By this time Lee was a brigadier general in the new Confederate Army, the highest commission then mandated.80 That put him in the peculiar position of directing both Virginia state troops and Confederate units sent into the state. Then Davis assigned another new brigadier, Joseph E. Johnston, to take command of Virginia volunteers at Harpers Ferry, superseding Jackson. Six days later Lee sent newly arrived Brigadier General Milledge L. Bonham with a brigade of South Carolina volunteers to the Manassas line, where Bonham replaced Colonel Cocke and began carrying out Lee’s instructions to erect defenses there and at Alexandria.81 On May 28 Lee finally escaped Richmond to inspect Bonham’s preparations. Some of the haughty South Carolinians were not much impressed. Bonham’s aide Samuel Melton thought Lee quite accomplished and “a splendid officer,” noting that “the Virginians have great confidence in him,” but feared that he was “slow—too slow,” undoubtedly a reference to the time it took Lee to become a Confederate, which many Carolinians never forgot.82
Still, Lee acted fast enough to send units out east, west, and north, to give early notice of any movement toward Leesburg or Harpers Ferry. He also addressed something that may have been in his mind for some time. The Manassas Gap Railroad connected Manassas with Harpers Ferry. Lee foresaw Bonham using that link to reinforce Johnston in case of an enemy threat, which Lee seemed to think the most likely at the moment. Of course, Johnston could just as easily use it to reinforce Manassas, which the Federal occupation of Alexandria on May 24 suddenly made seem more likely.83 As more units arrived, Lee sent most of them to Bonham, and on May 31 sent Brigadier General Pierre G. T. Beauregard to assume overall command.84
Letcher transferred all Virginia state forces to the Confederate States (CSA) on June 8, and Lee’s command evaporated. In his brief tenure he enlisted 40,000 state volunteers, put water batteries on the James and York Rivers, and started defenses around Richmond. When he relinquished command he felt his efforts had been prudent, given what he had to work with.85 Geography dictated his dispositions to protect avenues of invasion into the state, and any capable officer who could read a map ought to have done the same. Yet he revealed glimmers beyond the obvious, particularly his focus on the Manassas Gap Railroad. Lee addressed more than the possible strokes by the enemy. He looked for opportunities for counterstrokes.
He admitted to Mary that “I do not know what my position will be.” He was a brigadier with no brigade, a bit confused about lines of allegiance. If Virginia still needed him, his duty was to serve, but he was also subject to the new nation’s orders.86 The Federal advance into Alexandria made armed conflict inevitable, and he took the Yankee occupation of Arlington as God’s judgment against his family. “We have not been grateful enough for the happiness there within our reach,” he told Mary. “Our heavenly father has found it necessary to deprive us of what He had given us.” Acknowledging his own sins, he told her he would submit humbly to his punishment and advised her to do the same.87 They could do nothing to influence events, and “in this time of great suffering to the state & country, our private distresses we must bear with resignation like Christians.”88 Lee seemed almost to find comfort in helplessness, a peculiar attribute for a general in war.89 No wonder that on June 2 he took time to attend the first of many communions at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.90
Lee’s future role in the war would be determined by President Davis, who arrived in Richmond on May 29, and two days later Lee met with him in the first of several days of locked-door sessions on resources and strategy.91 They were the same age, knew each other from West Point, and exchanged some correspondence when Davis served as Pierce’s secretary of war, but they had no sort of personal relationship. Lee probably regarded Davis with some suspicion for several reasons. Years later he lumped him with the extremists he blamed for the crisis, evidence that his perceptions were not always keen, for Davis came slowly to secession.92 Also, Davis was not a Virginian. While Lee’s paternal grandfather was a wealthy planter and a member of the House of Burgesses during the Revolution, Davis’s had been an itinerant farmer wandering from Pennsylvania to Georgia. Lee likely regarded Davis as yet one more nouveau riche Southern demagogue. From now on they were often in daily contact, and became well acquainted, yet there would never be intimacy between them. Lee always remained muffled in expressing his opinion of a man who, for his part, came almost to worship the Virginian.
