Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (4 page)

T
HE
G
ETTYSBURG
campaign opened on May 15–16, 1863, in Richmond, Virginia. There President Davis began the course that determined the nature of the invasion, restricted its scope, and was to make his part in the battle as decisive as that of any man who fought on the field.

On May 14, Jefferson Davis had called General Lee away from his army at the Rappahannock River defense line, fifty miles north of Richmond, to attend a cabinet meeting in the White House. The South’s greatest general and the seven civilians gathered in the small oblong room on the second floor to decide on emergency measures to meet a crisis in the military fortunes of the two-year-old nation. The crisis was caused largely by the defense policies of the president, though Davis would never have admitted it.

Among the limitations of this self-aware gentleman was an inability to acknowledge himself in the wrong, and in military affairs his need to be right was aggravated by delusions of genius. His military experience was really very limited. It consisted of a mediocre career at West Point, routine garrison duty for a couple of years before he resigned from the army, and a moment of minor heroics in the Mexican War as colonel of Mississippi volunteers. But Davis came under the influence of the South’s image of itself. In a land where the age of chivalry was perpetuated, the military leader embodied the gallantry, the glamour, and the privilege of the aristocrat in a feudal society. His shrewd older brother had earned his way into the aristocracy that emerged from the frontier in the Mississippi delta country, and Davis took his status with the seriousness of one not born into the ruling class. He confused his susceptibility to the officer symbol with talents in the honored profession of arms.

Jefferson Davis was supported in his delusion by an excellent record as war secretary for President Pierce (1853–7), when he had been one of the most powerful figures in Washington. Apparently the ambitious man regarded his efficiency in this paper work relating to peacetime garrisons as qualifying him to command armies in the field. He went further than that: he regarded himself as the one person in the South fitted to command the generals of armies, to plan the war policy and design its execution in detail. In his one-man show Davis brought to war the same bureaucratic cast of mind and methods which had made him so successful as peacetime war secretary, and he guarded his authority as jealously as a Caesar.

From the beginning of the war, both presidents had taken quite literally their title of commander in chief. In this capacity, however, less was demanded of Lincoln than of Davis. As leader of an established nation, Lincoln had at his disposal unlimited wealth, the organized machinery of government, a navy, the war potential of heavy industry, and a four-to-one manpower superiority. Davis led a disorganized movement in self-determinism composed of proud and fiercely individualistic provincials who had scarcely declared independence before their borders were pierced by invading armies.

Moreover, unlike Lincoln, Davis lacked the capacity for growth, for changing as events changed. The more the war went against the Confederacy, the more he exhausted his mind and his associates’ patience by a concentration on bureaucratic details. There was something compulsive especially about his passion for interfering with troop dispositions. He endlessly shifted units from one post to another, frequently over the protests and sometimes to the outrage of generals in the field. His clerical work, which properly belonged in the war office or adjutant general’s office, seemed to afford the harassed man a sense of adequacy in the press of events beyond his capacity to direct. The consequences of this mania, and the policy behind it, caused the White House conference in which was born the desperate plan that ended at Gettysburg.

From the first, Davis’s policy was based on his fear that the states comprising the Confederacy could not win their independence from the Union, and his purpose always was to defend territory until the enemy lost the will to subjugate or until, as in the Revolution, help came from Europe. In his tenacity to hold ground, the president scattered his available troops in what might be called a strategy of defense by dispersal. Wherever the enemy posed a threat, there he hurried troops. As the enemy had more troops and superior lines of communication, by common arithmetic the Federal forces outnumbered the Confederates at any given point, and the results were inevitable. By May of 1863 the Confederate territory was being chewed up in detail.

West of the Mississippi, except for causing the dispersal of some Federal troops, the Confederate forces had virtually ceased to be a military factor. The buffer state of Tennessee was largely lost, including the river port of Memphis, at the Confederacy’s northern end of the Mississippi River. At the southern end, New Orleans, the South’s largest port, had long been a base for Federal operations. The only Confederate port still open was Vicksburg, approximately midway between Memphis and New Orleans, and this city was undergoing a siege from the river and the land. The river country to the north and south of Vicksburg was either occupied or had been ravaged in invasion; the defending Confederate forces were divided and ineffective; and unless the Confederate government could change the situation, its big river and the entire Confederate west would be lost.

In considering a change in this critical situation, Commander in Chief Davis had at his disposal two other major armies—the Army of Tennessee in the Confederate center and the Army of Northern Virginia protecting Richmond—along with assorted garrisons of various sizes awaiting any threatening movements the enemy thought of to disperse the Confederate strength further. In meeting similar crises Davis’s habit had been to hurry troops from one army to another, risking the less-exposed force to add some strength to the more-threatened. At the time of the threat to Vicksburg, however, no other Confederate army or even garrison force was safe from immediate danger.

Jefferson Davis had never before been confronted with a military dilemma that could not be solved, at least theoretically on his charts, by the shifting of troops. In his present consternation, he even asked the advice of his current secretary of war.

James Seddon was the fourth man, and by all odds the best, to try to serve in the post which contemporaries said the president reduced to the status of a clerk. A scholarly Virginia planter and avocational politician, Seddon was intelligent, a devoted patriot, and knew his limitations in military affairs. He personally favored sending reinforcements from Lee’s army to Vicksburg, but he did not feel qualified to make such a momentous decision. The result was the high-level conference that the South’s only successful commanding general was summoned to attend.

2

When General Lee left his army camped outside the sacked old city of Fredericksburg to come to Richmond, his thoughts were heavy, but none of his broodings touched upon a town in Pennsylvania of which he had never heard.

