Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation Read online

  When General Lee joined the president and the gentlemen of the cabinet in the room at the top of the high, winding staircase, his forming plan for meeting the Confederacy’s crisis was in unspoken opposition to the president’s existing policy. Lee’s purpose was to break the stalemate that Davis sought means of continuing. In resolving the undeclared conflict between their views, Lee and Davis reached an ultimate in compromise, which determined the nature of the campaign that ended at Gettysburg.

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  Lee was grave during the conference. War clerk Jones noted in his diary that the general looked “a little pale.” The six cabinet members, none of whom had had any military experience, said little. They did not need special training to recognize that Davis’s policy of passive defense was losing their independence. But these worried men were not accustomed to the president’s seeking their advice in military affairs, and doubtless they were confused by all the details of their emergency as presented by Davis.

  The problem was fundamentally this: how to send reinforcements to Vicksburg without exposing other major objectives of the enemy? These were the arms-producing center of Richmond—the Ruhr of the Confederacy—and Chattanooga at the gateway to Atlanta, the railroad and supply center in the heart of the lower South. The fundamental problem was beclouded by the variety of the enemy’s minor threats that unsettled Davis’s system of fixed dispersal. He had already scattered available forces so widely, reducing Lee’s army to do so, that not even a brigade was left to be moved to newly threatened areas.

  The enemy was threatening the interior of North Carolina from the inland waterways of the coast, threatening south-eastern Virginia from occupied bases in the Norfolk area, and perennially threatening the port of Charleston. Davis had managed to spread detached units in all those sectors, but now the multiplying forces of the enemy were threatening Richmond from the Union-held Fortress Monroe to the east, and “armies” were converging on the fertile Shenandoah Valley from the north and west. Cavalry raiders had recently ranged through Virginia, between Richmond and Lee’s army, stealing horses and tearing up railroad tracks, and more of the same could be expected. Davis’s usual methods of meeting such threats offered no solution to the situation.

  Not a man or a gun could be spared from the Army of Tennessee. Bragg, its inept and unpopular commander, was waiting apprehensively for the enemy’s move, and there had been speculation in the war department about the advisability of sending troops to prop him up.

  That left only Lee’s army, already depleted by the absence of two of Longstreet’s veteran divisions and Longstreet personally, and two fine brigades under experienced leaders detached in North Carolina. Cleared of all the confusing details, the problem as presented to Lee was reduced to a choice between sending his temporarily detached veterans to the relief of Vicksburg and recalling them to his army as replacements for the Chancellorsville losses. On the surface, removed from the context of the total military situation, the decision could appear to be merely a choice between Vicksburg and Richmond; many observers then and critics since have regarded the decision as that simple.

  General Lee, however, went to the inwardness of the crisis. On no other occasion as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia did he conceive so largely the totality of the South’s armed struggle for independence.

  The apparent choice was, in his concept, no choice at all. Additional men sent to Vicksburg, where a poor command situation divided troops and authority, were by no means certain to lift the siege. But it was certain that Lee, with the reduced numbers left him, could do no more than retreat to the works around Richmond and subject his mobile army to a static defense. At best, the Confederacy would have two key cities under siege instead of one. At worst, Vicksburg would be lost anyway, while Lee’s skillful veterans would lose that maneuverability without which no hope of striking a decisive counterblow existed.

  Lee’s actual choice, then, lay between striking for a decision while his army still retained the physical potential for an offensive and assuming a passive defense that doomed all Confederate forces by time and attrition. By the logic of arithmetic, to which Davis seemed blinded, the ratio of strength and losses at Chancellorsville afforded a warning illustration.

  Hooker’s army of 130,000 had lost nearly 17,000 in casualties; Lee’s army of 62,500 had lost more than 13,000. At the ratio of three Confederate losses to four Federal, where the opposing strengths were one to two, four more such battles would obliterate Lee’s army while Hooker would have the number with which Lee had begun. As the opposing armies then faced each other across the Rappahannock River, Lee, after a brilliant victory, could muster something under 50,000 —a serious reduction of his army by one fifth—but Hooker’s remaining 113,000 would not have been affected by a loss of little more than ten per cent.

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  An element complicating this somber appraisal was the increasingly critical scarcity of food for men and animals. This was another problem to which Davis appeared blind, but Lee said: “The question of food for this army gives me more trouble and uneasiness than everything else combined.” The supply situation was grave under existing conditions, but if the Army of Northern Virginia became immobilized in works, the Shenandoah Valley harvest would be gleaned by the enemy and Lee’s men would be confronted with starvation.

  A final consideration was that none of the defeatist makeshifts would meet the scattered threats by which the enemy goaded the president into further dispersals of his main armies.

  It is known that General Lee pondered these factors before he went to Richmond. It is reasonably certain that, in his own mind, he had reached a simple solution to the complex problems. When he was asked, in effect, to decide between Vicksburg and Richmond, his answer was to recommend a counterinvasion of the North.

  Lee’s reasons in support of his suggestion were developed in detail after the conference, in letters to Davis and the war office, but their essentials were already in his mind when he presented his drastic measure to the meeting.

