Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  During this time Lee not only held Richmond and Petersburg with never more than 35,000 men against an army of 150,000, but remained the animating spirit of the Confederacy, “the idol of the South,” as his son Robert put it. Indeed, as the Confederacy shrank, he grew, symbolizing the unshakable spirit of resistance, stubborn hope, courage, and honor—beyond criticism, perhaps even beyond reason. Although Grant’s control of the James River gave him the ability to shift the balance of his forces from one bank to the other, and attack Lee on his left or his right, Lee’s short interior lines enabled him to parry the blow, even though he was now holding a line almost thirty miles long with fewer than 1,000 soldiers to each mile.

  Lee’s headquarters were now in Petersburg, but he politely rejected all offers of a house, and continued to live in his tent, eating the same spare rations as his troops. “My father’s relations with the citizens of Petersburg were of the kindest description,” Robert noted. “The ladies were ever trying to make him more comfortable, sending him of their scanty fare more than they could well spare. He always tried to prevent them, and when he could do so without hurting their feelings he would turn over to the hospitals the dainties they sent him—much to the disgust of his mess steward, Bryan.” Once when he was presented with a peach—the first he had seen in two years—Lee sent it to the elderly lady in whose yard he had pitched his tents. Shirts, socks, ice cream, bread, vegetables, and milk he invariably gave to the troops, the only exception being two lemons, which he sent on to Mary Lee, who was in Richmond, confined to her “rolling chair.” Though it would have been easy enough for Lee to ride into Richmond and see Mary, he would not assume for himself a privilege he could not allow his men. It is part of Lee’s role as a kind of martyr-hero that he neither sought nor accepted any alleviation of his condition. When Mary wrote to him, begging him to take better care of himself, Lee replied, “But what care can a man give to himself in the time of war? It is from no desire for exposure or hazard that I live in a tent, but from necessity.” This was not altogether true—people offered Lee their homes; he would not accept them—but his role was not only to lead his men, but to share as much as he could their privations. It was a demonstration of his own humility, not so much deliberate as unconscious and natural. Though he did not seek out veneration, and would have regarded it as blasphemous, he was venerated by his men as few generals have ever been. Wherever he went the troops reached out to touch his boots or his horse, as if he were a secular military saint—indeed, contradicting the old French witticism, he was even a hero to his valet.* His aide Colonel Long, who was as close to Lee daily as any man could be, wrote of him at this period, “Never had care for the comfort of an army given rise to greater devotion. . . . He was constantly calling the attention of the authorities to the wants of his soldiers. . . . The feeling for him was one of love, not of awe or dread. They could approach him with the assurance that they would be received with kindness and consideration. . . . There was no condescension in his manner, but he was ever simple, kind, and sympathetic, and his men, while having in him unbounded faith as a leader, almost worshipped him as a man.” This is strong praise even for a loyal aide-de-camp, and it captures something of the admiration for Lee’s character that held both his army and his nation together, and inspired the citizens of Petersburg, who suffered all the horrors of a siege for ten months without complaint. His example ennobled their sufferings.

  On a practical level, however, Lee could at best hold back the inevitable. Lee had been slow to recognize the boldness of Grant’s sudden move across the James. He tried, as he had so often done before, “his old game” of threatening Washington, weakening his own forces by sending generals Breckinridge and Early into the Valley in the hope that Grant might be recalled by the president from his position close to Richmond; but Grant was not Halleck and the Lincoln of 1864 was not the same man as the Lincoln of 1862. Grant remained confident that he could defend the capital however close Early’s troops might come to it. The bluff that had been at the heart of Lee’s strategy in 1862 and 1863 no longer worked; nor was there any possibility of a new offensive on a large scale across the Potomac since the disaster at Gettysburg. Lee had long since lost hope that the Confederacy might be recognized by the United Kingdom, but he supposed like many people in the South that if the war could be continued until Tuesday, November 8, 1864, northern voters might bring to office a president who favored a negotiated peace, specifically Lee’s old antagonist General George B. McClellan, who, although he was running as a “pro-war” Democrat, was thought to be more open to offering the southern states terms that would bring them back into the Union. This was a faint hope to cling to. McClellan did win the Democratic nomination in August, but carried only three states in the election. To quote the verdict of General Fuller: “from the date that Grant began to lay siege to Petersburg, the end of the Confederacy, like a gathering storm cloud, loomed over the horizon of the war, daily growing greater and more leaden.” Only some act of supreme incompetence on the part of Grant could help Lee now.

