It is as well that Mary did not come to Coosawhatchie, for Lee spent little time there. When not off on distant inspections, he filled his days observing local troop dispositions and enemy positions, often not returning to his house until late, and then official correspondence occupied him until midnight.29 There was little time for leisure, though he enjoyed riding a new horse named Greenbrier, remarkably calm and good on long trips. For that reason Lee would rename him Traveller.30 He cut his personal correspondence to a minimum, paid few social visits in Savannah and Charleston, and only occasionally managed to attend church. “One of the miseries of war is that there is no Sabbath & the current of work & strife has no cessation,” he lamented to his daughter Annie. “How can we be pardoned for all our offenses!”31 During an inspection of the Florida defenses in mid-January 1862, he did make a special and very personal visit to Dungeness, home of Revolutionary War general Nathaniel Greene. His father, Light Horse Harry Lee, lay buried there in the family cemetery. Yet when he wrote Mary of his visit, he remained oddly detached, spoke of no feelings or emotions on this first visit to his father’s grave, and spent far more time describing the Greene house and garden than he did penning a single sentence, simply mentioning the marble slab and its bare inscription. When he wrote of the Dungeness visit to his son Custis he made no mention whatever of his father or his resting place.32 Clearly torn between a yearning to admire his father and the inevitable embarrassment, perhaps even resentment, of what the old hero had done to his own family, Lee still did not know what to think of Light Horse Harry.
Such interludes were few. Lee’s expectations for the war vacillated according to the news and his mood. When a Union warship stopped a British steamer carrying Confederate diplomats abroad and arrested them on November 8, the resulting international incident had many expecting war between the United States and Britain. This was a distraction that at the least would aid the Confederacy, and one that some hoped might lead to Britain granting diplomatic recognition and military assistance to the South. From the first Lee expected it to come to nothing, however. Granting that Lincoln and his cabinet “are not entirely mad,” he forecast that when it came to a choice of war or releasing the Confederate diplomats, the Union would let them go. “No one will help us,” he told Mary. In fact, he disdainfully complained that “the cry is too much for help.” It mortified him to hear public and press pleading for foreign assistance. “We want no aid,” he declared. He distrusted the entanglements and compromises that might be necessary to alliances. “We must make up our minds to fight our battles & win our independence alone,” he wrote on Christmas. If they did, they could win if they were patient. “It is not a light achievement & cannot be accomplished at once.”33 Lincoln decided to release the prisoners and the crisis subsided just as Lee expected. By mid-January he expressed cautious hope that another year might bring the conflict to an end, then wavered again, and at the end of the month spoke of the war as something that might outlive him.34
From the time of his arrival, Lee felt first alarm and then dismay at the lassitude of the people along the coast and through South Carolina and Georgia generally. There was no war on their soil, despite the Yankees at Port Royal. The war was in Virginia where they had sent regiments, and now with no more battles in Virginia since Manassas, surely that war was all but over. Yet somehow it still dragged on, and the government expected them to make more sacrifices. Behind his confident public face, Lee hid his frustration when volunteers came forward slowly, and the population seemed more concerned with getting its livestock and cotton and slaves to safety in the interior. “The people do not seem to realize that there is a war,” he complained to his daughter Annie.35 The volunteers still signed up only for twelve months, and the governors continued letting them do so.36 If South Carolinians enlisted slowly, Governor Brown seemed bent on keeping all Georgia volunteers under his personal control.37 “I am dreadfully disappointed at the spirit here,” Lee confessed at the end of the year. “They have all of a sudden realized the asperities of war, in what they must encounter, & do not seem to be prepared for it.” Worse, the volunteers objected to laboring on defenses while the enemy made almost daily landings and minor raids to pillage and burn. “Still on the whole matters are encouraging,” Lee felt by mid-January. If he only had a few veteran regiments he believed he could rally volunteers around them and hold his ground unless overwhelmed by raw numbers.38
Lee was in Charleston in late January when another fleet of old merchant vessels arrived to be scuttled in one of the main ship channels in another effort to close the harbor. He doubted it would be any more effective than the first such effort, but it added to his growing expectation that the Yankees would move first against Savannah, since an attack on Charleston using warships would need to use those blocked channels. Taking Savannah would give the enemy a foothold from which to launch a campaign approaching Charleston from the interior, perhaps to lay siege while the Union navy blockaded the port. The almost daily landings and petty raids along the Georgia coast confirmed his expectation as they seemed designed to cut off Fort Pulaski from communication with Savannah. “There are so many points of attack, & so little means to meet them on water,” he lamented to Mary, “that there is but little rest.”39