  The general offered two fundamental reasons of equal importance, one strategic and one of immediate practicality. It can never be sufficiently stressed that Lee’s practical reason for the invasion was to victual his army. He said that an invasion “relieves our country of his [the enemy’s] presence, and we subsist … on his resources” while “the absence of the army from Virginia gives our people an opportunity to collect supplies ahead.” From this viewpoint, the Gettysburg campaign can be called the largest commissary raid in the history of modern warfare, and the desperate necessity was symptomatic of the collapse of Confederate resources.

  Lee’s strategic reason illustrated more than any other single campaign the essence and the scope of his cause-and-effects concept of war—and more than any other instance its evisceration by Davis.

  Lee’s own words left no doubt about his repudiation of Davis’s policy and the presentation of his own to supplant it: “An invasion of the enemy’s country breaks up all his preconceived plans of invasion.”

  Concerning the enemy’s scattered thrusts in the area of southern Virginia and coastal North Carolina, he said: “It should never be forgotten that our concentration compells that of the enemy and … tends to relieve all other threatened localities.”

  In a final affirmative summary, he said: “It seems to me that we cannot afford to keep our troops awaiting possible movements of the enemy, but our true policy is … so to employ our own forces as to give occupation to his at points of our selection.” (Not his italics.)

  It is doubtful if the worried cabinet members appreciated this epitome of Lee’s strategy: by removing the initiative from the enemy, he would force the Federals to contract their dispersed threats in order to defend themselves. However, they did recognize that the general offered the only concrete, aggressive plan to replace the defensiveness that was permitting their country to be destroyed in detail. Probably because the plan was presented by Lee, five of the six members voted for it. Only Texas’s John Reagan, postmaster general and personally the most loyal liege of Jefferson Davis, voted against it.

  The president went with the majority, but only to the limited extent that he accepted Lee’s decision to invade as the alternative to sending troops from Lee’s army to the support of Vicksburg. His rigidified mind could not conceive of the projected invasion as a change in the existing policy, a shift from the defense to the offense. To Davis, Lee’s invasion was merely a necessary expedient in the policy of static, scattered defensiveness.

  For more than a month after the conference Lee repeated his arguments for a concentration to force the enemy’s constriction, but his urgencies made no impression on the commander in chief. Davis had not the slightest intention of reducing a single garrison to support Lee’s offensive.

  This was not revealed at the conference. Lee never expressed in words the change in over-all strategy which was implicit in his plan, but he expected Davis to perceive the necessity of giving less consideration to the scattered points in order to concentrate all possible strength in the invasion force.

  Following the conference, as his plans matured, Lee’s letters did make explicit the scope of his intention as it related to the total military situation. Writing that “the enemy contemplates nothing important” in all his menacing gestures, Lee suggested that “the best use that can be made of the troops in Carolina, and those … guarding Richmond” would be to assemble them, with other idle troops in South Carolina, in a single force in middle Virginia under Beauregard, commander at Charleston. Old Bory still had a name, and Lee said that even “an effigy of an army” under Beauregard, threatening Washington while the main army moved northward, would be worth more than small detachments rushed anxiously to all points of the enemy’s selection.

  Along with this, he suggested a similar concentration of the scattered forces in the middle Confederacy. These could swell the projected army under Beauregard to a size with which he could make a limited thrust through northwestern Virginia toward the Ohio; or these forces could join Bragg and build his strength sufficiently for him to undertake an offensive instead of waiting on the enemy’s initiative.

  These proposals were clearly designed to turn the enemy’s strategy on him. Lee had proved before that seizure of the initiative caused the enemy to contract and, even under the extreme restrictions imposed on him, he was to prove it again. But he never really reached his commander in chief.

  At the Richmond conference Lee did not suspect that he and Davis were talking about quite different things. Of all the “ifs” that have been raised about Gettysburg, the one never asked was this: would Lee have launched the invasion if he had known on May 16 that the president would restrict its scope and go so far in retaining his own policy that Lee would be denied even the full strength of the army he had built?

  Lee discovered it slowly, as he became increasingly committed to the invasion. But the opening phase of the Battle of Gettysburg had been fought and lost in a house on Eleventh and Clay streets in Richmond before one soldier moved northward from the Rappahannock River.

  What has been called “the high tide of the Confederacy,” and what Lee designed as a total stroke from a concentration of its armed strength, was reduced to a desperate, unsupported gamble of one man with one army—and not all of that.

  “We Must All Do More Than Formerly”

  ONE other man who was not at Gettysburg contributed even more to the nature of the campaign than the Confederate president. This was Lieutenant General Thomas J. Jackson. As his death hung like a pall over the South, so his absence hung like a shadow over the army that he had done more than any other person except Lee to build into its mobility and striking power. These qualities, along with the men’s ability to endure long on short rations, were the fundamental characteristics of Lee’s army at its peak. It is probable that the Army of Northern Virginia would not have been formed in that precise character without Stonewall Jackson.

