Crucible of Command

by William C. Davis

  Grant had much to reflect upon in his own conduct. He left the actual conduct of the forward movement to McClernand, as he should have. It was a risky management style that depended on good subordinates, and McClernand lost control in the camps and himself encouraged the looting. Grant also left the gunboats to act on their own, when they could have done good service distracting the fire from Columbus. Worse, he failed to take the enemy into account. Not worrying about what they might do made him vulnerable to what they did. Perhaps most puzzling of all was Grant’s objective. Belmont had no value and the few hours he held it would hardly keep Polk from threatening Frémont or Grant’s other columns if he wished. The attack made sense only as a step on the road to something else, but just what he expected, and how he expected to do it, he kept to himself.167

  Still, his planning had been audacious, his execution swift. His campaign gave him multiple options based on anticipated contingencies. His misdirection by keeping so many columns in motion at once masked his real intent, yet all were poised to converge on his own should he wish. His second combined operation reinforced a cooperative spirit with the navy, while steam transport afforded swift movement. He learned that he could manage a complex operation and retain considerable control over its components. He disobeyed Frémont’s orders not to bring on a battle, but unlike Lincoln’s commanders in the East, and Frémont in the West, Grant showed the imagination to conceive a bold plan, and the courage to take risks.

  Grant issued a congratulatory order on November 8 thanking his men for their performance.168 He did not, of course, mention his own, and when he wrote Julia and his father that same day he said virtually nothing about himself. He did tell them that “taking into account the object of the expedition the victory was most complete,” and that he “accomplished all that we went for, and even more.” He said nothing about moving farther south than Belmont. The battle put an end to that for the moment. This time he added no injunction to his father not to share his letter with the press, expecting Jesse to do just that. Belmont had been a close-run affair. All he had to show for it were a couple of captured cannon, several score prisoners, and the hope that he had disrupted Polk’s plans. Even though he learned of Frémont’s removal when he returned to Cairo, Grant could expect criticism of his actions, and getting his own version of the story before the public early would do no harm.169 Jesse did as expected, and soon the letter appeared in papers around the North. Belmont briefly captured nationwide attention, and the same day that Grant’s letter to Jesse first appeared in print, the New York Evening Post ran a headline asking WHO IS GENERAL GRANT? Its answer was a scant paragraph noting only that he was from Galena, attended West Point, fought and won distinction in Mexico, and left the army in the 1850s.170 That paragraph was soon republished around the North, fuelling curiosity. The nation would not have to wait very long to learn a good deal more.

  7

  LEE FRUSTRATED AND GRANT VICTORIOUS

  JEFFERSON DAVIS WAS still learning how to use Lee. By seniority he should have commanded in northern Virginia rather than Johnston, but his value marshaling state forces was too vital. By the time he was free of that, Johnston was the victorious general at Manassas and could hardly be superseded. The other Johnston, Albert Sidney, was now in place in the territorially vast department west of the Appalachians, so at the moment there simply was no open command commensurate with Lee’s rank. Yet with the steady organization and expansion of the war department in Richmond, need for Lee’s administrative services lessened. While President Davis was not always the most perceptive executive, he recognized that a desk wasted Lee’s skills, especially as the president jealously held all the real reins of his war machine. Thus when Lee returned from western Virginia, the president had another job for him right away.

  Lee’s beard had grown in full and almost entirely gray, and on getting back to Richmond he decided to keep it that way.1 He wanted Mary to see it, but she was visiting on the lower James River. Davis wanted him to leave right away for another trouble spot even more complex and poisoned than the last, so Lee had to leave without seeing his wife. The Yankees were poised for mischief along the Confederate Atlantic coast. They never gave up Fort Monroe, which positioned them to threaten Hampton Roads, afforded a potential base for operations against Richmond itself, and could support expeditions farther south. In fact, a substantial naval fleet left there on October 20, clearly intending a landing somewhere in the Carolinas. By the time Lee reached Richmond the fleet was already off Port Royal Sound, South Carolina, ready to attack the forts protecting that back door to Charleston and Savannah. Meanwhile, a command maelstrom at least as complicated as the Wise-Floyd-Loring situation prevailed in the area. Brigadier General A. R. Lawton commanded Georgia forces in Savannah, while Brigadier General James H. Trapier commanded South Carolina forces in Charleston. Neither had much use for the other, while governors Francis W. Pickens of South Carolina and Joseph E. Brown in Georgia guarded their own prerogatives. Everyone thought he was in charge, no one really was, and each worked against the other while guarding his own patch.