Although Davis exercised the prerogatives of his supreme authority with everyone, he had respect for Lee as a soldier, and, due to Lee’s patience and limitless tact, the president and the general enjoyed cordial relations. Neither was a revolutionary type, and Lee, having been trained from birth to respect constituted authority, gave the president the deference that Davis demanded. Beyond these surface relations, no two men could be more dissimilar.

Davis, at fifty-five, was a lean, attenuated man above middle height who gave the impression of being tall because of his erect military carriage. His features were well defined, and, when younger and at his best, he had made a handsome appearance. Under the stress of responsibilities beyond his capacities his features had sharpened, his cheeks hollowed, and his mouth tightened. Except when he was relaxed with intimates, a cold rigidity of expression gave him the look of an unapproachable autocrat, which he was becoming increasingly by the spring that ushered in the third year of the war.

A glaucoma had blinded one eye twelve years before, and the eyestrain of his paper work, along with the nerve-strain of his tensions, caused excruciating pain in his good eye and neuralgic spasms in his facial muscles. When he was suffering his organism’s protest at the unnatural burdens his will placed upon it, he became irritable and more highhanded than usual. When the attacks had passed, the effects showed in his expression and manner. At the conference of May 15–16 he looked an overtaxed man concealing his worries behind a mask of taut, proud reserve. Although as unaware of others’ dignity as he was sensitive about his own, when not affronted Davis was punctilious in manner.

While everything about Davis had been made, Robert E. Lee was a complete natural. Of a family that in all its interlocking branches had been powerful and distinguished in Virginia’s ruling class since 1641, he was the most perfectly proportioned product that plantation culture could produce, and he looked it. Massively built, he moved with the quiet assurance of a man born to rule, and his heroically molded face reflected his habit of authority. Lord Wolsey said that, of all the great figures he had met, “Lee alone impressed me with the feeling that I was in the presence of a man who was cast in grander mould and made of different and finer metal than all other men.”

One year older than Davis, General Lee was aging more rapidly, and probably was suffering already the early stages of the hypertension that was, with a cardiac condition, to cause his death in his sixty-third year. Lee was normally a sweet-natured man, gentle of manner, and his graciousness derived from that true courtesy which, the antithesis of Davis’s formal manners, was founded upon consideration for all others. This was the
noblesse oblige
of his class, which he inherited along with its privileges, and it should not imply any softness or false modesty about his gifts as a leader. He knew what he was and what he had; he never had to impress his status on anybody. He had a quiet humor, loved family society, was a devout Episcopalian, and, outside his sphere of war, was not a reflective man.

A career soldier, he was, except for his wife’s entangled estate at Arlington (which the Federals had confiscated), dependent on his army pay for support of his large family. In the army, after a brilliant career at West Point, his promise as general-officer material had been recognized by Winfield Scott during the Mexican War. By April 1861, when he resigned his commission as colonel of the 1st U.S. Cavalry, Lee was the most highly regarded soldier in the army and had been unofficially offered command of the Federal army destined to invade his native state.

The painful decision to end his thirty-two-year association with the old army, which had begun in his eighteenth year, was motivated entirely by his instinctive allegiance to his native land. As Washington and Jefferson meant Virginia when they said “my country,” Lee was a Virginian before he was anything else, American or Confederate. He would have gone with Virginia, whichever side his state had chosen. A disbeliever in slavery and not politically minded, he said it all in the simple words: “Save in defense of my native state, I never again desire to draw my sword.”

In surrendering his life’s career in defense of his state, Lee’s concept of a successful defense was based upon inflicting defeat on the enemy. His purpose was to
win
independence. While Davis clung to every foot of Confederate soil in order to impress on the world the success of the young nation’s defense of its right to exist, Lee believed that military victories would impress the world more than the amount of territory possessed, and cared nothing about holding ground. Always he strove for the large maneuver that would inflict on the’ enemy the decisive defeat; but always Davis restrained him. In Lee’s two years of Confederate service—barely one as the commander of the force that he molded into the Army of Northern Virginia—his military relations with Davis had represented a continuous compromise between the president’s undeclared policy of outlasting the enemy and the general’s purpose of winning by breaking the enemy’s will to continue their effort at subjugation.

When Robert E. Lee came to Richmond that May, he had grown depressed by the fruitlessness of victories won on the barren defensive line of the Rappahannock River, across the east-central section of the state. Although this plantation country had been fought over and occupied by the enemy until its fertility was destroyed for the foreseeable future, and although the terrain made a successful counteroffensive impossible, President Davis kept Lee’s army chained there to avoid even the temporary abandonment of a few miles. To Lee, this containment of the enemy in middle Virginia was at best a stalemate, and, by the logic of arithmetic, stalemates doomed the Confederacy to slow defeat.

From the beginning Lee had feared a long war that would exhaust the Confederacy’s resources. By the opening of the spring campaign of 1863 the tolls of attrition were evident in every branch of the service. The men could barely subsist on their rude rations; their clothes were ragged makeshifts of worn-out uniforms and civilian garments, with shoes gleaned from the dead; and their horses, from hard use and poor forage, looked to a Northern observer like the animals of immigrants’ wagons on the way to Chicago. More serious even than the failure of the supply system was the loss of irreplaceable manpower. Most serious of all was the steady draining from the shallow pool of general-officer material.

Only a few days before Lee took the train to Richmond, the Confederacy’s armed forces had suffered their most grievous blow in the death of Stonewall Jackson. Wounded by his own men in the dark at the Battle of Chancellorsville, General Jackson had contracted pneumonia following the amputation of his left arm and died on the afternoon of May 11.