Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  * A “stand of arms” was the complete set of equipment for one soldier: musket, bayonet, belt, cartridge box, sling, etc.

  * “Skirmishers” were one of the most ancient traditions of warfare, their function being to precede the mass of infantry formations, using cover to shoot at the front line of the enemy formations and disrupt their cohesion before the main body attacked. By the mid-nineteenth century special units filled this function; examples include the rifle regiments in Britain, with their distinctive dark green uniforms and black buttons instead of the scarlet coats of the rest of the infantry; the voltigeurs in France; and the Jäger regiments in Germany. In the Union Army during the Civil War dismounted cavalry troopers armed with breech-loading or repeating carbines sometimes played this role; in the Confederate Army they were mostly “sharpshooters,” i.e., specially selected natural marksmen (Wikipedia, “Skirmisher”).

  * There is some doubt whether the word “hooker” in fact comes from the kind of women who gathered around his headquarters, but even in his own time many people assumed that it did. The nickname “Fighting Joe” was a newspaperman’s invention, and Hooker disliked it. When Grant called him “dangerous” he meant to his own men, not the enemy.

  * One of Stuart’s objectives was to destroy the railroad bridge at Chambersburg, but it proved to be made of iron and he was obliged to leave it standing. Unlike T. E. Lawrence in World War I, Confederate cavalry raiders had neither the high explosives nor the demolition skills to destroy bridges unless they were made of wood and could be burned down.

  * The Burnside carbine was manufactured in quantity during the Civil War; more than 50,000 reached the army, and despite certain difficulties with the ammunition, it was quite popular among Union cavalrymen, and also among those Confederate cavalrymen who captured one.

  * Thus demonstrating the truth of Napoleon’s comment, “In war as in prostitution, the amateur is often better than the professional.”

  * This is one of the few subjects on which Lee allowed a certain asperity to show in his letters back to Richmond. “I am informed that there is a large number of shoes now in Richmond in the hands of extortioners, who hold them at an extravagant price,” he wrote (Fuller, Grant and Lee, 170). Even when he received shoes, there were none that fitted men with particularly large feet.

  * Longstreet puts the number a little lower than Long, at 68,000 plus the cavalry, but it was Long’s job to know the exact number and inform Lee of it.

  * Although Confederate uniforms were supposed to be gray, they were made with an inferior dye and often faded rapidly to a light khaki color, similar to homespun cloth dyed with bark from the butternut tree (Juglans cinerea): hence the appellation “butternut.”

  * Every cavalryman needs a horse, of course—in the Confederate Army cavalrymen provided their own—and every gun required twelve horses: six to pull a limber and the gun, six to pull a limber and two caissons of ammunition.

  * “Branches of trees laid in a row, with the sharpened tops facing outwards” (Wikipedia).

  * Taylor used this word, recently introduced into English from the Japanese taikun, in the old-fashioned sense of a great leader, rather than the modern sense of a wealthy, powerful businessman.

  * A daring and competent cavalry officer, Rooney Lee was then commander of a brigade under Major General J. E. B. Stuart.

  * These had been captured from the enemy at Chancellorsville, and left to rust.

  * Douglas Southall Freeman describes in some detail a conversation between Lee and Harrison in Lee’s tent, but Longstreet, whose scout Harrison was, explicitly denies that it took place (Freeman, Robert E. Lee, Vol. 3, 60–61; Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox, 294).

  * These quarrels occur after almost every war. The publication of Field Marshal Montgomery’s war memoirs, in which he was sharply critical of Eisenhower, caused no end of heartburn and indignation in the White House.

  * This was the much resented practice, when a Confederate commander captured a northern town, of demanding that those in authority hand over a large sum in U.S. dollars or gold or face the consequences. General Jubal Early demanded $100,000 from the town of York, Pennsylvania, but eventually settled for $28,000 in cash. General R. S. Ewell “requisitioned” from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 21,000 pounds of bacon, 100 sacks of salt, and 1,300 barrels of flour, in addition to large quantities of molasses, sugar, coffee, potatoes, and dried fruit. Blacks, even if freemen, were liable to be seized as runaway slaves and sent south under guard. This is not to deny that the Federal Army did as bad, or worse, in the South, but Lee’s chivalrous Order Number 73 of June 27, 1863, to warn his troops against looting did not represent the reality of Confederate occupation, however brief.

