Some great generals begin with a stunning success, knowing—or finding within themselves—everything they need to know to win a victory, like the young Bonaparte; but Lee started with a series of stumbles. He had much to learn, although his aggressiveness in battle—in sharp contrast to his gentle manner, courtesy, and unshakable dignity—would startle both northerners and his own countrymen alike. His military experience in Mexico had been in the age of the smoothbore musket, when aimed fire of thirty to fifty yards was the norm, but the rifled percussion muskets* with which both sides were increasingly armed, though slower to reload because the ball had to be pushed down hard against the rifling, were deadly at 300 yards in the hand of a competent marksman. The rifled cannons, although rarer, were also making artillery far more accurate over greater distances. In the North cavalry troopers were armed with breech-loading Sharps carbines that gave a far higher rate of fire than anything previously known, and toward the end of the war some of them were even armed with cartridge-loading Spencer repeating carbines†—indeed, Lee’s son Rooney would be wounded by a shot from one. Six-shot revolvers had been mechanical novelties in the 1840s, but by now, thanks to the genius for mass production of Sam Colt, all officers and many cavalry troopers were armed with them. The firepower of armies had increased dramatically, while their tactics remained for the moment unchanged.
8. Plan of battle north of the Chickahominy River, as announced by General Lee at the council of war, June 23, 1862.
{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.}
Although Lee’s favorite tactic was the swift-moving flank attack, he soon came to realize that these improvements in infantry weapons favored the defense, and he put that understanding to good use in what was certainly one of his most striking victories, at Fredericksburg in December 1862, and also during the winter of 1864–1865 as he retreated again and again, forcing Grant to attack him on ground of his choosing. Over the course of the war Lee would adapt to such novelties as the telegraph, observation balloons, iron ships, and even submarines, while the intricacies of moving men, guns, and horses by railway became the chief concern of a staff officer. Lee still talked of “giving the bayonet” to the enemy, but by now this was largely a metaphor for a last-ditch defense—the bayonet’s place in the order of killing was far below that of shrapnel, case shot, and musket fire; indeed, bayonets were responsible for less than 1 percent of battlefield casualties in the Civil War. He and the Army of Northern Virginia still had a lot to learn.
Early in the morning on June 1, 1862 Robert E. Lee rode out of Richmond into the field to take command of that army. He found President Davis and General Smith on Nine Mile Road, close to where they had been yesterday. The battle had already been renewed, at first with intense fighting, but then petering out. On the Union side General McClellan finally rose from his sickbed to survey the battle “in a state of utter exhaustion.” Many of his generals hoped that if he could bring enough reinforcements over from the north side of the Chickahominy to the south, a victory on the second day of the battle would still enable them to take Richmond. McClellan remained unconvinced; he thought the river was rising too fast and would make it difficult to reinforce his artillery, and worried about reducing the number of troops guarding “his communications and the immense park of artillery.” In short, he dithered away the chance of a decisive victory.
Still intent on a siege, McClellan wanted to move his heavy guns forward along the Richmond and York River Railroad, which ran from West Point (Virginia) and White House to Richmond, north of the Chickahominy. McClellan was loath to risk losing the railway by reinforcing his left at the expense of his right, or perhaps he simply did not feel well enough to make such a decision. In the end, he left things as they were, and went back to his bed, where he was to remain off and on for the next ten days, unable to mount a horse. To the disappointment of some of his generals, Lee ordered “the whole army back to the lines back to the lines it had occupied before the battle of the previous day.”
General Longstreet, whose failure to take the correct road the day before had cost Johnston a decisive victory, now wanted to commit the whole army to a new attack, even though the forces on his flanks were scattered and disorganized. His own attack that morning had been “feeble and accomplished nothing,” in the judgment of that final arbiter of Civil War history The West Point Atlas of the American Wars. As a professional soldier Lee was always unwilling “to reinforce failure.”
