Crucible of Command

by William C. Davis

  69Speech of Benjamin Hill, February 18, 1874, Augusta, GA, Daily Chronicle & Sentinel, March 11, 1874.

  70Davis to REL, February 25, 1865, OR, I, 46, pt. 2, p. 1, 256.

  71Venable to Taylor, March 29, 1878, Taylor Papers, duPont Library, Stratford.

  72Venable to Taylor, March 29, 1878, Taylor Papers, duPont Library, Stratford; Tower, Lee’s Adjutant, p. 228.

  73REL to MCL, September 5, 1864, Wartime Papers, p. 851.

  74Alfred P. Aldrich to Lewis M. Ayer, January 9, 1865, Lewis M. Ayer Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.

  75Raleigh, NC, Progress, n.d., in Hartford, CT, Daily Courant, January 14, 1864; Worcester, MA, National Aegis, January 30, 1864; New York, Herald, December 30, 1864.

  76William C. Davis, ed., A Fire-Eater Remembers: The Confederate Memoir of Robert Barnwell Rhett (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 80–81. Rhett does not date the sending of the Stephens letter, though the context would suggest that it was in the summer of 1863. However, Rhett’s chronology in his fragmentary memoir is often off, and late 1864 or early 1865 seem more probable.

  77Charles Minnegerode to Mary Carter Minnegerode, November 17, 1864, Charles Minnegerode Letters, copies on file at Richmond National Battlefield Park.

  78Charleston, Mercury, February 7, 1865.

  79United States Congress, Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States of America, 1861–1865 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904–1905), 4, pp. 456–58, 510–11.

  80New York, Herald, February 5, 1865.

  81REL to Davis, January 19, 1865, Wartime Papers, pp. 884–85.

  82REL to Seddon, February 4, 1865, ibid., pp. 888–89, General Orders No. 1, February 9, 1865, p. 891.

  83REL to Beauregard, March 9, 1865, William Reese Company Americana, New Haven, CT, website item 46845.

  84Richmond, Sentinel, January 16, 1865; Baltimore, Sun, January 21, 1865.

  85Boston, American Traveller, July 8, 1865; Norwich, CT, Aurora, February 11, 1865. Some of Singleton’s claims are more than suspect, especially the involvement of Grant, who scarcely knew Singleton and regarded him as just another speculator trying to profit from the war. In a few weeks, in fact, Grant would revoke Singleton’s pass to go through the lines. Still, it was common rumor in the army and in the North that the Illinoisan was on some kind of peace mission (USG to Stanton, March 8, 1865, PUSG, 14, pp. 113–15n, 13, p. 283n.). Even in Richmond his mission was no secret, as one paper commented on his arrival that the city was experiencing “a Perfect Diarrhoea of Peace Commissioners” (Richmond, Whig, January 16, 1865). Yet elements of his story are corroborated. He and Breckinridge did arrive in Richmond on the same day. Stephens, Campbell, Ould, and Hunter were among the men then seeking a means to peace, even at the price of reunion, and so were Longstreet and Ewell, and perhaps even Lee.

  86Boston, American Traveller, July 8, 1865.

  87REL to Henry A. Wise, February 4, 1865, Richmond, Daily Dispatch, February 17, 1865.

  88James Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1896), p. 584.

  89REL to Davis, March 2, 1865, Wartime Papers, p. 911, REL to Grant, March 2, 1865, pp. 911–12.

  90USG to REL, March 4, 1865, PUSG, 14, pp. 98–99n, USG to Stanton, March 4, 1865, p. 100.

  91R. M. T. Hunter to William Jones, n.d. [November 1877], Rowland, Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist, 7, pp. 576–77.

  92REL to Breckinridge, March 9, 1865, Wartime Papers, pp. 912–13.

  93Edward Younger, ed., Inside the Confederate Government: The Diary of Robert Garlick Hill Kean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 203; Burton Harrison to Davis, May 24, 1877, Rowland, Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist, 7, p. 551; John A. Campbell to Joshua Speed, August 31, 1865, “Papers of John A. Campbell,” Southern Historical Society Papers, 42 (September 1917), p. 69.

  94George G. Vest in the Sedalia, MO, Democrat, in Macon, Weekly Telegraph, June 15, 1875.

  95John B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1866), 2, p. 454; Nelson D. Lankford, ed., An Irishman in Dixie: Thomas Conolly’s Diary of the Fall of the Confederacy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 60–61.

  96REL endorsement, March 23, 1865, on John Bell Hood, “Notes on the Spring Campaign of 1865” addressed to Davis, n.d., Civil War Collection, Huntington Library.

  97USG to Dana, February 23, 1865, PUSG, 14, p. 26.

  98USG to Julia, March 30, 1865, ibid., p. 273.

  99USG to Julia, April 1, 1865, ibid., p. 311.

