Lee’s imperturbability was one of the Army of Northern Virginia’s most important weapons—his appearance polite and visibly unafraid, near the firing line, encouraged his soldiers, and no doubt shamed many a soldier who did feel fear into courageous behavior. He did not have Napoleon’s flair for the dramatic gesture; instead it was Lee’s impassivity that impressed the troops: his calm courage and his confidence in victory. Still, there was one moment during the day when Lee did let his anger slip. He remained anxious about the slowness of the troops marching from Harpers Ferry to the battlefield, and furious at the growing number of stragglers and deserters just when he needed every man. Riding forward toward Dunker Church he encountered a Confederate straggler from Jackson’s troops making his way back from the firing line to his camp carrying the carcass of a stolen pig. White-faced, Lee abruptly ordered the man “to be sent to Jackson with orders to have him shot as a warning to the army, and rode on.” In the event, Jackson, who knew his own men better than Lee did, ordered the soldier into the hottest part of the battle instead of shooting him. The soldier so distinguished himself that Jackson forgave him. Lee’s faithful aide Colonel Long, not normally given to jokes at Lee’s expense, remarked: “it may be said that, though [the soldier] lost his pig, he ‘saved his bacon.’” Long also recalled that it was one of only two incidents during the entire war when Lee acted in “hot passion.” Lee, he noted, with a certain clinical detachment, “was not wanting in temper, but was, on the contrary, a man of decided character and strong passions; yet he had such complete control over himself that few men ever knew him to deviate from his habitual calm dignity of mien.”
Although Lee still professed to believe that his job was merely to bring the troops to the right place and leave matters afterward to his generals, Sharpsburg was even more Lee’s battle than Second Manassas had been. Lee had brought the army into Maryland, detached Jackson to take Harpers Ferry against Longstreet’s advice, and chosen Sharpsburg as the place to concentrate his forces and fight McClellan; he even spent part of the early morning siting artillery batteries where he wanted them—this was the very reverse of hands-off generalship. Perhaps Lee’s confidence in his own ability was growing, or he was simply unaware of just how tightly he controlled every aspect of his battles, but both Long’s account and Lee’s own report of the battle to Richmond make it clear that he was familiar with every unit in his army and all his commanders, and that he was not only the animating spirit of the battle but the man responsible for every decision. Long, who was beside Lee, also makes it clear how great a risk Lee was taking to throw the majority of his forces to the left: “The Confederates, who had advanced about a mile, were gradually borne back to their original position. McClellan now directed his chief attack upon Lee’s left, with the hope of forcing it back, so that he might penetrate between it and the river and take the Confederate position in reverse. . . . The entire Confederate force, except D. R. Jones’s division, on the far right, was now engaged.”
One by one, Lee artfully fed units from his center and right into the fight, dangerously weakening Longstreet’s line. Everywhere on the field, row after row of dead and wounded men demonstrated the ferocity of the fight. One Confederate artillery commander called it “Artillery Hell,” and a Union commander who was in many of the major battles of the war declared that “the Antietam Turnpike surpassed them all in manifest evidence of slaughter.” From 9:30 a.m. to midday D. H. Hill’s division clashed with Major General William French’s Union division over the sunken road where Lee’s left met his center. The road had served as a shortcut around Sharpsburg for local farmers, and had many zigzagging angles, which acted like the fire bays and traverses of the 1914–1918 trenches and enabled the Confederates to pour fire into the flanks of the Federals each time they attempted to storm it. The road changed hands several times, though it eventually ended up in Union hands, and would become known as “Bloody Lane” because the blood pooled up in the hard-worn hollow of its dried clay surface and literally ran like a river. Three hours of hand-to-hand fighting in this one place cost over 5,000 casualties on both sides.
The morning involved some of the bloodiest fighting of the entire war, in which thousands of men fell in a relatively small area, while scores of field officers and generals on both sides fell leading them. On the Union side Major General Hooker himself was wounded, and Major General Mansfield was killed; on the Confederate side Brigadier General Starke was killed, and three other brigadier generals were seriously wounded, one of whom later died. Throughout the morning, “The roar of musketry and the thunder of artillery proclaimed the deadly conflict that raged. These deafening sounds of battle continued until about twelve o’clock, when they began to abate, and about one they had ceased.” McClellan had thrown in four Union corps to break the Confederate left, and failed. The brief, ghastly silence, broken only by the cries of the wounded and dying, signified that the four corps “were so much broken by loss and fatigue that they were unable to renew the contest,” which had so far cost both sides more than 13,000 casualties in the course of the morning.
The slaughter in Bloody Lane marked the end of the first phase of the battle. The artillery bombardment resumed, Lee rode back toward the depleted center of his line, where he dismounted on “an eminence” that gave him a view of the whole battlefield to talk to Longstreet, as usual indifferent to the fact that he was fully exposed to enemy fire. D. H. Hill, who had ridden over to report to Lee and remained mounted despite a jocular warning from Longstreet, was thrown to the ground when a Federal cannonball took off both his horse’s front legs.