Despite his troops’ disorder Lee understood that falling farther back on Richmond would eventually allow McClellan to bring up his heavy artillery and begin a siege—a recipe for disaster. He decided to stay put. He had worked hard, despite ridicule and criticism, to build a defensive line around Richmond, and he would now expand and improve it so that he could defend the city with as few men as possible, relying on earthworks and batteries to secure the capital in the last resort. Then the bulk of the army could be used to drive McClellan back down the peninsula, while Lee waited for the right moment to move Jackson’s army from the Shenandoah Valley to Richmond to join him. There were serious risks involved—lightly defended, Richmond might be taken by the enemy; bringing Jackson from the Valley to the peninsula might allow Banks to regain all that he had lost. But whereas Johnston had been waging a defensive fight, hoping to lure McClellan forward into a position where he could be defeated in one grand battle, Lee intended to take the initiative and attack McClellan boldly, every day and everyplace where McClellan attempted to draw a line.
Fortunately for Lee, McClellan gave him breathing space in which to perfect his strategy. Lee had more than three weeks, during much of which heavy rain poured down, to take the measure of his own generals, all the way down to brigade commanders. He also used the time to drill his troops hard and impose stricter discipline. He had been unpleasantly surprised by the amount of drunkenness, desertion, and insubordination in Johnston’s army. Only four days after he assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia, he wrote a long letter to President Davis, suggesting a bold new strategy. “After much reflection I think if it was possible to reinforce Jackson strongly, it would change the character of the war. This can only be done by the troops in Georgia, South Carolina & North Carolina. Jackson could in that event cross Maryland into Pennsylvania. It would call all the enemy from our Southern coast & liberate those states.”
This was radical thinking—too radical, as it happened, for Davis. It is interesting to note that Jackson had already acquired Lee’s confidence, and ironic to realize that Lee was already considering the advances into Maryland and Pennsylvania that would lead him to Antietam in 1862 and to Gettysburg in 1863. The letter provides a clear indication of Lee’s broad strategic intention, which was remarkably consistent from the very beginning, as well as of its limitation, which is that he always saw the focal point of the war as threatening Washington, and the crucial area in which it would be decided as northern Virginia. He was not indifferent to the war in the West, but just as being a Virginian had trumped his being an American, driving the enemy out of Virginia was his dearest goal. If his ambitious original plan been carried out, it would have forced McClellan to abandon the peninsula and come to the defense of Washington, opening the possibility that Lee might be able to destroy him with a flanking attack carried out as he retreated. Such an attack, if carried out simultaneously with Jackson’s advance into Maryland and Pennsylvania, and reinforced with 40,000 men from Georgia and the Carolinas, might well have brought the war to an end in 1862 with a decisive Confederate victory. But not even President Davis could persuade the governors of those states to strip their own defenses for the benefit of such a risky operation—the Confederacy was an alliance of equals, not a single country like the Union. “States’ rights,” ostensibly the reason for the war, was always a factor limiting the powers of the Confederate government. Lee’s
strategic vision was amazingly clear-sighted, and Napoleonic in scope, but in the end Davis did not have the political authority to impose it on all the Confederate states, or the will to do so.
Lee seems to have accepted this decision calmly—he may even have been relieved—and instead turned his attention to a new and promising form of attack. The mud and the overflowing rivers and creeks were slowing McClellan’s effort to bring his siege artillery far enough forward to bombard Richmond. Instead of waiting passively, Lee decided to use the pause to bring a bombardment to McClellan. He had a heavy gun placed on a railway flatcar, with improvised armor protection; sent it down the length of the Richmond and York railway line that was still in Confederate hands; and began shelling McClellan’s artillery park and supply dumps.
Lee has a certain reputation as an old-fashioned soldier, perhaps because of his dignified Old Testament appearance, but the Civil War was in fact the first modern war: a war of masses, railways, conscription, industrial power, and new technology.
