Johnston’s force of 60,000 now moved north and east of the city to defend Richmond. McClellan’s army, which consisted of 105,000, established a base at the White House on the Pamunkey and threatened the James River with gunboats that moved as far north as Drewry’s Bluff, a mere seven miles from Richmond. The booming of cannon plainly heard, life for the 38,000 citizens of the capital city soured. “Oh, the extortioners!” wrote John B. Jones on May 23. “Meats of all kinds are selling at fifty cents per pound; butter, seventy-five cents; coffee, a dollar and half; tea, ten dollars; boots, thirty dollars per pair; shoes, eighteen dollars; ladies’ shoes, fifteen dollars; shirts, six dollars each.” 12
By May 31 the armies clashed along the Richmond and York River Railroad line in the battle of Seven Pines. A muddy confrontation complicated by poor weather, the engagement presented an opportunity for Confederate success that slipped away. And the army’s commander, General Johnston, was carried from the field. As Davis wrote Varina,
General J. E. Johnston is severely wounded. The poor fellow bore his suffering most heroically. When he was about to be put into the ambulance to be removed from the field, I dismounted to speak to him; he opened his eyes, smiled and gave me his hand, said he did not know how seriously he was hurt, but feared a fragment of shell had injured his spine. . . . I saw him yesterday evening, his breathing was labored but he was free from fever and seemed unshaken in his nervous system. 13
Johnston would be recuperating for a long time to come. This would prove to be providential for the Army of Northern Virginia. The replacement for Johnston was Gen. Robert E. Lee.
“General Lee had up to this time accomplished nothing to warrant the belief in his future greatness as a commander,” wrote Col. Evander M. Law. He continued:
The general tone, however, was one of confidence, which was invariably strengthened by a sight of the man himself. Calm, dignified, and commanding in his bearing, a countenance strikingly benevolent and self-possessed, a clear, honest eye that could look friend or enemy in the face, clean-shaven, except a closely-trimmed mustache which gave a touch of firmness to the well-shaped mouth; simply and neatly dressed in his uniform of rank, felt hat, and top boots reaching to his knee; sitting [on] his horse as if his home was in the saddle. 14
Whatever the case, Lee’s nominal accomplishments on the battlefield were not the point—that he and Davis had established a clear, trusting bond was.
As the Yankees moved closer to Richmond, a major council of war was held at the White House. President Davis hosted this get-together all day on April 14 in an effort to decide whether to hold the line at Yorktown. The group included Davis, Robert E. Lee, Joe Johnston, Secretary of War George Randolph, and senior generals James Longstreet and Gustavus W. Smith. Held in the state dining room of the Davis residence, the war council offers a good snapshot of how Confederate military decisions were made at the highest level. At the time Johnston’s Army of Northern Virginia was just moving from its lines along the Rappahannock River to the peninsula; meanwhile, McClellan’s Yankees were disembarking and moving up the peninsula toward Williamsburg. Magruder’s Confederates had established defensive positions along the Warwick River from Yorktown to Mulberry Island, while McClellan’s soldiers were marching northward into their position. The question the council faced was should Johnston’s entire army move down to occupy the Warwick River line or move into some other closer to the Confederate capital?
Davis began by asking Johnston to summarize his situation. The general claimed that McClellan, no doubt, could move around the Warwick line and force his way closer to Richmond, so Magruder’s line might as well be abandoned. Johnston then handed the president a paper, written by Smith, which he said he had been given just before the council began. Davis read Gustavus Smith’s memorandum aloud, which confirmed Johnston’s notion that the Warwick line was indefensible; it should be abandoned, as well as Norfolk. Instead, Smith contended, reinforcing a line close in to Richmond should be the course, and if McClellan laid siege to the capital, the Confederates should march on Washington and Baltimore immediately.
Johnston told the president he wanted to draw McClellan inland, to concentrate his forces at Richmond and fight the Yankees there. Longstreet believed McClellan would not strike quickly and that Washington, therefore, could be attacked. But Davis criticized Longstreet for underrating McClellan. Meanwhile, Secretary Randolph argued against abandoning the Norfolk Navy Yard, and Lee insisted that defensive positions could be found along the peninsula.