The low hills and farmland to the north of Sharpsburg where the morning fight had been made were now held by the Federals. It was Burnside’s turn to make an attack, the time directly on Lee’s center and right. But neither he nor McClellan had thought to have Antietam Creek examined for fords, so from one o’clock on he sent brigade after brigade across the narrow stone bridge into a hailstorm of Confederate fire. As the afternoon wore on, one of his brigade commanders finally located Snavely’s Ford, about a mile and a half downstream, while many of the soldiers discovered that they could wade across the creek “without getting their waist belts wet in many places,” rather than get shot on the bridge. But it took two hours of fierce fighting for Burnside to get his troops across to the west bank of the creek and formed up, giving Lee time to move some of his men from his left, where the Union attacks had subsided, to his center and right. By the time Burnside’s attack had reached the southeastern corner of Sharpsburg, Lee played his last card, and sent in A. P. Hill’s division, which had been marching at a rapid pace from Harpers Ferry. Hill’s unexpected attack against Burnside’s left flank drove the Federals back to the bridge they had crossed with such grave losses earlier in the afternoon. McClellan, reluctant to risk his reserves at the end of the day and still believing that Lee outnumbered him, did not attempt another attack, although he had the forces with which to make it. Burnside held onto his bridgehead, Lee still held Sharpsburg, though his position was reduced to a tenuous perimeter, McClellan’s army had suffered nearly 12,500 casualties, Lee’s more than 10,000, just over 30 percent of his forces. Sharpsburg, or Antietam, was now the bloodiest single day of battle in American history.
As night fell, stretcher bearers and ambulances attempted to pick up the wounded under an informal truce. His headquarters now in the ruined town, Lee was urged by Longstreet and several other of his generals, to retire across the Potomac at once. He just replied, brusquely for him, “Gentlemen, we will not cross the Potomac tonight. . . . If McClellan wants to fight in the morning I will give him battle again. Go!” This was determination indeed, and possibly also pride, the one sin to which Lee was not altogether immune. He had lost nearly a quarter of his army in a single day’s fighting—in Longstreet’s words, “a struggle of eighteen hours, too fearful to contemplate.” In any event, the next day neither army was in a position to renew the battle. On the night of September 18 Lee finally faced
reality and withdrew his army across the Potomac. Stuart’s aide Heros von Borcke, painted the withdrawal as a Wagnerian scene: “The passage of the Potomac was one of those magnificent spectacles which are only seen in war. The whole landscape was lighted up with a lurid glare from the burning houses of Williamsport, which had been ignited by the enemy’s shells. High over the heads of the crossing column and the dark waters of the river, the blazing bombs passed each other in parabolas of flame through the air, and the spectral tress showed their every limb and leaf against the red sky.”
Lee moved his shattered army back to Virginia, while McClellan, who should have pursued him, relapsed into immobility, made good his losses, and fended off the efforts of Lincoln and Halleck to make him move. Although Sharpsburg looms large in Lee’s legend, it is hard to find much to admire in the Maryland campaign of 1862. Lee certainly had firmer control over his army than he had showed on the peninsula, and his maneuvers from Richmond to First Manassas, and from there to South Mountain, were among the swiftest and most brilliant in the history of warfare, but in the end warfare must be judged by its result. Lee had won a great victory at Manassas, and taken the pressure off Richmond—but his proclamation to the people of Maryland accomplished little; the division of the army after crossing the Potomac into Maryland was, as Longstreet had predicted, disastrous; and the battle at Sharpsburg, into which he had been forced, was at best a costly, if heroic, stalemate, in which neither side could claim victory. Lee escaped by the skin of his teeth, in large part because McClellan refused to renew the battle. Lee never reached Pennsylvania, where he had hoped to resupply his army and then march east to threaten a major city. More seriously, his army was reduced from 50,000 to 38,000 by the time he reached Sharpsburg, which means that he totally underestimated the exhaustion of his men and the fact that so many of them were shoeless. Lee’s own determination and ability to endure privation set a noble example for his troops but should not have blinded him to their condition. His pride in them led him again and again to overestimate what they could do, despite the lack of supplies and clothing. There is a point beyond which even the bravest and most devoted of armies can no longer carry out their commander’s strategy—one thinks inevitably of Napoleon’s Grand Armée at Moscow—and Lee’s intention to follow Hagerstown Pike into Pennsylvania was a good (though less disastrous) example of this. Longstreet was right—the Battle of Sharpsburg should never have been fought.
It was a political disaster too. Lee’s intention had been to bring Maryland into the Confederacy, and by winning a decisive victory to encourage Great Britain or France to recognize the Confederacy. Instead McClellan’s fight at Sharpsburg and Lee’s subsequent retreat across the Potomac at last convinced President Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.
Whether Lee wished it or no, the war was now no longer just about whether the Federal government had the right to coerce Virginia by armed force, as Lee saw it; the issue was slavery. He had inadvertently brought about a shift in politics that, by a supreme irony, was exactly what John Brown had sought to achieve in raiding Harpers Ferry.
CHAPTER 9
Glory—Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville
“It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it.”
