Pleased as Lee was to be out of Richmond and in command of troops, his appointment to oversee military operations in what is now West Virginia was not an enviable one. The military situation was “deteriorating steadily.” The Confederate forces were divided into three mutually antagonistic commands, the principal one led by Brigadier General William Loring, a doughty and experienced professional soldier who had lost an arm in the Mexican War.* He had only just arrived to replace the late General Garnett. The other two consisted of locally recruited “legions,” one led by former governor Henry A. Wise, the other by former U.S. secretary of war John B. Floyd. Rival politicians, Floyd and Wise detested each other, and both were reluctant to obey orders from Loring, who at least understood his business—neither Floyd nor Wise had any significant military experience, unless one counts the fact that Floyd was suspected of using his position as secretary of war to move over 150,000 rifles and muskets and many tons of heavy ordnance to arsenals in the South after John Brown’s raid in 1859. Floyd was an out-and-out liability in military terms, and Wise scarcely less so. Lee’s own position was ambiguous—“he had no written instructions”; he was to advise on strategy, and attempt to make the three generals cooperate with one another long enough to carry out an attack; but he still did not have the full authority of a commander in chief, possibly because Floyd and Wise still had the political clout to prevent it. President Davis did not understand the importance of placing command unambiguously and firmly in the hands of one person, or perhaps he still thought of that person as himself. In any event, Lee arrived in Staunton as a peacemaker between contentious generals, a role for which he was in fact better suited than that of knocking heads together. If Lee had one weakness, it was his dislike of open confrontation. Good manners and the gentle handling of people who disagreed with him were instinctive with Lee, but not always effective.
What Lee found at Staunton when he arrived on July 28 dismayed him. The men were hungry, ragged, insubordinate, sick. Desertion had thinned their ranks, and some regiments had simply disbanded or had dwindled to the point where only a few officers and men remained. An epidemic of measles, as well as typhoid fever and what was probably a form of flu had sickened much of the army, which was living in miserable conditions. Even in midsummer the nights were cold in the mountains, and the men lacked both overcoats and blankets. A day was enough to tell Lee all he needed to know about the state of the army. He left early the next morning for a ten-mile ride to Monterey, with the two aides who had accompanied him from Richmond: Colonel John A. Washington, a great-grandnephew of George Washington; and Captain John H. Taylor, who would remain with Lee throughout the war. He would write to Mary a few days later with considerable enthusiasm about the scenery: “I enjoyed the mountains as I rode along. The views are magnificent—the valleys so beautiful, the scenery so peaceful. What a glorious world Almighty God has given us. How thankless and ungrateful we are, and how we labour to mar his gifts.” He did not mention that it was pouring rain and the roads were so mired in mud that wagons sank up the hubs of their wheels. Five days later, it was still raining. Colonel Washington and Captain Taylor were sharing a tent at the camp of Brigadier General Henry R. Jackson—a Georgian, as well as a “Yale graduate, an art lover, a poet, an ex-judge and former United States minister to Austria,” another of those odd, talented civilians whom the war pushed into uniform. Jackson pointed out to Lee that the rain had been falling steadily since July 22, that his men were without tents or camp equipment, and that his horses were “jaded and galled” and unfit for use.
Lee wrote to Mary that their second son, Fitzhugh (“Rooney”), now a major in the cavalry, had visited him for dinner and still—a touch of Lee’s taste for gentle teasing—“preserves his fine appetite.” He did not add that the boy had no overcoat. The Union troops facing Jackson were commanded by Brigadier General J. J. Reynolds, whom Mary Lee would remember as an assistant professor of philosophy at West Point. A few days later Lee wrote to two of his “Precious Daughters,” Mary and Mildred, to complain that it was still raining and so cold that he was writing in his overcoat. His servant Perry, who had been one of the slaves who waited on the Lees in the dining room at Arlington, was unable to dry any of Lee’s socks or towels.* The health of Richmond, Lee’s horse, he reported, was fine, although the animal was not accustomed to such meager rations and poor shelter. Lee describes a cozy domestic scene under canvas, with Colonel Washington seated on a folded blanket doing his own sewing. To reassure his wife and daughters, Lee preferred to make light of the discomforts of camp life. It is also possible that despite those discomforts he was glad to be back in the field, but one gets from his letters home a sense of the extreme misery of the troops, as well as the difficulty of holding the Confederate positions in northwestern Virginia against the superior strength of the Union forces, and the hostility of the local population. Lee is always very frank about the war in his letters to Mary and to his daughters, and makes no attempt to varnish the truth.
