Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (5 page)

What carried these particular Confederates as far as they had come also had a great deal to do with their confidence and adulation for the man who commanded them—“the idol of his soldiers & the Hope of His Country,” and the “only man living in whom they would unreservedly trust all power for the preservation of their independence,” who “combines the organizing capacity of a Marlborough, the intuition of a Turenne, the celerity of a Napoleon, and the tenacity of a Wellington.” His name was Robert E. Lee.
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  CHAPTER TWO  

M
ARLBOROUGH WAS FIFTY-FOUR
at the time of his victory over the French at Blenheim; Wellington was forty-six at Waterloo. At fifty-five, Robert Edward Lee was older than either in the summer of 1863, but the impression he made on soldiers and spectators easily rivaled the image of the great dukes. “He is six feet in height, weighs about one hundred and ninety pounds; is erect, well formed, and of imposing appearance,” wrote a Confederate journalist. He had grown a beard at the beginning of the war (a military fashion popularized by the British Army in the
Crimean War), although both that and the jet-black hair and mustache he had in 1861 quickly turned gray, and then silvered over to white. “He is exceedingly plain in his dress,” sometimes wearing “a long linen duster, which so enveloped his uniform as to make it invisible, topped off with “a wide-brimmed straw hat,” and sometimes in a “well-worn long gray jacket, a high black felt hat, and blue trousers tucked into his Wellington boots.” He wore none of the usual Confederate officer’s gold braiding on his sleeves to indicate his rank, only “three stars on his collar” and “a military cord around the crown” of the hat. “No man,” wrote a Richmond newspaper, “is superior in all that constitutes a soldier and the gentleman—no man more worthy to head our forces and lead our army.”
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This was a judgment that few people would have been inclined to make only two years before. “When Gen. Lee took command there was really very little known of him generally,” admitted
Edward Porter Alexander, who would later become one of Lee’s most talented officers. He was the fifth child of one of
George Washington’s favorite devil-may-care cavalrymen, “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, and Anne Hill Carter. Light-Horse Harry was a spendthrift and
a rake, and when he abandoned them, one step ahead of his creditors, Robert, his siblings, and his mother were thrown back on the resources of their Carter relations. He learned from that to prefer “my own kith & kin to any one elses,” and when he married, it was to one of his cousins, Mary Anna Custis.
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Lee entered West Point in 1825 and went on to graduate second in his class, without a single behavioral demerit. But any gloating was buried beneath self-discipline, a punctiliousness about paying debts, and a reserve which made him seem to
Mary Chesnut, the greatest of Confederate diary keepers, to be “so cold and quiet and grand.”
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And although the Custis marriage settled Robert Lee financially and put a permanent roof over his head in the form of the Custis mansion, Arlington, Lee stayed with the army rather than earn the reputation of a sponger. During the
Mexican War, he made an immediate and admiring impression on his commanding officer,
Winfield Scott. Lee was “the very best soldier I ever saw in the field,” Scott wrote to the secretary of war in 1857, and Scott later prophesied that Lee “is the greatest soldier now living, and if he ever gets the opportunity, he will prove himself the greatest captain of history.”
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Lee never indulged much hope for the future for
slavery. “In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country,” Lee wrote in 1856. But in his mind, emancipation “will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of
Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery controversy.” And so Lee deplored slavery—and still held slaves, rented slaves, and on one occasion whipped them. As the Union began to tear itself apart over slavery in the winter of 1860–61, Lee felt a similar ambivalence. His long service in the army, and in so many different locales, made it obvious to him that the American republic “contained no North, no South, no East no west, but embraced the broad Union, in all its might and strength, present and future.” But when Virginia finally made up its mind to join the Confederacy in April 1861, Lee was pulled in the other direction by the enormous debts he owed to the “kith and kin” who had kept him afloat in his youth. Lee had never owned a square inch of Virginia soil in his own name, and thought of the Lower South fire-eaters as a malignant political cancer; but Virginia’s people had been the single safety net that his mother and her children had known, and to that intervention Lee owed everything.
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Despite the pleas of Winfield Scott, and an offer of high command from Abraham Lincoln, Lee resigned from the only professional world he had ever known. He was promptly commissioned as a brigadier general of Virginia state volunteers and adopted by
Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, as his chief military adviser. But he was only too well aware of the likely consequences, both for himself and the South. Arlington was immediately
occupied by Federal troops, rendering him homeless and penniless at the same time. Nor did he have much confidence that the Confederacy could summon enough military vigor to resist the pounding the industrial North was likely to give it. “When this war began, I was opposed to it, bitterly opposed to it,” Lee remarked to his son, “and I told these people that, unless every man should do whole duty, they would repent it.” But even if they did that duty, the odds remained long ones. If there was any chance for victory, it would come through invading the North and so demoralizing Northern public opinion that “a revolution among their people” would force the Lincoln government to give up.
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But in 1861, invading the North was not the strategy preferred by Southerners who wanted to portray the Confederacy as the injured party in this war. Confederate troops instead stood inertly on the defensive in both the West, in Tennessee, and in the East, in northern Virginia, and field command of the Confederate troops in Virginia went instead to an old friend of Lee’s from West Point,
Joseph E. Johnston, who likewise preferred to wait, defensively, for the Federal forces to act. When they did, Johnston merely fell back farther, ignoring Lee’s advice “to turn against Washington” and attack “with his whole force.” As a Federal invasion finally did appear, and crept closer to the Confederate capital at Richmond in the spring of 1862, Johnston was severely wounded at the
battle of Seven Pines, and into his place Jefferson Davis thrust Lee.
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From that moment, people saw another man, the aggressive, temperamental, almost reckless Lee, the long repressed son of Light-Horse Harry. Just after Lee’s appointment to field command, Porter Alexander remembered being brought up short by a colleague for wondering if Lee had the aggressiveness needed to drive back the Federal invaders. “Alexander,” he was told, “if there is one man in either army, Federal or Confederate, who is, head & shoulders, far above every other one in either army in audacity that man is Gen. Lee … Lee is audacity personified.” Jefferson Davis discovered the same thing—“Lee’s natural temper was combative”—and so did an English journalist who watched Lee prepare to take on the Federal hosts. “No man who, at the terrible moment, saw his flashing eyes and sternly-set lips, is ever like to forget them” or “the light of battle … flaming in his eyes.” Lee was, said John Mosby, the “most aggressive man I met in the war, and was always ready for any enterprise,” never happier than when he could cast his doubts and the scabbard away together.
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The enterprise immediately at hand was to reshape the sprawling force he inherited from Joe Johnston and use it to save the threatened Confederate capital. Johnston had already found it necessary to begin sorting the multitude
of Confederate volunteer regiments into brigades (of four or more regiments) and then divisions (of three or more brigades). Now, taking charge of an army which had grown to almost 92,000 men, Lee organized the force into two
corps d’armée
, and put these corps into the hands of the two most aggressive officers he could find, the South Carolina–born
James Longstreet and a onetime
Virginia Military Institute instructor, Thomas Jonathan Jackson, who had earned the first great nickname of the war—“Stonewall.” And he made official the name by which this army would be known until it surrendered its last banner—the
Army of Northern Virginia.
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On June 26, 1862, Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia uncoiled and struck. Over the course of one week, Lee crowded the Federal army back to the
James River in a series of deadly battles in Richmond’s outlying towns—Mechanicsville, Gaines’ Mill, Savage’s Station, Frayser’s Farm, Malvern Hill—bounded aggressively up into northern Virginia to wallop another Federal force twenty miles outside Washington, and then bolted across the Potomac into
Maryland, aimed at
Pennsylvania. This miraculous reversal of fortune was carried along by Lee’s belief that only by shifting the fighting onto Northern soil and transferring “this campaign from the banks of the James to those of the Susquehanna” could the Confederacy hope to collapse Northern public confidence to the point of demanding a negotiated peace. But Lee’s invasion plans were thwarted when a copy of his campaign orders fell into Federal hands, and he was forced to fight an outnumbered battle at Antietam Creek in September 1862. He withdrew sullenly back to Virginia. But he never stopped hoping to carry the war northward. “If I could do so, I would again cross the Potomac and invade Pennsylvania,” Lee insisted. “I believe this to be our true policy.” Not only would an invasion of Pennsylvania in 1862 have given “our people an opportunity to collect supplies” in an untouched enemy granary, but “we would have been in a few days’ march of Philadelphia, and the occupation of that city would have given us peace.”