In their meetings Lee outlined the situation at Harpers Ferry, Manassas, and elsewhere.93 He should have felt buoyed on June 10 when forces he had placed near Big Bethel Church drove back twenty-five hundred Federals advancing from Fort Monroe. He had alerted commanders at Yorktown and Norfolk to the threat, and now his vigilance and theirs gave the Confederacy a victory, albeit of minor consequence.94 Lee was anxious to get into the field himself, but what he called “matters beyond my control” kept him in Richmond. That was the president. No one knew the full picture of Virginia’s defenses as well as Lee, so Davis kept him in Richmond as an advisor with little to do while others led the battalions he helped create. Late in June Lee hoped to be sent into the field any day, yet no orders came, though he escaped for a quick visit to Manassas on June 29.95 He arrived in time to see the men at dress parade, and for them to get their first glimpse of the man many would follow for nearly three years. Reactions were mixed. “Gen. Lee is a stout built, fleshy, rather haughty looking man,” one volunteer wrote a few days later. “His fullness about the face and eyes would seem to indicate a fondness for drink, but it is said that he is perfectly temperate.”96
In mid-July Lee asked to be sent to the western counties where an enemy approach raised serious concerns, but Davis refused.97 What he did do was consult on refining the defense of Manassas, and when a Union army under Brigadier General Irvin McDowell marched out of Washington on July 16, Beauregard was ready for the clash that ensued on July 21 by the waters of Bull Run. Desperate to get to the scene, Lee stayed in Richmond, where Davis kept him to funnel reinforcements to the front. Lee wrote Mary that he felt “mortified” not to be on the field where he might have helped.98 “I should have preferred to have been there than here,” he told friends a few days later, “not that I could have done as well as was done, but I could have struck for my home and country.”99 At least he realized that his proposal to use the Manassas Gap Railroad to achieve a concentration of forces was the decisive feature, as Johnston arrived from the Shenandoah at the eleventh hour and precipitated the Federal rout. “That indeed was a glorious victory,” he wrote Mary, assuring others that “the battle of the 21st was some evidence of our strength.”100
With northern Virginia secure for the time being, Lee asked again to go to the western counties where a crisis brewed, largely of Davis’s making. Finally the president assented but still did not send Lee as a field commander.101 Rather, he was to be an inspector general to observe, coordinate, and facilitate, but not direct, the movements of the commanders in the department.102 Davis had a habit of creating unwieldy assignments with wide discretion and few specific instructions, and Lee’s would be his first. Still, it got him in the field at last. No one appreciated the extent of indifference or outright Unionism in the region. Lee’s early efforts at recruiting in those counties failed, and attempts to stimulate loyalty by a display of force proved almost risible. The basic problem for Lee, as for Letcher and others in Richmond, was that he was not really a Virginian. Rather, he was an eastern Virginian. He had few friends or family west of the Appalachians. He had not even been in the region for more than twenty years, and he had no grasp of the culture or its people.103 The subsistence farmers of the hollows, the hunters of the hills, and the merchants clinging to the great river were about as familiar to him as the Antipodes, yet he assumed that, being Virginians, they would think and feel as he did.
Most of them did not. On June 11 they met in a rump “convention” at Wheeling and declared a Union state government, with talk of declaring themselves an actual new state for the Union. Two weeks earlier General Mc
Clellan sent three columns to protect the Union hold on the Baltimore & Ohio, support the Unionists in the region, and threaten Harpers Ferry. Minor skirmishes followed, and then on July 11 Brigadier General William S. Rosecrans led 2,000 soldiers to defeat perhaps 1,300 Confederates at Rich Mountain. Another defeat two days later at Corrick’s Ford killed the Confederate department commander Brigadier General Robert S. Garnett and lost the Rich Mountain–Cheat Mountain line, a significant barrier to enemy advance toward the east. Barely forty miles separated the Federals from passes into the Shenandoah.