In fact, the Civil War should be seen not as a continuation of eighteenth-century warfare in the tradition of Lee’s father, but as the first in a series of vastly greater and progressively more destructive modern wars. Some Civil War generals were throwbacks to an earlier and more romantic view of war, like J. E. B. Stuart, who unself-consciously played the role of a Cavalier. Others, like General William Tecumseh Sherman,* were precursors of the late-twentieth-century military doctrine of total war, the belief that the indiscriminate destruction on a vast scale of the enemy’s cities, crops, infrastructure, and civilian population is the fastest way to end a war—“War as hell,” to paraphrase Sherman. Lee was neither of these. Unlike Stuart, he found little romantic appeal in war. He was not nostalgic for the imagined glories of the past. Unlike Sherman, Lee did not encourage his troops to burn and pillage in enemy territory; indeed he had them punished severely for even minor theft, whenever it was brought to his attention. He did not attempt to wage war against civilians; he regarded that as uncivilized. Some military historians have criticized him for not having a “siege train” of heavy artillery ready to employ against northern cities like Washington or Baltimore; but in the first place the Confederacy had no means by which to procure or produce the equivalent of McClellan’s heavy artillery, and—more important—Lee was reluctant to subject enemy civilians to bombardment. In many ways Lee was a man more of the eighteenth century than the nineteenth in his thinking, even though he was of his own century professionally. A trained engineer, he understood technology far better than he is given credit for, and when he could, he employed it—Lee’s innovative use of artillery mounted on a flatcar is a good example of his willingness to embrace new ideas. Still, it is worth noting that Lee used the railway gun to strike at McClellan’s supply dumps, whereas McClellan’s “siege train” was intended to level Richmond and kill those civilians who did not flee their homes.
Despite his foray into grand strategy, Lee’s principal concern in the first two weeks of June 1862 was to develop a strategy that would drive McClellan back from Richmond, and if possible expel him from the peninsula altogether. He was correct in assuming that the Confederacy could not expect foreign support or recognition so long as its capital was in danger from an army with superior numbers dug in only a few miles away. The fact that the Confederacy might have been better off had its capital not been moved from Montgomery, Alabama, was not Lee’s responsibility, but the preservation of Richmond was.
Even before assuming command of the Army of Northern Virginia Lee recognized that the key to defeating McClellan on the peninsula was a swift, secret transfer of Jackson’s forces in the Shenandoah Valley for just long enough for the combined troops to strike a crushing blow at McClellan’s right. It was with this in mind that Lee maintained a general oversight of Jackson’s operations even though Jackson still came under Johnston’s command. Lee sought to understand Jackson’s difficult, secretive, and sometimes impenetrable character by means of an exchange of letters, which not only revealed Lee’s own thoughts and plans but gently drew out Jackson’s. Seldom have two generals corresponded with such frankness and mutual admiration—or with such fruitful results. By June 1862 Lee did not have to spell matters out in detail for Jackson; he merely had to hint at what he wanted, and leave it to Jackson to develop a detailed plan and timetable.
On June 8 Lee wrote to Jackson, congratulating him on his march to Winchester, which, he wrote, had been “conducted with your usual skill and boldness,” and warning him to be ready to move his entire command at a moment’s notice. “Should there be nothing requiring your attention in the valley so as to prevent your leaving it for a few days, and you can make arrangements to deceive the enemy and impress him with the idea of your presence, please let me know, that you may unite at the decisive moment with the army near Richmond.”
On June 11 Lee managed to scrape up fourteen more regiments to reinforce Jackson, “the object [being] to crush the forces opposed to you,” and made his own plans somewhat clearer. “Leave your enfeebled troops to watch the country and guard the passes covered by your cavalry and artillery, and with your main body . . . move rapidly to Ashland by rail . . . and sweep down between the Chickahominy and Pamunkey, cutting up the enemy’s communications, &c., while this army attacks General McClellan in front. He will thus, I think, be forced out of his intrenchments, where he is strongly posted on the Chickahominy, and apparently preparing to move by gradual approaches on Richmond.”
