Mary Chesnut saw Davis at a Richmond soirée. He was given to pacing. He “walked with me slowly, up and down that long room.” Our “conversation was of the saddest.” “Nobody knows so well as he does the difficulties which beset this hard-driven Confederacy. He has a voice which is perfectly modulated. I think there is a melancholy cadence in it which he is unconscious of as he talks of things as they are now.”
Mrs. Robert E. Lee was no less downcast. Her home, Arlington, was gone; it had been confiscated by the United States Government, and would soon be converted into a Federal cemetery. Her daughter, Annie—“my sweet Annie,” General Lee called her—was dead. Her son, William Henry Fitzhugh Lee, who was known as “Rooney,” had been taken prisoner. While he was in captivity his young wife, Charlotte, had sickened and died. Mrs. Lee was a charming woman, cultivated and pious. She had borne her husband seven children, and she had managed the household while he followed the peripatetic life of a soldier. Yet like many women of her class, Mary Lee had receded into invalidism. Rheumatism confined her to a wheelchair, and she was constantly in pain. “Poor lame mother,” she said of herself. “I am useless to my children.” Over tea she and Mary Chesnut found solace in the past. They talked of how, in the “old Revolutionary times,” Mary Chesnut’s mother-in-law had greeted Mrs. Lee’s relation, General Washington, as he made his way to New York to become the first President of the United States.
The despair of General Lee, though it was also great, was in a manly and heroic mold. Mary Chesnut thought him “the very first man in the world.” When, after the fashion of an earlier age, he made her one of his low bows and flashed her one of his charming smiles, she blushed like a schoolgirl. She was a little afraid of the General, but his manner to her was full of gentle consideration. He spoke to her of his son, Rooney. “Poor boy,” Lee said, “he is sadly cut up by the death of that sweet little wife of his.” Mary Chesnut thought she saw tears stand in the General’s eyes. When ladies were present Lee invariably concealed the iron that lay just beneath the surface of his exquisite courtesy. With meddlesome officers he was apt to be more direct. When Wade Hampton III, who had questioned Lee’s judgment concerning the deployment of some brigades, threatened to quit the service and return to his plantation, Lee dismissed the planter with a wave of casual disdain. “I would not care if you went back to South Carolina with your whole division,” Lee told him. Hampton pronounced the rebuke “immensely mortifying.”
At times it appeared as though Lee’s graceful and ingenious chivalry was all that held the Confederacy together. The country was sinking fast. President Davis was, by this time, one of the most unpopular men in the South. He had, it was said, less to fear from the vengeance of the Yankees than from the passions of his own enraged constituents. He could still rely on the soldiers to cheer him whenever he passed them by; but much of the civilian population regarded him with contempt. In Richmond itself the anxiety was great. The shrieks of wounded soldiers wrought upon the nerves of the townspeople as they went about their business. When, in the churches of Richmond, the congregations sat down to worship of a Sunday, there was an ominous thudding as amputees laid aside their crutches. Most disturbing of all, there was a scarcity of bread. The prospect of famine loomed.
So, too, did the possibility of revolt. The slaves were restive. President Davis’s manservant, Jim, absconded with Mrs. Davis’s maid, Betsy. One morning Mary Chesnut, coming down to breakfast, was startled to find her husband’s man, the fastidious Laurence, drunk. Ordered to move a chair, the slave raised it above his head and smashed a chandelier. James Chesnut watched the exhibition with mounting indignation. “Mary,” he said, “do tell Laurence to go home. I am too angry to speak with him.” Laurence was sent home to Mulberry, where he was followed, in a short time, by Molly, Mary Chesnut’s maid. “I am to be left,” Mary Chesnut said, “for the first time in my life, wholly at the mercy of hired servants.”
The agitation of Richmond found its analogue in the depths of the country. The report of her mother’s illness brought Mary Chesnut deep into the interior of the Confederacy. She took the train to Montgomery, and from there traveled by steamer to Portland. During her journey she encountered much bitterness towards the régime. “This horrid, horrid, Confederacy!” a woman at Montgomery shrieked. “It is unendurable. My God! This den of thieves. I have lost everything but my virtue. My clothes all gone. This dress—it is an old toilette table cover.”
