If Stuart was not dissatisfied and Hampton and Fitz Lee were pleased, the reorganization could be judged a success; but in accordance with the history of promotion from the days of the Trojan wars, almost as many officers were offended as were pleased. Tom Rosser of the 5th Virginia might have maintained that his title to advancement was as good as that of any who were made general officers. Colonel Tom Munford of the 2nd Virginia was aggrieved. He was one of the senior colonels of cavalry in the army and had shared in almost every campaign after that of First Manassas.
Stuart was embarrassed over the unhappiness of these two officers. In January 1863 he had recommended the creation of an additional brigade of cavalry and in warm eulogium had urged that Rosser be appointed to it. From this recommendation Stuart had not withdrawn, but Rosser had fallen into disfavor with the War Department. His regiment declined in efficiency; his own morale was low. Then, in May 1863, he married a girl of great charm, and soon his bride’s letters rallied him. His conscience rebuked him for drinking and for being less diligent in camp than on the field of battle. In this spirit Rosser overcame whatever objection there was to his promotion. But there was no brigade for him until the long, ugly feud between Stuart and Grumble Jones reached a climax.3
Stuart’s decision to leave Jones to guard the Virginia mountain passes during the preliminaries of the Gettysburg campaign had fired anew the animosities between the two. All the tact and diplomacy of Lee failed to soften the feeling of either man. At length, early in September, a direct verbal clash occurred. Stuart arrested Jones for disrespect to his superior officer and brought him to court-martial. Jones swore he never would serve again under Stuart. Grumble might have saved his oath because the court found him guilty. The patient commanding general now reluctantly concluded that Jones must be sent elsewhere, and he was ordered to southwest Virginia to take charge of the cavalry there. Jones’s men were reconciled by the wisdom of Stuart’s choice of a new brigade commander. He recommended and Lee endorsed the promotion of Rosser, who on October 10 was commissioned brigadier general.4
Munford’s case took a different turn. When he was told that Rosser would be recommended ahead of him, he took it manfully, but his friends appealed to General Lee. In answer to one of these admirers, Lee assured George Wythe Munford, secretary of the Commonwealth of Virginia, that consciousness of duty, faithfully performed, “is the most certain road to honorable advancement. That such will be the action of your son, his previous conduct leads me to expect, and that the result will meet his expectations and those of his friends, I have no doubt.”5
On August 1, Lawrence Baker was wounded so seriously that he might be invalided. To act for Baker during his incapacity the choice of Lee and Stuart was Colonel James B. Gordon of the 1st North Carolina. Gordon was forty-one years old and without professional military training, but he had been distinguished for bravery and intelligent leadership in all the battles of his brigade. It was a departure from hampering bad precedent to name a colonel to the next grade while there was a prospect that his senior would return to the field. The necessity of maintaining discipline was the reason for abandonment of a rule Lee often had reason to deplore.
Calbraith Butler was recovering slowly from the wound received at Brandy. For temporary direction of his brigade Stuart and Lee chose Pierce M. B. Young, colonel of Cobb’s Legion, South Carolinian by birth and Georgian in uprearing. Young had been a cadet at West Point but resigned on the secession of Georgia. He was twenty-seven, of splendid manners and great magnetism, though considered somewhat spoiled. His record had been of the highest.
With these appointments the reorganization of the cavalry corps was complete. Hampton’s division consisted of the brigades of James B. Gordon (Baker’s), Pierce Young (Butler’s), and Thomas L. Rosser, formerly Jones’s. In Fitz Lee’s division were the brigades of J. R. Chambliss (Rooney Lee’s), Lomax, and Wickham. Albert Jenkins’s brigade was detached. In command, this was a force entirely different from that which Stuart had carried into Pennsylvania, except for one significant fact: The two most renowned of the former brigadiers were now divisional commanders. Before them was fame.
