Slavery Lee knew to be evil, but he believed that the institution was slowly disintegrating and would gradually disappear. The Puritan, he maintained, sought to accomplish through violent revolution that which the “slow influences” of providence would achieve in a milder and more merciful way. When, in 1859, a knot of conspirators led by John Brown seized the engine house at Harpers Ferry and attempted to incite a slave revolt, Lee was dispatched by the War Department to suppress the insurrection. Lapsed Puritans like Emerson believed Brown to be a noble and heroic man. Lee concluded that he was either “fanatic or madman.”
Closely connected though he was to the soil of Virginia, Lee differed from many of those who held high place in the Confederacy. He had not passed his life on a plantation, nor had he passed it among politicians whose principal object was to defend the plantation. He had gone to West Point and graduated second in his class. His work as an army engineer had taken him around the country, to Savannah and New Orleans, Brooklyn and Saint Louis. He had served as Superintendent of West Point. But he was always to return to Virginia. His wife, Mary Custis, was the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington. She was as much a child of Virginia as Lee himself. The two were married, in 1831, in the shadow of the doric portico of Arlington, the Custis estate near Alexandria. Arlington became Lee’s home—a place he cherished, and eventually lost. Although his military career often took him away from Virginia, he remained, even in his absences, devoted to his house, his hearth, and his roots. He was a loyal family man and an affectionate father, and in the mornings he let his young children climb into bed and “lie close to him.”
Lee was never, like McClellan, self-consciously literary, yet his intellectual culture was less narrow than is sometimes supposed. As a young man he read, in French, Rousseau’s Confessions; and in maturity he made a careful study of Bonaparte’s campaigns. Though he made no special pretense to piety, he had, in middle age, experienced a kind of widening, or deepening, of spiritual perception, and at the age of forty-six he was confirmed, by the Bishop of Virginia, in the Protestant Episcopal Church. The most intense phase of his military education came during the Mexican War under General Scott, for whom he undertook a series of intrepid reconnaissances. Scott called him “the very best soldier that I ever saw in the field.”
Strong as Lee’s attachment to the Union was, his attachment to Virginia was stronger. He was, he said, “one of those dull creatures that cannot see the good of secession.” He could not anticipate a “greater calamity for the country than a dissolution of the Union.” When, however, the Union was dissolved, he returned to his native state to share, he said, “the miseries of my people.” On the day he laid down his commission in the United States Army, he was calm. “Well, Mary,” he said to Mrs. Lee, “the question is settled. Here is my letter of resignation and a letter I have written General Scott.” “Lee,” Scott told him during their last interview in Washington, “you have made the greatest mistake of your life, but I feared it would be so.”
A year after he had thrown up his commission, Lee could take satisfaction in all that he had accomplished. He had done as much as any man to form the Army of Northern Virginia, and he had used the army, boldly and skillfully, to relieve the distress of the Southern capital. “The siege of Richmond was raised,” Lee wrote, “and the object of [McClellan’s] campaign, which had been prosecuted after months of preparation at an enormous expenditure of men and money, completely frustrated.” But he could not rest; and the blood on his sword was scarcely dry when, in August, he went forth to meet a Union army under the command of General John Pope.
Chapter 11
TRUMP CARDS
London, July-August 1862
LEE MUST GRAPPLE with Pope; but Lincoln was forced to contend with England. In the summer of 1862 it seemed not unlikely that the fate of the President’s revolution would be settled, not on the plains of Virginia, but in the Palace of Westminster. On the evening of July 18, a small man, slight of stature, went down to the Houses of Parliament. Such was his frigid hauteur that Lord John Russell commanded a deference scarcely less profound than royalty. In those days the ducal houses of England still possessed wealth and influence almost princely in extent. Yet even among dukes Lord John Russell’s family stood high. The Russells were descended, in the paternal line, from Weymouth merchants who in the later Middle Ages had risen into wealth and gentility. The revolution of the Tudors, which completed the ruin of so much of the old medieval aristocracy of England, spelled opportunity for the Russells, and put them on the path to the ducal coronet. Together with such families as the Cecils and the Cavendishes, they formed the foundation of a new ruling class—the mighty aristocracy known to history as the Whigs.
The Whigs had, for more than two centuries, been the party of liberty in England. In the civil struggles of the seventeenth century, the Whigs had maintained, with courage and perseverance, a long contest with the Crown, one that prevented the emergence, in the British islands, of an absolute monarchy. The Whigs were zealous for liberty, yet they were no less jealous of their own prerogatives, and after the deposition of James II, the last of the Stuart kings, they formed themselves into an oligarchy hardly less powerful than that which ruled at Rome in the age of the Scipios or at Venice in the era of the Querini and the Contarini.
The anomalous qualities of the Whigs were evident in the career of “Johnny” Russell. As a young man he favored the reform of the House of Commons, which he hoped to see become a body more truly representative of the English nation; yet he owed his first seat in the House, which he entered in 1813 at the age of twenty, to the Russell interest. His father, the Duke of Bedford, told the electors of Tavistock, in Devonshire, one of the Russells’ “pocket” boroughs, to return his son as their MP; and the electors of Tavistock, whose livelihoods depended on the Duke’s munificence, did as they were told.
