Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation (6 page)

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other man who was not at Gettysburg contributed even more to the nature of the campaign than the Confederate president. This was Lieutenant General Thomas J. Jackson. As his death hung like a pall over the South, so his absence hung like a shadow over the army that he had done more than any other person except Lee to build into its mobility and striking power. These qualities, along with the men’s ability to endure long on short rations, were the fundamental characteristics of Lee’s army at its peak. It is probable that the Army of Northern Virginia would not have been formed in that precise character without Stonewall Jackson.

Between Lee, the Tidewater aristocrat, and Jackson, of mountaineer yeoman people, there existed a personal affection and a curious affinity in the making of war. Like collaborators, they were perfectly met. Their concepts of warfare were identical, and each was wholly committed to the conviction that independence would be won only by taking the war to the enemy. To be withheld passively on the defense, allowing the enemy the initiative, was maddening to Jackson, and in audacity Lee could suggest nothing too bold for Old Jack to attempt. Because of their intuitive argeement on war policy and battle strategy, in tactics Jackson operated like an army of Lee’s brain.

Of him Lee said: “I had such implicit confidence in Jackson’s skill and energy that I never troubled myself to give him detailed instructions. The most general suggestions were all that he needed.” Lee could have added that the most general suggestions were all that he wanted. In Jackson’s two greatest offensive achievements, Second Manassas and Chancellorsville, he acted in semi-independent command, where he was out of contact with general headquarters and completely responsible for his own part of the battle.

These characteristics of the man who was not at Gettysburg exerted a profound effect on General Lee through habits Lee had formed during his operations with Stonewall Jackson.

From the moment Lee learned of his loss, he recognized that the army could not function in the organization that had evolved out of the collaboration. When Lee had inherited a year earlier the hodgepodge of forces which he built into the Army of Northern Virginia, he had followed no regular charts of organization. Adapting to his material, he had formed two very large corps of four divisions each. To slow-moving and tenacious Longstreet was allotted the orthodox work, largely under Lee’s eye, while Jackson’s Second Corps took the risks and did the marching. “Jackson’s Foot Cavalry,” the men called themselves. Without Old Jack, this arrangement was no longer possible.

Saying that “I know not how to replace him,” Lee did not try. He reorganized the army into three corps, hoping that two men would prove adequate where Jackson had excelled. He said: “We must all do more than formerly.”

Mechanically his reorganization to compensate for Jackson’s loss was sound in design. However, it was untried in battle, and, because of Davis’s exercise of his prerogatives as supreme commander, details in the new army were not as Lee designed them.

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Lee’s purpose in reshaping the army was to maintain what he called a “proper concert of action” between his proved units. As his infantry contained roughly 60,000 troops, he formed three corps of approximately 20,000 each. Longstreet retained the First Corps, minus the division of Richard H. Anderson. Richard S. Ewell, formerly Jackson’s dependable division commander and recently returned to the army after having a leg amputated, was promoted to lieutenant general and given the old Second Corps, minus the six-brigade division of A. P. Hill. Powell Hill, the most highly regarded division commander in the army, was promoted to lieutenant general and given command of a newly created Third Corps. This was to be composed of Anderson’s division, a division of four brigades from Hill’s famous “Light Division,” and a new division to be formed of two brigades from Hill’s old division plus two other brigades. To fill the complement of Hill’s new division, Lee expected the return of his two veteran brigades, under proved leaders, then detached in North Carolina.

In this new organization, which was to be tested in an invasion, Lee counted on an all-veteran personnel accustomed to his habits of command and adapted to the peculiar demands of the Army of Northern Virginia. Rightly though not officially called “Lee’s army,” this most personal of all armies was a reflection of Lee’s character, particularly in its relation to the Southern character.

The region from which the soldiers came was a limited, restricted world that demanded conformity to its concept of gallantry. Although real enough, the life resembled a drama in its preconceived pattern, its conscious design, and its ritualized forms for the actors. And, just as the stage imposes physical limitations, this environment imposed limitations on the range of thought, of decisions, and of action.

As a part of its self-concept as a region of the aristocratic republic, the South naturally produced a concept of its individual model, a prototype of its perfected citizen. This ideal embodied not only the best traits that the society had produced according to its nature, but a distillation of the best that it aspired to, that it fancied itself as possessing, and that it attributed to itself from its past legends.

At bottom, there was an inviolability of personal dignity. As in religions, many subscribers to the Southern ideal were more perfect in the forms than in the substance. It was a sorry kind of man who, however far short he fell of the model, would not stand on his personal rights and frequently assert them violently.

Because of this element, discipline in the army was a fantastic problem, especially complicated where officers, in exercising their duties as soldiers, must conform to the mores of the society. Frequently privates were socially superior to their officers, and the consequences in a caste society were awkward. Privates who were social equals of their military superiors thought nothing of challenging them to duels, and the Confederacy was probably the only country in the world where generals would meet enlisted men at grand affairs-and call them “Mister” too. Only the officers of the rank of colonel or below had been elected, but the men had the feeling that they had chosen all their officers.

Where the relationship of officers to their men was that of members of a club who had been elected to office, and no effective machinery of an established nation controlled the individuals, the good officers commanded by moral force and the confidence they inspired through demonstrated capacities for leadership. The reason the Army of Northern Virginia became the best fighting force in the South was that its leader personified the ideal individual concept of the Southern people. As in the concept of the region’s exemplar there was inherent the image of the Hero, Lee embodied the image of the patriarchal planter who, as military leader, assumed benevolent responsibility for his domain.

