Lee, for all his family feelings for Markie, could recognize a hothead when he saw one, and no doubt thought Orton would be more useful in battle than in a position that required discretion and good judgment. But if Lee thought he was well rid of the young man, he was wrong. Orton went on to distinguish himself at Shiloh and was promoted to the rank of captain, and eventually colonel. His “quick temper and insistence upon absolute military discipline” led him to shoot one of his own soldiers who failed to show him respect—an incident that greatly damaged Orton’s reputation.
He came to visit the Lees at Hickory Hill over Christmas in 1862, where, tall, blond, and handsome in his “képi and hussar jacket,” he charmed everyone, and paid particular attention to Lee’s daughter Agnes, a friend since their childhood. He had brought “a pair of ladies’ riding gauntlets and a riding whip.” It should be noted that in those more delicate days, presentation of any article of apparel—say, gloves or a handkerchief—as a gift to a young woman was considered a prelude to an engagement. Agnes and Orton went “on long horseback rides in the woods” unchaperoned, and the entire household seems to have expected that he would ask for her hand. On the last day of his visit he did propose, but to everybody’s dismay Agnes declined.
Given his nature Orton probably pressed his suit too hard, and although Agnes could not be described as “worldly,” she was able to tell that Orton, however attractive, was not stable enough for marriage. There is some suggestion that he drank too much, and that he was not only fearless but reckless. At any rate to a daughter of such a pillar of rectitude as Robert E. Lee he may not have seemed like a suitable husband.
For reasons that remain unclear Orton changed his name to Lawrence William Orton, perhaps hoping to escape the blot on his reputation after he had shot one of his own men.* Perhaps he was also hoping to impress General Lee, and so he set out to perform a great feat of arms. Some continue to contend that Orton was chosen by Judah Benjamin, of President Davis’s cabinet, to carry messages to Europe for the Confederacy. However, riding through the Union lines to Canada dressed as a Union officer seems too improbable a scheme for Judah Benjamin to have approved. Orton was six feet tall, with “an indefinable air of distinction and individuality in all that he said and did,” as one of his captors put it, so he was hardly a man to pass unnoticed. In any case it would have been unlikely for Benjamin, who was considered extraordinarily clever, to have picked someone as erratic as Orton for an important diplomatic task, or to have suggested such a circuitous route when Confederate blockade runners made frequent voyages to Great Britain and Europe.
In any event, Orton and his cousin Captain Walter G. Peter were apprehended behind the Union lines in Franklin, Tennessee, wearing Federal uniforms, after attempting to borrow money from a Union colonel and pocketing several cigars. Their real names and ranks were inscribed on the headband of their hats, and their documents were quickly recognized as counterfeit. When asked for his opinion, Major General James A. Garfield, a future president, replied by telegraph that they must be tried immediately by “a drum head court martial” as spies, and if found guilty, hanged “before morning without fail.” This was draconian punishment, but not unusual on either side. Orton protested that he was not a spy but would not reveal the nature of his mission, and both men were duly convicted and hanged.
Lee was said to be outraged, but although he was concerned about the pain that the execution would cause Markie and Agnes, he could not condone the whole business of espionage, and he would have done the same to Union spies.
Whatever Lee thought about the execution, his greater concern was for Agnes. “Again and again,” wrote Mary Coulling in her biography The Lee Girls, “she must have wondered whether her refusal of him . . . had propelled him towards such a death-defying scheme.” News of Orton’s death proved “a shock from which she never recovered”; Agnes never married, and as she lay dying from typhoid fever at the age of thirty-two, she called for the Bible that Orton had given her before the war.
She was as much a victim of it as was Orton.
In August, after the retreat from Gettysburg, Lee offered his resignation to President Davis. This has been regarded by many of his biographers as pro forma, an offer that Lee knew would be refused. Given Lee’s honesty, it seems more likely that the combination of defeat, ill health, and his family’s woes made him doubt that he was up to the job of defending Virginia, let alone of going west, as Jefferson Davis suggested, to take on the enemy in unfamiliar country. In the end, Lee continued to command the Army of Northern Virginia. His first act was to dispatch Longstreet to reinforce Bragg, reducing that army for the moment to fewer than 50,000 men.
Everywhere Lee looked he saw tragedy: his army was living on scant rations; its animals were dying for want of grain and forage; one of his sons was a prisoner; his daughter-in-law was grief-stricken and dying; his daughter Agnes was heartbroken; his wife was an invalid living in constant pain—the wonder is not that Lee offered to resign, but that he still believed in the cause.
In retrospect, the defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg seem to mark the point at which the defeat of the Confederacy became only a matter of time, although there would be almost as many casualties on both sides in the two years after Gettysburg as in the three years preceding it, and vastly more civilian deaths. Lee had twice tried to invade the North, and both times had been defeated, in Maryland and Pennsylvania. After July 1863 the war would be fought only on southern soil. The “defensive” war that Longstreet had urged unsuccessfully on Lee would now become an inevitable reality, although with each battle there would be less to defend. Why, then, go on fighting?