  Of such divided counsels the enemy could make much, and on November 5 Davis asked Lee to go immediately to order before the Yankees gained an advantage. This time there would be no uncertainty about authority. Davis officially combined the two states and the eastern part of Florida into a single military department, placing Lee in command, while the new secretary of war Judah P. Benjamin informed generals and governors that “General Lee has full power to act” with “all the means of the Government within his reach.”2 There was no equivocation in that, but a few at least feared that his time as a desk soldier fitted him for nothing more now. “Though reputed to be an accomplished & great officer,” Virginia secessionist Edmund Ruffin wrote on hearing of the new appointment, he feared Lee was “too much of a red-tapist to be an effective commander in the field.”3 Writing from Johnston’s army at Manassas, an artilleryman mused that Lee “has lost ground in the army.” He might be popular with the generals and officers but was regarded as “too cautious by the army and lacking in confidence in volunteers.”4

  Lee himself had no illusions about what lay in store, dismissing it as “another forlorn hope expedition,” if anything, “worse than western Virginia.”5 Still, he left at once and by November 8 established headquarters in a deserted house on the Coosawhatchie River a few miles upstream from Port Royal Sound.6 He arrived to find the Yankee fleet already pushing its way into the sound, the forts and batteries evacuated, and most of their guns and equipment abandoned. Worse, the Georgia units at the forts returned to Savannah without orders.7 General Lawton wrote to welcome Lee and his assistance in the emergency, but was too busy to come see him and suggested that his new commander come to Savannah instead.8 Trapier wanted permission to declare martial law in Charleston.9 Governor Brown insisted on the return of Georgia troops to protect their own state, and Pickens demanded arms for South Carolina regiments not yet in existence.10 Learning from his last experience. Lee asked for explicit definition of his authority. Benjamin replied that he could command soldiers, munitions, supplies, and “the entire resources of South Carolina and Georgia that are under control of the Confederate Government.”11

  Armed with that, Lee visited Savannah and Charleston to inspect their defenses, then went on to Fernandina, Florida. He knew how to judge the strength and readiness of masonry forts like those in and around Charleston Harbor, and he had overseen some of Fort Pulaski’s construction thirty years before. The Yankees made no further advance, instead consolidating their gains at Port Royal to begin the buildup of a secure base. That gave Lee time to set in motion improvements, and he began making changes after just a week in the department. He first addressed immediate personnel and defensive necessities. Lee sent Trapier, a West Point–trained engineer, to Fernandina to see to its defenses, replacing him with Brigadier General Roswell S. Ripley, whom he ordered to continue the fortification of Charleston Harbor. It was Lee’s first important p
ersonnel change of the war, on its face a good one, for Ripley had experience as an officer and performed well in Mexico. Only later would his penchant for liquor and insubordination become apparent. Lee also mustered and armed as many South Carolina volunteers as Pickens would release, and assumed temporary command of unassigned Confederate naval officers at Charleston to detail them to the harbor’s water batteries.12

  That done, Lee moved to the broad scale and made a pragmatic decision. He commanded more than three hundred miles of coastline with something fewer than 25,000 soldiers. Obviously, he could not attempt to defend all of it or he would spread himself so thin that he might not hold any of it. He decided to fortify only the most important points: Charleston and its vital harbor; Savannah and its approaches via the Savannah River and Fort Pulaski; Brunswick, Georgia, and St. Simons Sound; and Cumberland Sound at the mouth of the St. Mary’s River, the border between Georgia and Florida. Lee put men to work shifting seacoast artillery from other locations to those points, a calculated risk based on his expectation that the enemy would want them as ideal spots for bases to supply the blockading squadron and launch campaigns into the interior. Given a month, he believed he could have their defenses ready to meet what the Yankees threw at him.13