  * Gettysburg was a thriving center of tanneries and shoe manufacturing of long standing.

  * Fremantle himself cut an elegant figure in a gray tweed hacking jacket, well-tailored riding breeches; high boots with spurs; a shiny silk top hat with a jauntily curled brim worn at a rakish angle; and a colorful embroidered poncho or serape with long tassels at the ends, worn over one shoulder, presumably purchased in Texas—a very practical garment for a man on horseback. During part of his journey through the Confederacy he also carried in his saddlebags, like a typical English gentleman, formal black dinner wear should the occasion require it.

  * The improvements in muskets and artillery had made the full-scale cavalry charge obsolete (except in the minds of cavalrymen) and the Civil War was closely studied by foreign observers for its use of cavalry as “mounted infantry.”

  * What Lee needed was a chief of staff like Eisenhower’s Major General Walter Bedell Smith at SHAEF headquarters during World War II: “Ike’s hatchet man,” whose job was telling people what they did not want to hear and what Ike did not want to say to them himself. But Lee preferred to act as his own chief of staff, which did not suit his nature and added to the strain on him.

  * Come to that, we have only Longstreet’s account of the conversation that took place between them. It certainly sounds like Lee, but we cannot know whether or not Longstreet remembered his words exactly after so many years.

  * Ewell’s silence while Early spoke for him resembles that of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg in World War I, who was known disparagingly as Marschall “Was Sagst Du?” for his habit of referring all questions to his chief of staff, General Ludendorff, and asking, “What do you say?”

  * He seems to have said this to several people, including General Hood.

  * William Butler Yeats, “Under Ben Bulben.”

  * Lee would probably have hesitated to use a church tower as a vantage point. This is one of Fremantle’s rare errors; the building may have been the Gettysburg Alms House, which had a cupola.

  * This was exactly the criticism that Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery made about his rival Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander, though most people, including General Dwight D. Eisenhower, felt that Montgomery spent too much time planning and Alexander not enough.

  * The time when Longstreet’s artillery barrage began varies in different accounts by more than an hour, but I have used Colonel Fremantle’s estimate, since he was present and close to Lee, waiting for it to begin.

  * In another sharp dig at Longstreet, Freeman criticizes him for writing that too much delay would have been caused by sending “messengers five miles in favor of a move he [Lee] had already rejected,” when Lee was only two miles away, “opposite the Pfizer house” (Freeman, Robert E. Lee, Vol. 2, 98). But it is clear enough that Longstreet was referring to the distance it would take a messenger to ride there and back.

  * Longstreet suffered from a certain degree of what the French call l’esprit de l’escalier, which means thinking of a witty or telling remark after the event, on the way downstairs as it were; so over the years he may have, to some degree, tidied up his comments to Lee.

  * Various versions exist of this comment from Lee to a friend shortly before his death, but that quoted in Douglas Southall Freema
n, Robert E. Lee, Vol. 2, 161, seems the most plausible (and sounds the most like Lee).

  * The flavor of Orton’s somewhat grandiose personality is reflected in his self-justification for the shooting, quoted in Who Is Markie? by Frances Scott and Anne Cipriani Webb: “For his ignorance I pitied him; for his insolence I forgave him; for his insubordination, I slew him.”

  * What adds credibility to the story is that Lee customarily wore a plain gray uniform with no gold braid on his sleeves, and only the three small stars of a colonel—his last substantive rank in “the Old Army”—on the collar of his coat, and would not therefore have been instantly recognized as a general.

  * This was done under a new law that enabled the Federal government to tax property in areas that were in rebellion. The taxes were not exorbitant, but a wrinkle in the law required that the owner must make the payment in person. Lee obviously could not do this, so Arlington was seized.

  * Meade in fact remained in command of the Army of the Potomac, but as general in chief Grant chose to accompany the army rather than remain in Washington. For all practical purposes, Grant directed the strategy of that army and all the other Union armies from the field, and seems to have reached a remarkably good working relationship with Meade, rather like that which existed between Eisenhower and Bradley in 1944–1945. For the reader’s convenience I will refer to Grant rather than to Meade in the text.

  * “The problem of overestimating or even hero-worshipping successful enemy commanders in time of war was not, of course, confined to nineteenth-century America” (Michael Korda, Ulysses S. Grant, 41). In Great Britain, to the irritation of Winston Churchill, admiration of General (later Field Marshal) Erwin Rommel was widespread until his defeat by General Montgomery at El Alamein proved him to be “mortal.”