  Between Lee, the Tidewater aristocrat, and Jackson, of mountaineer yeoman people, there existed a personal affection and a curious affinity in the making of war. Like collaborators, they were perfectly met. Their concepts of warfare were identical, and each was wholly committed to the conviction that independence would be won only by taking the war to the enemy. To be withheld passively on the defense, allowing the enemy the initiative, was maddening to Jackson, and in audacity Lee could suggest nothing too bold for Old Jack to attempt. Because of their intuitive argeement on war policy and battle strategy, in tactics Jackson operated like an army of Lee’s brain.

  Of him Lee said: “I had such implicit confidence in Jackson’s skill and energy that I never troubled myself to give him detailed instructions. The most general suggestions were all that he needed.” Lee could have added that the most general suggestions were all that he wanted. In Jackson’s two greatest offensive achievements, Second Manassas and Chancellorsville, he acted in semi-independent command, where he was out of contact with general headquarters and completely responsible for his own part of the battle.

  These characteristics of the man who was not at Gettysburg exerted a profound effect on General Lee through habits Lee had formed during his operations with Stonewall Jackson.

  From the moment Lee learned of his loss, he recognized that the army could not function in the organization that had evolved out of the collaboration. When Lee had inherited a year earlier the hodgepodge of forces which he built into the Army of Northern Virginia, he had followed no regular charts of organization. Adapting to his material, he had formed two very large corps of four divisions each. To slow-moving and tenacious Longstreet was allotted the orthodox work, largely under Lee’s eye, while Jackson’s Second Corps took the risks and did the marching. “Jackson’s Foot Cavalry,” the men called themselves. Without Old Jack, this arrangement was no longer possible.

  Saying that “I know not how to replace him,” Lee did not try. He reorganized the army into three corps, hoping that two men would prove adequate where Jackson had excelled. He said: “We must all do more than formerly.”

  Mechanically his reorganization to compensate for Jackson’s loss was sound in design. However, it was untried in battle, and, because of Davis’s exercise of his prerogatives as supreme commander, details in the new army were not as Lee designed them.

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  Lee’s purpose in reshaping the army was to maintain what he called a “proper concert of action” between his proved units. As his infantry contained roughly 60,000 troops, he formed three corps of approximately 20,000 each. Longstreet retained the First Corps, minus the division of Richard H. Anderson. Richard S. Ewell, formerly Jackson’s dependable division commander and recently returned to the army after having a leg amputated, was promoted to lieutenant general and given the old Second Corps, minus the six-brigade division of A. P. Hill. Powell Hill, the most highly regarded division commander in the army, was promoted to lieutenant general and given command of a newly created Third Corps. This was to be composed of Anderson’s division, a division of four brigades from Hill’s famous “Light Division,” and a new division to be formed of two brigades from Hill’s old division plus two other brigades. To fill the complement of Hill’s new division, Lee expected the return of his two veteran brigades, under proved leaders, then detached in North Carolina.

  In this new organization, which was to be tested in an invasion, Lee counted on an all-veteran personnel accustomed to his habits of command and adapted to the peculiar demands of the Army of Northern Virginia. Rightly though not officially called “Lee’s army,” this most personal of all armies was a reflection of Lee’s character, particularly in its relation to the Southern character.

  The region from which the soldiers came was a limited, restricted world that demanded conformity to its concept of gallantry. Although real enough, the life resembled a drama in its preconceived pattern, its conscious design, and its ritualized forms for the actors. And, just as the stage imposes physical limitations, this environment imposed limitations on the range of thought, of decisions, and of action.

  As a part of its self-concept as a region of the aristocratic republic, the South naturally produced a concept of its individual model, a prototype of its perfected citizen. This ideal embodied not only the best traits that the society had produced according to its nature, but a distillation of the best that it aspired to, that it fancied itself as possessing, and that it attributed to itself from its past legends.

  At bottom, there was an inviolability of personal dignity. As in religions, many subscribers to the Southern ideal were more perfect in the forms than in the substance. It was a sorry kind of man who, however far short he fell of the model, would not stand on his personal rights and frequently assert them violently.

  Because of this element, discipline in the army was a fantastic problem, especially complicated where officers, in exercising their duties as soldiers, must conform to the mores of the society. Frequently privates were socially superior to their officers, and the consequences in a caste society were awkward. Privates who were social equals of their military superiors thought nothing of challenging them to duels, and the Confederacy was probably the only country in the world where generals would meet enlisted men at grand affairs-and call them “Mister” too. Only the officers of the rank of colonel or below had been elected, but the men had the feeling that they had chosen all their officers.

  Where the relationship of officers to their men was that of members of a club who had been elected to office, and no effective machinery of an established nation controlled the individuals, the good officers commanded by moral force and the confidence they inspired through demonstrated capacities for leadership. The reason the Army of Northern Virginia became the best fighting force in the South was that its leader personified the ideal individual concept of the Southern people. As in the concept of the region’s exemplar there was inherent the image of the Hero, Lee embodied the image of the patriarchal planter who, as military leader, assumed benevolent responsibility for his domain.