  100Venable to Taylor, March 29, 1878, Taylor Papers, duPont Library, Stratford.

  101REL to Edward G. W. Butler, March 2, 1868, Swann Auction Galleries, Sale 2333, New York, November 16, 2013, item 15.

  102David Gregg McIntosh Diary, April 2–3, 1865, Gregg Papers, VHS.

  103USG to Julia, April 2, 1865, PUSG, 14, p. 330.

  104The correspondence between Grant and Lee will be found in Ibid., pp. 361–73, and Wartime Papers, pp. 931–34.

  105This theme is developed in Elizabeth R. Varon, Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 35–37 and passim.

  106Colonel T. P. Shaffner in Louisville, Courier-Journal, in Philadelphia, Inquirer, December 16, 1879.

  107PMUSG, 2, p. 489.

  108Horace Porter, “The Surrender at Appomattox Court House,” Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York: The Century Company, 1888), 4, p. 743.

  109Ibid., p. 496.

  CHAPTER 17: GRANT AND LEE IN 1868

  1USG to Washburn, April 10, 1865, PUSG, 32, p. 78.

  2New York, Tribune, May 25, 1866.

  3PMUSG, 2, p. 497. Sadly, this is the only firsthand account of the private meeting between the two. Lee never wrote of it, and the staff member and bugler with Grant presumably waited out of earshot. That night Grant told members of his staff about the conversation, and Horace Porter later wrote his recollection of what Grant told them, which agrees substantially with Grant’s account, adding only that Lee said emancipation would not be an obstacle to reunion. Porter, “The Surrender at Appomattox Court House,” in Johnson and Buel, Battles and Leaders, 4, pp. 745–46.

  4Theodore Lyman to Elizabeth Lyman, April 23, 1865, George R. Agassiz, ed., Meade’s Headquarters 1863–1865: Letters of Colonel Theodore Lyman from the Wilderness to Appomattox (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1922), pp. 360–61; Meade to Margaretta, April 10, 1865, Meade, Life and Letters, 2, p. 270.

  5REL to Davis, April 12, 1865, Wartime Papers, pp. 935–38.

  6General Orders No. 9, ibid., pp. 914–15.

  7Giles B. Cooke Diary, April 10–13, 1865, excerpted on February 20, 1923, Profiles in History Auction, Calabasas, CA, July 11, 2014, “The Property of a Distinguished American Private Collector, Part IV-54D, p. 49, item #22.2; MCL to Louisa Snowden, April 16, 1865, T. Michael Miller, “My Dear Louisa: Letters from Mrs. Mary Custis Lee to the Snowden Family of Alexandria, Virginia,” The Fireside Sentinel, 5 (June 1991), p. 72. Cooke’s dairy—as excerpted, anyhow—says they left April 11, but virtually all other sources unite in saying April 12.

  8Milwaukee, Sentinel, May 1, 1865.

  9MCL to Mary Meade, April 23, 1865, MacDonald, Mrs. Robert E. Lee, p. 197.

  10REL to Davis, April 20, 1865, Wartime Papers, pp. 938–39.

  11Lyman to Elizabeth Lyman, April 23, 1865, Agassiz, Meade’s Headquarters, p. 362.

  12MCL to Mary Meade, April 23, 1865, MacDonald, Mrs. Robert E. Lee, p. 198.

  13Keowee, SC, Courier, June 2, 1866.

  14J. Stoddard Johnston interview, December 1879, Trenton, State Gazette, December 18, 1879.

  15Cincinnati, Commercial, August 9, 1879.

  16Boston, Daily Advertiser, May 5, 1865; Philadelphia, Inquirer, May 3, 1865.

  17New York, Tribune, May 9, 1865.


  18Washington, Evening Union, June 3, 1865.

  19This episode, which is almost certainly apocryphal, has enjoyed enormous popularity in Lee biographies and other works, and been misquoted and carelessly embellished to become an example of his magnanimity, charity, and good feeling toward the newly freed slaves. As usually given, it presents Lee attending communion service at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church early in June, when the congregation is stunned that a black man went first to the communion table at the call for communicants. No one else would go forward until Lee did, knelt beside the man, and they took communion together, Lee accepting the black man’s equality before God.

  The episode stems from the article “Negro Communed at St. Paul’s Church” in the Confederate Veteran, 13 (August 1905), p. 360. It is based on a conversation with T. L. Broun, who was in St. Paul’s that day and according to the unidentified transcriber said that when the invitation to take communion was announced, a tall, well-dressed, and very black man went to the communion table, apparently before anyone else. White would-be communicants were so shocked that they remained immobile in their pews, “deeply chagrined at this attempt to inaugurate the ‘new regime’ to offend and humiliate them during their most devoted Church services.” Lee, however, “ignoring the action and presence of the negro,” walked up the aisle to the chancel rail and stopped not far from the black man, then knelt to receive the host. Lee’s act, “under such provoking and irritating circumstances had a magic effect,” and Broun and the rest rose and joined him. “By this action of Gen. Lee the services were conducted as if the negro had not been present. It was a grand exhibition of superiority shown by a true Christian and great soldier under the most trying and offensive circumstances.”

