Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (5 page)

Lee’s grief at the loss of his personal friend and most trusted associate sharpened his awareness of the futility of defensive victories whose cost the South could not afford. At Chancellorsville (May 2–3), against double his own numbers, Lee defied all military maxims by dividing his army in the presence of a superior force and, in a movement of incredible audacity, carved the battle masterpiece of the age. Yet, with one fourth of his army dispersed in other areas, Lee lacked the concentration of forces to make his victory decisive. The greatly acclaimed defeat of “the finest army on the planet” was, to Lee, only a checkmate to the powerful force of Major General Joseph Hooker. Already pugnacious “Fighting Joe” was plotting new maneuvers for coming at Lee again.

When General Lee joined the president and the gentlemen of the cabinet in the room at the top of the high, winding staircase, his forming plan for meeting the Confederacy’s crisis was in unspoken opposition to the president’s existing policy. Lee’s purpose was to break the stalemate that Davis sought means of continuing. In resolving the undeclared conflict between their views, Lee and Davis reached an ultimate in compromise, which determined the nature of the campaign that ended at Gettysburg.

3

Lee was grave during the conference. War clerk Jones noted in his diary that the general looked “a little pale.” The six cabinet members, none of whom had had any military experience, said little. They did not need special training to recognize that Davis’s policy of passive defense was losing their independence. But these worried men were not accustomed to the president’s seeking their advice in military affairs, and doubtless they were confused by all the details of their emergency as presented by Davis.

The problem was fundamentally this: how to send reinforcements to Vicksburg without exposing other major objectives of the enemy? These were the arms-producing center of Richmond—the Ruhr of the Confederacy—and Chattanooga at the gateway to Atlanta, the railroad and supply center in the heart of the lower South. The fundamental problem was beclouded by the variety of the enemy’s minor threats that unsettled Davis’s system of fixed dispersal. He had already scattered available forces so widely, reducing Lee’s army to do so, that not even a brigade was left to be moved to newly threatened areas.

The enemy was threatening the interior of North Carolina from the inland waterways of the coast, threatening south-eastern Virginia from occupied bases in the Norfolk area, and perennially threatening the port of Charleston. Davis had managed to spread detached units in all those sectors, but now the multiplying forces of the enemy were threatening Richmond from the Union-held Fortress Monroe to the east, and “armies” were converging on the fertile Shenandoah Valley from the north and west. Cavalry raiders had recently ranged through Virginia, between Richmond and Lee’s army, stealing horses and tearing up railroad tracks, and more of the same could be expected. Davis’s usual methods of meeting such threats offered no solution to the situation.

Not a man or a gun could be spared from the Army of Tennessee. Bragg, its inept and unpopular commander, was waiting apprehensively for the enemy’s move, and there had been speculation in the war department about the advisability of sending troops to prop him up.

That left only Lee’s army, already depleted by the absence of two of Longstreet’s veteran divisions and Longstreet personally, and two fine brigades under experienced leaders detached in North Carolina. Cleared of all the confusing details, the problem as presented to Lee was reduced to a choice between sending his temporarily detached veterans to the relief of Vicksburg and recalling them to his army as replacements for the Chancellorsville losses. On the surface, removed from the context of the total military situation, the decision could appear to be merely a choice between Vicksburg and Richmond; many observers then and critics since have regarded the decision as that simple.

General Lee, however, went to the inwardness of the crisis. On no other occasion as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia did he conceive so largely the totality of the South’s armed struggle for independence.

The apparent choice was, in his concept, no choice at all. Additional men sent to Vicksburg, where a poor command situation divided troops and authority, were by no means certain to lift the siege. But it was certain that Lee, with the reduced numbers left him, could do no more than retreat to the works around Richmond and subject his mobile army to a static defense. At best, the Confederacy would have two key cities under siege instead of one. At worst, Vicksburg would be lost anyway, while Lee’s skillful veterans would lose that maneuverability without which no hope of striking a decisive counterblow existed.

Lee’s actual choice, then, lay between striking for a decision while his army still retained the physical potential for an offensive and assuming a passive defense that doomed all Confederate forces by time and attrition. By the logic of arithmetic, to which Davis seemed blinded, the ratio of strength and losses at Chancellorsville afforded a warning illustration.

Hooker’s army of 130,000 had lost nearly 17,000 in casualties; Lee’s army of 62,500 had lost more than 13,000. At the ratio of three Confederate losses to four Federal, where the opposing strengths were one to two, four more such battles would obliterate Lee’s army while Hooker would have the number with which Lee had begun. As the opposing armies then faced each other across the Rappahannock River, Lee, after a brilliant victory, could muster something under 50,000 —a serious reduction of his army by one fifth—but Hooker’s remaining 113,000 would not have been affected by a loss of little more than ten per cent.

*********************

An element complicating this somber appraisal was the increasingly critical scarcity of food for men and animals. This was another problem to which Davis appeared blind, but Lee said: “The question of food for this army gives me more trouble and uneasiness than everything else combined.” The supply situation was grave under existing conditions, but if the Army of Northern Virginia became immobilized in works, the Shenandoah Valley harvest would be gleaned by the enemy and Lee’s men would be confronted with starvation.