The difficulties Lee faced in northwestern Virginia would probably have been insurmountable by any general, however gifted, but it must also be said that the Lee of legend had not yet been forged. Some generals ascend to fame and glory in one quick leap, but Lee was a fifty-four-year-old man who had never commanded an army in the field, and whose last experience of war had been nearly fifteen years ago. He had much to learn, first of all about himself.
He could see the military situation clearly enough—the parallel chains of mountains running diagonally northeast from the Great Kanawha River to the Cheat River were like a series of natural barriers preventing the Union Army from advancing to Staunton and cutting the Virginia Central Railroad, thus splitting Virginia in two, and at the same time cutting Richmond off from Tennessee and the Shenandoah Valley. The “front,” if it could be called that, was over seventy-five miles, and the mountains were not easily crossed except by three passes.* Lee saw no great difficulty at first in holding this line—despite McClellan’s superiority in numbers, supplies, and equipment, but that was before he had fully measured the enmity between the Confederate commanders. He could see at once that the strongpoint of the Union line was Cheat Mountain, on top of which McClellan had built a substantial earthwork fortress, well equipped with artillery, and had felled enough trees to give the defenders a clear field of fire. If Lee could take Cheat Mountain before winter set in, then the whole Union line would have to fall back toward the Ohio River.
3. Cheat Mountain.
{Robert E. Lee, Volumes 1, 2, and 3, by Douglas Southall Freeman, copyright © 1934, 1935, by Charles Scribner’s Sons, copyright renewed 1962, 1963, by Inez Godden Freeman. All rights reserved.}
On August 3 Lee rode up to Huntersville, from which any attack on Cheat Mountain would have to begin; found it crowded with sick and miserable troops; and called on General Loring, who to Lee’s dismay greeted him in a cold, surly manner. Loring, it transpired, had been senior to Lee as a colonel in “the old Army,” and resented both Lee’s rank and his presence. An experienced professional soldier, Loring saw no reason why he needed Lee’s supervision, still less his tactical advice.
It is possible that Lee underrated how swiftly winter came to the mountains—it was already cold at night, and on the night of August 14–15 an ice storm would freeze mules to death and would be followed by an early snowfall that covered their bodies so only their ears showed. Certainly he underrated the sheer, bloody-minded refusal of the generals to cooperate with each other, or with him.
Lee had already learned that there was a rough road or track along which it was possible to advance unseen less than eighteen miles to the Tygart River valley, then turn eastward in a sharp “fishhook” to climb Cheat Mountain and attack the Union battery on its summit from behind. This uncannily resembled the flanking route around a supposedly impregnable enemy position on a mountaintop that Lee had discovered in April 1847, and which had led to Scott’s victory at the Battle of Cerro Gordo.
Loring, a
lthough he understood what Lee had in mind, was slow to move; and Lee certainly should have overruled him but chose not to. The problem was that Loring was unwilling to advance anywhere until he had built up a base of supplies at Huntersville. Days went by, the rain continued making the roads almost impassable, and the moment passed. There was after all no point in a flanking attack if it was not made in conjunction with a bold advance from the rest of Loring’s forces. The attack that should have been made on August 4 did not in the end take place until September 12, by which time Loring’s attempt to build up his base had been more or less canceled out by the rapidly spreading sickness of his troops, due partly to the increasingly cold, wet weather and partly to carelessness about even the most elementary rules of hygiene. Lee lamented the sickness of the troops. “Our troops, I know, suffer much.” he wrote to Mary. “They bring it on themselves by not doing what they are told.” This was probably true; but still, Lee, who had just been confirmed as a full general by the Confederate Congress, had only to give an order that sanitary precautions must be taken, latrines dug, and men forbidden to foul the streams or to drink downstream from where horses were watered—elementary rules for an army since Roman times—but he did not do so. A show of temper or a well-placed threat might have helped, but Lee waited patiently for Loring to get ready, and put up with what he knew perfectly well was a total lack of professionalism on the part of Loring’s officers, while seventy miles to the south the jealousy and spiteful lack of cooperation between Wise and Floyd threatened to open the Kanawha Valley to the Federals. That would expose Loring’s left flank and his line of communications, and bring about a debacle in northwestern Virginia.
