Early in the war Lee had hastily organized a defensive force of militia troops in Richmond, helped to initiate a Confederate naval force, protected Norfolk, and helped to reinforce Manassas, Harpers Ferry, and Fredericksburg. By midsummer about forty thousand Confederate troops were in Virginia’s fields. Arms, ammunition, cannon, powder, and other supplies had been furnished for $3.8 million, all in about eight weeks. Six days later, at First Manassas, Lee wrote his wife, Mary, about the battle: “That indeed was a glorious victory and has lightened the pressure on our front amazingly. Do not grieve for the brave dead. Sorrow for those they left behind—friends, relatives, and families.” 6
On July 28 Lee departed for western Virginia to coordinate operations and ensure that commanders were working well together in that mountainous region. It was a bland assignment, and on August 4 he wrote Mary from Huntersville. After mentioning that he had traveled on the same road in 1840, he commented that “if any one had then told me that the next time I traveled that road I would have been on my present errand, I should have supposed him insane.” 7
A few days later, on August 6, the Memphis Daily Appeal described the overseer of western Virginia: “His life, since he assumed the chief command of the Virginia forces, has been a model of soldierly patience and energy and watchfulness. Six o’clock in the morning has seen him regularly enter his office, which, with rare exceptions, he has not left, save at meal times, till eleven at night. A man of few words, of unvarying courtesy, but of a singularly cold and distant manner.” 8
This same week at Valley Mountain, young John Worsham recalled seeing the visitor for the first time. “General Robert E. Lee . . . joined us here and pitched his headquarters tent about one or two hundred yards from our company. He soon won the affection of all by his politeness and notice of the soldiers.” Articles of food and gifts delivered to Leewere “sent to some sick soldier as soon as the messenger got out of sight.” This was consistent behavior for a general already celebrated for showing compassion to his men. Considering the case of a soldier accused of being asleep on guard duty, an offense that could have seen him shot, Lee told the supervising officer, “Captain, you know the arduous duties these men have to do daily. Suppose the man who was found on his post asleep had been you, or me. What do you think should be done to him?” 9 Suffice it to say this was an uncommon generosity.
In August Leedescribed his temporary home to Mary. “The mountains are beautiful,” he wrote, “fertile to the tops, covered with the richest sward of bluegrass and white clover, and inclosed fields waving with the natural growth of timothy. The habitations are few and the people sparse. This is a magnificent grazing country.” 10 A few days later Stonewall Jackson wrote Col. Thomas Bennett, auditor of Virginia: “My hopes for our section of the state [western Virginia] have greatly brightened since General Lee has gone there. Something brilliant may be expected.” 11 But difficulties lay ahead. Federal Brig. Gen. William S. Rosecrans had a sizable force in the vicinity of Cheat Mountain, in the hills north of White Sulphur Springs, ready to attack southeastward toward the upper Shenandoah Valley. Rains were relentless, and mud was everywhere. On September 1 Lee wrote Mary, who was now at an estate called Audley, in Clarke County, Virginia: “We have a great deal of sickness among the soldiers, and now those on the sick-list would form an army. The measles is still among them. . . . The constant cold rains, with no shelter but tents . . . with impassable roads, have paralyzed our efforts.” 12
Nonetheless, Lee planned his first battle, an attack on Cheat Mountain beginning on September 11. Lee clashed with the enemy first at Conrad’s Mill, and the action proceeded up Cheat Mountain. But the Confederate objectives failed due to confused logistics and terrible weather that made the roads nearly impassable. Newspapers attached a sobriquet to Lee that he most certainly did not appreciate: “Granny Lee,” taunting his supposed timidity.