Johnston and Smith continued to argue, much of the day, that the Warwick line simply could not be held. Hence, Davis sat and listened, Longstreet sat and listened, and the Johnston-Smith and Lee-Randolph sides hammered it out. The whole group pored over maps spread all about. After eight hours of this, a break ensued at 6 p.m. The meeting resumed at 7 p.m. and dragged on until 1 a.m. the next day, with all parties stuffed into the cozy dining room. Then, suddenly, the president announced that Johnston’s army would return to the lower peninsula to unite with Magruder and that they would, in fact, hold the Warwick line and that Yorktown and Norfolk would be held for as long as could be. It was a striking confirmation of two things: the inability of the Confederate leadership to reach consensus and the president’s confidence in Lee over any other. That confidence would continue throughout the war. 15
To help the president make the most of his military men, in April four aides-de-camp, authorized by Congress, were assigned to him. They were Davis’s old friend James Chesnut of South Carolina; William Montague Browne of Georgia; Joseph Christmas Ives, a Confederate captain; and William Preston Johnston, a lieutenant colonel. The last of the four was the son of Albert Sidney Johnston.
The elder Johnston’s death at Shiloh had struck his close friend Davis like a hammer blow. The president called the loss “the greatest our country could suffer from” and wept considerably in private. He told Preston Johnston some time later, “My dear Boy, I cannot think calmly of your Father. I cannot speak or write of him without immotion.” 16 Subsequently, Preston Johnston not only acted as an aide to the president, but he moved into the Confederate White House and was essentially a surrogate son. This coincided with the Davis family’s escape to Raleigh, North Carolina, to flee the enemy, which was now at the doorstep of Richmond. “I have a fine room in the third story,” Preston Johnston wrote his wife, Rosa, “with a fine view & everything comfortable. The President lives simply, but delightfully. The hours are rather late to suit me.” A week later he wrote his wife again: “From ten or eleven until five are the usual office hours then going to bed at midnight I have to wait an hour or two to breakfast.” 17 Before long Davis would return to Richmond, leaving his family behind but taking Preston.
With bleak military prospects Davis, nonetheless, attempted to put on a brave face to Congress and to the rest of the world. In the wake of Shiloh, he reported to Congress:
I am able to announce to you, with entire confidence, that it has pleased Almighty God to crown the Confederate arms with a glorious and decisive victory over our invaders. . . . The last lingering hope has disappeared, and it is but too true that General Albert Sidney Johnston is no more. . . . My long and close friendship with this departed chieftain and patriot forbids me to trust myself in giving vent to the feelings which this sad intelligence has evoked. 18
Johnston’s death continued to elicit strong feelings among Confederate officers. “The tears of the South now freshen the grave,” wrote the South Carolina politician and officer Lawrence M. Keitt, “and the gratitude of the South now embalms the memory of Sydney Johnston. . . . I believe that we shall win.” 19
Nevertheless, political fighting still raged over some of Johnston’s past responsibilities. In the House Henry Foote and colleagues delivered a report on the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson, with many members blaming the loss on Johnston. Foote and Horatio Bruce of Kentucky drew up additional reports, which laid blame for the fiasco squarely on the dead general and vindicated Floyd an
d Pillow, who had been censured by the president and relieved of command.
