately saw the Confederacy's great tactical problem: the number of troops necessary to defend Richmond from every direction would soon reduce the South to the perimeter around the capital. The remainder of the troops would be too widely dispersed to withstand Union assaults elsewhere. While Lee understood the basic defensive posture of the Confederacy, he counseled a more aggressive strategy that could relieve the mass of troops in Virginia for important service elsewhere: “We must decide between the positive loss of inactivity and the risk of action.”
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Lee found a ready disciple in Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson who had launched a merry escapade in the Valley of Virginia—seventeen thousand Confederate troops toying with three federal armies totaling sixty-four thousand men. Jackson's mission in the spring of 1862: keep the federal forces occupied and prevent them from reinforcing McClellan's large Union army bearing down on Richmond to the east. The sickly, nearsighted, partially deaf math professor from the Virginia Military Institute found his calling in combat. He delighted in playing tag with assorted Union forces that could never quite catch up to him. Jackson carried on an incessant dialogue with God, not unusual among nineteenth-century evangelicals, except that God always answered back. Before a battle, Jackson paced his tent engaging his Mentor. He had lost nearly everyone he had loved in his life; God was, literally, all he had left. The depth of his penetrating pale blue eyes seemed to envelop at once an overwhelming sadness and a steadfast purpose. In appearance and background, he was the opposite of Lee. In his generalship, he was equally brilliant.

Believing he acted as God's sword, Jackson pressed his troops to uncommon exertions on long, fast marches and lightning strikes against the enemy, impervious to weather, terrain, or exhaustion. Between May 8 and June 9, Jackson and his foot cavalry raced four hundred miles up and down the Valley of Virginia, using the Massanutten mountain range as a shield and darting through the gaps to surprise Union forces, capturing huge supplies of arms and ammunition and enemy soldiers equal to the size of his army. Moving northward through the valley, Jackson gave the impression that Washington, D.C., was his ultimate goal. This false reading pinned down sixty thousand federal troops in the valley and prevented Lincoln from reinforcing the anxious McClellan. Jackson's quick strikes and withdrawals exhausted his troops, but they respected him. No long waits and brief skirmishes with Jackson; no futile charges in front of withering fire. Just hurtle forward, fall back, and then press on again. He exulted to fellow officers after a victory, “He who does not see the hand of God in this is blind, sir, blind!”
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Jackson, with God's help, drove the Federals crazy, inflicting seven thousand casualties while suffering less than half that number. “God has been our shield, and to His name be all the glory,” he declared, as he prepared to depart from the valley and bring his “army of the living God” to Richmond. There he would join with Lee, to put an end to McClellan's campaign.
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Lee's initial move was to send his dashing cavalry commander, twenty-nine-year-old James Ewell Brown (J. E. B.) Stuart, and his twelve hundred Confederate cavalrymen on a ride around McClellan's army. Stuart disrupted communications and supplies, took prisoners, and eluded inept attempts by Union cavalry to chase them down. He lost all of one man in the escapade. The bold raid also gave Lee the intelligence that the Union's right flank was “in the air,” that is, not anchored by a strong feature of terrain such as a hill or river, nor curled back in the form of a defensive perimeter. Lee ordered Jackson back from the valley while he engaged McClellan in a minor contest on June 25, beginning what became known as the Seven Days' Battles. With Jackson in place on the twenty-sixth, Lee launched an uncoordinated and largely ineffectual attack. Jackson was uncharacteristically lethargic, and Lee exercised little command over his troop movements. Whatever McClellan's personal shortcomings, his expert training was evident in the stiff resistance his men put up throughout the Seven Days. Lee mounted another assault on the twenty-seventh that broke one Union line, but again the lack of coordination produced little strategic advantage.

McClellan had seen enough. Already spooked by Stuart's dramatic ride and Lee's persistent if mostly ineffectual attacks, he concluded that he faced a larger and more formidable force than even his initial inflated estimates assumed. He began to withdraw down the peninsula, what one Rebel soldier called “the great skedaddle.” McClellan fired off an angry telegram to President Lincoln: “I have lost this battle because my force was too small.”
22

Lee continued to harass McClellan, who successfully parried these attacks in a series of minor encounters over the next three days. Growing impatient, Lee decided on an all-out assault to destroy McClellan's army on July 1. Union forces, however, occupied a strong defensive position on Malvern Hill and repulsed the attack, allowing McClellan to continue his withdrawal in relative peace.

So many things had gone wrong for Lee—poor intelligence, faulty maps, uncoordinated movements, and sluggish generals—that he viewed the Seven Days as a singularly frustrating episode. “Under ordinary circumstances,” he told President Davis, “the Federal army should have been destroyed.” The threat to Richmond was over, though at a frightful toll. Twenty thousand Confederates lay dead or wounded, nearly one fourth of Lee's army, sixteen thousand on the Union side. The Shiloh war had come east. Northern journalist Frederick Law Olmsted, horrified at the sight of battlefield dead, pronounced it a “republic of suffering.” The battles were among the earliest demonstrations of the effectiveness of rifled muskets in the hands of well-trained defenders. Lee's aggressive tactics had saved Richmond, but many more such successes would leave him without an army. Still, McClellan's retreat gave southerners their first opportunity to exhale in many months, especially after the bad news from the West. The boost to morale was much needed. Lee proposed to push the advantage.
23

The news of McClellan's retreat sorely tested President Lincoln's patience. He took the unusual step of traveling to the Virginia coast to meet with his general to find out what had happened and ponder the next step in an increasingly frustrating war. McClellan was unapologetic, blaming the weather, the lack of sufficient troops (though at no time did he engage his entire force), and even Lincoln's war aims. The president brushed aside these excuses, vowing to continue the contest “until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me.” He replaced McClellan with John Pope, combined McClellan's Army of the Potomac with Pope's Army of Virginia, and ordered a new offensive against Richmond.
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Pope had enjoyed some success in the West and, unlike McClellan, was a Republican. Some Republicans attributed McClellan's reluctance to fight to his Democratic politics. His unhappiness with Lincoln was well known. Union Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs was shocked to overhear several of McClellan's officers threaten “a march on Washington to clear out those fellows.” Whether high-ranking officers ever discussed a coup, except in idle talk, is unknown, but it is clear that these were dangerous days for the administration, with increasingly hostile northern public opinion and a rank-and-file soldiery loyal to a dismissed commander.
25

McClellan maintained popularity among his men. And why not? Retreating down the peninsula he made a point of being the last federal soldier to abandon camp or cross a bridge, though he also steered well clear of the fighting. He lived his creed, citing as his first responsibility “the lives of my men.” As McClellan pictured the unfolding Peninsula Campaign in his mind's eye, it would be a relatively bloodless affair, capped by a Union victory: “I do not expect to lose many men, but to do the work mainly with artillery, and so avoid much loss of life.” Nor did he countenance vandalism of Rebel property. The pity was that his war was over, if it ever existed. A new war had exploded in early 1862, and he could not adjust.
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