Never Call Retreat (16 page)

General Lee's difficulties were different. If Hooker knew that he must move promptly, General Lee at times had to wonder whether he could move at all. He and his men had already created their share of the undying Confederate legend, which told of an undernourished army made victorious by brilliant leadership and unending valor but desperately lacking the material support an army had to have; and in this legend there was, by the winter of 1863, altogether too much truth for comfort.

In the middle of February, Lee admitted that he could not take the offensive. The rivers were too deep for fording, he lacked pontoon bridges, the roads were impassable—"we have mud up to our eyes"-—and the horses and mules that pulled the army's guns and wagons were so badly run down that "the labor and exposure incident to an attack would result in their destruction and leave us destitute of the means of transportation." The • Federals were massing troops around Norfolk, possibly to move up the James toward Richmond, and Lee had to send James Longstreet and two good divisions down to the south side of the James to meet this threat. When he ordered the move he warned Longstreet that "the horses are in such a reduced state, and the country so saturated with water, that it will be almost impossible for them to drag the guns."
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Fortunately it had been possible to make the move by rail, but the warning was ominous. Ordinary cross-country movements were out of the question unless Lee could count on drier roads and stronger animals.

Stronger animals he could not get. In ordinary times the southern states got most of their horses from Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and western Virginia—precisely the areas largely held by the Federals. The army used up animals as prodigally as it used up men, and now it was becoming extremely difficult to find replacements. Within a few months an army inspector concerned with such matters would warn that Confederate sources of supply were almost exhausted and that "nothing is left us but to procure animals from the enemy's country." To make matters worse, it was impossible to get enough food for the animals the army did have. The northern part of Virginia, from Rappahannock tidewater all the way to the Shenandoah, had been stripped of everything; to get hay and grain for his livestock Lee had to send wagons seventy miles from the army, but with bad roads and weakened teams these wagons carried pitifully small loads. The army was beginning to face a problem as dire as a modern army would face if it ran out of gasoline. Lee put it bluntly to Secretary of War Seddon: if underfed horses were overworked now they would be entirely out of action by spring, when active campaigning began, and "without forage for the horses provisions for the infantry cannot be transported."

To make the difficulty more acute, it was discovered that when the Federal threat on the James River faded (as it did, before winter ended) Longstreet and his divisions had to stay down there in order to collect supplies from the unravaged land between the lower James and the Carolina border. In effect, Lee had to use a fourth of his undersized army on a food-collecting expedition in order to keep the rest of the army alive. In March he cut the army's transportation to the lowest possible limit, pointing out that this necessity arose "from the difficulty of procuring animals and forage and from the increased demand for transportation of subsistence when the army shall be removed from the vicinity of the railroads."
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It would not have been quite so bad if the railroads had been adequate, but the railroads were in deplorable shape.

There had been a shortage of rolling stock from the beginning, and most Southern railroads were lightly built, all of which meant that there was an extraordinary need for ample repair and maintenance work. But this need could not be met because most of the mechanics were in the army, and every attempt to get them out of the army was blocked by the army's need to keep every soldier it had. A quartermaster officer complained that "there is not a car, engine or machine shop in the country able to do half the work offered it for want of men and material," and by fall it was estimated that fifty locomotives were idle because they could not get new iron tires for their drive wheels. One War Department official said flatly that "the railroads are worn out," noted that the man responsible for railroad service said he could do nothing unless he got more mechanics, and added: "General Lee has fought all winter against this."
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What Lee was fighting was the War Department system of "details"—an attempt to solve industry's worst problems by detailing soldiers with mechanics' training for temporary service in shops and factories. Like every other army commander Lee opposed this bitterly, suspecting that most requests for details were politically inspired and knowing all too well that he was critically short of combat men anyway. In February this led to an exchange of letters with Secretary Seddon, who came about as close as any Confederate Secretary of War ever came to giving General Lee a rebuke.