But that is to see the war in hindsight. As if to torment the South, Confederate armies continued to win victories like the one at Chickamauga, when Longstreet distinguished himself by his brave advance through a gap in the Union line. Refusing to surrender soon became an end in itself. No nation is defeated until it believes itself to be so, and in the autumn of 1863 the Confederacy was still determined to fight on. Southerners were also encouraged by the possibility, not by any means unrealistic, that Lincoln and the Republicans might lose the next election and be replaced by the Democrats and a president with a more conciliatory state of mind—McClellan, for instance, to name but one, though he vigorously denied it.
By this time Lee sensed that he was being turned into an object of hero worship, far above any role he could still play as a general. It is part of his greatness that he accepted this role with humility and grace, and that it kindled no political ambition. Southerners had made him into a symbol for which they were fighting, and they recognized his constant, calm acceptance of God’s will. A nation besieged needs a powerful national myth to keep it fighting, and Lee became, however unwillingly, the personification of that myth. Jefferson Davis might have his people’s respect, but Lee held their trust and affection—he was, and would remain, what they most wanted to see in themselves.
Freeman mentions that soldiers stepped out of the ranks to shake Lee’s hand or pat Traveller’s neck, and that “he welcomed all visitors, humble in station or exalted in rank.” He tells the story of a farmer coming up to Lee: addressing him as “colonel,” not guessing Lee’s identity; and saying that he had come to see General Lee.* “I am General Lee,” Lee replied modestly, “and am most happy to meet you.” No doubt the story is true, but it has also been told in slightly different forms about other great heroes, including Napoleon, so the point is not so much its truth as that it represents Lee’s transformation into a living legend and myth.
He had before him a great and difficult task—the rebuilding of the Army of Northern Virginia, at a time when everything was lacking that was needed, from men to forage. He set about it, aided to no small degree by the inactivity of the Federal Army, though this inactivity could not be expected to last forever. The few skirmishes and battles gave no advantage to either side that fall. It was clear that Meade would not renew the struggle in full force until the spring of
1864. If he had ever enjoyed the confidence of President Lincoln, Meade had lost it by failing to pursue and destroy Lee’s army after the Union victory at Gettysburg. The patrician Philadelphian and the Illinois railway lawyer with his folksy stories and canny political skill were not a good mix to begin with. Lincoln was in any case looking for a different kind of general, a self-starter who would “hold on [to Lee] with a bulldog grip, and chew & choke, as much as possible.” Despite the stories about his drinking, Lincoln at last chose Major General Ulysses S. Grant, the victor of Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and Missionary Ridge.
In March 1864 Grant arrived in Washington, to be made the first lieutenant general since George Washington had been appointed to that rank by Congress, and given command of the whole U.S. Army. Grant’s taciturnity, his simplicity, his shyness, his roots in Ohio, and his years as store clerk wrapping packages in Galena, Illinois, all served to increase Lincoln’s confidence in him. Lincoln did not interfere in Grant’s plans; he did not even ask to know them. From their very first meeting—at a White House soirée when the president had shouted to Mrs. Lincoln, “Why look, mother, here is General Grant,” and then asked the general to stand on a sofa so the curious guests could see the man who had taken Vicksburg and 32,000 Confederate prisoners—Lincoln recognized and respected Grant’s quiet, firm determination to win the war, and even his reluctance to explain how he intended to do it.
Grant knew Lee, of course—the officers of the Old Army all knew one another—and had served beside him in Mexico. He understood that Lee was a master of maneuver—it had after all been Lee’s idea to flank Hooker’s right at Chancellorsville, even though Jackson had carried it out—and for that very reason Grant was determined not to let him maneuver. Grant had no interest in Richmond, except that he assumed correctly Lee would feel obliged to defend it as long as he could; nor was he interested in fighting a big set-piece battle that would decide the war. Grant’s object was not the Confederate capital, but Lee’s army, and he had in mind a three-pronged attack that would wear the Army of Northern Virginia down remorselessly. Grant had more men, more guns, more supplies; he was confident that he could make good his losses more quickly than Lee could, and that if he pushed forward constantly, day after day and never let up the pressure, Lee’s casualties would eventually become unsustainable—it was a simple question of mathematics. In addition, Sherman’s march through Georgia to the sea would inevitably cut off Lee’s supplies from the great southern agricultural heartland, so the Army of Northern Virginia would eventually be reduced, surrounded, and starved into submission. It was only a question of time, and Grant was not in a hurry. He would wear Lee down inexorably, though perhaps not in time for the 1864 election, as Lincoln hoped. Time, pressure, and numbers were Grant’s secret weapons—he would fight Lee every day, win or lose; he would go on until the Army of Northern Virginia could fight no more.
Even in his own day people accused Grant of being a “butcher.” In fact his casualties were not very different from Lee’s, but he had no interest in glory, a firm grasp of the dreadful logic of warfare, and a grim confidence in his own ability to master it—the worse the war was, the more quickly it would be won. Though Grant would have spoken it sadly, rather than triumphantly, Carthago est delenda might have been his motto.
After more than three years, Lincoln had at last found the right man for the job.
