Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  As control of the armed forces assembling in Virginia gradually passed from the state to the Confederate Department of War, a period of confusion reigned, until Lee’s steady hand could sort things out. In less than a month he had collected over 40,000 armed men, equipped them with 115 field guns, and produced over 100,000 cartridges and 1 million percussion caps, as well as creating formidable artillery batteries and fieldworks to protect Richmond. It was an enormous achievement, and having completed it he was content, as he wrote Mary Lee, to leave the outcome in other, more powerful hands: “God’s will be done,” he wrote to her on May 11.

  With the completion of preparations for the defense of Virginia and the transfer of its armed forces to the Confederacy on June 7, Lee’s position became anomalous. Since the Confederate Army had, for the moment, no higher rank than that of brigadier general, he dropped one step down from his rank of major general. This did not trouble him. He would be made one of five full generals soon after the Confederacy created that rank, but Lee never wore a general’s insignia on his uniform, content to wear on his collar the three small stars of a full colonel in the Confederate Army, his old rank in the U.S. Army, and made it clear that he would not wear a Confederate general’s insignia until the South was victorious. Having no army to command, and living in the same hotel as the Davises, Lee became, for the moment, a kind of unofficial chief of staff and military adviser to the president. “I should like to retire to private life,” he wrote to Mary, but at the same time he was anxious to prevent any “antagonism” from developing between the Confederate government and that of Virginia.

  Lee may also have known that he was still needed, and that there was not the slightest chance of his being allowed to retire to private life. He constantly expressed the wish that there was “an abler man” to take his place, but no such person existed: the Confederacy desperately needed a realistic professional commander who could both train and prepare the army for the long war to come, and at the same time tactfully restrain President Davis from trying to lead the army in the field as if he were a general in chief. Only Lee fitted this description. It was, after all, similar to the role that General Winfield Scott had played during the Mexican War.

  Lee already guessed that the major attacks on Virginia would come simultaneously in the west, where it was weakest, and on the peninsula, from which, once the Union Army had accumulated enough troops and equipment, an attempt to take Richmond, only eighty-one miles away, would certainly be made. It did not escape his attention that once Union troops were placed in force to attack from the west and from the east, the two forces separated by almost 400 miles, their center would inevitably be weak. A Confederate counterattack launched from Manassas might therefore catch them unprepared, and perhaps even threaten Washington.

  Some generals are good at defense, some at offense, but very few in the history of warfare have been good at both. Grant and Sherman, for example, were brilliant at offense, but were never put to the test of waging a defensive campaign, given the superiority of the North in manpower, equipment, and supplies. Lee was an exception to the rule. As a trained engineer with great experience in building fortifications and fieldworks, he was a master at defense, but at the same time he was a genius in offense, a master of maneuver and of the unexpected flank movement, undaunted by adverse odds and always bold, even to a fault. He was that rarest of generals, a formidable opponent both attacking and defending; there is nobody else quite like him in American military history. Even in full retreat Lee would prove to be a dangerous opponent—even though the Army of Northern Virginia was reduced to hardly more than 28,000 men in April 1865, most of them starving and low on ammunition, Lee was still able to maneuver with the small force remaining to him, and to put up a stiff defense against overwhelming odds.

  In June 1861 Lee found himself in the unenviable position of trying to shore up Confederate positions in three places—western Virginia, Manassas, and the peninsula—without any formal authority to give orders, and always having to tread carefully lest he offend President Davis, who was at once sensitive to any perceived slight and determined to cling to his prerogatives as commander in chief. Although Davis held Lee in “esteem,” and respected his advice, his patience, and his organizational skill, he had yet to see any evidence of Lee’s genius on the battlefield. It would be some time before Davis reluctantly accepted that the proper place for the president of the Confederacy was not in the front line, exposed to enemy fire, urging the troops forward.