  On July 30 Grant almost presented Lee with one. Although Grant had been contenting himself with sending cavalry raids to the south and west of Petersburg in a constant effort to cut the Confederate railway lines, with mixed results, he still wanted to break through Lee’s defenses. In mid-June a former mining engineer proposed digging a mine more than 500 feet long under the Confederate front line and blowing up a fort in the middle of the Confederate First Corps’ line. Four tons of gunpowder would open a gap that would allow a full-scale assault to take the enemy trenches from behind. Grant was persuaded—he had a certain fondness for bold schemes involving digging and machinery on a large scale—although in his memoirs he initially plays the plan down somewhat as an attempt to keep a regiment composed of Pennsylvania miners busy. In fact, he carried out an elaborate plan to mislead Lee that involved laying a pontoon bridge across the James River and sending a Union infantry corps and two divisions of cavalry across it to threaten Richmond, and if possible cut the Virginia Central Railroad line connecting Richmond with the Valley. He hoped to force Lee to withdraw troops from around Petersburg—a smaller version of the strategy Lee had used for so long by threatening Washington in order to reduce Federal pressure on Richmond.

  President Davis was just as sensitive about the safety of Richmond as President Lincoln was about Washington, so Lee took the bait and thinned his defenses, though the presence of the mine was, by then, an open secret. In fact the Confederates had been vigorously, though unsuccessfully, attempting to dig a countermine and seize the Union mine before the charges could be exploded. The mine was finally set off at five o’clock in the morning on July 30, producing “a crater twenty feet deep and a hundred feet in length.” The blast killed over 300 Confederate soldiers instantly. Unfortunately for Grant the preparations for exploiting the explosion were badly bungled. The original plan had called for a division of “United States Colored Troops” of General Burnside’s corps to lead the assault. They had been specially trained for their role, but at the last minute General Meade developed cold feet—he had little confidence in the operation to begin with, and feared that if it failed black soldiers would be blamed.

  Instead, Burnside provided another white division from his corps for the task of leading the breakthrough. He allowed his division commanders to draw straws for it, but the unlucky loser commanded a division that had received no training for its mission, and its commander, far from leading it, remained behind and got drunk, having neglected to brief his officers. Instead of making their way around the crater and then making a vigorous thrust toward Plank Road, less than half a mile away, which led directly into Petersburg, the leaderless and bewildered troops descended into the crater, and found they were unable to climb the steep bank of dirt and debris thrown up in front of them by the explosion. As the dazed Confederates recovered from the shock they began to shoot down into the crater from the rim, “a turkey shoot,” as it was later described. The black tr
oops, when they were finally sent in by Burnside, that consistently unlucky general, were attacked on both flanks and virtually slaughtered. Many of their wounded and most of those who attempted to surrender were shot on the spot. It was not only “a tremendous failure,” in Grant’s words, but “the saddest thing [he] had seen in the war.”

  Lee rode at once to the spot to make sure the Confederate line was restored. Even the retreat of the surviving Federal troops was a disaster: as Colonel Taylor, who was watching beside Lee, noted, “they were compelled to retreat across the space intervening between the lines, which was commanded by our artillery posted on the right and left of the crater, and the destruction here by musketry fire and the grape and canister poured into the retreating mass was very heavy.”