Everyone in Richmond bungled affairs in the western counties. Lee and Davis sent too few reinforcements, too little supply and materiel, and too few competent leaders. Davis made brigadiers of two local politicians, former secretary of war John B. Floyd and Henry A. Wise, both past governors and ardent secessionists with powerful connections, but unfit for military command. Each had raised his own force—Wise’s was called a “legion” since it had infantry, cavalry, and artillery. Davis had assigned Wise to the Kanawha Valley near the Kentucky border, and Floyd to southwestern Virginia. Neither cooperated with the other, each believing himself subject only to orders from the president. When Davis and Lee replaced Garnett with Brigadier General William W. Loring, they just added yet another inept martinet to the broth. Though he had no knowledge of the country, Lee tried to manage Loring’s subsequent movements from Richmond. He wanted the three generals to converge their commands west of Staunton to protect the Virginia Central Railroad, and then make a counterblow against Rosecrans.104 Instead, Wise and Floyd, each determined not to be superseded by a general of senior rank, made no effort to join Loring, or even communicate with him, creating an unhappy environment to await Lee when he left Richmond on July 28 to join them.105
Men who saw Lee that day found him erect in his carriage, and scrupulously neat in dress, with thinning hair gone almost completely gray, a heavy mustache, and dark though not black eyes. He spoke with a voice that was rather musical, his pronunciation resonant with the ancient Tidewater accents that turned “colonel” into “coronel,” and “walnut” into “wonnut.” Though he spoke about the war, he said nothing whatever of his plans or where he was going.106 On arrival, Lee found part of Loring’s command guarding the gap at Monterey leading to Staunton, and Loring himself at the next gap to the south at Huntersville. That eased his mind about those lines of approach, and he turned to concentrating Loring, Wise, and Floyd in a counterstroke to reclaim lost ground, virtually mirroring the instinct Grant soon revealed to seize initiative and hold it when grasped. Then he learned that thirty miles southwest of him Wise faced an enemy column aiming to strike the Virginia Central’s terminus at Covington. Floyd’s appearance with his brigade on August 6 just two miles from Wise’s camps boded well for a concentration to force back the foe in their front. Instead, Floyd decided not to cooperate, but took his brigade sixty miles northwest to attack Federals near Charleston. Two weeks Wise’s senior in rank, Floyd ordered him to provide reinforcements, and Wise all but refused, instead sending to Lee for an order recognizing his command as independent from Floyd.107
This was the pattern of the poisoned command system in western Virginia. Floyd ignored Lee and operated as if independent, while Wise implored Lee to set his command outside the chain of command. Uncertain of his authority with these political generals, Lee ignored Floyd’s insubordination and mollified Wise with platitudes about the need for cooperation.108 Eventually Floyd tried to take over Wise’s command, and Wise ordered his officers to ignore Floyd.109 Lee abhorred conflict, and felt uncomfortable in confrontations with subordinates just as he had dealing with the Arlington slaves. During his years in a profession riddled with egos, he had observed such clashes among others, but never as a participant. Back in Richmond he heard occasional muttering over thwarted ambitions, as when Colonel D. H. Hill complained that Lee assigned his regiment to a brigade commanded by another colonel actually junior to Hill in seniority, but there were no direct confrontations.110 Lee’s management style reflected his personality, leading by instruction and example, not fiat. Even his reprimands at the Military Academy came in terms of encouragement to do better. He was unequipped by nature to deal with men like Floyd and Wise, who did not share his allegiance to duty above self. Even as he attempted to make something of his feuding subordinates, he reflected that doing his duty was “all the pleasure, all the comfort, all the glory we can enjoy in this world.”111 He would have to find a more effective way of dealing with such men.