  In the meantime, Lee’s predictions about the enemy’s operations came true, and he was thrust into the role of what we might now call a fireman, sent to cope with whatever emergencies arose as the widely separated Union armies began to attack in force. At dawn on June 10, only two days after Virginia’s forces (Lee with them) formally became part of the Confederate Army, Major General Benjamin Butler attacked Magruder in the peninsula at Big Bethel, and was stopped by the trenches and earthworks Lee had insisted on digging, as well as by an incident of what is now called friendly fire when two New York regiments opened fire on each other, perhaps because the Third New York Volunteer Regiment wore gray uniforms exactly like those of the Confederates. Union troops attempted several assaults against the Confederate lines, and soon learned the futility of attacking well-entrenched infantry with a bayonet charge. They eventually retreated back to the safety of Fort Monroe, leaving much of their equipment scattered on the road behind them because of the heat. Butler had achieved nothing except the satisfaction of burning down the houses of several supposed secessionists at Little Bethel and taking some of their slaves back to Fort Monroe, white Lee took the opportunity of sending more artillery to Magruder and digging in some batteries of heavy guns.

  Whether at the suggestion of President Davis or on his own responsibility, Lee quickly became de facto commander of the Confederate far right in Virginia, on the peninsula and across the James River at Norfolk; and of the Confederate far left, to the west in the Alleghenies, where his former adjutant general Brigadier General R. B. Garnett was in command facing an extremely competent Union major general, George B. McClellan. Neither Lee’s rank nor any formal authority accompanied these weighty responsibilities—he simply took control of Virginia’s flanks, while allowing President Davis and General Joseph E. Johnston to concentrate on the vital center, at Harpers Ferry and Manassas, either one of which seemed likely to be the objective of the large Union forces being collected in Washington. His role was still limited to hastening supplies and reinforcements, when he could find them, and to overseeing matters from a distance—a kind of watching brief rather than direct command. There has been conjecture among historians that President Davis did not like Lee, but it seems more likely that Davis simply did not wish to share the limelight with him. General Johnston, then thought to be the Confederacy’s most competent commander, made it clear enough that while he wanted Lee’s logistic support, he did not want to receive orders from him, or even advice. For that matter, neither Magruder nor Garnett was under any obligation to obey Lee’s orders, though Magruder soon learned the wisdom of paying attention to what Lee had to suggest. Garnett, being Lee’s former subordinate, would probably have accepted his advice willingly, but he was far away from Richmond, in the mountains of what is now West Virginia, so there was very little chance that any advice from Lee would reach him in time to make a difference.

  Unfortunately Garnett had inherited a calamitous situation. On his arrival he found that Grafton and Philippi were both in Federal hands, leaving the way to Staunton open; that the ragtag Confederate army gathered around Huttonsville was “in a miserable condition”; and that the inhabitants of northwestern Virginia were for the most part strongly pro-Union. Garnett had fewer than 5,000 men, woefully lacking in arms, clothing, discipline, food, and enthusiasm, and was heavily outnumbered. A vigorous attack on Staunton by the Union forces, followed by a bold “hook” to the southeast, might have brought McClellan’s army into the Shenandoah Valley in the rear of t
he Confederate forces at Harpers Ferry and Manassas; and this, if coordinated with an attack from Alexandria by the Union brigadier general Irvin McDowell, might have cut Virginia in two and ended the war with a decisive Union victory in 1861. Fortunately for the Confederacy, while McClellan had many of the attributes of a great general, they did not include boldness. His manner was grandly self-confident, but this was a mask. He constantly overestimated the enemy’s strength, sometimes by a factor of two or three, and while he was efficient at training an army, he seemed reluctant to spoil it by use. Though he was personally courageous, he had no appetite for risk—a perfectionist, he wanted a perfect record of victories, with the result that he would attack only when he thought there was no chance of losing.