  The incident cost Grant about 4,400 casualties for no appreciable gain. The mine was a sensational event, but it did nothing to change the reality of Lee’s position. As Colonel Long records, Lee “was sorely tried and beset with difficulties”; he simply did not have enough men to hold such a long line, or to withstand Grant’s deft switching of attacks from one place to another. Still, Lee made every effort not to adopt a purely defensive role, and had occasional victories. On August 19, for example, A. P. Hill attacked and “defeated the force opposed to him, capturing twenty-seven hundred prisoners, including a brigadier-general and several field-officers,” thus forcing Grant to withdraw his forces “from the north side of the James River.” On August 25 Hill attacked again, trying to break the Federal hold on the Weldon Railroad at Reams Station. He took “twelve stands of colors, 2100 prisoners, and 9 pieces of artillery,” but left this vital railway line still in Federal hands. During most of this fighting, Lee’s army inflicted far more casualties than it received, but as Lee himself recognized, Grant could make good his losses far more easily than the Confederates could.

  Colonel Taylor, like many others, refers often to the overwhelming superiority of numbers of the Union Army, and notes, with a detectable sneer, “When patriotism failed soldiers could be bought.” In fact the South had introduced conscription before the North, and on both sides exemptions could be sought and substitutes could be had at a price. In the sense that Taylor means it, the Federal troops were no more “mercenaries” than the Confederates, though they were certainly better fed, clothed, and paid. The evils of the Federal draft, which produced the New York City draft riots of July 1863, were mirrored by those of the Confederate system, equally convoluted and skewed in favor of the well-to-do. No doubt a higher proportion of Lee’s troops than of Grant’s were “volunteers,” but after the initial burst of enthusiasm that impelled men to enlist in 1861 and 1862 both sides resorted to conscription, however inefficiently, or unfairly conducted, or enforced by various degrees of coercion. Lee’s manpower problem derived not from any unwillingness to recruit forcibly those between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, but from the fact that the North had a larger population to draw on and from the high rate of desertion and “straggling” in his own army.

  The loss and evacuation of Atlanta in September, and its partial destruction on the orders of Lieutenant General John Bell Hood as his troops abandoned the city (the destruction was completed by Major General Sherman after he entered it), inevitably produced a strong impression on “those men in high authority” in Richmond, though it had no apparent effect on Lee’s determination to fight on. Colonel Taylor, who accompanied Lee to “a conference” with President Davis the day after Hood evacuated Atlanta, noted (carefully excluding Lee’s name) the opinions expressed, which may have been those of President Davis. The Democrats, he wrote, “must have a decided peace candidate to secure the support of the element in opposition to the administration and the war. . . . Let them adhere firmly to their intention to propose an armistice and some good may result to us. . . . My idea of the armistice is that the armies will remain as they are now. There will be no disbanding on either side, nor will the Federals withdraw from our territory. . . . We must not claim what it would be unreasonable to expect.”

  If this is what President Davis hoped for, he was to be severely disappointed. When the Democrats nominated McClellan as their presidential candidate, he rejected that particular plank in their platform, although had he been elected he would almost certainly have sought a negotiated end to the war. But neither Lincoln nor Grant had the slightest interest in an armistice that would allow what remained of the Confederacy to survive as a separate nation.

  From the account given by Colonel Taylor (not as a rule a man likely to be critical of his master), it does not appear that Lee shared Davis’s rather cautious optimism: but then, paperwork was what Lee hated most, and it was the job of his staff to force it on him. Although his son Rob had been wounded; his wife, Mary, was by now a complete invalid, cut off from her normal round of visits to hot springs to seek relief from her pain; and both Richmond and Petersburg were suffering the horrors of an ever more vigorously enforced siege, Lee never lost his singular ability to inspire his troops with a single, simple gesture, performed always with perfect serenity and out of a natural and unself-conscious spirit.

