Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  “There are times,” Scott is reported to have told Lee, “when every officer in the United States service should fully determine what course he will pursue and frankly declare it. No one should continue in government employ without being actively employed. . . . I suppose you will go with the rest. If you purpose to resign, it is proper that you should do so at once; your present attitude is equivocal.”

  There is some question whether these were Scott’s exact words, but they certainly sound like him. In any case, Lee had already reached the same conclusion. He went immediately to see his elder brother Commander Sydney Smith Lee, who was serving in Washington at the time. Neither of them knew that Virginia had already made the critical decision. Lee rode home to Arlington, still under the impression that he and Smith had some time to spare, but when he went into Alexandria the next morning the news of the Virginia Convention’s decision to secede was in the newspapers. “I must say that I am one of those dull creatures that cannot see the good of secession,” Lee is reported to have said to the druggist as he was paying his bill, expressing an opinion that he was not to change, though increasingly he would keep it to himself.

  Cheering crowds had greeted the news of secession, but Lee still thought of the government across the Potomac River as his government, one that his own father had fought to establish. “I am unable to realize,” he had written Mary Lee’s cousin Markie Williams, only four months ago, “that our people will destroy a government inaugurated by the blood & wisdom of our patriot fathers, that has given us peace and prosperity at home, power & security abroad, & under which we have acquired a colossal strength unequalled in the history of mankind. I wish to live under no other government, & there is no sacrifice I am not ready to make for the preservation of the Union, save that of honour. . . . I wish for no other flag than The Star Spangled Banner, & no other air than Hail Columbia.” Honor and duty had brought him to a decision that he did not welcome, and to a future that must have seemed deeply uncertain for an Army officer of fifty-four whose whole adult life had been spent obeying the orders of his superiors and urging obedience on those under his command, and whose role model since childhood had been George Washington.

  What would Lee have done if Virginia had not seceded? It is hard to imagine him sitting at home as a retired colonel while war raged between the Union and the other southern states, but he had already made his mind up that he would not participate in any Union attack against the South, and once Lee reached a decision, he did not retreat from it. His stubbornness and inflexibility of purpose were remarkable. They were qualities that he shared with the retired Captain Ulysses S. Grant, then still humbly wrapping parcels in his father’s harness shop in Galena, Illinois, and they would make Lee a formidable opponent on the battlefield.

  He sat down late that night and wrote his brief, formal letter of resignation to Secretary of War Cameron: “I have the honor to tender the resignation of my commission as Colonel of the 1st Regt. of Cavalry.” It is easy to imagine with what pain Lee wrote those few lines bringing to an end a thirty-six-year career. Perhaps more painful still was his longer letter to General Scott, in which he wrote that to “no one, General, have I been as much indebted as to yourself for uniform kindness and consideration, and it has always been my ardent desire to earn your approbation”—adding what had become part of his formula: “Save in defense of my native State, I never desire again to draw my sword.” These were not empty words. Lee would not take up arms against the Union until the Union took up arms against Virginia, whatever the other southern states did. When he was done, he brought the letters down to show them to Mary—she had heard him upstairs fall to his knees in prayer. Having received her approval Lee sent them off by messenger first thing in the morning. Rooney and Custis were at home at the time, both of them appalled by Virginia’s decision to secede, as well as by their father’s decision to resign from the army, which, as one of his daughters put it, “Was to him home and country.”

  Lee then went back to his desk to write what was, no doubt, the most difficult letter of all, to his beloved sister Anne Marshall in Baltimore, knowing that she and her husband were staunch Unionists and would not approve of what he had done. “I know you will blame me,” he wrote, “but you must think as kindly of me as you can, and believe that I have endeavored to do what I thought right.” He then wrote to his brother Sydney Smith Lee, informing him of the decision, without suggesting that Smith follow his example.

  Having informed those he wanted to inform of his decision, Lee patiently waited on events. Patience was another of those qualities that would make him a great general. His self-control was unshakable and inspired confidence even in men who might otherwise have lost heart. He had only to appear at any critical point on the battlefield to infuse men with his own courage. It was not a pose, Lee’s calmness, his “marble image,” and his refusal to reveal his emotions were all reflections of the man himself. He had no wish and no ability to create an image; he was, quite simply, what he appeared to be. He would shortly become the major military and political asset of the Confederacy.

  He showed no emotion when he discovered in the morning that his own daily newspaper, the Alexandria Gazette, called for his appointment to a high-ranking command if he resigned his commission in the U.S. Army: “There is no man who would command more of the confidence of the people of Virginia, than this distinguished officer.” Lee, the most modest of men, must certainly have been embarrassed by this uncalled-for effusion, but by lunchtime he received a letter from Judge John Robertson of Richmond, asking for an interview with him the next day. He was left for the moment with nothing to do, and it surely occurred to him, as it did to Custis, that if hostilities began the town of Alexandria, and with it Mary Lee’s beloved Arlington, which commanded the south bank of the Potomac River from high ground within sight of Washington, would be occupied by the Union Army. Indeed, Custis remarked that if he were in command of the Union forces in Washington this would be his first move, and he was not wrong.