  There was no chance of his losing in the beginning of July 1861. He carried out a textbook attack on Garnett’s positions, securing “the passes on Rich Mountain and Laurel Hill,” which commanded what were then the major roads to Ohio and Pennsylvania. Garnett had unwisely divided his forces to guard both passes, and the two parts were not close enough to support each other; thus McClellan was enabled to take both positions en série, attacking the 2,500 Confederates on Rich Mountain with over 10,000 men. Once that position had been taken, Garnett was forced to abandon his position on Laurel Hill. Most of Garnett’s defeated, discouraged troops either disbanded or surrendered—McClellan took over 1,000 prisoners. Garnett himself was killed at Corrick’s Ford, on the Cheat River, bravely trying to rally a few of his remaining men. He was the first general officer of the war to meet his death in battle.

  McClellan’s victory brought him a torrent of praise in the northern press—his reports of the battle, “magnified by [his] rhetorical congratulations to his troops,” made him an instant hero, the first of the war. The New York Herald hailed him as “the Napoleon of the Present War,” and both reporters and his own men took to referring to him as the “young Napoleon,” a comparison that would stick to him, at first without irony, and which he encouraged, perhaps unconsciously, by his habit of placing his right hand between the buttons of his coat at stomach level like the emperor. All this inspired a misplaced confidence in him among the northern public and in the White House. More dangerously, McClellan himself took all this praise seriously; he came to the conclusion that his already high opinion of his own military genius had been confirmed. In the meantime, General in Chief Scott, fearing that McClellan’s supply line was stretched too far and that he was vulnerable to attacks on his extended flanks, ordered McClellan to stay put at Monterey, although at that point he was only forty miles away from Staunton, from which he could have reached the Shenandoah Valley and cut the Virginia Central Railroad line. Fortunately for Lee, McClellan lacked the “Nelson touch.” Admiral Nelson, when he received Admiral Sir Hyde Parker’s signal to withdraw at the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, had put his telescope to his blind eye, and said, “Really, I do not see the signal,” and sailed on to win one of his greatest victories. But McClellan was no Nelson. He obeyed Scott’s order and stayed put, throwing away the opportunity for what might have been a decisive Union victory—or at least his men stayed put, for on the strength of his victory in western Virginia McClellan himself would shortly be recalled to Washington to oversee the defense of the capital and to command the Army of the Potomac.

  To many this seemed like an early low point of Confederate fortunes. True, Butler’s attempt to break out of Newport News and the protection of Fort Monroe had been stopped, largely owing to Lee’s foresight in improvising a fortified line in the peninsula; but the defeat in northwestern Virginia was a calamity, and despite the importance attached to Harpers Ferry, it had for the moment fallen (the town was to change hands fourteen times during the Civil War, and would be reduced to a ruin). The Union major general Robert Patterson had forded the Potomac River at Williamsport, Maryland, and by dint of superior numbers and better-handled artillery Falling Waters* succeeded in pushing the forces of two future Confederate heroes—Colonel Thomas J. Jackson and Colonel J. E. B. Stuart—almost back to Winchester, Virginia. At that point Patterson, like McClellan, halted his advance; he returned to Martinsburg, his resolve apparently shaken by the ferocity of the Confederates’ fighting retreat.

  Lee followed these events, from Richmond, where his first priority was to find men and arms to send on to General Johnston in Winchester and to General Beauregard, who was camped around Manassas Junction, about twenty-five miles southwest of Washington.

  Lee wrote to Mary, “My movements are very uncertain, and I wish to take the field as soon as certain arrangements can be made. I may go at any moment.” But this was optimistic. Eighteen days later he wrote that despite his anxiety “to get into the field,” he was “detained by matters beyond my control,” and told her to disregard the rumor that he was about to be created “Commander-in-Chief of the Confederate States Army,” a title which, he reminded her, belonged to President Davis. He “had been labouring to prepare and get into the field the Virginia troops, and to strengthen, by those of the other States, the threatened commands of Johnston, Beauregard . . . &c.” The combination of overwork and inaction led to a mild breakdown in his health that confined him briefly to bed. Still, he was responsible for both the reinforcements and the strategy that would produce the Confederate victory at First Manassas (or the First Battle of Bull Run, as it is known in the North). For the first time, Lee used the railway to swiftly transfer Johnston’s troops from Winchester to Beauregard’s position at Manassas Junction once battle had been joined—an ambitious and daring plan, since it would leave Winchester and the Shenandoah Valley briefly uncovered. But Lee already knew he would not take part in the battle. For the moment he was relegated to a role at headquarters.