In the summer of 1862, Lord John was Foreign Secretary in the ministry of Lord Palmerston, who had been Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister almost continuously since 1855. When, on the evening of the eighteenth, Lord John came down to Parliament, the lobbies were astir with anticipation. The members were agitated by a rumor that General McClellan, on the Peninsula, was on the verge of capitulating to Robert E. Lee. Lord John went, not to the House of Commons, where he had for many years played a conspicuous part, but to the House of Lords, for since 1861 he had been a peer in his own right.13 Yet in spite of the rumor of a great turn of fortune in America, he found the upper House quiet. The Lord Chancellor took his seat on the woolsack at five o’clock, and their Lordships proceeded calmly to discuss a question relating to colonial fortifications.
Very different was the temper of the lower House. In the House of Commons, William Schaw Lindsay, Member for Sunderland, rose to move a resolution urging Her Majesty’s government to intervene in the American Civil War. Lindsay, a shipping magnate deeply concerned in the Southern trade, foresaw in the disruption of commerce brought about by Lincoln’s policies the ruin of European markets, and in both Paris and London he pressed for intervention. His talents as a speaker were such as might be expected from one who had been long engaged in commercial pursuits. He had neither the polished tone nor the forensic skill of those orators who, like Palmerston and Russell, had been bred as politicians. But Lindsay was rich, and his influence considerable. He was heard with respect by the House. It was clear, he said, that the South could never be conquered. It was still more clear that the Southerners could never be brought again into the fold of the Union. The time had come for the English government to abandon its policy of neutrality. The Confederate States had, he said, shown both the determination and the ability to support their independence. They ought therefore to be received into the family of nations; and England herself ought to offer mediation to the rival belligerents, for both humanity and England’s own interests demanded that a stop be put to the war.
A long and spirited debate followed. Perhaps a trifle too spirited; one of the speakers, Lord Vane-Te
mpest, the son of the Duke of Newcastle, was said to have come down to the House drunk. At length the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, rose, and defended the policy of the government. He confessed that he regretted that a debate had been brought on; and he earnestly hoped that the House would leave so delicate a matter in the hands of the ministers. The contest between the North and the South had not yet, the Prime Minister said, assumed that character which would justify England in supposing that the independence of the South had been established; and no man could say what posture the conflict would next assume. Lord Palmerston sat down to cries of “Hear, hear,” whereupon Lindsay rose and, on the strength of the Prime Minister’s representations, withdrew his motion in favor of intervention in the American conflict.
The Houses adjourned, and Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell went out into the London night. Although the two men continued publicly to defend the policy of neutrality, Palmerston was privately meditating a change. With sky-blue eyes and muttonchop whiskers—carefully dyed—Palmerston was an aristocrat of a type altogether different from that of Russell. Baronial juices, fermenting for centuries in the blood of the de Temples, had produced, in Henry John Temple, third Viscount Palmerston, a most potent liqueur. He had, during many decades, been at the summit of English political life. He entered Parliament in 1807 at the age of twenty-two and was made a junior Minister in the same year. He was now seventy-seven, and so little abated was his vigor that he was soon to be cited in a criminal case for improper relations with a lady who was not his wife. “Old Pam” was supposed to favor the South; and he had long desired the severance of the United States “as a diminution of a dangerous Power,” one which he, like many Englishmen, regarded as their country’s “great competitor for the commercial and industrial supremacy of the world.” “It is in the highest degree likely,” Palmerston said, “that the North will not be able to subdue the South, and it is no doubt certain that if the Southern Union is established as an independent state, it would afford a valuable and extensive market for British manufactures.”
Intervention in the American war would, Palmerston knew, be popular in England, for it would strengthen the position of the South, and public opinion in the country ran, at this time, strongly against the North. Englishmen had not forgotten how, a few months before, United States Marines had boarded RMS Trent, a royal mail steamer flying the Red Ensign, and carried away two Confederate diplomats, James M. Mason and John Slidell—an incident that brought England and the United States to the brink of war. (Lincoln, who needed saltpeter from British India for his guns, later released the envoys.) What was more, the cotton famine was on. The Union blockade of Southern ports had deprived England’s manufacturing cities of the staple on which their prosperity depended. Factories were idle, and laborers were out of work. Some of them were beginning to go hungry.
Even in places untouched by the cotton famine, anti-Union sentiment was strong. The young Henry Adams, who had come to England with his father, Charles Francis Adams, President Lincoln’s emissary to London, was astonished at its ferocity. Everyone of consequence, Adams said, “regarded the Washington Government as dead” and expected “to see Lincoln and his hirelings disappear in one vast débâcle.” When, on Commemoration Day in the University of Oxford, candidates for honorary degrees were solemnly proposed under the painted ceiling of the Sheldonian, the name of Lincoln was received with groans and hisses, while that of Jefferson Davis was saluted with tumultuous applause.