“Do you not wish Lincoln was dead and the war over?”
“No,” the woman replied. “There are worse men—worse presidents on this continent than Lincoln.”
On the steamer to Portland, Mary Chesnut’s cousin, James William Boykin, told her of the bales of cotton he had lost in Mississippi. He “charged it all to Jeff Davis in his wrath.” When they disembarked, her cousin rode off, and Mary Chesnut waited for the coach in an unlit shanty. The proprietor was a white-trash grotesque; he was drunk and stared at her with a queer look on his face. “Well, Madam,” he slobbered, “what can I do for you?” She had reached the heart of the Confederacy, the “jungle South,” they called it, where the air was miasmic and men and morals equally dilapidated. In the shanty there were no lamps or candles, and although it was a hot night Mary Chesnut kept close to the fire. Her temples throbbed.
At last the carriage came and took her to her sister’s house. She went at once to her mother. “I knew you would come,” the old woman said as she took her daughter’s hands.
Her sister Sally’s appearance shocked her. “As she lifted the candle over her head to show me something on the wall, I saw that her pretty brown hair was white.” Her sister’s eyes were without life, and “in a stony way, pale and cold as ice,” she told Mary Chesnut of the deaths of her children. Kate, the baby of the family, was a beautiful gray-eyed girl. “Strange,” Sally said, that “one of my children . . . has lived and has gone, and you have never seen her at all. She died first, and I would not go to the funeral. I thought it would kill me to see her put in the ground.” Then thirteen-year-old Mary fell sick. “I did not leave her side again in that long struggle between life and death.” “Mama,” the girl said, “put your hands on my knees. They are so cold.” “I put my hand on her knee. The cold struck to my heart. I knew it was the coldness of death.” “I did everything for her,” Sally told her sister. “I even prepared my darling for the grave.”
As soon as her mother recovered, Mary Chesnut left the Black Belt and returned to Richmond. On the way to the capital she passed troop trains that extended for miles along the tracks. Soldiers on platform cars lay covered in gray blankets. A feeling of “awful depression” laid hold of her as she passed them by. “All these fine fellows going to kill or be killed,” she reflected. “Why?”
When she reached Richmond, she found her friends gripped by a giddy hysteria. They resembled “sailors who break into the spirits closet when they find the ship must sink.” For the first time she encountered a “resolute feeling to enjoy the brief hour and never look beyond the day.” Her husband’s resistance to wine and to “hospitality run mad” disappeared. “Your plan for a solitary life in Richmond seems to have failed,” she teased him as she prepared one of her elaborate menus. A typical dinner began with soup à la reine, followed by mutton, ham, wild duck, and partridges. The wines were as copious as the dishes—a Sauternes with the first course, a Burgundy with the second, then sherry and Madeira.
The senators and patricians of Richmond crowded Mary Chesnut’s soirées, eager to drown consideration. Foreign officers came too, among them a Prussian cavalry officer on Jeb Stuart’s staff, Heros von Borcke, a young man destined to play a part in two of the three great revolutions of the decade. Yet in whatever exuberance of spirit Mary Chesnut’s parties began, they ended now on a note of lamentation and regret.
“After the battles around Richmond [when McClellan was before the city],” one of her guests said, “my hope was strong. All that has insensibly drifted away.”
“I am l
ike David,” said another, “after the child was dead. Get up, wash my face, have my hair cut. . .”
“I now long, pine, pray, and grieve—and—well, I have no hope,” said a third. “Have you any of old Mr. Chesnut’s brandy here still?”
James Chesnut took the key to the cellar from his pocket. In a moment the decanter was set down. As the men sat over their brandy, the conversation was grim.
“One more year of Stonewall would have saved us,” said one.
“General Lee can do no more than keep back Meade,” said another.