Douglas Freeman, Lee’s loyal admirer, blames all this entirely on the fact that until now Lee “had lived with gentle people, where kindly sentiments and consideration for the feelings of others were part of noblesse oblige,” and that this rendered him unable to deal with people who were “sour or self-opinionated.” Certainly there is some truth to this, but Lee at this point was a man in his mid-fifties who had been in the army since his youth, and fought in a war—a small one, by later standards, but still nasty enough. Brigadier General Loring, whom Lee himself had chosen to replace Garnett, cannot have been the first ungentle person with whom he was obliged to cope!
It is true that Lee did not wish to instill fear in people, and there was nothing in his character that resembled the frightening intensity of, for instance, Stonewall Jackson. Lee preferred to lead by example, and to inspire those who served with him rather than shout them down or threaten them. He held himself under strict self-control, and expected others to do the same, but this still does not explain his inability to deal with Loring, Floyd, and Wise, or to demand that Loring carry out an attack that might have succeeded in early August, but was becoming problematic as the winter approached and the Federals on Cheat Mountain began to patrol and secure the complicated tangle of trails to the west of the mountain. The answer, perhaps, is that Lee was still in the process of inventing himself as the “Marble Man,” whom everybody sought to please, and whose slight frown of disappointment was all it took to chasten a subordinate. These elements of his character were always present, but they required an effort of will on Lee’s part, and they needed to be confirmed by victory in battle.
Despite the torrential rain, the misery of the troops, and the continuing resentment of General Loring, Lee saw another chance to attack Cheat Mountain. A civilian engineer approached Colonel Albert Rust of the Third Arkansas Regiment with the information that there was another rough trail through the dense brush and steep ravines to the south and west of Cheat Mountain, by which it was possible to climb unseen to a position west of the Union lines on the summit and overlooking them, at a point where they were poorly defended by merely a few trenches and an improvised wooden blockhouse. If this movement was coordinated with a frontal assault from the east that Loring had been putting off for weeks, and if an attack from the west could be launched at the same time to sever the road from the summit to Huttonsville by which the Union forces were supplied, there seemed to be a good chance of dislodging the Federals from Cheat Mountain. Since very few people in this part of Virginia were secessionists, the civilian engineer’s story about the existence of the trail had been cause for some doubt, so Rust himself had accompanied the man on a second trip to the summit, and vouched for the truth of it. In return for this good news, Rust asked to be given command of the assault from the position he had reconnoitered. Lee agreed. By this time Major General McClellan had been recalled to Washington to replace McDowell, and Brigadier General W. S. Rosecrans was in command of what would become the Department of Western Virginia.
Lee and Loring came up with a plan that had every virtue except simplicity, since it depended on perfect timing and the element of surprise, neither of which would prove easy to achieve. One of the difficulties was topographical. From a distance Cheat Mountain and its neighbors looked like gently rolling hills covered in autumn foliage, but they were in fact much steeper than they seemed, and separated by deep ravines. The ground was broken by many ridges, and all of it was heavily wooded and covered in dense thickets of shrub, except for the summit of Cheat Mountain itself, which had been cleared by the Federals to offer a good field of fire. This would not only make it difficult for Lee’s troops to attack but also make it difficult for Lee to see or communicate with the three different elements of the attack.
Lee chose to oversee the battle from the left, which was probably the appropriate place for him to be in terms of its importance, but it still didn’t give him real control over the battle. His plan called for the left wing, under Loring, to approach Cheat Mountain along both sides of the Tygart River valley. When they were directly west of the summit, the rest of his force would arc left to cross Elkwater Ford, where the bulk of Reynold’s forces were encamped. This would block any Union reinforcements from coming to the support of the troops on the summit. Meanwhile, the rest of Loring’s troops would attack the summit from behind. This attack, along with Brigadier General Henry Jackson’s frontal attack from the east, would begin the moment they heard Rust’s small force of 2,000 men commence fire at the trenches and blockhouse. This effectively ceded control of the battle to Rust, who had previously estimated that there were between 2,000 and 3,000 Union troops on the summit after his personal reconnaissance.