  Lee’s new command now thrust him into the seedbed of the firebrands and zealots he blamed for fomenting disunion. South Carolina was secession’s womb. So radical were some of its offspring that when Virginia failed to secede in the first rush, men like Robert B. Rhett eyed it with distrust, suggesting even that it should not be allowed to join the Confederacy. They extended that suspicion to Lee personally, especially when the stories of his hesitance to resign his old commission became current, followed by the rumors that he had hoped for peaceful reunification.14 When Lee first met Pickens, he did not know that the past summer the governor suspected both his commitment and his capability, claiming that the Yankee army defeated at Manassas would not have gotten even that far “if Lee had been the man his reputation makes him.” Privately Pickens declared that “the truth is, Lee is not with us at heart, or he is a common man, with good looks, and too cautious for practical Revolution.”15

  A civilian population fearful of invasion tested Lee’s diplomatic skills. Early in December those in the vicinity of his headquarters petitioned him to declare martial law along their coast. Lee politely demurred. The civil authorities functioned adequately and there was as yet no military emergency. Nowhere had the Confederate military declared a suspension of civil law as yet, and he believed it should be done only “as a last extremity.”16 Yet Lee did, for the first time, step outside his province and into the political realm. Asked for his views on South Carolina’s defenses, he sent the state convention a letter declaring that the state must mobilize as many volunteers as possible, and not for a year’s enlistment like so many of the current regiments, but for the actual duration of the war. This conflict was not going to be over in a season, and “we cannot stop short of its termination, be it long or short,” he declared. In spring 1862 the enlistments of all the twelve-month volunteers raised in the early days of the war would expire. Their army could evaporate in the face of the enemy. “The Confederate States have now but one great object in view,” he said. “The successful issue of their war of independence.” Everything worth possessing depended on that, and “everything should yield to its accomplishment.” Moreover, Lee pleaded that volunteers be enlisted only in individual regiments of infantry and cavalry and batteries of artillery as now prescribed by regulations, and not in “legions” or independent brigades like Wise’s and Floyd’s. He warned, from his own experience, that “special corps & separate commands are frequent causes of embarrassment.”17

  Sounding very much as if he expected to be quoted publicly, he warned that the enemy grew stronger all the time, and would act soon. “Where he will strike I do not know,” he said, “but the blow when it does fall will be hard.”18 Lee revealed a clear appreciation for the benefit of influencing public opinion, even if it meant violating his aversion to seeing his words in the press, for more than once now he wrote with the popular ear clearly in mind. When the Federals brought a fleet of old merchant ships loaded with stone to the mouth of Charleston Harbor and sank them in the main channel on December 20, hoping to close the harbor on the anniversary of the state’s secession, Lee responded immediately with venom greater than any of his words to date. “This achievement, so unworthy any nation, is the abortive expression of the malice & revenge of a people which they wish to perpetuate by rendering more memorable a day hateful in their calendar,” he wrote. “It is also indicative of their despair of ever capturing a city they design to ruin, for they can never expect to possess what they labor so hard to reduce.”19

  When the Yankees raided the smaller bays and estuaries, destroying anything of military value, the masters fled and the slaves stole or destroyed what remained.20 That made work on the defenses only the more vital. With legislators’ approval, Lee employed slaves on the military works, and put picks and shovels in the hands of mustered white volunteers. He anticipated that when the enemy advanced he would send infantry to cut the Charleston & Savannah Railroad near its Savannah River crossing; this would prevent the two cities from reinforcing each other while the Yankees concentrated other columns and warships first on one city and then the other. Lee thought subtly and expected his foe to do the same, fearing that “this would be a difficult combination for us successfully to resist,” but he prepared to meet it should it come.21 He designed an interior defensive line so placed as to protect the approaches to the railroad, and at the same time safely out of range of Yankee gunboats coming up the river. That meant even more spadework, which did not make him popular with the new recruits.