Oppressed by such a feeling of doom, Mary Chesnut might, at Mulberry, have sought relief in morphine. In Richmond, she was comforted by the nearness of Buck. She still watched the lovely girl from across the room. “The darling!” she exclaimed. “She has her peculiarities. Who can describe her? This I know. I would not have, if I could, anything altered about her mentally, morally, physically. Of how many people can one say that?” In Mrs. Ives’s house she saw her favorite with General Hood. Buck was protecting the crippled warrior from the crush of admirers. John Cabell Breckinridge, Vice President of the United States under Buchanan (he now wore the uniform of a Confederate general), bustled up to Mary Chesnut and interrupted her reverie. “That is a beautiful picture,” he said, catching the direction of her gaze. “Will she marry him?”
Mary Chesnut shook her head.
Breckinridge growled. “He cares awfully for her. No wonder. She is so sweet. Poor old battered hero. . . .”
Hood was by this time able, with the help of crutches, to walk, and he could again mount his horse. He and Buck often went out together to ride. Yet she continued to elude him.
Did the stump repel her? She said that it did not. The “Cause glorifies such wounds,” she said. Perhaps the lugubrious face disturbed her, those features, so reminiscent of a Mannerist painting, strangely grafted onto a mass of Kentucky flesh. Certainly the violence of Hood’s passions gave her pause. When, at a later time, he caught the briefest glimpse of her naked flesh, she was frightened by the desire she aroused in him. Yet she insisted that she was not one of those beauties who was afraid to be pawed by the beast, and she told Hood that if only her parents had not forbidden the match, she could “care for him.”
This, however, was a lie. No explicit prohibition touching Sam Hood had been laid down by Colonel and Mrs. Preston. Buck confessed her untruthfulness to Mary Chesnut. “You foolish child!” the older woman scolded. In a softer tone she warned Buck that it was dangerous to encourage, in a man like Hood, a passion she could not return. “Why,” Mary Chesnut asked, “are you playing with him in that way?”
Chapter 20
THE VALIANT MEN
Washington and Virginia, March-June 1864
IN THE SAME MOMENT the German revolution found, in Helmuth von Moltke, a victorious captain, Lincoln’s revolution, too, found its commander.
Not that the man who entered the lobby of Willard’s Hotel on a March afternoon in 1864 looked like a conquering hero. He stood just five feet eight, and he slouched in a way that made him seem shorter. He was slightly built, weighing about a hundred and thirty-five pounds. His major general’s uniform was shabby. A cigar hung at his mouth. Five days earlier, he had been summoned to Washington from the West, where he commanded the Army of the Tennessee. The lofty rank of lieutenant general of the Army, once held by George Washington, had been restored by act of Congress. It was now to be bestowed upon him.
The man who signed the register of Willard’s— “U. S. Grant and son, Galena, III.”—knew himself to be one of destiny’s more puzzling children. Ulysses S. Grant sometimes reflected on the inscrutable motions of providence. “It seems that man’s destiny in this world,” he said, “is quite as much a mystery as it is likely to be in the next.” Three years before his arrival in Washington, in the spring of 1861, Grant had been, at the age of thirty-nine, a failure in the race of life. Although he had graduated from West Point and served with distinction in the Mexican War, he felt no vocation for the profession of arms, and he had been unhappy in the peacetime army. Sent to a remote outpost on the Pacific coast, he had been unable, on his officer’s pay, to bring his family with him. The unhappy man sat down beside a barrel of whiskey and “drank himself out of the army.” Grant resigned his commission and returned home without prospects. His father-in-law gave him eighty acres near Saint Louis. Grant turned farmer. He chopped down trees and rode into town in his old blue army coat to sell firewood. The farm did not prosper, and he tried to sell real estate. He failed as a real estate agent and attempted to secure the position of county engineer. The place was given to another man, and Grant, in his old army coat, went about the town looking for work. “He was actually the most obscure man in Saint Louis,” the wife of his onetime real estate partner said. “Nobody took any notice of him.” In May 1860 he took his family to Galena, Illinois, where his father gave him a job as a sales clerk in the family’s leather goods business. He met with no more success in this line of work than he had in the others he had tried, and in the spring of 1861 he saw only the prospect of more failure before him. “I was no clerk,” he said, “nor had I any capacity to become one.”