  The next day, a Sunday, Lee attended service at Christ Church in Alexandria, and was dismayed by the enthusiasm of the people for war and perhaps even more so by the hope they placed in him. He learned, after church, that Judge Robertson would not be able to meet him as planned, since the Federal authorities had seized the mail steamboats on the Potomac River—a sign that would not have surprised Lee. At least some people in the U.S. government knew what they were doing. Virginia’s many difficulties in communication, supply, finance, and transportation soon followed. That evening Lee received a message from the judge apologizing for his inability to reach Alexandria earlier in the day, and inviting Lee to accompany him to Richmond to meet with the governor of Virginia, John Letcher. Never one to waste a minute, Lee departed by train for Richmond early the next morning, wearing civilian clothes and a silk top hat, and accompanied by Judge Robertson.

  Lee would never see Arlington again.

  Richmond was abuzz with excitement. Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederate States of America, had arrived to negotiate Virginia’s union with the Confederacy, a major but inevitable step. Lee checked into the Spotswood Hotel, and after a meal made his way to the capitol through the boisterous crowds in the street, apparently unrecognized by them. Like many military officers Lee had an ingrained distrust for politicians, both southern and northern, and John Letcher may have seemed to him at first glance exactly the kind of politician he didn’t like. Although some describe Letcher as “bald-headed, florid, and bottle-nosed,” in photographs he looks thin, stern, and intelligent—not at all a southern version of a Tammany Hall type. Certainly Letcher had the delicate skill of the born politician when it came to altering his principles to take advantage of events. He was a longtime foe of secession and had wanted to bring slavery to an end in Virginia, but once elected to the governorship he adroitly put all that behind him, and rather like Lee, he went to work with considerable efficiency for two causes in which he did not believe.* He see
ms to have won Lee’s trust at their first meeting, and kept it throughout most of the war. His letter to Lee having gone astray, he explained that Virginia needed “a commander of [its] military and naval forces,” carrying with it the rank of major general. He offered the post to Lee, who instantly accepted. If Lee felt any doubts, he did not express them. Governor Letcher informed the convention of Lee’s nomination, which was unanimously approved. By the time Lee got back to his hotel, he was, at last, a major general, though without the uniform. Photographs of him published around the time of his appointment are all old ones altered for the occasion, showing him in the pre–Civil War full dress uniform of a U.S. Army colonel, but with the badge of the U.S. Army and the letters “U.S.” clumsily changed into those of the Virginia Militia. In these photographs he looks remarkably young and dashing for his age, now fifty-four, with penetrating dark eyes, a thick black mustache, and a full head of Byronic dark hair—the noble, careworn face with the silver hair and the full white beard had yet to appear.

  Before he could get to bed he was politely summoned to meet the vice president of the Confederate states at Ballard House. A Georgian, Alexander Stephens was tiny, frail, ill, wizened—he weighed less than 100 pounds—but his skeletal hands, pitted face, and high voice were offset by fierce intelligence and great courage. Although a friend described him as “highly sensitive,” with “poverty-fed pride” and “morbid” self-preoccupation, he had risen high in the ranks of the U.S. Congress until 1858; his greatest achievement was the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which infuriated northerners. His bravery was legendary—despite being repeatedly stabbed by an opponent during an argument about the Wilmot Proviso, preventing the extension of slavery into the territories, Stephens vocally held to his opinion even when he was seriously wounded. In 1861, just two months before his meeting with Lee, he had defined the Confederate government’s policy firmly: “Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to a superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”

  Lee and Stephens did not discuss slavery, but Stephen’s position on the subject was exactly the same as the one Lee had described in a letter to Mary on December 27, 1856, and would state under oath to a committee of the U.S. Senate in 1868.

  Stephens immediately got to the point of the meeting. He was concerned that Lee’s new rank of major general might become an obstacle to Virginia’s joining the Confederacy. With some embarrassment, Stephens explained that the Confederate Army had no higher rank than brigadier general. If Virginia were, as he hoped, to merge its military forces with those of the new nation, Lee might have to lose a star, or become a subordinate of an officer of lower rank than his own. Lee replied that he did not wish “his official rank or personal position” to stand in the way of the “alliance” between Virginia and the Confederacy.

  Behind this polite exchange was a serious political issue: Virginians had not yet voted on the Virginia Convention’s decision to secede, and of all the southern states Virginia had the longest border with the northern states—over 425 miles—and was therefore the most exposed to immediate attack from the North. It was also the largest, richest, and most populous of the slave states, with more than 1.5 million people, 500,000 of them slaves. Virginians saw their state as a country, bigger indeed than some European nations, and their institutions, history, and major figures of the Revolution as having been instrumental in shaping the U.S. government. Many Virginians, including Lee, had already guessed that if war came, much of it would be fought in the narrow space between Richmond and Washington; it would not be easy for Virginia to cede control of its armed forces to the new Confederate nation, or to allow Georgians or Mississippians to dictate Virginia’s strategy or command its troops. Virginians had a natural reluctance to give up one form of subordination for another—hence the delicate negotiations Stephens was in Richmond to undertake. Lee himself, though he accepted the logic of joining the Confederacy, would remain a Virginian throughout the war, and would often be criticized for focusing so much of the Confederacy’s limited strength on the great battles in northern Virginia.