It was assumed by most observers that “Johnny” Russell would oppose Palmerston in the attempt at intervention. He had, not long before, helped Camillo Benso di Cavour to make a free and united nation of Italy, and he was understood, The New-York Times said, “to wish success to the United States.” He came from a family in which the love of freedom amounted almost to an hereditary trait; the Russell pedigree, Henry Adams thought, practically guaranteed his fidelity to the Good Old Cause of a free republic.
But could Lord John resist the Prime Minister? Early in August, Palmerston wrote to Queen Victoria and informed her that England would very likely intervene in the American conflict. So strong was Palmerston’s hostility to the United States believed to be that Henry Adams’s father took the extraordinary step of refusing to receive further communications from the Prime Minister except through Lord Russell. At Cambridge House in Piccadilly, Palmerston’s London residence, the antipathy to the Union cause was palpable. Adams remembered seeing the Prime Minister in the foyer in close conference with John Delane, the anti-Union editor of The Times, which had likened Americans in the North to “monkeys, grinning and chattering” at the distress they had caused in the manufacturing towns of Lancashire. Palmerston’s loud, mechanical laugh haunted the young Adams as he climbed the staircase.
“Ha! . . . Ha! . . . Ha!”
Virginia and Washington, July-August 1862
FIRST ONE, then another telegraph line went dead. In the field headquarters of the Union Army, agitation was rapidly succeeded by panic. The army was cut off from Washington. The commander, John Pope, the son of an Illinois judge in whose court Lincoln had once practiced, had a short time before boasted of his prowess as a warrior. The boasts were now forgotten. Pope was scared. Where was Lee? In front of him? Behind him? Pope could not say. He seemed to confront, in the rival commander, not a soldier but a sorcerer, one whose sinister maneuvers baffled all rational calculation.
Within a short time Pope’s army was shattered. So violent were the enemy’s blows that a number of Union battalions collapsed, disintegrated by the power of opposing force. In one of his dispatches Pope said that he feared that his army would “melt away.” He sat slumped in a chair, a picture of ruin. A cold rain fell as those who survived the ordeal trudged back, tired and beaten, to their camps around Washington. Others, unable to walk, were conveyed by horse-drawn ambulances to Fairfax, where they were laid upon the open ground. As darkness fell the heath resounded with the groans and shrieks of dying men, some hideously wounded, others in the last transports of feverish delirium. Clara Barton, the nurse, went among them in the night, a lantern in her hand; but not even her energetic ministrations could relieve such a mass of suffering.
All felt the sting of Lee’s lash, and the heat of Stonewall Jackson’s fire. In an order that revealed the full measure of his daring, Lee had, in the days before the fatal encounter with Pope, divided his army. He had given Jackson 23,000 men and ordered him to get behind Pope’s lines, a strategy which, if it had been discovered by the enemy, might have resulted in the destruction of the Southern army. After many exertions, Jackson and his 23,000 succeeded in getting behind Pope’s battalions. They seized Bristoe Station and severed the rail and telegraph lines that connected Pope to the world. Meanwhile Lee, astride his warhorse, Traveller, led his own detachment through Thoroughfare Gap to the plains of Manassas where, uniting his force with Jackson’s brigades, he proceeded to surprise and, after fierce fighting, break the larger army of Pope.
The magnitude of the Union’s defeat was indisputable; and Pope was shortly afterwards exiled to a remote command in the Department of the Northwest. But a question haunted the commanders of the vanquished army. Was it only the martial genius of the Southern soldiers that brought the Federal forces to ruin at Second Manassas?
General McClellan had by this time returned from his disastrous campaign in the Peninsula. He still commanded the Army of the Potomac. In the most charitable construction that can be placed upon his actions in August 1862, McClellan preferred to sulk in his tent rather than co-operate in the destruction of the common foe. The young General was never one to throw himself enthusiastically into work which tended, not to his own, but to another man’s glory, and his pride was exasperated by the elevation of a rival commander. Pope, he said, was “a villain” who “ought to bring defeat upon any cause that employs him.” Ordered to assist Pope by dispatching a corps of men under General Franklin, McClellan dithered. The order was repeated, with more vehemence; McClellan responded
with excuses. Franklin’s men, McClellan said, had no horses. It soon appeared that General Sumner’s corps was in a similar state of unreadiness, and could not, or so McClellan claimed, “move out and fight.” When, in the heat of battle, Pope begged the commander of the Army of the Potomac not for men but for supplies, McClellan surveyed with indifference the misfortunes of his competitor and coldly refused the desired succor.
A newspaper correspondent who covered the White House had never seen the President so angry. Lincoln told his private secretary, John Nicolay, that he suspected that McClellan deliberately withheld troops from Pope during the battles of Second Manassas. “He has acted badly towards Pope,” the President said; “he really wanted him to fail.” Such conduct was, Lincoln maintained, “atrocious,” “shocking,” “unpardonable.” He saw at once that the egotism of McClellan had assumed a more sinister complexion; but he knew that the young man still possessed the confidence of the Army of the Potomac, for whatever his other failings, McClellan was skillful in managing the affections of his men. The humiliations of the Peninsula he had artfully laid at the feet of the government, and his officers, many of whom were secretly grateful for a commander who preferred to dream of glory rather than wrest it from the enemy joined him in vilifying the political leadership of the Republic.
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