This was the critical letter: in it, Lee’s intentions are made crystal clear, as is his concern for security. Military intelligence in the Civil War was poorly organized on both sides—the Union spy chief Allan Pinkerton, while effective at foiling plots on Lincoln’s life, consistently overestimated the strength of the Confederate forces, contributing to McClellan’s belief that he was facing numbers two or three times greater than his own—but the fact that there were no “foreigners” in the war made security hard to achieve in moving large numbers of men. Fortunately, no commander was more obsessed with security than Jackson, who seldom shared his plans even with his own senior officers. He took care to make sure that Union ambulances were not permitted to cross the lines to pick up their wounded, and that “bearers of the flag of truce” were impressed “as much as possible with the idea of a heavy advance [to the north] on our part, and let them return under such impression.” Jackson also put a stop to the practice of allowing local civilians “to drive their cattle on this side of the lines.” As far as possible he sought to “cut off communication across the lines between us and the enemy,” and did so very effectively—quite an achievement in the Valley, where there was no easy way to distinguish a Union supporter from a Confederate sympathizer.
In Richmond Lee’s staff set about preparing rail transportation for men and horses, together with forage for horses, while Lee continued to urge upon Jackson the need for speed and secrecy. “In moving your troops,” he wrote to Jackson on June 16, “you could let it be understood that it was to pursue the enemy in front. . . . To be efficacious, the movement must be secret. . . . Be careful to guard from friends and foes your purpose and your intention of personally leaving the valley.” For his part, Jackson met even with his own cavalry commander in secrecy, writing from “Near Wyeth’s Cave”: “If you can meet me in Staunton by 5 o’clock tomorrow morning I hope you will do so. . . . I will be on my horse at the north end of the town so you need not inquire after me. I do not desire it to be known that I am absent from this point.”
Lee had been in command of the Army of Northern Virginia for only two weeks, but his energy and sense of purpose had already touched every man, from general to private. He had quickly seized the initiative, no longer merely reacting to McClellan’s moves, as Johnston had done, but completing a large and complicated plan to destroy him before his artillery could threaten Richmond. He put J. E. B. Stuart* on notice “to send some cavalry at least as far north as Hanover Junction . . . to watch the movements of the
enemy and give protection to the railroad,” characteristically adding, “Endeavor to spare your horses as much as possible, and charge your officers to look to their comfort.” Lee is sometimes charged by military historians, Major General Fuller for one, with giving insufficient attention to detail, but his correspondence with his own commanders is full of practical details, as well as sound advice. For example, he advised Jackson that if he was short of rations, “Beef cattle could at least be driven, and if necessary we can subsist on meat alone.” This is not the voice of a general lost in grand strategy; despite his dislike of paperwork, Lee seems to have had a firm grasp of the details, right down to rations for the men and the transportation of artillery batteries. Aware of how much weaker in numbers he was than the enemy, he kept his cards close to his chest and played his hand very shrewdly indeed.
Before he could transfer Jackson’s army from the Valley to attack McClellan there was still much that Lee needed to know. McClellan’s left was anchored less than seven miles east of Richmond, and protected by White Oak Swamp, his center ran “northward” to the Chickahominy, and his army was strongly entrenched. What Lee did not know was how far McClellan’s right ran north of the Chickahominy, and whether there was a wagon trail from White House in addition to the railroad to carry McClellan’s supplies forward. So on June 11, he risked the best part of his cavalry, and ordered the twenty-nine-year-old Brigadier General J. E. B. Stuart to ride behind the enemy’s line and bring back a clear report of McClellan’s dispositions to the north of the Chickahominy. Stuart set off the next day with 1,200 men, including Lee’s son Rooney and a colorful group of adventuresome young officers—among them Lieutenant John S. Mosby, the future Confederate partisan leader, who would be known as the “Gray Ghost”; and Captain Johann August Heinrick Heros von Borcke, a mighty six-foot-two Prussian who weighed between 200 and 300 pounds and carried a whole arsenal of weapons, including a sword of medieval weight and length and three pistols. Borcke was almost fanatically devoted to Stuart.
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