A final consideration was that none of the defeatist makeshifts would meet the scattered threats by which the enemy goaded the president into further dispersals of his main armies.

It is known that General Lee pondered these factors before he went to Richmond. It is reasonably certain that, in his own mind, he had reached a simple solution to the complex problems. When he was asked, in effect, to decide between Vicksburg and Richmond, his answer was to recommend a counterinvasion of the North.

Lee’s reasons in support of his suggestion were developed in detail after the conference, in letters to Davis and the war office, but their essentials were already in his mind when he presented his drastic measure to the meeting.

The general offered two fundamental reasons of equal importance, one strategic and one of immediate practicality. It can never be sufficiently stressed that Lee’s practical reason for the invasion was to victual his army. He said that an invasion “relieves our country of his [the enemy’s] presence, and we subsist … on his resources” while “the absence of the army from Virginia gives our people an opportunity to collect supplies ahead.” From this viewpoint, the Gettysburg campaign can be called the largest commissary raid in the history of modern warfare, and the desperate necessity was symptomatic of the collapse of Confederate resources.

Lee’s strategic reason illustrated more than any other single campaign the essence and the scope of his cause-and-effects concept of war—and more than any other instance its evisceration by Davis.

Lee’s own words left no doubt about his repudiation of Davis’s policy and the presentation of his own to supplant it: “An invasion of the enemy’s country breaks up all his preconceived plans of invasion.”

Concerning the enemy’s scattered thrusts in the area of southern Virginia and coastal North Carolina, he said: “It should never be forgotten that our concentration compells that of the enemy and … tends to relieve all other threatened localities.”

In a final affirmative summary, he said: “It seems to me that we cannot afford to keep our troops awaiting possible movements of the enemy, but our true policy is … so to employ our own forces as to give occupation to his at points
of our selection.”
(Not his italics.)

It is doubtful if the worried cabinet members appreciated this epitome of Lee’s strategy: by removing the initiative from the enemy, he would force the Federals to contract their dispersed threats in order to defend themselves. However, they did recognize that the general offered the only concrete, aggressive plan to replace the defensiveness that was permitting their country to be destroyed in detail. Probably because the plan was presented by Lee, five of the six members voted for it. Only Texas’s John Reagan, postmaster general and personally the most loyal liege of Jefferson Davis, voted against it.

The president went with the majority, but only to the limited extent that he accepted Lee’s decision to invade as the alternative to sending troops from Lee’s army to the support of Vicksburg. His rigidified mind could not conceive of the projected invasion as a change in the existing policy, a shift from the defense to the offense. To Davis, Lee’s invasion was merely a necessary expedient in the policy of static, scattered defensiveness.

For more than a month after the conference Lee repeated his arguments for a concentration to force the enemy’s constriction, but his urgencies made no impression on the commander in chief. Davis had not the slightest intention of reducing a single garrison to support Lee’s offensive.

This was not revealed at the conference. Lee never expressed in words the change in over-all strategy which was implicit in his plan, but he expected Davis to perceive the necessity of giving less consideration to the scattered points in order to concentrate all possible strength in the invasion force.

Following the conference, as his plans matured, Lee’s letters did make explicit the scope of his intention as it related to the total military situation. Writing that “the enemy contemplates nothing important” in all his menacing gestures, Lee suggested that “the best use that can be made of the troops in Carolina, and those … guarding Richmond” would be to assemble them, with other idle troops in South Carolina, in a single force in middle Virginia under Beauregard, commander at Charleston. Old Bory still had a name, and Lee said that even “an effigy of an army” under Beauregard, threatening Washington while the main army moved northward, would be worth more than small detachments rushed anxiously to all points of the enemy’s selection.

Along with this, he suggested a similar concentration of the scattered forces in the middle Confederacy. These could swell the projected army under Beauregard to a size with which he could make a limited thrust through northwestern Virginia toward the Ohio; or these forces could join Bragg and build his strength sufficiently for him to undertake an offensive instead of waiting on the enemy’s initiative.

These proposals were clearly designed to turn the enemy’s strategy on him. Lee had proved before that seizure of the initiative caused the enemy to contract and, even under the extreme restrictions imposed on him, he was to prove it again. But he never really reached his commander in chief.

At the Richmond conference Lee did not suspect that he and Davis were talking about quite different things. Of all the “ifs” that have been raised about Gettysburg, the one never asked was this: would Lee have launched the invasion if he had known on May 16 that the president would restrict its scope and go so far in retaining his own policy that Lee would be denied even the full strength of the army he had built?

Lee discovered it slowly, as he became increasingly committed to the invasion. But the opening phase of the Battle of Gettysburg had been fought and lost in a house on Eleventh and Clay streets in Richmond before one soldier moved northward from the Rappahannock River.

What has been called “the high tide of the Confederacy,” and what Lee designed as a total stroke from a concentration of its armed strength, was reduced to a desperate, unsupported gamble of one man with one army—and not all of that.

“We Must All Do More Than Formerly”