  From Kinloch, Edward Turner’s home in Thoroughfare Gap, Fauquier County, where Mary Lee was staying “in [the] cooler hill country” of the Bull Run, she wrote to ask Lee to buy her the sheet music of “Dixie,” which, though it was an old minstrel song usually performed in blackface, had become the unofficial national anthem of the Confederacy.* One music publisher reported that sales were “altogether unprecedented”; indeed it was so popular that President Davis had a music box that played it. Lee sent a young man out to buy a copy, but had to report that he had visited everyplace in Richmond without finding it: “I suppose it is exhausted,” he wrote to her. “The booksellers say Dixie is not to be had in Virginia.”

  Mary continued moving from place to place, pushed westward by her husband’s anxiety for her safety, so it is ironic that, for once obedient to his wishes, she ended up no more than thirty miles from where First Manassas would be fought, and more or less in the direct path General Johnston would take to bring his army to join that of General Beauregard at Bull Run. Her daughter Mildred, or Precious Life, as her father called her, had joined her mother and her sister Mary Custis at Kinloch, bringing with her at her mother’s advice “all her winter and summer clothes.” As Mary Lee observed, “it is best to be prepared for any emergency.” At Kinloch they received a letter from Mary’s cousin Markie, who had just visited Arlington: “The poor house looked so desolate,” she wrote. “Oh! Who in their wildest dreams could have conjured all this last summer? It was but one year ago that we were all there, so happy & so peaceful.” Mary’s maid Selina showed her around the house, and Markie passed on greetings from many of the Lee family’s servants, including Ephraim, the gardener, and reported that Tom Titta, the family cat, about whom Mildred had been deeply concerned, had appeared and “rubbed his little head against my dress in the most affectionate way.”

  Lee was no happier in Richmond than Mary was as a guest at Kinloch. In the few hours when he was away from his desk, he was living along with President and Mrs. Davis at Spotswood Hotel—which meant that Lee was in effect part of Davis’s household, a kind of general-in-waiting to the president. This was uncomfortably close quarters for Lee, who did not much like to explain himself or his plans to anyone, let alone his chief executive. Lee’s strategy was to r
emain on the defensive until the South had a better supply of men and weapons, so he was constantly discouraging President Davis’s zeal for a big battle that would establish at one blow the Confederacy’s credibility with foreign governments and, more important, with the North.

  Lee had no patience with spectacular and unrealistic plans. His own instinct was that McDowell, the Union general, would attack in the direction of Manassas Junction. It was not so much that Lee was clairvoyant, or even benefited from a good intelligence service, as that he knew how General Scott’s mind worked as well as he knew his own—and that a bold attack on his right by General Johnston would defeat him. As skeptical as Lee was about the flamboyant Beauregard, he respected his old friend Joe Johnston’s professional ability. On paper, McDowell was superior in numbers to Beauregard—McDowell had 35,000 men in and around Centreville and Alexandria to Beauregard’s 20,000 around Manassas Junction, but Lee had noticed the fact that General Patterson had halted at Martinsburg with his 18,000 men, instead of continuing to advance toward Winchester, and guessed that the first priority was to keep Johnston’s army of 12,000 bottled up in the Shenandoah Valley. And true to form, Patterson advanced only ten miles from Martinsburg to Bunker Hill, before “taking counsel of his fears,” then retreated back to Charlestown, worried about the length of his supply line and the constant presence of J. E. B. Stuart’s cavalry in front of him. None of these generals, not even Scott, had ever commanded more than 5,000 men in battle, so they were in some ways as raw as their troops, most of whom lacked the veteran infantryman’s ability to put one foot in front of the other for hours on end, then stand his ground calmly when facing an attack.