Rise to Greatness (30 page)

June 1 proved to be a portent, however, of harder times ahead. That morning, the Confederate army, newly christened the Army of Northern Virginia, awoke to find itself under the command of a quiet Virginian named Robert E. Lee. In the waning hours of the previous day, Johnston had been badly wounded during the attack on McClellan’s right wing. With his top general incapacitated, Jefferson Davis handed the reins to Lee.

In time, Lee’s command of the Confederate army would come to seem as inevitable and necessary as the sunrise. He was among the South’s most experienced soldiers, and no man better represented the South’s ideal image of itself. Lee was the scion of one of America’s most distinguished founding families; his father was a Revolutionary War hero, his mother a descendant of a planter so wealthy and powerful in colonial Virginia that he was dubbed Robert “King” Carter. His wife was the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, and even though he grew up in straitened circumstances after his father squandered a fortune, Lee was as much a part of the plantation aristocracy as anyone could be. He represented virtues esteemed by a culture based on hereditary privilege: good manners, a sense of duty and honor, commitment to land and family. (He also represented a bit of the quirkiness idealized by aristocrats—he kept a pet hen at his army headquarters.)

A majority of Confederate soldiers had never owned a slave, and men in the ranks often grumbled that theirs was “a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight.” Lee was an answer to that complaint, because he embodied a version of the rebellion that wasn’t about money or slaves. His war was the expression of a proud refusal to have other people—whose forebears had not necessarily settled the continent or fought the British or signed the Declaration of Independence, as his had done—come into Virginia and tell her people what their future would hold. He had a name for his enemies, which spoke volumes about his attitude: “those people.” Though he had saluted their flag for most of his life, “those people” were now alien to him. They were trying to dictate to his own people on matters of morals and culture. But the South would not be dictated to.

There is a famous story, perhaps true, about a Union soldier and his Rebel prisoner on some battlefield of the long war. “What are you fighting for, anyhow?” asked the man in blue. “I’m fighting because you are down here,” the prisoner replied. In the dark gaze of Robert E. Lee, generations of Americans would read that same defiance, that quiet insistence on being left alone, and they would understand a bit better why so many fought so well for so long in a losing and tainted cause.

But for now Lee’s reputation was mixed, at best. Originally he had hoped to remain neutral in the conflict between North and South; when Virginia left the Union, however, Lee was forced to choose between the stars offered to him by both armies. In his first command, he failed to keep McClellan out of Virginia’s strategically important western mountains. Newspapers howled when he pulled his troops back, dubbing him “Evacuating Lee.” After Davis transferred him to South Carolina to bolster the coastal defense, the West Point engineer focused on building trenches and fortifications, earning himself a second derisive nickname: King of Spades. When Davis called Lee to Richmond in early 1862 to serve as his senior military adviser, some junior officers began calling him Granny Lee behind his back, on account of his fussy attention to protocol. No wonder a woman in North Carolina, hearing news of Lee’s latest promotion, wrote: “I do not much like him. He ‘falls back’ too much.” The
Richmond Examiner
took the same line, predicting that the Southern army “would never be allowed to fight” with Lee in command.

McClellan made the same mistake. Having bested Lee a year earlier, he welcomed the new arrival across the lines. Assessing his foe in terms that more aptly described himself, McClellan assured Lincoln that Lee was “too cautious & weak under grave responsibility.” While he was “personally brave & energetic to a fault,” McClellan added, “he is yet wanting in moral firmness when pressed by heavy responsibility & is likely to be timid & irresolute.”

It was a season of misjudgments. On matters large and small, Northern leaders suffered a sudden epidemic of foggy thinking. Out west, Henry Halleck completely misread the opportunity that lay before him now that he had possession of the swampy, malarial crossroads of Corinth. Flushed from their fortifications, the southbound Rebels made an enticing target to warriors like Grant, but Halleck, instead of pursuing and fighting the Confederates with his superior numbers, let them go. He was the product of a peacetime army designed for short wars and frontier garrison duty; thus trained, the scholarly Halleck remembered his West Point lessons too well. “Ever since there had been a United States Army, it had been operated on a constabulary basis, with many isolated posts and forts,” wrote the historian Bruce Catton, explaining Halleck’s error. “When campaign time arrived, the Army would be assembled from these posts and made into a mobile force; when the campaign ended, it would be redistributed all over the country.… This was the system that [Halleck] followed now.”