That only made his manpower needs more critical. When a commander in neighboring North Carolina appealed for help, Lee answered that he had too few men himself, some not yet armed, and faced constant threats along his own coast.40 Compounding that, by early February something Lee had long feared and predicted began to materialize. The one-year enlistment of some of his South Carolina volunteers manning Fort Pulaski expired, and the men refused to reenlist and simply went home, while more units were due for expiration in the coming weeks. His command could evaporate in the face of the foe. “Neither the sentiment of the people, or the policy of the State seems to favor the organization of troops for Confederate service,” he lamented to Benjamin. As for the volunteers still in the ranks, he had too few experienced officers to train them, especially gunners for the artillery that he believed would be the backbone of his defense. “Artillerists cannot be made on the eve of a battle,” he complained.41 On his next visit to Savannah he found defensive works that ought to have been finished still incomplete, and his officers seemed helpless to make the volunteers work harder or faster. “It is difficult to arouse ourselves from ease & comfort to labour & self denial,” he told Mary, grumbling that “it is so very hard to get anything done, & while all wish well & mean well, it is so difficult to get them to act energetically & promptly.” That meant more work for him. He had too much to do already—more, he feared, than he could accomplish well.42
There were tough decisions to make now that enemy activity pointed to Savannah as the point most at hazard. He must take some guns from his coastal defenses to strengthen the city. More than that, he had to abandon some points in order to concentrate his forces to meet the greatest threat. “I exceedingly dislike to yield an inch of territory to our enemies,” he notified Benjamin, but on February 10 his orders went out to withdraw units and artillery from the least essential positions.43 The first to be evacuated was St. Simon’s Island protecting the water approaches to Brunswick, Georgia, which drew an immediate protest from Governor Brown.44 A few days later Lee ordered the evacuation of Brunswick itself, but that was not all. The small town was a summer resort with a salubrious climate and ample buildings that could be turned into barracks and hospitals and other comforts for soldiers, while its harbor could host a small fleet of warships. Lee believed that if the Federals occupied the place, they would use it as a base for future operations against his other defenses. Months earlier he had warned Mary that military necessity in this conflict might result in acts that in peacetime would be deemed barbarous. “Many enormities will be committed I fear on both sides,” he confessed.45 Now he proposed one himself. Rather than leave Brunswick for the foe to convert to his own benefit, Lee proposed to destroy the town when the enemy approached, e
ven though it was all private property. Doing so, he argued, would show the enemy their willingness to sacrifice, and their determination to be independent. He may also have known that much of it actually belonged to Northern capitalists, which would surely lessen his sorrow at such a move, but still his proposal would result in the largest destruction of civilian property in the war to date. No wonder he sought sanction both from the war department and Governor Brown before acting. No answer came from Richmond, but Brown emphatically supported Lee’s proposal, which fortunately he never carried out.46
Expecting the enemy to strike in force when he moved, Lee asked Ripley and Trapier to abandon nonessential points, contract their lines where possible, and concentrate their commands far enough back from navigable rivers and estuaries that Federal naval cannon could not be brought to bear, thus taking them out of the equation so that “we can meet on more equal terms.”47 Governor Brown responded by refusing to send two Georgia regiments to the aid of Florida, and Governor John Milton of Florida protested the evacuation order and demanded that Lee send reinforcements to hold ground instead of abandoning it. The ugly face of the state-rights doctrine leered at Lee in a critical moment.48 Then on February 8, events hundreds of miles to the west interfered with his plans. “News from Kentucky & Tennessee is not favourable,” he wrote Mary.49 He learned that two days earlier Fort Henry on the Tennessee River had fallen to the Yankees. Later, word of more loss out there only darkened the horizon. “Disasters seem to be thickening around us,” he lamented on February 23. For the first time taking note of what Grant was doing, though not by name, he confided to his son Custis that Grant’s victories demanded greater exertion and sacrifice on their part. Otherwise they might well be overrun for a time “& must make up our minds to great suffering.”50 Even before then, orders came from Richmond to contract his lines and abandon all islands along his coastline to protect the interior, while sending a regiment to Tennessee to reinforce General Albert Sidney Johnston as he assembled an army to try to hold Tennessee.51 A few days later Benjamin ordered Lee virtually to abandon Florida and send more regiments to Johnston, and by March 1 Lee had them on their way.52
For the first time Lee felt at long distance the reverberations set in motion by Grant. This only reinforced his conviction that now they faced a long and hard contest. “The whole country has to go through much suffering,” he wrote Mary. “It is necessary we should be humbled & taught to be less boastful, less selfish, & more devoted to right & justice to all the world.” They must resolve themselves to accept defeats when they came, and use their wits and resources as best they could to overcome them, and in the end to “be resigned to what God ordains for us.”53
Reduction of his own forces hardly made Lee’s task on the coast any easier, but then he began to suspect that the enemy had no immediate plans to advance on Savannah, or else meant to deceive him regarding that city, while really moving on Charleston. He put Ripley on the alert, yet still held artillerists ready to come to Savannah immediately to man its guns should he be mistaken. Regardless of where the foe moved, Lee expected him first to try to cut the Charleston & Savannah Railroad to isolate the cities and garrisons from each other, and then to move inland to complete that isolation by cutting the Augusta & Savannah and the South Carolina Railroads at Augusta. Lee had just asked Governor Brown to support building a quarter-mile connection to link the two lines where they terminated at Augusta, and could not afford to lose either now. Consequently, he ordered the Savannah River to be obstructed inland below Augusta to prevent enemy boats from coming upstream to threaten the rail lines.54 By the end of the month he believed he had done all he could with his small means and persistently slow workers, whom he still pushed to complete his interior defense line.55