He really ruled rather than led, and his often-mentioned gentleness was that of a strong father who raises his children by kindness instead of sternness. The men’s affectionate reverence for him was shown by their referring to him as “Uncle Robert” or “Marse Robert.” The “Marse” today smacks of the treacly myths of the plantation era, but in their time it was only a slurring of Mister or Master as a prefix of respect for one sufficiently intimate to be addressed by his first name. “Mister” and “Uncle,” as well as “Miss,” have customarily been used before first names in the South for older intimates of one’s family or respected elders in the community.

Lee’s understanding of the nature of his force and of his relationship to it produced the nature of the command situation in the Army of Northern Virginia. As with the head of a large family, the general as patriarch encouraged the diffident, restrained the overconfident, settled quarrels, averted duels, soothed injured feelings, separated antagonistic personalities by placing them in different corps. When officers failed to adjust to the character of his army, he tried to transfer them to areas where their usefulness would not be lost to the country. When officers simply failed, he did not care where they went; he got them out of his army. Some officers were forced on him by Davis’s political considerations, and sometimes a man was promoted on grounds of his patriotism and his troops’ devotion to him. But Lee, when given a choice, judged on performance as coldly as Lincoln and Napoleon.

The problem after the Chancellorsville losses was that he no longer possessed a choice. In the new organization, Lee’s general-officer personnel would contain two newly promoted lieutenant generals, neither of whom had commanded a corps even temporarily. New major generals commanded four of his twelve divisions. Twelve of his thirty-seven brigades were commanded by men new to their posts, several of such doubtful quality that they were placed in temporary command and not promoted above the rank of colonel. None of the general officers had commanded more than a company before the war. One new major general, a V.M.I, graduate, had had no army experience prior to the war, and many of the brigadiers had come directly from civilian life.

When Lee said: “We must all do more than formerly,” he expected the men promoted to new responsibilities to demonstrate initiative within the framework of team unity. Lee’s type of command presupposed proved units with experienced leaders who were accustomed to working together and were acquainted with one another’s methods and potentials. But even while Lee was changing the structure of his successful command across the river from Hooker’s masses, he received the first intimations of the interference with his own army which was to result from Davis’s fixity of purpose in maintaining his defensive system.

With every garrison force in the eastern Confederacy from Charleston to Richmond held unchanged where it was, veteran units on which Lee had counted in his reorganization plans were kept away from his army on detached duty, guarding railroads and supply depots. Instead of the two highly regarded brigades that Lee had designated for the new division in A. P. Hill’s new corps, Davis arbitrarily sent him two brigades unknown to the Army of Northern Virginia. One of these, itself newly formed, contained green troops and was led by a general innocent of combat service—the president’s own nephew. This consequence of Davis’s compulsion to manipulate troop dispositions was a fateful factor in the Battle of Gettysburg.

Lee was profoundly disturbed by the lack of support for his bold stroke which was evidenced by this immobilizing of two brigades trained in maneuver and as familiar with him as was he with them. In writing Lee of the continuing threats of the enemy which he must guard against, the president revealed how completely he had missed Lee’s point of a concentration to force a contraction of the enemy’s forces. In substituting second-line strangers for an equal number of known veterans, he revealed his total misunderstanding of Lee’s needs in rebuilding an army for an invasion. More depressing proof was to follow.

One of the two divisions of Longstreet’s corps which had been detached at Chancellorsville, Pickett’s, was the largest in the army, numbering nearly 8,000. The division most rested and the least fought in the past six months, it was one of the two in the army whose all-veteran command, from colonels to major general, had been unchanged in the reshuffling. To Lee’s dismay, its largest brigade was detained on guard duty in North Carolina and the other four brigades were assigned to guard Hanover Junction, twenty-odd miles north of Richmond. Even the usually equable Pickett wrote exacerbated letters about the waste of sending four of his crack brigades off on fruitless marches in response to the alarums that goaded Davis into sending orders unrelated to any military plan at all.

By the time Lee finally received the promise of the release of three of Pickett’s brigades from Hanover Junction, Davis’s course had shaken the general’s resolution about the invasion. Still hoping for the fourth brigade, on May 30 he wrote: “I fear the time has passed when I could have taken the offensive with advantage.”

In deep pessimism, he warned Davis that if the enemy moved against him, “there may be nothing left for me to do but fall back.”

Then, apparently trying an oblique approach through the secretary of war, he wrote Seddon that he had “greatly relied” on the brigades withheld from him, and, as it was, “if the Department thinks it is better to remain on the defensive, guard as far as possible all avenues of approach, and await the time of the enemy, I am ready to adopt that course.”

Seddon responded to this feeler by a warm assurance of his support for Lee’s invasion. Three of Pickett’s brigades would be sent on, and he promised to try to release the fourth from its desuetude. Although no war secretary could speak for the commander in chief, Lee appeared to be heartened by Seddon’s moral support and the expectation of four of Pickett’s brigades.

As it happened, Davis overruled Seddon. Only three of Pickett’s five brigades joined Lee. The division, formerly the largest, became the smallest in the army. Lee did not learn until he had crossed the Potomac that four of his best brigades, the equivalent of a division, were to be uselessly employed away from the army. But, even while still expecting troops that never came, the burdened general was unsettled by the limitations imposed on his planned offensive. It was not at all the way he wanted to make an invasion, and he showed an unusual indecisiveness.

Yet there was nothing else to do. Hooker, with all his huffing and puffing, would not commit his army to attacking, and, as Lee wrote to Richmond, there was no military profit in attacking the Federals on the Rappahannock River line. Also, his troops were daily growing hungrier and his animals leaner.

Writing more importunities to Davis, Lee, with a divided mind and a sense of desperation, gave the marching orders to his new and incomplete army on June 2.