Other controversies burst forth into Congress. Severe tension over the conscription law had failed to dissipate, especially with the more cantankerous of the governors. “The constitutional question discussed by you in relation to the conscription law had been duly weighed before I recommended to Congress the passage of such a law,” Davis angrily wrote Joe Brown of Georgia, who implied the president was trying to put one over on good Confederates on the home front. “It was fully debated in both Houses; and your letter not only has been submitted to my cabinet, but written opinion has been required from the Attorney General.” 20
In April Congress resolved that the president should appoint a military chief of railroads; this constituted the first of many attempts to improve transportation and eliminate communication problems. Davis resisted, however, feeling that it was not Congress’s place to order him to do such things. 21 Nor had the details regarding a Confederate Supreme Court been settled, with House member William Porcher Miles peskily continuing to raise the subject. Miles was also dealing with an impending financial crisis. “Our Department is entirely out of funds and we have pressing requisitions on us,” wrote Josiah Gorgas, chief of ordnance, in a letter to him. 22 Too little money and too much debate was a dangerous combination. Indeed, it seemed like free debate was preferable to expensive resolution. Familiar arguments over nominations of officers continued. Davis wanted (and justly held) the only responsibility for appointing officers, while various state governors disputed that power, feeling they should have the authority. “It is the province of the executive to nominate and of the Senate to confirm or reject,” Davis scolded Senators William Yancey and Clement Clay of Alabama. “Recommendations are willingly received and respectfully considered by me, but I will not argue as to their propriety and do not recognize the fairness of the within statement of my course and assumption as to what it should be.” 23 Davis further questioned Congress’s acts to distribute naval prize monies and the pay of deceased soldiers. Davis blocked payment of the monies to the wives of sailors held as prisoners and to the widows or heirs of dead soldiers and sailors. He saw both of these as invasions of Congress into unconstitutional ground. 24 Others must have seen such measures as, at the least, good politics.
Not that Davis had no sense of political priorities: he was constantly dealing with politicians second-guessing his military plans for reasons that had little to do with winning the war. Occasionally this was acknowledged by the petitioners. “That Charleston should be defended ‘to the last extremity,’ seems to me, in a political point of view, if not a military, a matter of grave importance,” William Porcher Miles wrote to the president about his home city from the House Chamber in the Capitol. 25 But such confessions were rare. So, too, Davis had to deal with the near-continuous arguments between commanders about what was happening in the field. Francis Pickens, for example, complained to Robert E. Lee about the field commanders at Charleston. “Ripley dislikes Pemberton, Pemberton dislikes Ripley, and everything is dysfunctional. It strikes me that it is all important that some able and independent officer should be sent to inspect the forts by your authority.” 26 Lee replied, telling Pickens that Porcher Miles wanted Roswell S. Ripley kept in position. Eventually, when the situation degraded further, Ripley was reassigned—but only after a great deal of ink and sweat and tears had been expended on this one question among hundreds. Talk may have been cheap, but inaction was costly.
In Virginia the fighting politicians on the peninsula also had their own evolving ideas about the president and military strategy. “We were kept in the trenches, often times a foot deep in water, for eighteen days, without any necessity or object that I could [learn, except] the stupidity and cowardice of our officers,” Bob Toombs wrote his friend Aleck Stephens, who was still sick and bedridden back in Georgia. He continued:
McClellan was there with his whole army, a good deal less I think than ours, and we could have whipped [them] as easily there as anywhere else. But as usual we burnt up everything and fled, were attacked in the retreat, and left in the hands of the enemy some ten or twelve hundred of our killed, wounded, and sick, and that after a decided victory. This is called generalship!! . . . Davis’s incapacity is lamentable, and the very thought of the basement of Congress in the impressment act makes me sick. I feel but little like fighting for a people base enough to submit to such despotism from such contemptible sources. 27
Toward the end of May, the president rode out to inspect the Confederate lines around Richmond. Davis wrote to Varina:
Riding on the bluff which overlooks the Meadow Bridge, I asked Colonel Anderson, posted there in observation, whether he had seen anything of the enemy in his front. There, by the use of a powerful glass, were distinctly visible two cavalry videttes at the further end of the bridge, and a squad of infantry lower down the river, who had covered themselves with a screen of green boughs. . . . I then rode down to the bank of the river, followed by a cavalcade of sight-seers, who I suppose had been attracted by the expectation of a battle. The little squad of infantry, about fifteen in number, as we approached, fled over the bridge, and were lost to sight. 28
The walls seemed to be closing in. “I packed some valuable books and the sword I wore for many years,” Davis reported to Varina at month’s end, “together with the pistols used at Monterrey and Buena Vista, and my old dressing case; these articles will have a value to the boys after time and to you now.” 29 But the Confederacy was far from done. Indeed, it was about to roar.