2
THE DETACHMENT OF LONGSTREET
While the cavalry was being reorganized, the infantry command was confronted with a new problem, mass desertion. This began as soon as Gettysburg was lost. On the afternoon of July 4, when the wagon train was started for the Potomac, about 5,000 unwounded men slipped away from their posts and went with the vehicles. Many of these were captured by the enemy, many were returned to their commands, others were listed as A.W.O.L. Of the wounded or sick men who went to hospital, some quietly disappeared. The calamity threatened by these conditions was to be read from the rolls of the army. General Lee estimated the missing from all causes at the end of July at not less than 20,000. To rally the negligent and shame the cowardly, a general order for the return of absentees was issued July 26. “I do not know whether it will have much effect,” Lee wrote the President, “unless accompanied by the declaration of an amnesty.”6
The words of Lee were emphasized by events. Fifty men of Scales’s shattered brigade deserted on the night of July 29. Forty-two belonged to the 22nd North Carolina, a regiment that had an honorable name. It was assumed that these men were conscripts who had been prompted to desert by seditious articles in the Raleigh Standard, whose editor, William Woods Holden, was proclaiming that conscription was unconstitutional. His arguments could not always be answered within Scales’s command. On July 1 the brigade had lost fifty-five officers; Pender, who had held the division in his grasp, was dead; Scales, who might have exploded the absurdities of Holden and stiffened discipline, was absent wounded.7
These conditions, which were typical of those in many regiments, explained though they did not excuse the behavior of the North Carolina soldiers. President Davis followed Lee’s advice and on August 11 offered a general pardon to deserters who would return to their commands. Amnesty was supplemented for a brief time by a system of furloughs to soldiers of meritorious conduct. Extra Billy Smith was sent on a speaking tour to supplement amnesty and furloughs and to stir the people by his eloquence. Assemblies were held in many North Carolina regiments to reaffirm their loyalty and to denounce the “factious and treasonable course” of the Standard.8
The effect of this was nil. Some men even presumed upon the amnesty to go home without leave, in the expectation that if they returned before the twenty days of mercy expired, no punishment could be inflicted. Numbers of Virginians who had wearied of the hard infantry service deserted to join companies of partisan rangers, who were supposed to combine good living and high adventure. Few commanders seem to have asked themselves whether their own shortcomings as army administrators, rather than the innate baseness of deserters, was responsible for the steady disappearance of men who previously had fought well. Lee realized some of the causes of discontent, but when amnesty and furloughs had been tried, he abandoned hope of stopping desertion otherwise than by the imposition of death sentences on men captured after leaving the ranks. The good soldier did not need this lesson, and if he belonged to the First Corps he soon demonstrated his devotion anew in operations that had their unhappy origin in events in the Far South.
The fall of Vicksburg on July 4 had been followed by General Joseph E. Johnston’s retreat deep into Mississippi. Remote as these maneuvers appeared from Virginia, the government knew how closely they were related to battles on the Rapidan. If Johnston’s army was considered the Confederate left, on the long front from the Mississippi to the Rapidan, the center was Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee. This force stood idle in front of Chattanooga, facing the Federal forces under Generals W. S. Rosecrans and A. E. Burnside. Unattached to Bragg but affecting nearly all his movements was the Confederate right, the Army of Northern Virginia, which, despite Gettysburg, still had faith in itself and in its commander.
Almost all the Southern leaders agreed that they could not maintain a strict defensive. To win, Co
nfederate armies had to strike. The difference of opinion concerned the place—left, center, or right. Bragg proposed that he reinforce Johnston for an attack on Grant, but Johnston dismissed this with four gloomy words: “It is too late.” Lee believed that if his army could recover sufficient strength, the best hope of the Confederacy lay in the renewal of the offensive against the Federals in northern Virginia. General Samuel Cooper thought the wisest course would be to strengthen Bragg from Johnston’s army and attack Rosecrans. Longstreet was aggressively convinced that this was the imperative strategy but that the troops for Bragg should come from Virginia, not from Mississippi. With unwonted eagerness, he renewed the argument he had advanced at the conclusion of the Suffolk campaign. Lee’s army might be reduced temporarily; one corps, at least, might be sent to Tennessee. Bragg then should be able to crush Rosecrans. Unless this was done, he feared that the Federals would follow their triumph at Vicksburg with a march through Georgia. That would wreck the Confederacy.
In this conviction, Longstreet about the middle of August wrote Secretary of War Seddon a general outline of a proposed transfer of troops from Lee’s army to Bragg’s. Longstreet told Seddon that he had not discussed the subject with Lee, but this secrecy did not persist. In conversation with Lee soon afterward, Longstreet argued that Bragg should be reinforced from the Army of Northern Virginia for an attack on Rosecrans.