He would have moved sooner in that direction but for two more determined Federal thrusts toward Richmond. Lee stopped them both, at Fredericksburg in December 1862, and at Chancellorsville in May 1863. But he knew that defensive victories won on Virginia’s soil would only end up wearing down Confederate resistance. “At Fredericksburg,” Lee admitted, “our people were greatly elated” but “I was much depressed. We had really accomplished nothing; we had not gained a foot of ground, and I knew the enemy could easily replace the men he had lost.” The same thing happened after Chancellorsville. “Our people were wild with delight—I, on the contrary, was more depressed than after Fredericksburg; our loss was severe, and again we had gained not an inch of ground and the enemy could not be pursued.” Sitting
on the defensive in Virginia also spelled deterioration for his army’s discipline. Northern Virginia was “so cleaned out that one can forage to no purpose now,” and as commissary officers and ordinary men in the ranks scavenged the Old Dominion’s depleted fields and pastures ever more desperately, they would gradually disintegrate into what one Alabama officer described as “little better than an armed mob.”
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But the ultimate proof of the folly of a defensive war was the death of Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville. Accidentally wounded by fire from his own corps, Jackson lingered for eight days until he died on May 10, 1863. With this awkward, blue-eyed, relentlessly devout Presbyterian from the western Virginia mountains, Lee had developed an almost intuitive rapport. His death was “a terrible loss … Such an executive officer the sun never shone on. I have but to show him my design, and I know that if it can be done it will be done.” Jackson’s death was also a warning that the attrition of war would only keep grinding up the Confederacy’s best officers and men unless the torch was made to burn on Northern soil and Northerners became disheartened enough to quit. “As far as I can judge,” Lee wrote to Confederate secretary of war
James A. Seddon, “there is nothing to be gained by this army remaining quietly on the defensive … I am aware that there is difficulty & hazard in taking the aggressive with so large an army in its front,” but a new offensive aimed at the North was “worth a trial” rather than sitting and waiting to be overwhelmed. “All our military preparations and organizations should now be pressed forward with the greatest vigor.” If so, then “next fall there will be a great change in public opinion in the North” and “the friends of peace will become so strong” that a “distinct and independent national existence” would finally be conceded to the Confederacy.
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