—Robert E. Lee, at the
Battle of Fredericksburg
During the afternoon of September 17, as Lee was preparing to defend his center and right from Burnside’s attack at Sharpsburg, he encountered his son Robert again. Robert later described the occasion:
As one of the Army of Northern Virginia, I occasionally saw the commander-in-chief, on the march, or passed the headquarters close enough to recognise him and members of his staff, but a private soldier in Jackson’s corps did not have much time, during that campaign, for visiting, and until the battle of Sharpsburg I had no opportunity of speaking to him. On that occasion our battery had been severely handled, losing many men and horses. Having three guns disabled, we were ordered to withdraw, and while moving back we passed General Lee and several of his staff, grouped on a little knoll near the road. Having no definite orders where to go, our captain, seeing the commanding general, halted us and rode over to get some instructions. Some others and myself went along to see and hear. General Lee was dismounted with some of his staff around him, a courier holding his horse. Captain Poague, commanding our battery, the Rockbridge Artillery, saluted, reported our condition, and asked for instructions. The General, listening patiently, looked at us—his eyes passing over me without any sign of recognition—and then ordered Captain Poague to take the most serviceable horses and men, man the uninjured gun, send the disabled part of his command back to refit, and report to the front for duty. As Poague turned to go, I went up to speak to my father. When he found out who I was, he congratulated me on being well and unhurt.
I then said:
“General, are you going to send us in again?”
“Yes, my son,” he replied with a smile. “You all must do what you can to drive these people back.”
There are conflicting accounts of this meeting, but since Lee and his youngest son were the only people who heard what they said to each other, Robert’s is surely the correct one. That Lee once more failed to recognize his son is less surprising if one remembers that commanding generals tend to see their men en masse, rather than as individuals. Lee was focused on the surviving gun, not on the grimy, soot-blackened, tattered gunners who served it, but once he recognized Robert his words were typical of him: patient, kindly, firm. Also typical is the fact that he avoided giving the enemy a name: they were not “Union,” or “Federal” troops, still less “Yankees.” He always referred to them as “these people,” or “those people,” as if reluctant to face the fact that he was fighting the U.S. Army, his army, in the service of which he had spent most of his adult life.
Even in the midst of great events and heavy responsibilities Lee’s family was never far from his mind. His other two boys were also in the army: Rooney, the middle brother, commanding a cavalry brigade under the command of his cousin Fitzhugh Lee; the eldest, Boo, serving as an aide-de-camp to President Jefferson Davis, and eager for a combat command. Lee followed their doings closely, but he scrupulously avoided any hint of favoritism. Rooney was in any case a professional soldier and a first-rate cavalry commander, who would almost certainly have risen to high rank even had his name not been Lee. Of the girls, Annie, Mildred, and Agnes remained in Jones Spring, the spa where Rooney and Charlotte’s son had died, while Mrs. Lee and her oldest daughter, Mary, had returned to Richmond to nurse Rooney through a dangerous illness—probably typhoid fever. Lee had advised his wife not to stay there, since by this time it was “one immense hospital . . . [where citizens] breathed the vapors of the charnel house,” but Mrs. Lee was no more likely to follow her husband’s advice than she had been before. When Rooney was better, she moved to Hickory Hill, north of Richmond on the Pamunkey River, and still only a few miles from the Union lines. Lee, like many another parent, expressed relief when his daughter Mildred agreed reluctantly, after a year’s urging on his part, to attend a boarding school out of harm’s way in Raleigh, North Carolina, “St. Mary’s Academy, the largest church-related seminary for girls in antebellum America,” where she would be unhappy and lonely. She does not appear to have made friends there, even though she was treated like a celebrity as the daughter of the South’s most famous general.
Worse than Mildred’s unhappiness was in store for Lee. The supposed health resort at Jones Spring, which had already claimed the life of Lee’s grandchild, now claimed that of his beloved daughter Annie, who succumbed to typhoid fever after three weeks of suffering. Her mother had journeyed down to be with her, keeping Lee informed of Annie’s illness, though he did not share his agonizing concern with anyone. When he finally received news of her death, his aide, Colonel Taylor recalled:
At the usual hour he summoned me to his presence to know if there were any matters of army routine upon which his j
udgment and action were desired. The papers containing a few such cases were presented to him; he reviewed and gave his orders in regard to them. I then left him, but for some cause returned in a few moments, and with my accustomed freedom entered his tent without announcement or ceremony, when I was startled and shocked to see him overcome with grief, an open letter in his hands. That letter contained the sad intelligence of his daughter’s death.
Years later Taylor still marveled at Lee’s self-control and dedication to duty:
He was the father of a tenderly-loved daughter . . . whose sweet presence he was to know no more in this world; but he was also charged with the command of an important and active army, to whose keeping to a great extent were intrusted the safety and honor of the Southern Confederacy. Lee the man must give way to Lee the soldier. His army demanded his first thought and care. . . . Who can tell with what anguish of soul he endeavoured to control himself, and to maintain a calm exterior, and who can estimate the immense effort necessary to still the heart filled to overflowing with tenderest emotions, and to give attention to the important trusts committed to him, before permitting the more selfish indulgence of private meditation, grief, and prayer? Duty first was the rule of his life, and his every thought, word, and action, was made to square with duty’s inexorable demands.
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