If the decision were to strengthen Bragg at the expense of the Army of Northern Virginia, said Lee, would Longstreet care to have the command of the forces sent west? Longstreet showed that he already had been considering the possibility. He would accept, he said, on two conditions which he had framed carefully: First, he must have opportunity of winning the confidence of the forces before leading them into action; second, he must be given assurance that any success would be exploited.9
Late in August Lee went to Richmond and discussed with President Davis the general strategic situation. In some fashion, word was spread during the next few days that Longstreet was going to Tennessee and, what was more, was going as Bragg’s successor, not as one of Bragg’s corps commanders. This was not in the mind of the President at the moment, but Longstreet did not hesitate to suggest it to Lee. The Army of Northern Virginia, he said on September 5, could maintain a safe defensive with a reduced force and, if need be, could retire to the Richmond defenses. In the event the First Corps could not be spared from Lee’s army, he thought the Confederacy “might accomplish something” by giving him three brigades from the Richmond front, putting him “in Bragg’s place,” and transferring the commander of the Army of Tennessee to the head of the First Corps under Lee. If instead the First Corps went to Tennessee, Longstreet continued, “We could surely take no great risk in such a change and we might gain a great deal…. I doubt if General Bragg has confidence in his troops or himself either. He is not likely to do a great deal for us.”10 In this bid for command Longstreet was entirely confident. Nothing he wrote on the subject disclosed any doubt on his part that he could administer and lead successfully the contentious Army of Tennessee.
The President wished Lee to assume general command in the region where Johnston and Bragg were operating, but when Lee expressed belief that officers already on the ground could do better, Davis acquiesced, though perhaps reluctantly. With Lee’s acquiescence, the swift, final decision was to send the greater part of Longstreet’s corps to reinforce Bragg, who was to continue at the head of his army. On September 6, Lee ordered the quartermaster general to prepare the transportation. By the eighth, troops were moving toward Richmond from the camps on the Rapidan.11
Longstreet made no complaint that he was not to supplant Bragg, but busied himself in exchanging brigades. Simultaneously with the troop movement to Tennessee, detachment had to be made from the troops in Virginia to reinforce Charleston, which for almost two months had been under violent attack. If he had to supply two brigades from his corps for Charleston, Longstreet concluded to leave in South Carolina two weakened Georgia brigades, Bryan’s and Tige Anderson’s, and thereby reduce the prospect of desertion from these commands when they were on the Georgia-Tennessee boundary, close to home. He also negotiated to leave Pickett’s division, weakened in numbers and dangerously lacking in officers, in the Richmond defenses, and take in its place the brigades of Micah Jenkins and Henry A. Wise, who were stationed close to the capital. In urging this, Longstreet undoubtedly was angling to have Jenkins. The South Carolinian was a splendid fighter and was anxious to reunite his excellent troops with their old comrades. In this Old Pete was partially successful. Pickett was left in the quiet Richmond sector, Tige Anderson’s and Wise’s brigades were sent to South Carolina, and Jenkins and Bryan went west.12
The time came for Longstreet to leave the Rapidan. After the friendliest of farewells, Lee’s parting words were, “Now, General, you must beat those people out in the West.” Immediately Longstreet answered: “If I live; but I would not give a single man of my command for a fruitless victory.” Lee replied that it should be so. Plans to pursue a success already were being made.13
In the Confederate capital, Longstreet was disappointed by a vexatious change of route. All the logistics of the operation had been based on the dispatch of the troops directly to Chattanooga byway of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad. The Federals prevented this. Knoxville was occupied by the Federals on September 2, and Chattanooga fell to the Unionists on the ninth. The same day Cumberland Gap was surrendered, making it certain that Federal cavalry would proceed from the Gap to the railroad. All Confederate reinforcements had now to be routed by the overloaded railway that led south from Richmond. “Never before,” said Moxley Sorrel, “were so many troops moved over such worn-out railways, none first-class from the beginning.” He elaborated: “Never before were such crazy cars—passenger, baggage, mail, coal, box, platform, all and every sort wabbling on the jumping strap-iron—used for hauling good soldiers.”