  Lee’s chaplain, the Reverend J. William Jones, recounts how Lee, under heavy shell fire in an exposed position, ordered those around him to take cover, but himself walked out into the open despite explosions all around him, to pick up from the ground “an unfledged sparrow” that had been blown out of a tree and return it gently to its nest. No other general in history has successfully managed to combine the better qualities of Napoleon with the spirit of Saint Francis of Assisi. There is no better illustration of the special role Lee had already come to play in southern mythology: like the Almighty’s, his eye was (literally) on the sparrow. If this story were about anybody else but Lee, we might consider it a myth, like the story of the young George Washington and the cherry tree, but with Lee it rings true. His quick eye and what Colonel Long calls “his love for the lower animals and deep feeling for the helpless,” combined with his complete lack of fear and total indifference to danger, make the story about the sparrow ring perfectly true, and help to explain the willingness of his men to follow Lee anywhere and to keep on fighting even when their situation seemed hopeless.

  Lee’s faith in the Confederate cause did not blind him to the dire reality. Jubal Early’s “raid” on Washington, which failed to shake loose Grant’s hold on Petersburg, was followed by hard fighting as Early retreated up the Valley—and then by Sheridan’s merciless scorched-earth policy there, under which everything from fence posts to barns and houses was set on fire. Meanwhile Sherman’s troops not only tore up the railways in Georgia, but heated the rails over open fires and bent them around trees like a steel necklace so they could never be used again. Lee’s only hope was to break free of Grant’s “strangle-hold, to cut loose from Richmond and transfer the struggle to some other area,” where he could once again maneuver his army, and perhaps provision it. But at the same time giving up Richmond, with its arms factories and workshops, would cripple the army and deal a deathblow to the Confederates’ morale. Loyally, Lee refused to consider it, conscious perhaps that for him to even raise the issue was to open discussion of surrender. He urged President Davis to transfer officers and men of the “conscript bureau” to the defense of Petersburg and of Wilmington, North Carolina, the last port remaining in southern hands, and to move the Virginia and North Carolina reserves—mostly older men and invalids by now—into the trenches, leaving his own troops “free for active operations.” Lee ended his letter with a warning: “It will be too late to do so after our armies meet with disaster.”

  Yet, like most of the South, Lee fought on. The Army of Northern Virginia had become, to an extraordinary degree, the keystone that held together a disintegrating economy and a shrinking territory. There was a growing belief among many people in the South that this was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” as well as doubts about the leadership and wisdom of President Davis, but still there remained a unanimous admiration of Rober
t E. Lee. He did not have to make noble speeches, or even win great victories, he merely had to be himself. By the autumn of 1864 he had become the symbol of what southerners were fighting for, the essence of courage, courtesy, dignity, and lack of self-interest that they believed separated them from the greedy Yankee hordes who had no respect for the traditions of an older, gentler America. Whether Lee willed it or not—and he clearly did not—his apotheosis was already in progress.

  In the meantime, Lee continued to serve in an anomalous position. He was certainly recognized as the “first soldier” of the Confederacy, and his advice was sought on every subject from conscription to the best use of what remained of the Confederate Navy, but his authority extended only to the Army of Northern Virginia. He was not the commander in chief of the whole army, as Grant was, and did not have Grant’s ability to plan and carry out a grand strategy involving it. He would eventually become general in chief of the Confederate Army on February 9, 1865, but by then the appointment was an empty honor; “it was too late for him to accomplish anything.” The history of the Confederacy might have been quite different had Lee been given full command of the entire army in 1863, but neither Jefferson Davis, who throughout the war saw himself as a military leader more than a political figure, nor the Confederate Congress was eager to give up that power. Lee’s exaggerated deference toward Davis and dislike of politics remained unwavering. He would make suggestions about military decisions to Davis, always in the most respectful way, but he would never insist, or threaten. No man was less likely than Robert E. Lee to become the military dictator who alone might have saved the South by taking firm control of all the armies and the economy, and yet no one else had the prestige to fill the role.*