On paper, seen as a plan, it looks excellent, particularly since Lee had about 15,000 men, approximately the same number as his Union opponent, Brigadier J. J. Reynolds, the former assistant professor of philosophy at West Point. In Lee’s case, however, at least half his men were disabled by sickness, and the effect of his plan was to divide what remained of his forces in four, thereby giving up the principle of concentration in favor of dispersal, never a sound policy in war. Then too, drawn up as a neat map, the plan fails to convey the difficulties of the terrain, which were considerable. The attack was set for September 12, but troops were on the move from September 9 on, mostly over muddy roads or worse trails, on which the men and even the mules slipped and slid, and where in some places men had to climb or descend by grasping the branches of trees. The troops soon ran out of rations, and although it was cold at night, fires were forbidden, so the men were forced to huddle together in the mud and torrential rain for a miserable two days and nights to get into position.
The morning of September 12 began inauspiciously with a heavy fog. When it lifted, Lee could look down the Tygart valley and see Reynolds’s encampment clearly, although the summit of Cheat Mountain was still shrouded. He waited for the sound of Rust’s men opening fire, but instead he heard the irregular crackle of musket shots from ahead on his right, near Becky’s Ford. The explanation was, as he discovered only later, that some of Brigadier General Joseph Reid Anderson’s men, concerned that the rain may have dampened the powder in their muskets, were firing into the air to clear and dry the chambers—the lazy man’s way of preparing a weapon for use, rather than the one prescribed by t
he army. The result was that Lee’s plan to surprise the enemy was immediately eliminated. Lee galloped ahead to see what was happening, and he and his party nearly collided with a Union cavalry charge. For a moment they actually found themselves behind Reynolds’s lines, but they managed to retire unnoticed in the confusion.
The next element of the plan to go wrong involved Rust’s column, from which no firing had been heard. The reason was that Rust had captured a few Union pickets and teamsters, who managed to persuade him that there were at least 4,000 or 5,000 Union troops facing him on the crest, when the real number was only between 200 and 300. Rust held a brief council of war with his senior officers and decided to follow their advice and withdraw. In the absence of any firing from Rust’s men, Lee’s planned frontal attack never took place, and he was unable to persuade Loring and his officers to carry out the attack on the left—the morale of the men had plummeted as the resolve of their commanders dissolved. Still another Confederate loss was the death of Lee’s aide Colonel Washington, when he and Rooney Lee blundered into the Federal picket line on “the right branch of the Elkwater Fork,” looking for another way of attacking Reynolds’s forces. It was a tragic end to a battle that had failed dismally before it began.
In pouring rain, the dispirited, starving Confederate troops made their way back slowly to where they had started from. A week of exhaustion and misery had accomplished nothing, and it was clear that with winter coming on, nothing else could be attempted here. Lee paused in camp long enough to inform one of Colonel Washington’s two daughters about their father’s death and to write a rather bland letter to Governor Letcher about the failure of the “expedition,” laying the blame on the weather, and carefully avoiding any criticism of the men or their officers. Curiously enough, except for the usual expressions of humility and unworthiness, Lee is notably reticent about his own failings in his letter to Letcher. He should have imposed his authority on Loring from the very beginning; he should have chosen an officer more experienced than Rust to lead the attack on the summit; and when Rust didn’t attack, Lee should have concentrated his own forces and pushed them forward to attack anyhow. Above all, Lee should have taken firm control of the battle himself. His expressions of regret were mild indeed compared with the opprobrium that soon descended on his head from the southern press; it was from this time on that he would be called “Granny Lee” by a public that thought he was too cautious to command in battle. The truth is that Lee did not seek praise for things that went right for him, nor did he blame others or himself when things went wrong. He saw in everything God’s will, and patiently endured the criticism. This is saintly behavior, but very rare among generals, and it explains a certain opaque quality in Lee’s character, even as described by his admirers. Even his devoted aide Walter Taylor seems baffled by it, and no man was closer to Lee.
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