By September 14, Longstreet had advanced the troop movement to the stage where he could schedule his own departure for the West. In a final letter to his old commander he wrote, “If I can do anything there, it shall be done promptly. If I cannot, I shall advise you to recall me. If I did not think our move a necessary one, my regrets at leaving you would be distressing to me, as it seems to be with the officers and men of my command…. Our affections for you are stronger, if it be possible for them to be stronger, than our admiration for you.” It was bravely said, was honestly felt, and, as concerned Longstreet himself, was hopefully written in strange and unhappy contrast to the experiences that awaited him in Tennessee.14
3
LONGSTREET AND HILL IN DISTRESS
Old Pete reached the Chickamauga battlefield, in northern Georgia near the boundary with Tennessee, in time for the second day of fighting. To Longstreet, without hesitation, Bragg committed the whole left wing of the army. On September 20, Longstreet’s veterans and their new comrades went forward magnificently. Hood headed the column of attack and equaled any of his exploits in Virginia, but fell with his thigh fractured by a rifle bullet. Longstreet established his usual grip on his men and soon had the troops violently engaged. He husbanded his forces and, with excellent judgment, threw in his last division at precisely the correct moment. At nightfall the enemy had been swept from the field.
All the early news of the Battle of Chickamauga that reached Richmond presented it as an overwhelming triumph for the Confederacy. To Longstreet went a cordial letter from Lee. “If,” said the general, “it gives you as much pleasure to receive my warmest congratulations as it does me to convey them, this letter will not be written in vain.”15 The distressful part of the first reports was that of heavy casualties. Hood’s wound was such that his leg had to be amputated on the field. For a few days his recovery was in doubt, but he rallied. By the end of the first week in October he was asking how long a time would elapse before he could take the field again. That field would not again be Virginia, however. In deep tragedy the fame of Hood was to wan
e. When he was crippled and defeated and no longer had the bright blue flame of battle in his eye, his old comrades in Virginia were to remember his boldness, his bravery, his chivalry, his magnanimity.
The letter that carried congratulations to Longstreet expressed warmly the consciousness of Lee’s need for his “Old War Horse.” Lee wrote, “Finish the work before you, my dear general, and return to me. I want you badly and you cannot get back too soon.” The situation justified the language. On September 13, Federal cavalry crossed the Rappahannock, and for the next fortnight all the intelligence reports indicated an early advance by the Army of the Potomac. Then, overnight, the outlook in Virginia changed. Now the report was that Meade’s XI and XII corps, under General Hooker, were to be dispatched to Rosecrans. Cumulative proof of the accuracy of this information reached army headquarters almost daily. By October 1, Lee was convinced that the two corps had left Meade. New plans were made immediately. Instead of awaiting attack, the Army of Northern Virginia once more was to deliver it.16
But while Lee believed he could give battle in the absence of Longstreet, that officer was beginning to regret, for the best of reasons, his change from Virginia to Tennessee. On the morning after the Federals were driven from the field of Chickamauga, Longstreet had urged Bragg to take the offensive. The commanding general hesitated, reflected, and did not send his columns after the defeated enemy until that afternoon. Then he moved to Missionary Ridge instead of directly against Chattanooga. In the judgment of Longstreet and the other lieutenants, their commander thus yielded to the enemy, by indecision and delay, all the fruits of the victory at Chickamauga.
Disillusionment came quickly to Old Pete. By September 25, after hardly five days with his new chief, he felt so outraged that he wrote directly to Secretary of War Seddon in galled criticism of Bragg. “To express my convictions in a few words,” Longstreet wrote, “our chief has done but one thing that he ought to have done since I joined this army. That was to order the attack upon the 20th…. I am convinced that nothing but the hand of God can save us or help us as long as we have our present commander…. Can’t you send us General Lee?” There was much more to this unhappy episode. A round-robin urging the President to relieve Bragg of command prompted a visit by Davis to Bragg’s headquarters. On the ninth of October the grievances of all the senior officers were heard by the chief executive in the presence of Bragg. That unusual procedure produced a concurrence, as Longstreet phrased it, “that our commander could be of greater service elsewhere than at the head of the Army of Tennessee.”17
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