  After a month in command, Lee reorganized the South Carolina portion of his department into five separate districts for more streamlined management that allowed the commander in each to react more immediately to threats on his own front.22 At the same time his diplomacy with Pickens—aided by a helpful, perhaps planted, rumor that conflicts over state or national control of South Carolina regiments caused him embarrassment—elicited from the governor an acknowledgment that all South Carolina soldiers were “without any reservation” under Lee’s Confederate control; this was an important concession from the leading state-rights state.23

  By year’s end Lee had made progress on every front without a shot fired, as the Federals continued to give him time, though hardly for leisure. Lee had hoped Mary might join him, or at least find lodging in Charleston or Savannah where they could see each other occasionally. She actually wanted to stay with him at Coosawhatchie, but he chided her for rejecting two very comfortable and genteel cities in favor of what he called “a decrepid & deserted village.” If she saw the place, he believed she would desert it like its former inhabitants. As close as it was to Federal lines, she might not escape in an emergency, especially as she always moved so slowly. Lee felt good enough to banter with her again, joking that if the enemy approached, she would tell him to give her “just a minute,” and be captured while still getting ready. “Well it shows the perverseness of human nature,” he concluded.24 She never came to South Carolina, and when Christmas arrived he could only write to her in recollection of more than thirty holidays past. “We must be content with the many blessings we receive,” he wrote that day. “If we can only become sensible of our transgressions, so as to be fully penitent & forgiven, that this heavy punishment under which we labour may with justice be removed from us & the whole nation, what a gracious consummation of all that we have endured it will be!”25

  He still spoke of “the whole nation,” though by now he had abandoned hope of a rapprochement. By Christmas he had been out of his old uniform just eight months, but his experience since, his frustration, and his shifting loyalty showed in his attitude toward the object of his former allegiance. His comments on the United States hosted not just anger now, but vestiges of distaste, even detestation, and a burgeoni
ng sense that Yankees were of a lesser order. A few weeks after his condemnation of the North for sinking the stone fleet at Charleston, he told Custis that he believed “no civilized nation within my knowledge has ever carried on war as the United States government has against us.”26 His investment in his new nation rapidly tarnished the luster on his love for the old Union. He spoke now of “the great principle for which we are contending,” without saying specifically what that principle might be.27 He resigned his old commission because he could not fight against Virginia, friends, and family. When Virginia became Confederate, so did he, yet still he clung to hope for peaceful reconciliation founded on political compromise on an issue—slavery’s protection in the territories—that meant little or nothing to him personally. Sacred Virginia had been invaded, and the Yankee presence fouled its northeastern soil and western counties.

  Worst of all, part of that foothold was beloved Arlington, the home cherished by both him and his wife, however much of a headache it had been for him. Stories of his family’s possessions being pillaged, the theft or destruction of precious George Washington artifacts, and grounds lacerated to build defenses and campsites raised his gorge. Even if the vindictive Yankees failed to destroy it, he doubted his family would ever recognize it again. Arlington would probably be uninhabitable when the war ended now that the main house, his family’s home, was occupied by enemy soldiers. The Yankees dishonored their own Constitution’s Third Amendment prohibiting quartering soldiers in private houses, and had “foully polluted” Mary’s beloved home and his son Custis’s birthright. Even his daughter Mildred’s cat was still there at the enemy’s mercy. Lee advised his family to abandon hope of ever returning, and to cherish their memories of Arlington before the Yankees came. “They cannot take away the remembrances of the spot, & the memories of those that to us rendered it sacred,” he told them. The Federals and their war made the Lee family virtually homeless.28 Personal loss is a powerful negative motivator of loyalty, and at this point it helped make Lee in heart as well as sword a Confederate, a conversion effected far more by circumstances than political conviction. Still, though he might deplore Yankee actions and attitudes, he did not hate them, for hatred meant loss of control.