In the interval since he had relinquished his clerkship to rejoin the colors, Grant had risen fast. He was now the ascendant hero of the North. He had, during more than two years, been the brightest star in the Union officer corps. Early in 1862, when the other Union commanders were paralyzed by fear and vanity, Grant, in Tennessee, took Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, feats which had gladdened the heart of Abraham Lincoln. When, at Shiloh, he was taken by surprise and regained the field only after a copious expenditure of blood, Lincoln refused to censure him. “I can’t spare this man,” the President told one of Grant’s detractors, “he fights.” In July 1863 Grant took Vicks-burg, the most important Confederate citadel then remaining on the Mississippi. (New Orleans, the gateway to the river, had fallen to Admiral David Glasgow Farragut in April 1862.) Lincoln rejoiced. “The Father of Waters,” he said, “again goes unvexed to the sea.” Grant’s victory at Chattanooga in the autumn of 1863—his men succeeded in taking Missionary Ridge and breaking Bragg’s siege of the city—confirmed the superiority of his abilities and sealed his reputation as the most formidable of the Union commanders. “Grant,” Lincoln said, “is my man.”
After dining at Willard’s with his thirteen-year-old son, Fred, who had accompanied him to Washington, Grant went to the White House. He had never before seen the President. He had only once before been in Washington. Lincoln, receiving guests in the Blue Room, recognized him at once from likenesses that had appeared in the press. “Why, here is General Grant!” the President said as he grasped his hand. “Well, this is a great pleasure, I assure you!” Lincoln thought his guest the “quietest little fellow you ever saw,” a contrast to the more familiar type of military swagger and verbosity. The next day, when he awarded Grant his commission, the President expressed the “nation’s appreciation of what you have done, and its reliance upon you for what remains to be done. . . .” Grant, who did not like to speak in public, thanked the President for the honor he had conferred upon him. His voice was tremulous, and he was at first unable to make himself heard. If, he said, he succeeded in meeting the responsibilities which now devolved upon him, his success would be due to the armies he commanded and “above all, to the favor of that Providence which leads both nations and men.”
Grant went at once to the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac. He saw, with the glance of genius, what so many commanders had overlooked. The materials for victory were there. But they were disorganized. There was a need for system and discipline in the deployment of men and matériel. The auxiliary departments that supplied the army with food and munitions were independent of the field commanders; the commissary and ordnance personnel acknowledged no masters other than those in the bureaus of Washington. Grant fixed the problems. Lincoln was amazed. He “makes thing git,” the President said. “Wherever he is, things mov
e.”
His most important changes were in the realm of strategy and command. The methods he adopted bore a remarkable resemblance to those which his counterpart in the Prussian army, Helmuth von Moltke, had lighted on across the ocean. But where Moltke’s ideas were the product of years of studious brooding, Grant’s were formed rapidly in the bloody cauldrons of Shiloh and Vicksburg. Both Grant and Moltke turned their minds to an eternal problem of war. A battle-field, the Prussian strategist Clausewitz said, is inevitably a scene of confusion. Innumerable reports, some true, more false, most distorted, reach the ears of the commander. He begins to doubt the strategy he set out to execute, and issues orders not from conviction but from despair. This age-old problem had been rendered more acute by the conditions of modern warfare. The advent of the railroad and the telegraph greatly enlarged the field of operations which the commander must consider in making his dispositions; and it was all but impossible for him to attend to the many technical tasks involved in the deployment of his army and at the same time retain a sense of the overall strategic picture.
Moltke and Grant, independently of one another, solved the problem by means of a division of labor. Under the new system, the offices of strategist and field commander were separate and distinct. Yet the specialists who performed these discrete rôles were obliged to work in close concert with one another. The commander in the field was accompanied by, or was in constant communication with, the principal strategist of the war. Grant, accordingly, did not take for himself the position of commander of the Army of the Potomac: he left General Meade in that place. But he established his own headquarters near Meade’s, and he assumed in his camp a rôle similar to that which Moltke, in the Danish War, had undertaken in the camp of the Red Prince. In the past the field commander relied on an intuitive coup d’œil to penetrate the fog of war. The new system endowed him with a “better angel” (or evil genius), an officer who had strategy constantly in his mind.
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