Near the end of September, he wrote Mary from a camp at Sewell’s Mountain, near Beckley: “It is raining heavily. The men are all exposed on the mountain, with the enemy opposite to us. We are without tents, and for two nights I have lain buttoned up in my overcoat. To-day my tent came up and I am in it. Yet I fear I shall not sleep for thinking of the poor men.” 13
With cold weather approaching, Lee could barely attempt another offensive movement; stalemate and disappointment were in the air. Lee settled in, got to know his men, whom he lived with closely, and grew a gray beard. Seeing an opportunity, he clashed with Federals again in early October at Sewell’s Mountain, where the enemy was now positioned. This also failed due to jealousies between Lee’s subordinate commanders, who didn’t cooperate or communicate well, and poor logistics; rain-soaked roads were occasionally impassable. “Poor Lee!” editorialized the Charleston Mercury on October 16. “Rosecrans has fooled him again . . . are the roads any worse for Lee than Rosecrans? . . . The people are getting mighty sick of this dilly-dally, dirt digging, scientific warfare; so much so that they will demand that the Great Entrencher be brought back and permitted to pay court to the ladies.” 14
Lee did in fact return to Richmond, visiting Mary at Shirley plantation for the first time since leaving her in April. “He came back, carrying the heavy weight of defeat,” wrote Jefferson Davis. “And unappreciated by the people whom he served, for they could not know, as I knew, that, if his plans and orders had been carried out, the result would have been victory rather than defeat.” 15 Davis fixed blame for the failed campaign on Lee’s subordinates because of their omnipresent bickering. In truth a Southern victory in western Virginia may have been irrelevant. Before year’s end the region’s citizens initiated a movement to break away from Virginia, becoming a separate state loyal to the Union. It was not territory worth fighting over.
On November 1 Jefferson Davis learned that a large Federal naval force was moving southward toward the South Atlantic coast, allegedly to Port Royal Sound, South Carolina. Four days later Lee was given the assignment of commanding the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Eastern Florida, a duty that would last until March 5, 1862. He was not happy with the assignment and, due to the public relations damage he had suffered during the western Virginia campaigns, neither were South Carolina authorities. After his arrival, however, opinions changed. South Carolina governor Francis Pickens wrote Jefferson Davis on November 24, saying, “I take this opportunity to say from the interviews I have had with Genl. Lee that I have a very high estimation of his science, patriotism, and enlightened judgment. I am also delighted with his high bred cultivated bearing. If he has a fault it is over caution which results from his scientific mind.” 16
In the words of Jefferson Davis, Lee arrived in Charleston and “his vigorous mind at once comprehended the situation . . . directing fortifications to be constructed on the Stono and the Edisto and the Combahee, he fixed his headquarters at Coosawhatchee, the point most threatened, and directed defenses to be erected opposite Hilton Head.” 17 Ten days later Lee and his staff witnessed the great fire in Charleston, when much of the city accidentally burned.
For Robert E. Lee Christmas 1861 would be spent away from his family, this time in Coosawhatchie. He wrote to Mary:
I cannot let this day of grateful rejoicing pass without some communion with you. As to our old home [Arlington], if not destroyed it will be difficult ever to be recognized. Even if the enemy had wished to preserve it, it would almost have been impossible. With the number of troops encamped around it, the change of officers, the want of fuel, shelter, etc., and all the dire necessities of war, it is vain to think of its being in a habitable condition. I fear, too, the books, furniture, and relics of Mount Vernon will be gone. 18
On the same day he wrote one of his daughters. “Having distributed such poor Christmas gifts as I had around me,” he penned, “I have been looking for something for you. . . . I send you some sweet violets that I gathered for you this morning while covered with dense white frost, whose crystals glittered in the bright sun like diamonds.” 19
LEE was not the only general officer who enjoyed the unbridled confidence of the president. Albert Sidney Johnston was perhaps the closest military friend of Jefferson Davis’s. No relation to Joe Johnston, this Johnston was a Kentucky-born soldier who, at age fifty-eight, was among the senior military minds adhered to the Confederacy at its outset. A veteran of the Black Hawk War, Sidney Johnston, as he was called, had been caught up in the Texas revolution after migrating there and served as secretary of war for the Republic of Texas. He had gone to West Point with Jefferson Davis and there, at a young age, formed a close friendship with the Mississippian. Sidney Johnston had served as a staff officer in the Mexican War and, thereafter, was consumed with frontier duty as colonel of the Second U.S. Cavalry, serving mostly in Texas. He became renowned in the 1850s for leading an expedition to Utah Territory to quell the so-called Mormon Rebellion, a reported uprising. Sidney Johnston then reverted to frontier post duty, and at the outbreak of war, he had been stationed in California. When the Southern states began to secede, he resigned his army commission and made a long, circuitous journey from California back east. His travels were reported widely in the newspapers, making him something of a Southern hero before the war even started, and his close friendship with Jefferson Davis ensured him an important place in the military hierarchy of the new nation.