  * Ammunition and powder for over 300 guns; 4,300 supply wagons; nearly 900 ambulances; and “a herd of cattle for slaughter.”

  * Gordon C. Rhea, The Battles of Wilderness and Spotsylvania, National Park Service Civil War Series, 435–36, 440.

  * Wolseley’s reputation for military knowledge and perfectionism was so great that his name became a late-nineteenth-century British expression for anything done correctly: “Everything’s Sir Garnet Wolseley.”

  * “No man is a hero to his valet,” is attributed variously to Madame Aïssé, a friend of Voltaire’s; and to Madame Cornuel, a mistress of Louis XIV.

  * Missing was the role that General George C. Marshall played vis-à-vis President Roosevelt in World War II. Marshall was the president’s trusted military and strategic adviser, as well as the man to whom the two supreme commanders—Eisenhower and MacArthur—reported. President Davis mistakenly attempted to play both roles himself.

  * Fitzhugh Lee was not only a brave and brilliant cavalry commander but one of the very few generals of the Confederate Army to be appointed a Union major general in the years after the war.

  * Even if he had lived long enough to do it, it is hard to imagine Lee being tempted to dictate the equivalent of the eight volumes of Napoleon’s Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène as a giant literary monument to himself.

  * Churchill was arguing in the war cabinet against the case Lord Halifax, then foreign secretary, was making for asking “Signor Mussolini” to inquire from Hitler what terms the Führer might offer for a British surrender (May 27, 1940, as quoted in John Lukas, Five Days in London: May 1940, 149).

  * Lee had numerous swords. He gave one to his youngest son, Robert E. Lee Jr., when the latter received his commission as a Confederate officer; the most elaborate was the one he wore to Appomattox, the blade inlaid in gold on one side with a quotation from Joan of Arc, Aide-toi, Dieu t’aidera (“Aid yourself and God will aid you”), and on the other “Gen. Robert E. Lee CSA from a Marylander 1863.” Though Lee seldom wore a sword in battle, he did keep one with him throughout the war: it had belonged to George Washington and was left by him to Lee’s father-in-law, Mr. Custis. If Lee was going to have to surrender his sword, it would be the fancy French-made one, not the one that had been Washington’s.

  * Lee was right to be doubtful; he soon received a message from Fitz Lee that the previous communication about a route of escape was in error.

  * General Dwight D. Eisenhower too preferred to wear a simple “battledress,” without decorations—in fact, the short waist-length jacket he favored was known as an “Eisenhower jacket” in World War II. It drew a contrast between himself and more “showy” generals like Patton or MacArthur.

  * Custer has since been painted into the group in the McLean parlor by several artists, but he was not in fact there. The surrender is not just an iconic moment in American history; it has also become encrusted with legend, and there is even a notable parody, James Thurber’s If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox. Not only was Custer not in the room where the surrender was signed; he also did not ride off bearing on his head the table on which Grant signed the fair copy of his letter to Lee, as Evan S. Connell claims in Son of the Morning Star. General Sheridan in fact bought the table for $20 (U.S.) from Wilmer McLean and later gave it to Mrs. Custer. It is known as “the Ark of the Covenant of the Civil War.” General Ord paid McClean $40 (U.S.) for the table Lee used. Grant’s table is now in the Smithsonian, Lee’s in the Chicago Historical Society’s Civil War room. Since the collapse of the Confederate dollar left McLean penniless, these were both significant amounts to him.

  * The Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles offers car owners a “Robert E. Lee Commemorative License Plate” with Lee’s picture to the left of the plate, and the words “The Virginia Gentleman, General Robert E. Lee, 1807–1870” imprinted on it.

  * Some confusion has been caused in accounts of Lee’s surrender by the fact that when he referred to “the president” he was of course referring to Jefferson Davis, not to Lincoln.

  * To put this in context, it was about the number of cadets at West Point in the late nineteenth century, and about half the number of undergraduates at Yale or Harvard in the same period (Freeman, Robert E. Lee, Vol. 3, 299).

  * “Mosby’s Raiders” (or “Rangers”) were accused by the Federals of having crossed the line between uniformed cavalrymen and guerrillas.