Seddon complained that practically all of the War Department's requests for details were being turned down at Lee's headquarters. These requests, Seddon went on, "are not transmitted incautiously but are sent by me reluctantly and stintingly, and only when on large considerations of public interest the requirements of the general service, in my judgment, demand them." Would not General Lee consider this matter, give more weight to the Department's measured judgment, and permit "only strong controlling considerations of a military character" to lead to a disapproval?

General Lee would not. He remarked that when a man got a government contract "his first endeavor appears to be to get his friends out of the army to help him." Hundreds of soldiers, he said, went home on sick leave and then pulled every imaginable wire to promote a safe detail in some shop; of the thousands who had been detailed for special purposes, hardly one ever got back to the army, some regiments were almost useless as a result, and the whole thing had given Lee "the impression of waning interest on the part of the people in our cause." If the Department flatly ordered the details he would of course obey, but if he were allowed any discretion he would disapprove as long as life remained.
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Lee and the Confederacy were beginning to face a most baffling problem.

The problem came out of all-out war—by definition, a war in which complete victory is the only thing that matters. To fight so calls for maximum effort in two conflicting areas— the army needs every man it can get and so does industry, and the rival needs have to be balanced. Eighty years later, in the Second World War, the same struggle was fought in Washington, and army and industry accused each other of vast stupidity. All ended well in the 1940s because the most highly industrialized nation on earth found that it could meet both requirements; but in the 1860s one of the world's least industrialized nations could do nothing of the kind. The Confederacy could have an adequate army, or it could support its army adequately; it could not conceivably do both because it did not have the resources to do both. It could only wrangle about those details. In this winter of 1863 it was being warned about ultimate disaster but the warning did no good because the disaster was inescapable. The Confederacy had got into the sort of war it could not win.

One trouble was that it was so hard to identify the problem. In the field, brave men faced the foe; at home they wrestled with high prices and low salaries, found that butter cost $2 a pound and pantaloons $40 a pair, noted that a Negro cobbler could make more money than a member of Congress, and concluded that villainy was afoot: "all patriotism is in the army; out of it the demon avarice rages supreme."
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On April 2 Mr. Davis was called in haste to quell a riot on Richmond's Main Street, where some hundreds of people were demanding bread and were indiscriminately looting bakeries, jewelry shops, millinery stores and other places. As always, the President faced up to it. He mounted an empty dray, called on the mob to behave itself, emptied his pocket to toss what money he had with him into the crowd, and then summoned the militia, which fixed bayonets, loaded its muskets with ball cartridges, and ended the disturbance.
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The business meant nothing in particular except that the shortage of transportation was beginning to bind; this was a war in which a collapse of railroads might be as deadly as a collapse of armies.