Never mind that Halleck had the enemy off balance; after taking stock of the Yankee-hating citizenry surrounding his army at Corinth, he concluded that he must disperse his troops to pacify the land. “The repair of the railroad is now the great object to be attended to,” he advised Washington. Dividing his large army, Halleck restored Grant to field command, but sent him neither toward Tupelo (where the Rebels were reorganizing themselves under a new commander, Braxton Bragg), nor toward Vicksburg (where the Rebels were collecting every available gun to fortify their last stronghold on the Mississippi). Instead, Halleck ordered Grant to the newly captured city of Memphis, where the warrior began to tackle such pressing matters as whether secessionist preachers should be compelled to pray for the Union.

On a larger scale, the fog shrouded the very nature of the war and the Union’s path to victory. A great cloud of confidence had billowed up in the period between Grant’s victory at Fort Donelson and McClellan’s arrival outside Richmond, which now obscured the intensity of the Rebel resistance. While the South instituted a draft to replenish its armies, Stanton had overconfidently shuttered the recruiting offices of the North. Each new Federal victory was heralded as a sign of imminent peace, when in fact the Rebel spine stiffened as Confederate territory shrank.

The setbacks of summer transformed overstated hopes into equally overstated despair. Lincoln would endure many hot and sleepless nights of worry over news that would later prove not quite so bad as it first appeared. When the excess bravado dried up, he was left almost alone to bind himself and the Union to the terrible truth: victory could come only through the slow and wasting destruction of the enemy’s capacity to fight. Lincoln would later marvel at how many times he was called upon that summer to shore up the faltering courage of other men—including men who spent their lives in uniform. Melancholy and often fatalistic, he was history’s unlikely choice to wield the weapons of steely optimism and dogged determination.

*   *   *

The price of foggy thinking was high. Lincoln’s overconfident belief that he could maneuver three armies to trap Stonewall Jackson cost him dearly. He spent most of June cleaning up the mess, because the force he had collected under McDowell was scattered once more and would not be easily reassembled. One exchange of telegrams gives a glimpse of the confusion. On June 3, Lincoln asked McDowell plaintively: “Please tell about where Shields [is].” The general answered: “At Luray, on the road to New Market with an indifferent road which the constant rains are making bad and with the Shenandoah impassable and rising.”

Frémont, meanwhile, after being so difficult to get started, proved every bit as difficult to stop. (The Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce once said of Frémont that he “possessed all the qualities of genius except ability.”) Blindly pursuing Jackson, and insisting on reinforcements every step of the way, the rogue general stumbled into the Rebels on June 8 and 9 at Cross Keys and Port Republic, in the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley. After a bit of fighting, Jackson disappeared again, while Frémont resumed his fruitless chase.

By now Lincoln had come to see that hounding Jackson was exactly what the Rebels wanted him to do, and he ended the effort in a scorching exchange of telegrams with Frémont a week later. There would be no reinforcements, the president insisted, because the whole point of Jackson’s campaign was to siphon Union troops away from the real confrontation: McClellan against Lee. “Jackson’s game,” as Lincoln put it, “is to magnify the accounts of his numbers and reports of his movements, and thus by constant alarms keep three or four times as many of our troops away from Richmond.”

If these words had a familiar ring, it was because McClellan had seen through the game weeks earlier. The fact that Lincoln was slow to embrace the truth about Jackson’s strategy further damaged his already threadbare relationship with McClellan. Although Lincoln tried to make amends to the general for diverting McDowell’s force—he gave McClellan command of the Fort Monroe garrison and sent him a Pennsylvania division under the elderly professional soldier George McCall—it wasn’t enough, for McClellan had lost all respect for the administration. “How glad I will be to get rid of the whole lot,” he told his wife. At this point, he believed either that Lincoln and Stanton were incapable of managing the war or that they were secretly plotting his defeat to destroy him as a potential political rival. Inside the White House, meanwhile, Nicolay spoke for others when he complained that McClellan’s “extreme caution, or tardiness, or something, [was] utterly exhaustive of all hope and patience.”