  Immediately evident, of course, is that Lee’s is an act of defiance, not charity or welcome to the black man as it is usually depicted. Other questions arise as well. For instance, given that blacks, slave or free, customarily sat in the western gallery at St. Paul’s, how did this man get downstairs and past the entire white congregation to be first at the rail? Had he taken a seat beforehand in one of the front rows, that in itself would have been as much an outrage as what Broun described, and he would have been evicted before the service commenced.

  The Confederate Veteran actually appeared four months after the first publication of Broun’s story, and made some subtle alterations. The Richmond, Times-Dispatch, April 16, 1905, recounted a conversation with Broun the previous day in which he told the story. So Broun orally recounted the tale to a reporter who presumably tried to transcribe it carefully, and then four months later an unidentified person somewhat carelessly transcribed it again to send to the Confederate Veteran. Hence the Confederate Veteran version is thirdhand and forty years after the fact, which alone would make it highly suspect. Broun originally said that the black man was “among those who first arose,” not the very first as implied in the later version. Broun also originally said that the man “walked with an air of military authority,” and that when the rest of the congregation remained seated, their shock was at “this attempt of the Federal authorities to offensively humiliate them.” The suggestion is strong, though not explicit, that this was a black Union soldier, which someone four months later chose to leave out. However, by June 4 the Army of the Potomac had gone to Washington to be disbanded, and Grant had ordered all black units out of Richmond to other duty, so there should have been no black soldiers in the city.

  Finally, any incident such as this, whether involving a black soldier or civilian, occurring as described, would have left an indelible memory that would not have had to wait four decades to see print. It is likely that white males in the congregation would have forcibly ejected the offender, causing enough of a scene to attract notice in contemporary diaries and in the Richmond press, yet the newspapers are silent, as are the diarists. Broun did know Lee somewhat, for his brother sold the horse Traveller to the general in early 1862. By 1905, when he told his story to the Times-Dispatch reporter, Broun was eighty-one years old, adding the probability of faulty memory, or even possible dementia, to the usual problems of recollections that far from the event.

  In the end, the whole incident is probably fantasy, though Broun had no reason to lie, so it is possible that some sort of minor incident took place at that communion that was exaggerated and grossly reshaped by forty years of failing memory. For more on this questionable incident, see Philip Schwarz, “General Lee and Visibility,” at http://www.stratalum.org/leecommunion.htm.

  20REL to A. L. Long, May 24, 1865, Robert E. Lee Papers, Washington and Lee.

  21MacDonald, Mrs. Robert E. Lee, p. 199.

  22REL to Robert E. Lee Jr., July 10, 1865, Lee-Jackson Collection, Washington and Lee.

  23Trenton, NJ, State Gazette, August 19, 1865

  24Undated endorsement by GWCL attached to REL to Andrew Johnson, June 13, 1865, Sotheby’s Presidential and Other American Manuscripts Sale Catalog, April 3, 2008, item #13.

  25REL to Beauregard, October 1865, Gary W. Gallagher “A Question of Loyalty,” Civil War Times, 52 (October 2013), p. 30.

  26Alexandria, Gazette, September 14, 1876; USG to Halleck, May 6, 1865, PUSG, 15, p. 11, June 16, 1865, p. 150, USG to REL, June 20, 1865, pp. 210–11. Lee’s amnesty oath of allegiance is in General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NA.

  27REL to Robert E. Lee Jr., July 10, 1865, Lee-Jackson Collection, Washington and Lee.

  28REL to Charles Minnegerode, July 29, 1865, ibid.

  29REL to John Letcher, August 28, 1865, Gilder Lehrman Collection.

  30REL to Louise H. Carter, November 16, 1865, SPC.

  31REL to “A gentlemen in Petersburg,” n.d. [September 1865], Washington, Evening Union, September 30, 1865.

  32USG to Julia, April 16, 1865, PUSG, 14, p. 396.

  33USG to Pope, April 17, 1865, ibid., p. 403.

  34USG to Sherman, April 21, 1865, ibid., pp. 424–25.

  35USG to Julia, April 21, 1865, ibid., p. 429.

  36USG to Silas Hudson, April 21, 1865, ibid., pp. 429–30.

  37USG to Halleck, May 6, 1865, PUSG, 15, p. 11.

  38USG, Report, June 20, 1865, ibid., pp. 204–206.