“Winter of Discontent”
“Blessed be the Lord my strength: who teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight.” Freeman quotes this from the most worn and well-fingered page in Lee’s copy of the Book of Common Prayer, which Lee marked “with a small strip of paper.” It is from Psalm 144 and surely indicates how often Lee read and repeated this psalm in his devotions, and his profound belief in the fighting spirit of his troops and in the workings—however difficult to fathom they might be—of the Lord. One imagines that it must have comforted him through a long and difficult winter. His troops were virtually immobilized for want of shoes or the means of repairing them, and many had no blankets—the South had not a single blanket manufacturer—nor were they better off in terms of rations. Lee’s troops spent the winter on a daily ration of four ounces of bacon or salt pork and one pint of cornmeal. Lee himself insisted on sharing their plight—his midday meal was usually cabbage boiled in salt water. As General Fuller points out, with some justice, “Not only did [Lee] refuse to exert his authority to obtain supplies, but instinctively he had a horror of the whole question . . . trading was antipathetic to his aristocratic nature; besides, to compel the people to part with their food stocks was abhorrent to him, he looked upon them as a heroic race, almost as God’s chosen people, who must be appealed to only through the heart.” He appealed again and again to President Davis, but he recoiled from what might have worked—thunder, anger, a threat to march on Richmond and seize the supplies that were stored there—and as a result his army suffered, even though he suffered with it.
As a result, Lee could not do much with his forces in the winter of 1863–1864 except to hold Meade north of the Rapidan River. Fortunately for Lee, Meade showed little ambition to move. It was typical of Lee that he chose to spend Christmas of 1863 with his army, in his tent, when he might have spent it in Richmond with his family. The day after Christmas he learned that his grief-stricken, ailing daughter-in-law Charlotte had died. “It has pleased God,” he wrote to Mary, “to take from us one exceedingly dear to us, and we must be resigned to His holy will. She, I trust, will enjoy peace and happiness forever, while we must patiently struggle on with the ills that may be in store for us. What a glorious thought it is that she has joined her little cherubs and our angel Annie in heaven.” Lee’s resignation to God’s will was a major source of his strength, and of his hold over his own men, though it may not have consoled Mary Lee, who was now living in a cramped rented house in Richmond, and facing, as well as all the other family tribulations, the fact that the Federal government had at last confiscated her beloved Arlington.*
Lee’s equanimity in the face of adversity was and would remain remarkable—with no particular effort or sense of sacrifice on his part he was in the process of being turned into a kind of uniformed, secular saint, a remarkable tour de force for a soldier, perhaps unequaled since the days of Joan of Arc. It was clear to him that the Federal Army was being steadily reinforced in preparation for a full-scale assault on northern Virginia as soon as the winter was over, and he devoted a good deal of time to preparing fortifications and earthworks to enable his men to hold their own against vastly greater numbers. His mastery of the architecture of defense was as impressive as his genius for maneuver. If his troops could not march in the winter of 1863–1864, they could dig, and Lee made them build a line of trenches, redoubts, and forts that would, more than any other single factor, prolong the survival of the Confederacy for nearly a year and a half more.
Lee acted as the Confederacy’s secretary of war much of the time, corresponding respectfully but as an equal with President Davis. He urged that conscription be extended and that “more vigorous enforcement” be applied. He also recommended using the utmost severity against deserters. By 1864 conscription in the Confederacy extended to almost every white male from the age of seventeen to fifty-five, but it was still not enough to produce sufficient manpower. At its lowest point, in February 1864, with Longstreet and much of his corps detached to fight in the west, the Army of Northern Virginia was reduced to “no more than 35,000 men,” a number ludicrously insufficient to hold off the Army of the Potomac when it finally advanced. The picture of Lee as a benevolent, even saintly figure, sometimes carried to sugary extremes, does not do full justice to his complex character: he was kindly; he did feel sorrow for the suffering of his men and his animals (the “slow starvation” of the army’s horses was particularly painful to him); he did regularly include the Union soldiers in his prayers; but he did not flinch from ordering extreme measures of punishment for deserters, or for those who had in any w
ay failed to do their duty by “shirking” or “straggling.” His methods of replenishing his ranks were rough-and-ready. They had to be, since the recruiting process in the South was as full of loopholes, exceptions, and what Lee called “partiality” as it was in the North.
Even after Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg and Pemberton’s surrender at Vicksburg, Lee still did not question the cause he had joined with such reluctance. The strategy of invading the North and seeking out a single major battle in the hope of achieving British or French recognition of the Confederacy failed twice, and it could not be attempted again. What faced the Confederacy now was a war of attrition, which, given the superior numbers and industrial power of the North, could only end in defeat. Seen from 150 years later, this seems inevitable, as does the fact that continuing the war would bring unimaginable destruction in the South once General Sherman introduced what a later generation would call total war, involving the burning of cities, homes, and farms on a wide scale—a “razed earth” policy that would cause untold suffering for generations to come. Admittedly, as the Confederacy shrank it would increasingly enjoy the benefit of shorter interior lines, but even this would be canceled out by the inadequacy of the southern railway system.
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