Early in April Secretary Seddon drew Lee's attention to the need for reinforcing the western armies. Lee replied that the natural thing would be to send troops from Virginia, but railroad service being as it was this would be cumbersome and slow "and if we rely on that method we may always be too late." Should Hooker remain on the defensive, he went on, the Army of Northern Virginia could relieve the pressure on other fronts by invading Maryland: however, "this cannot be done in the present condition of the roads, nor unless I can obtain a certain amount of provisions and suitable transportation." A week later he confessed that he could reach no satisfactory conclusion in the matter. He doubted that Hooker would remain inactive much longer. When Longstreet returned, it might be possible to hold Hooker in check and clear the Federals out of the Shenandoah Valley, but "if it is decided that it will be more advantageous to reinforce General Johnston, these operations will have to be arrested." Stonewall Jackson was working hard on a plan to march all the way into Pennsylvania and cripple Northern industry by breaking up operations in the anthracite coal fields, and he had his topographical engineer prepare detailed maps of the country between the Potomac and the Susquehanna, but Lee at this time could make no elaborate plans. On April 16 he could tell Mr. Davis only that it was going to be necessary to assume the offensive by May, if possible; still, "at present we are very much scattered, and I am unable to bring the army together for want of proper subsistence and forage."
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Lee was beginning to show the strain physically. To his daughter Agnes, who had been hoping to visit him, he wrote that "the only place I am to be found is in camp, and I am so cross now that I am not worth seeing anywhere." He told Mrs. Lee that he felt "almost worn out" and feared that "I may be unable in the approaching campaign to go through the work before me," and shortly after this he wrote: "As for my health, I suppose I shall never be better. Old age and sorrow is wearing me away, and constant anxiety & labor, day and night, leaves me but little repose." Early in April his doctors warned him that he was threatened "with some malady which must be dreadful if it resembles its name but which I have forgotten." He had a hard cold and suffered from sharp pains in the chest and back, and the doctors "have been tapping me all over like an old steam boiler before condemning it."
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The wry humor with which he talked of his symptoms shows clearly that his real concern was not the state of his own health. He seemed this winter to be approaching a new concept of Confederate strategy, as if he began to feel that final victory would be won by a dogged endurance based on superior spiritual resources; and here, typically, he was thinking about the flaws in his opponent's armor. Handicapped as they were in all material things, the Confederates might yet wear the Yankees out by greater dedication to the cause. On April, 19 General Lee explored this thought in a letter to Mrs. Lee:

"I do not think our enemies are so confident of success as they used to be. If we can baffle them in their various designs this year & our people are true to their cause & not so devoted to themselves & their own aggrandisement, I think our success will be certain. We will have to suffer & must suffer to the end. But it will all come right. This year I hope will establish our supplies on a firmer basis. On every other point we are strong. If successful this year, next fall there will be a great change in public opinion at the north. The Republicans will be destroyed. I think the friends of peace will become so strong that the next administration will go in on that basis. We have only therefore to resist manfully."
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4. A Bridge for the Moderates

AMONG THE MOST prominent friends of peace in the North was Congressman Clement Laird Vallandigham of Ohio. He was a Democrat and a lame duck, having been gerrymandered into defeat in the 1862 election, but he would remain a member of Congress to the end of the present session and he planned to run later in the year for governor of Ohio. He was going to run on a peace platform, and on January 14 he arose in the House of Representatives to demand that the war be stopped.

He was not, he hastened to emphasize, a disunionist. On the contrary he devoutly wanted the Union restored, and his big objection to the war (one of his big objections, at least) was that the way it was being fought made reunion impossible. He believed that the sections would return to fraternal embrace once the shooting stopped, and he wanted the war ended so that this could happen.

Vallandigham subjected the past to rigid analysis and took the future on faith. He was smooth, persuasive, an uncommonly able orator, offering a politician's mixture of principle and self-interest whose proportions no one could quite make out; he was speaking today partly as an old-fashioned Democrat trying to bedevil the Republicans, partly as a gubernatorial candidate exploiting a useful issue, and partly too as a spokesman for genuine resentments, fears, and ideals. He pointed out that he had never supported the war and he thanked God that "not so much as one drop of its blood is upon my garments."

On the record, he held, the Northern war effort had been a failure. The rebellion was still going on, the Union was not yet restored, and the Constitution was dishonored. The

South not only was unconquered: it never could be conquered. War for the Union had been abandoned, and it had been replaced by "war for the Negro." which was proving a bloody failure. Vallandigham had a solution:

"Stop fighting. Make an armistice—no formal treaty. Withdraw your army from the seceded states. Reduce both armies--to a fair and sufficient peace establishment. Declare abso]ute free trade between North and South. Buy and sell, Recall your fleets. Break up your blockade. Reduce your navy. Restore travel. Open up railroads."Re-establish the telegraph. Reunite
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express companies. No more monitors and ironclads, but set your friendly steamers and steamships once again in motion. Visit the North and West. Visit the South. Exchange newspapers. Migrate. Intermarry. Let slavery alone. Hold elections at the appointed times. Let us choose a new President in sixty-four.