Weather and camp sickness made matters worse.112 After several weeks he complained to Rooney that “I have been able to do but little here.” As he told his son, “a battle must come off, and I am anxious to begin it.” Finally the sun reappeared and the ground began to dry.113 By that time Lee was camped almost thirty miles in advance of Loring’s position, on a ridge overlooking the Tygart River valley twenty miles south of Rich Mountain. On the face of it, he and Loring got along, but one day as they stood behind two officers unaware of their presence, one asked the other if he saw any prospect of a move against the Yankees. “None in the world,” responded the other, “unless somebody puts a coal of fire on the back of that old terrapin Lee.” The “terrapin” smiled in good humor, but Loring broke into loud laughter that may have revealed more about himself.114 He resented Lee’s presence, and when Lee gently pressed him for several days to plan a campaign against the Yankees near Rich and Cheat Mountains, Loring stalled and protested.115 For the moment Lee gave up being commander and reverted to inspector, riding ahead to scout Yankee positions, and for several days thereafter sent out reconnaissance patrols that he often accompanied. He also seemed to enjoy himself in the open air more than he had in months.116
Then on September 1 or 2 he learned that Davis had nominated him for promotion. To deal with the rapidly growing army, the Congress mandated four grades of general officer: brigadier, major, lieutenant, and full general. Lee was to be a full general, ranking in seniority third behind adjutant and inspector general Samuel Cooper and Albert Sidney Johnston, soon to be assigned to command in the Mississippi Valley.117 Davis also wanted Lee back in Richmond as his advisor, but gave him freedom to decide when he should return and what steps to take to clear the region of the enemy first.118 That suited his anxiety to bring on action already too long delayed. He had found a route to reach the Federals’ rear and cut their supply line to Cheat Mountain, and learned of another path—difficult to be sure—that could get him on the mountain itself to strike the enemy’s exposed right flank. If he forced them off the mountain and cut their route of retreat, Lee could have a crushing victory, albeit against a modest force. Wise and Floyd were too far away to be engaged, but still the total effective force for the operation was a little more than 7,500. Yankee numbers were probably more, though divided between 2,000 men on Cheat Mountain and a main force at Elkwater on the Tygart five miles west.119
Once more Lee planned a concentration of forces from two sides at once. He probably consulted with Loring in framing a plan of campaign that appeared over Loring’s signature in an order on September 8. It would send part of one division on the night of September 11 to take a position fronting the Yankee line atop Cheat Mountain; there it would act as a distraction the next day while 2,000 men used the newly discovered path to hit the enemy flank on the summit at dawn on September 12. Meanwhile, another column was to cut off the enemy route of retreat, while two additional columns struck the Yankees at Elkwater to isolate them from the Federals on the mountain. Then all columns were to converge to drive the fleeing enemy back beyond Rich Mountain.120 The plan suffered from too much complexity and too much contingency, especially for inexperienced volunteers in their first campaign, operating in largely unfamiliar and difficult territory. There were nine assignments, and if just one or two miscarried, the whole could founder, and the directive made scant allowance for the fact that the enemy might not react as expected. It left little discretion to subordinates, which did not sound
like Lee. Most likely Loring drafted the details, Lee the commander disappearing in Lee the advisor.
Emphasizing how forgotten this theater was, at that very moment people elsewhere wondered if the Virginian had in fact disappeared. A Baltimore newspaper actually ran the headline WHAT HAS BECOME OF GEN. LEE? while a Charleston, South Carolina, paper alleged that he was no longer a Confederate general. Rumors said he had resigned over differences with Davis, or in a huff when Beauregard got the Manassas command instead of himself. Northern press said he regretted siding with the Confederacy and wanted to return to the U.S. Army and rally the loyal people of Virginia to fight for the Union. Some people accused him of abandoning Mary with no home or support, and others alleged that in fact the two were separated, arising from the fact that she remained at Arlington and then Ravensworth until late May, and then moved on to Kinloch in Fauquier County, all within easy range of Yankee raids.121 Lee dismissed such slanders, and discouraged Mary from giving one of his letters to the press to refute the charges. “I never write private letters for the public eye,” he added. “Everybody is slandered, even the good,” he told her. “How should I escape?”122
That same day he drafted a special order to his small force telling them that “the progress of this army must be forward.”123 Yet once launched, the campaign fell apart, and quickly. The several columns got in each other’s way, they found the roads muddy and difficult to pass, a heavy night rain ruined most of their rations, and they had no tents to protect them. Lee moved with Loring and the main column aiming for Elkwater, and by nightfall on September 11 was in position. In spite of the obstacles almost every element was in its place, their signal to advance being the sound of the attack on the Cheat Mountain flank the next morning. It never came. Instead, the commander of that column called off his attack and withdrew, fearing his surprise was discovered. By ten o’clock that morning, Lee decided that surprise had been lost and ordered all units to retire, but now the Federals on the mountain and at Elkwater began to advance, threatening to take them in flank and surround them. It took much of the day for some of the columns to disengage and withdraw. Lee and Loring halted them to regroup, and for a time it seemed there might be some chance to renew their offensive, but in the end Lee did what he would do in the future after a battlefield setback. He spent the next three days keeping his men in position, daring the enemy to attack him and hoping for a chance to retrieve the lost opportunity. When the Federals did not move, he finally ordered Loring to withdraw.
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