Sidney Johnston had been placed in charge of the significant, large area known as Confederate Department Number Two, a tract of land that encompassed much of Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, and Louisiana. He was, thus, the preeminent western departmental commander of the Confederate armies, and he would be the chief architect of strategy to thwart the Yankees, who—as yet unknown to the Confederates—planned to cut southward along the rivers and deep into Southern territory. Additionally, Sidney Johnston would command the Army of Central Kentucky, organizing and drilling it to prepare for major battles that might erupt in the spring of 1862.
FOR now, the military situation was relatively quiet. August had brought the battle of Wilson’s Creek in Missouri, where the Yankees were beaten back after a bloody fight. The following month the Federals had laid siege to the small town of Lexington, Missouri. In the east scattered fighting continued in the mountains of western Virginia, and in the autumn, a sharp fight broke out at Ball’s Bluff, along the Potomac near Leesburg, the elegant village named for Robert E. Lee’s more famous relatives, where the Declaration of Independence had been hidden during the War of 1812. A massive Federal naval expedition threatened the sea islands near Port Royal, South Carolina, a site of naval actions during the Revolutionary War. As the year waned battles flared at Belmont, Missouri, where a little-known Union commander, Ulysses S. Grant, pushed his force forward, and Alleghany Mountain, Virginia, back in the mountains of the western part of the state.
Meanwhile, the North was having its share of problems with military commands. In November Lincoln replaced Winfield Scott, the old and infirm general-in-chief, with the young and vigorous Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan. This apparent salvation of the Union command structure was a brief illusion. “Little Mac” was energetic and famous for his quick succession of victories in western Virginia and came to Washington with excellent credentials as the ranking major general of the regular army with experience in army organization, training, and military planning. But it didn’t take Lincoln long to realize that McClellan was an overcautious tactician, eager to underestimate his readiness and prone to overestimating the strength of the Confederate armies he faced. Moreover, McClellan began to side with the opponents of Lincoln’s Republican administration.
Politically, the Union had its hands full late in 1861. Both Missouri and Kentucky seceded in part and were, thus, counted as member states by both the U.S. and C.S. governments. Embarrassingly for the Lincoln government, Confederate diplomats James M. Mason and John Slidell were captured while aboard the British ship HMS Trent, which nearly brought England down against the United States until Mason and Slidell were released, and the affair blew over. (“One war at a time!” Lincoln had quipped.)
Politics in the South took the form of elections. Early in the year the Provisional Congress had ordered congressional elections to be held on the first Wednesday of November 1861. Unlike the United States, the Confederacy permitted politicians to hold military office concurrently, and many politicians found the lure of the battlefield irresistible. The men were technically still members of Congress, but they were absent from Richmond and unable to engage in helping run the government. According to one observer, Congress had gotten rid of “nearly all it had of worth and talent.” 20
Transfixed with military affairs, most citizens voted quietly on that Wednesday in November. Some soldiers could cast absentee votes in the field, while the organization of Indian voting was left by the Confederacy to tribal officials. Most candidates were fairly well known and declined to campaign due to the exigency of the military situation, though some candidates unimaginatively advertised in newspapers, calling attention to either their state rights advocacy or vigorous prosecution of the war. Candidates in the field handed over their campaign to be run by friends. Candidate John Goode of Virginia recalled a stump speech by his opponents. “After they all had spoken . . . some friend of mine would arise in the audience and say, ‘Gentlemen, you must remember that Mr. Goode is also a candidate. . . . He cannot be here to-day because he is down at the front with the other boys in the army.’” 21 Such proxies were common. The situation was completely different in the Confederate Senate. There, the Constitution required that senators be selected by the state legislatures, not the people, so Senate candidates did no campaigning whatsoever, and a good-ol’-boys network of state politics made the decisions.