  39New Orleans, Times, September 24, 1865; Macon, GA, Weekly Telegraph, August 30, 1867; Providence, RI, Evening Press, August 23, 1865; Burke memoir, 1896, Garland Papers.

  40New Orleans, Times, September 24, 1865.

  41REL to Letcher, August 28, 1865, Gilder Lehrman Collection.

  42REL to Trustees of Washington College, August 24, 1865, Washington and Lee Archives.

  43MacDonald, Mrs. Robert E. Lee, p. 206–207.

  44REL to M. G. Harmon, November 22, 1865, Philadelphia, Illustrated New Age, December 4, 1865.

  45Rufus L. Patterson to Mrs. Lisetta Maria Fries, July 31, 1866, Thomas Felix Hickerson, Echoes of Happy Valley: Letters and Diaries, Family Life in the South, Civil War History (Chapel Hill, NC: privately published, 1962), p. 111. Patterson had seen Lee at Alum Springs in Rockbridge County the day before, July 30, 1866.

  46Cleveland, Plain Dealer, June 29, 1872.

  47REL to? at Fort Riley, KS, May 23, 1866, Richmond, Times Dispatch, January 23, 1922.

  48REL to M. O. McLaughlin, April 27, 1866, Dallas, Morning News, December 19, 1928; REL to W. G. Morgan, March 16, 1867, Lexington, KY, Morning Herald, May 19, 1901.

  49REL to Catherine Carson, July 9, 1866, Breckinridge Family Papers, LC.

  50REL to W. G. Morgan, March 16, 1867, Lexington, KY, Morning Herald, May 19, 1901.

  51REL to J. B. Minor, January 17, 1867, Lee Papers, UVA.

  52“An Address to the Parents and Public of Virginia, by General R. E. Lee and Professors Minor and Dabney,” Macon, Weekly Telegraph, March 29, 1867.

  53Columbus, GA, Daily Enquirer, July 7, 1868.

  54REL to R. W. Jemison, June 18, 1870, Macon, Weekly Telegraph, July 12, 1870.

  55Letter April 10, 1868, New York, Tribune, April 20, 1868.

  56Richmond, Whig, March 6, 1868.
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  57Anonymous letter, March 17, 1868, Cleveland, Leader, April 17, 1868; Cincinnati, Daily Gazette, April 6, 1868.

  58Jamestown, NY, Journal, April 24, 1868.

  59New York, Commercial Advertiser, October 22, 1868.

  60MacDonald, Mrs. Robert E. Lee, p. 222.

  61Augusta, GA, Daily Constitutionalist, June 11, 1868.

  62Albany, NY, Daily Argus, July 24, 1868.

  63REL to?, n.d. [September–October 1869], Baltimore, Sun, October 18, 1869.

  64Macon, GA, Weekly Telegraph, November 17, 1868.

  65Wilmer McLean to REL, April 2, 1866, Lee Collection, Washington and Lee.

  66REL to Wilcox & Gibbs Sewing Machine Company, January 12, 1867, Augusta, GA, Daily Constitutionalist, August 20, 1868; REL to William J. Rivers, March 25, 1869, item 76, Civil War Auction Catalog No. 155, Antebellum Covers, Ron and Anne Meininger, Gaithersburg, MD.

  67REL to John B. Baldwin, May 20, 1867, John B. Baldwin to Robert H. Maury, June 5, 1867, Richmond, Whig, June 11, 1867.

  68Richmond, Dispatch, August 20, 1867; REL to M. G. Harman, H. W. Sheffey, John B. Baldwin et al., July 28, 1870, Alexandria, Gazette, August 1, 1870.

  69REL to Charles Minnegerode, July 29, 1865, Lee-Jackson Collection, Washington and Lee.

  70REL Circular Letter, July 31, 1865, Lee Collection, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis; REL to Early, November 22, 1865, March 15, 1866, New Orleans, Times-Picayune, March 16, 1886; REL to John B. Gordon, July 31, 1865, John B. Gordon Papers, University of Georgia, Athens.

  71R. M. Smith to REL, November 24, 1865, item 13, Gary Hendershott Catalog, August 1999, Little Rock, AK; Alexandria, Gazette, February 11, 1874; REL to Charles Venable, March 1866, Minor-Venable File, University of Virginia.

  72REL to J. Stoddard Johnston, January 2, 1866, Lee-Jackson Collection, Washington and Lee; Macon, Telegraph, June 17, 1866; REL to Osman Latrobe, June 8, 1866, sold at auction in 1980, present location unknown.

  73Dallas, Weekly Herald, August 4, 1866; REL to Charles Marshall, December 4, 1865, item 77, Alexander Autographs “War Between the States” catalog, 2008; New Orleans, Daily Picayune, January 5, 1866; Augusta, GA, Chronicle, March 23, 1866.