  Already, it was obvious that given its resources, the Confederacy was too big to defend at every point—its coastline alone was nearly 3,000 miles long, from the Potomac to the mouth of the Rio Grande, and its frontier stretched even farther, including eleven states and contested areas of Arizona, New Mexico, Missouri, and Kentucky, as well as long stretches of the nation’s biggest river systems. Lee knew better than most the harsh maxim of Frederick the Great: “He who attempts to defend everything, defends nothing.” What people wanted Lee to do was to attack the North as soon as possible, and attempt to win a single, decisive victory in the field, one big enough to shatter northerners’ self-confidence and confirm the South’s independence in the eyes of the world. On the other hand, as a professional officer who had served under General Winfield Scott in Mexico, Lee knew that the Confederacy was unprepared to take the offensive. The South lacked men, arms, horses, and mules, and above all it lacked a well-trained, efficient command and logistic structure. It was symbolic of Lee’s problems that many weeks would pass before he could improvise any kind of uniform for himself—not until late in the year would he first appear in Confederate gray, with what was to become his trademark headgear, a silvery gray, modestly broad-brimmed hat. Producing a real army would take longer.

  From the beginning, Lee was plagued by enthusiasts who believed the war could be won in thirty days, or at worst in ninety, and that some combination of southerners’ zeal, courage, spirit, and breeding would overwhelm the forces of the “money-grubbing Yankees.” He was also plagued by legions of wide-eyed visionaries each of whom had a surefire plan for winning the war at one stroke. Lee’s imposing dignity and remote courtesy provided a kind of natural protective barrier between him and people like this until such time as he had formed a loyal staff whose primary responsibility was to shield him from as many interruptions as they could.

  Lee was given a small office in “the Virginia Mechanics Institute at Ninth and Franklin Streets,”* which was soon enlarged until it filled the building. He had barely settled in when four members of the Virginia Convention arrived to escort him to the capitol to confirm his new commission.

  If there was one thing that Lee disliked almost as much as Grant did, it was formal ceremonies at which he was obliged to speak, but he submitted to the ordeal with his usual grace. The convention was in session behind locked doors when he arrived, and he was obliged to wait several minutes in the rotunda, which had been designed by Thomas Jefferson. In its center stands Jean-Antoine Houdon’s life-size marble stature of Washington, dressed in his simple uniform, resting his arm against a fasces, or bundle of rods, the Roman symbol for political power, with a plow behind him, emphasizing his roles as general, president, and gentleman farmer. One of Lee’s escorts, watching him contemplate Washington, heard him say, oddly enough, “I hope we have heard the last of secession.” Did he mean that now that Virginia had seceded it was time to think about defense, or was he reflecting again, now that it was too late, on his dislike of the whole idea of secession? Might he have been thinking about how difficult it would have been to explain to his idol George Washington that his own state had seceded from the Union, which the founding fathers had fought so hard and so long to establish and which had lasted only eighty-four years before unraveling into civil war?

  Finally, the doors were opened, he was ushered into the crowded room, and “the convention rose to receive him.” He stood a few paces from the entrance, in the central aisle of the chamber, while the nineteenth-century taste for fulsome oratory ran its course.

  In contrast, his reply, though gracious, was hardly more than fifty words long, including his disclaimer, that he “would much have preferred had your choice fallen upon an abler man.” It was not so much that Lee felt inadequate to the task before him—in fact, thanks to his position on General
Scott’s staff in Mexico few officers could have been better prepared—as that he would have happily yielded his place to a more competent soldier had such a person existed. But the truth was that there was nobody abler than Robert E. Lee, and nobody who commanded such universal respect. After Lee had spoken, the delegates left their seats to crowd around him, as if seeking confidence from his presence: he was, from the beginning, the totem of the southern cause, the person who seemed to embody its highest aspirations and lend nobility to them. It was not a role he enjoyed, though in the end he grew so used to it that it became part of his personality.

  As soon as he decently could, he left and returned to his office to get on with the task of defending Virginia.

  The two immediate problems facing him had already been met, with mixed results. The Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, the target of John Brown’s raid, was occupied by Virginia “volunteers,” many of them militiamen, but not before the small detachment of departing Union troops had set fire to the workshops and storage buildings, destroying most of the muskets kept there, but leaving the machinery for producing them intact. The Virginia officer commanding the forces now holding Harpers Ferry was a then little known and mildly eccentric former brevet major of the U.S. Army, Thomas J. Jackson, professor of natural and experimental philosophy and instructor of artillery at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington. He had distinguished himself in the Mexican War, and would soon earn the nickname “Stonewall,” becoming Lee’s most valued corps commander, and indeed ranking as a southern hero second only to Lee himself. Although Lee had seen and admired Jackson fighting in Mexico, he may not at first have realized that the loss of thousands of desperately needed rifles was less important than the fact that Major Jackson had joined the cause.