For the majority of Southerners, the experience of the Confederacy up to this point was one of relative harmony, of unity in purpose and action. The rifts that occurred politically were mostly hidden behind the seams of the new nation’s fabric. But even among such tepid campaigning, some good old-fashioned politics began to shine through. In Alabama Clement C. Clay and John Ralls were accused of land speculation. In North Carolina a debate between two candidates came to a near riot. In Mississippi Henry Chambers forced Col. W. A. Lake into a duel over their contest and shot him dead with his rifle.
Despite such scattered turbulence, the election came off, resulting in a hodgepodge of a now almost meaningless state of various political parties—Unionists, Democrats, Whigs, Secessionists. Now that all were loyal Confederates, the standard political party affiliations lost meaning.
Though few took notice at the time, from state to state within the Confederacy, tiny divisions were beginning to show. The psychology of where various states seemed to stand within the Confederate hierarchy began to play out in the real world. South Carolina’s politicians, for example, considered their state the “birthplace of secession” and, therefore, the linchpin of the Confederacy. It should be central to important decisions, the state’s citizens felt. This attitude of supremacy began to take effect in the bold actions and the air of superiority among men like William Porcher Miles, James Chesnut, Milledge Bonham, and Lawrence Keitt. The governor, Francis Pickens, also behaved demandingly toward Jefferson Davis, as if Davis owed South Carolina the very reason for his position. Virginia’s politicians also began to see themselves as the central focus of the Confederacy; Governor John Letcher, situated right in the beehive of the national Confederate government in Richmond, considered himself uniquely privileged. Those among the Virginia delegations who felt a boost from state influence included Robert M. T. Hunter, James A. Seddon, Thomas S. Bocock, and Roger A. Pryor.
Other states, of course, had less political pull. Texas, for example, began the war as a relatively isolated arena that seemed detached from the “action” out east. Consequently, Texas politicians, and those of other western states, felt left out as the new session of Congress approached. Western politicians who overcame this feeling, like Texas’s Louis Wigfall, did so by sheer energy
and conniving political tactics, something that not all members of Congress could muster.
Amid this swirl of growing political intrigue, the fifth session of Congress assembled in Richmond on November 8, 1861, with the Senate and House meeting in separate chambers and with separate agendas. There was one special day off, on January 21, 1862, allowing members to attend the Richmond funeral of John Tyler, the former president of the United States who had been a member of the Confederate Congress. Otherwise the session would last until February 17, 1862, and be a relatively quiet gathering as far as legislation was concerned.
The main focus of political thought in Richmond and throughout the South centered on Jefferson Davis and his wartime policy. Although support had been solid when the conflict started, chinks in the armor began to appear through 1861. The war clerk, John B. Jones, reflected this shift in his diary. “No Executive had ever such cordial and unanimous support,” he wrote early in the war. But by summertime he reported “murmurs” against the president. Stephen Mallory, secretary of the navy, remarked in August how Congress seemed to be unhappy with Davis and that a “spirit of opposition” was growing. At the same time Confederate senator Lawrence Keitt of South Carolina openly termed Davis “a failure.” 22
The focus was not exclusively on the president. In September Leroy Walker, the ineffectual war secretary from Alabama, had resigned. Judah Benjamin succeeded him, with Thomas Bragg now becoming attorney general, and the legions who didn’t like Benjamin were growing. “Benjamin is the supple boot of the President, a Eunuch,” wrote Milledge L. Bonham, a brigadier general who would become governor of South Carolina before war’s end. Most members of Congress were bothered by this sense that Davis had appointed an administrator and could act as his own de facto war secretary. Not only did they dislike Benjamin’s subservience, but those who favored an aggressive war policy found him far too enamored with playing defense. 23
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