The president and his top general barely masked their harsh opinions of each other. One back-and-forth paints the picture. On June 3, while catching up on paperwork, Lincoln sent a bit of unsought advice to McClellan: “With these continuous rains, I am very anxious about the Chickahominy so close in your rear, and crossing your line of communication. Please look well to it.” Though brief and outwardly friendly, this little missive could hardly have been more insulting. After all, McClellan had regularly been updating the War Department (and thus Lincoln) about his efforts to bridge the river, and he had just finished fighting a sharp battle brought on by the fact that his army was straddling the swollen stream. He didn’t need anyone to tell him to pay attention to the river. The general volleyed back: “As the Chickahominy has been almost the only obstacle in my way for several days[,] your Excellency”—never had that title, which Lincoln abhorred, dripped more venom—“may rest assured that it has not been overlooked.”

But that was mild compared with the tone of the public debate swirling around Lincoln and McClellan. That very night, in the crowded lobby of Willard’s, a drunken Senator Zachariah Chandler—one of a trio of hard-war Republicans dubbed “the Jacobins” by John Hay—was loudly denouncing McClellan as a “liar and coward” when a broad-chested soldier with dark, curly hair pushed through the throng. The stars on his shoulders signaled a man to be reckoned with. He was Samuel D. Sturgis, the soon-to-be commander of the Washington defenses and a West Point classmate of George McClellan. “Sir, I don’t know who you are, nor care,” Sturgis scolded the swaying senator, “but hearing you talk in this abusive way, against an absent man, I make free to tell you that it is you who are the liar and the coward!”

Men could shout and glower all they wanted; Lincoln had no option but to stay the course with McClellan. Little Mac still enjoyed the trust and support of his fellow Democrats. He was loved by the troops he had trained. Most of all, he was tantalizingly close to the spires of Richmond.

Lincoln understood that he could not change his horse midway across the Chickamoniny. So, as he argued with Frémont via coded wires, the president wrestled with the question of how to restart the southward march he had interrupted, and then push McClellan across the finish line before the Rebels could reinforce Lee. He encouraged Banks in the Shenandoah Valley to watch out for Confederates moving by railroad from the direction of Corinth. He took stock of Shields’s troops, concluding sadly that their fruitless marches on the trail of Jackson had put the division “terribly out of shape, out at the elbows and out at the toes … it will require a long time to get it in again.” And, having recognized the folly of placing three ambitious generals at the heads of three independent armies in a single region, Lincoln concluded that he must reorganize the whole Virginia theater.

He would have to do it quickly, because he was running out of time in the court of public opinion. When McClellan’s army in all its glory set sail from Washington, and Farragut muscled his warships up the Mississippi to New Orleans, people all over the North told themselves the end was in sight. “I think of that magnificent ‘Army of the Potomac’ of 4 months ago and almost weep to think how its powers have been paralyzed,” wrote one influential soldier.

Now it was June, yet there was no sign of peace and the Union’s momentum was spent. “The current reports from the Peninsula tell of much camping and of comparatively little forward marching,” Lincoln’s secretary William Stoddard recounted. With patience worn and the blood and red ink rising, the public expressed itself in a blast of criticism. “Never did such wild letters of reproach come pouring through the mails. They come by the hundred,” Stoddard wrote. “Your cheeks burn as your eyes glance over the letters.” No decision of Lincoln’s escaped the lash of the critics. “Halleck is a pedantic fool; Grant is a blundering drunkard; Burnside is a sluggard … Buell is a traitor,” the secretary summarized. To judge from the president’s mail, every general he chose was “a pernicious mistake, and every campaign is a failure.”

And that was before news reached the North that a party of some 1,200 Rebel cavalry, led by a flamboyant young general named J. E. B. Stuart, had ridden virtually untouched all the way around McClellan’s army. On June 12, Lee sent the bold officer to make a reconnaissance of the Union’s right wing, which Stuart did, noting that it was flapping just as loose as it had been three weeks before. But instead of taking this news straight back to headquarters, Stuart kept going, cutting telegraph wires and collecting prisoners and horses as he galloped across the Federal supply lines. Stuart’s father-in-law, the Union cavalry commander Philip Cooke, gave chase with his own horsemen, but when the Rebels arrived back in camp on June 15, they had lost only a single rider—and had scored one of the most compelling psychological victories of the war.