Chapter 9
The Rise of Lee and Bragg
THE summer of 1862 saw the Confederacy in a precarious position. Alarm was palpable on the streets of Richmond, as McClellan’s Yankees were spread widely around the city’s outskirts, threatening the capital and the very livelihood of the South. “McClellan has been quiet for several days,” war clerk John B. Jones wrote his wife in June. “If we do not attack him and beat him soon, Richmond must be evacuated. He is digging his way to it, and may soon have his siege guns in reach of the city.” 1 With Confederate military campaigns on multiple fronts in full swing, long, sweltering, dangerous days were now being experienced by a huge number of troops. The tally of deaths was growing, and the examples of men running away from the army to visit home, even with the intention of returning, was alarming Southern commanders.
With Joe Johnston wounded and Lee taking over the Army of Northern Virginia, no one was exactly sure how the Confederate forces would fare. Lee, after all, had been notable in western Virginia early in the war as “Granny Lee,” too timid to attack the Yankees in force and preoccupied with digging entrenchments, earning him the additional sobriquet “King of Spades.” President Davis, though, was hopeful regarding his military adviser.
But the president and Varina were worried, too, as sickness had struck their own family. From Raleigh Varina wrote of the travails of wartime loneliness and longed to be with her husband in Richmond. Preston Johnston sent her frequent news of the president, in addition to Davis’s own letters. With Richmond in jeopardy, Sidney Johnston dead, and having heard about Joe Johnston’s wounding, she wrote her husband, “Why are our best friends killed?” The Davises’ young son William was intermittently sick with boils and cholera, and most of the medications tried for him did no good. “My heart sunk within me at the news of the suffering of my angel baby,” wrote the president. “Your telegram of 12th gives assurance of the subsidence of disease. But the look of pain and exhaustion, the gentle complaint, ‘I am tired’ which has for so many years oppressed me, seems to have been revived.” 2
Around Richmond McClellan moved most of his force south of the Chickahominy River and, characteristically, waited. The weather was poor, and several weeks passed before any significant action came. Then, on June 25, the armies began a series of battles that collectively came to be called the Seven Days. On June 25 occurred the battle of Oak Grove. A more significant action, the battle of Mechanicsville, was
fought along Beaver Dam Creek the following day. Lee’s sound plan to force the Yankees from their trenches by flanking movements went awry when Stonewall Jackson arrived late for his attack and Brig. Gen. A. P. Hill attacked without orders. The following day Lee and his subordinates attempted to regroup. Robert Stiles, a young soldier in the Richmond Howitzers, was present when Lee met Jackson. He wrote:
The two generals greeted each other warmly, but wasted no time upon the greeting. They stood facing each other, some thirty feet from where I lay, Lee’s left side and back toward me, Jackson’s right and front. Jackson began talking in a jerky, impetuous way, meanwhile drawing a diagram on the ground with the toe of his right boot. He traced two sides of a triangle with promptness and decision; then starting at the end of the second line began to draw a third projected toward the first. This third line he traced slowly and with hesitation, alternately looking up at Lee’s face and down at his diagram, meanwhile talking earnestly; and when at last the third line crossed the first and the triangle was complete, he raised his foot and stamped it down with emphasis, saying “We’ve got him.” 3
The generals believed they knew how to defeat the Yankees by striking them before they could establish a solid defensive line. The bloody battle fought on June 27 was termed Gaines’s Mill. Lee planned to envelop Union Brig. Gen. Fitz John Porter’s right, but again, Jackson was slow. Nevertheless, a massed Confederate assault late in the afternoon turned the battle into a Confederate victory. So close to the zone of war, Davis could not keep away. On June 26 he commenced a tour of the battlefields, and he actually slept a number of days out under the stars with the troops. At Oak Grove Davis approached so close to the front lines that Lee had to ask him to leave, which he eventually did. Shortly thereafter Davis toured the troops and their encampments along the Chickahominy River and encouraged the men to fight on stubbornly. He was shaken by the terrible wounding of a friend, Brig. Gen. Richard Griffith, whom he saw carried away on a litter to die. Elsewhere the president came under fire and—again after Lee’s prodding—he left a house that was later struck by artillery shells.
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