At the dawn of March the Virginian seemed suspended between hope and despair, and in that dilemma he took refuge once again in resignation. What God had foreordained, man could not alter or halt.56 “It is plain we have not suffered enough, laboured enough, repented enough, to deserve success,” he told daughter Annie. “Our people have not been earnest enough, have thought too much of themselves & their ease, & instead of turning out to a man, have been content to nurse themselves & their dimes, & leave the protection of themselves & families to others.” He could not help hearing the complaints that he did nothing but pointless digging, or the epithets of “Spades Lee” and “King of Spades” being murmured. His soldiers refused to see the necessity of their labor or that “it is better to sacrifice themselves than our cause.”57 Back in Virginia, some who had hoped he might accomplish something in South Carolina were now disillusioned. “Lee is very cautious—too much so, it is said by some,” observed an artillery officer at Manassas. “This remains to be seen.”58 Lee complained privately that the people of his department “have been clamorous in criticising what others have done, & endeavored to prove that they ought to do nothing.” They could not see what he saw: that now whenever the Yankees launched a campaign against Charleston or Savannah or the vital railroads, there would be a chance of repelling the invader, not by the storybook heroics of chivalrous “Southrons” in headlong battle, but thanks to miles of hard-built earthworks and bastions to protect those inexperienced and ill-equipped men.
Hardly had he written those words when a telegram came from Richmond. President Davis wanted to see him as soon as possible. Lee prepared to leave immediately on what he assumed would be a temporary visit, placing Major General John C. Pemberton in temporary command, and leaving three of his staff officers to continue pressing on with the work. He left on the evening of March 3 with much done, and much yet undone.59 The night before he left he wrote his daughter Annie that “if our men will stand to their work we shall give them trouble & damage them yet.” In the end surely God would give them the victory.60
Confederate newspapers had asked WHAT HAS BECOME OF GEN. LEE? because of his reputation and unrealized expectations. When the New York Evening Post asked WHO IS GENERAL GRANT? after Belmont, it was because he had neither reputation nor expectations.61 Suddenly the public wanted to know something of an obscure general associated only, if at all, with the occupation of Paducah. Even a correspondent in Cairo could barely begin to fill in the picture. “General Grant is a man of plain exterior,” he wrote a few days after the engagement. “He is plain and retiring in his manners, and never wastes a word with any one, but pays strict attention.” Reckoning Grant one of the best officers in the western theater of the war, the reporter predicted that he would “take an active part in the service of his country.”62
“The battle of Belmont, as time passes, proves to have been a greater success than Gen. McClernand or myself at first thought,” Grant wrote Washburne a fortnight after the fight, a pardonably proud assessment that few others then or later shared.63 The day after the engagement Grant simply referred to it as “the skirmish of yesterday,” when he sent a message to Polk seeking leave to collect his dead and wounded and exchange prisoners.64 The Confederate was perhaps surprised, having heard that Grant was killed in the action, but the Federal’s choice of words stunned him.65 “Skirmish?” Polk supposedly exclaimed. “Hell and damnation! I’d like to know what he calls a battle!”66 On November 13 Grant and Polk met aboard a steamboat anchored midstream between Cairo and Columbus and spoke at length on final terms of a prisoner exchange, neither government having yet worked out a cartel.67 Polk did not think much of him. “He looked rather sad like a man who was not at ease and whose thoughts were not the most agreeable,” the Confederate told his wife two days later. At length Grant smiled, but still Polk concluded that he was “rather second-rate, though I dare say a good enough man.”68
Once back at Cairo Grant dove into administrative responsibilities of a kind that rarely troubled Lee thus far. His men needed clothing and stores badly, yet his quartermaster had no money to pay vendors, while outstanding government debt in his command hovered around $600,000 and few would extend any more credit.69 He tried several expedients to give ret
ailers confidence that they would be paid, then discovered that some of the problem was outright fraud in his headquarters.70 Captain Reuben Hatch, his quartermaster, apparently bought goods at low bid prices, but submitted high bid invoices to the war department and pocketed the difference. Grant told Hatch he would be replaced, but Hatch did his best to impede an investigation when Grant asked that an inspector be sent.71 Grant annulled Hatch’s deals. “I am tearing all corrupt contracts,” he said, yet the more he looked the more he uncovered.72 “Extravagance seems to be the order of the day,” he declared in January 1862. Thereafter, he personally examined and approved all contracts issued in his department. No matter was too small to catch his eye; he even replaced a corrupt bread contractor, in the process saving one-eighth of a cent per pound, which amounted to $50 a day.73 He would not be lured into a conflict of interest, and when his father sent him unsolicited price quotations for leather harness, Grant tersely informed Jesse that “I cannot take an active part in securing contracts.”74 Meanwhile, he proposed that guilty contractors be forced to enlist in the army.75
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