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  BOOKS BY DOUGLAS SOUTHALL FREEMAN

  LEE’S LIEUTENANTS

  THE SOUTH TO POSTERITY

  R.E. LEE

  LEE’S DISPATCHES

  LEE’S

  LIEUTENANTS

  A Study in Command

  DOUGLAS SOUTHALL FREEMAN

  ABRIDGED IN ONE VOLUME BY

  STEPHEN W. SEARS

  INTRODUCTION BY

  JAMES M. MCPHERSON

  A TOUCHSTONE BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY SIMON & SCHUSTER

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  TOUCHSTONE

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  Copyright © 1998 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Introduction copyright © 1998 by James M. McPherson

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  First Touchstone Edition 2001

  TOUCHSTONE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

  Set in Adobe Caslon

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  5 7 9 10 8 6

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Scribner edition as follows:

  Freeman, Douglas Southall, 1886-1953.

  Lee’s lieutenants: a study in command / Douglas Southall Freeman; abridged in one volume by Stephen W. Sears; introduction by James M. McPherson.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Campaigns. 2. Confederate States of America. Army—Biography. 3. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Biography. 4. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Regimental histories. 5. Confederate States of America. Army of Northern Virginia. I. Sears, Stephen W. II. Title.

  E470.2.F7 1998

  973.7′3—dc21 98-15416

  CIP

  ISBN 0-684-83309-3

  eISBN: 978-1-451-60325-5

  0-684-85979-3 (Pbk)

  This is an abridged edition of the following works:

  Lee’s Lieutenants Volume One copyright 1942 by Charles Scribner’s Sons; copyright renewed © 1970 by Inez Goddin Freeman.

  Lee’s Lieutenants Volume Two copyright 1943 by Charles Scribner’s Sons; copyright renewed © 1971 by Inez Goddin Freeman.

  Lee’s Lieutenants Volume Three copyright 1944 by Charles Scribner’s Sons; copyright renewed © 1973 by Inez Goddin Freeman.

  Picture Credits

  Cook Collection, Valentine Museum: A. P. Hill, Jackson, Fitzhugh Lee, Longstreet, Mahone, Stuart

  Library of Congress: Ewell, Gordon, Hampton, Pickett

  Meserve Collection: Anderson, Early, D. H. Hill, Hood, Rodes, Pender

  To

  JOHN STEWART BRYAN

  who has kept the faith

  Contents

  Maps

  Introduction: James M. McPherson

  Foreword: Douglas Southall Freeman

  Editorial Note: Stephen W. Sears

  Dramatis Person

  1. Opening Guns

  2. Beauregard’s Battlefield

  3. Beauregard’s Star Wanes

  4. Johnston Passes a Dark Winter

  5. Challenge on the Peninsula

  6. Seven Pines

  7. To Defend Richmond

  8. Guarding the Valley

  9. Jackson Launches His Offensive

  10. Victory in the Valley

  11. Struggle for Richmond

  12. Richmond Relieved

  13. Lessons of the Seven Days

  14. Facing a New Threat

  15. Return to Manassas

  16. Across the Potomac

  17. Desperate Hours on the Antietam

  18. Rebuilding an Army

  19. Battle at Fredericksburg

  20. In Winter Quarters

  21. Facing a New Campaign

  22. Jackson Gets His Greatest Orders

  23. Victory and Tragedy at Chancellorsville

  24. Renewal and Reorganization

  25. Across the Potomac Again

  26. Two Days of Battle

  27. Gettysburg and Its Cost

  28. Challenges for Longstreet, Hill, and Stuart

  29. Tests and Trials of Winter

  30. The Wilderness and Spotsylvania

  31. Richmond Threatened

  32. New Fronts, New Battles

  33. The Darkening Autumn of Command

  34. In a Ring of Iron

  35. The Last March

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Maps

  Strategic areas of northern Virginia

  Operations in western Virginia, July 1861

  First Battle of Manassas

  Williamsburg, May 4-5, 1862

  Seven Pines

  Stuart’s “Ride Around McClellan”

  The central Shenandoah Valley

  Front Royal, May 23, 1862

  Battle of Winchester, May 25, 1862

  The Massanuttons, Shenandoah Valley

  Battle of Port Republic, June 9, 1862

  Jackson’s advance to the Richmond front

  Jackson, Ewell, and Branch, June 26, 1862

  Gaines’ Mill battlefield

  Environs of Savage Station

  White Oak Swamp, June 29-30, 1862

  Malvern Hill, July 1, 1862

  Cedar Mountain, August 9, 1862

  Jackson’s march against Pope

  Confederate positions, Second Manassas

  Jackson’s march to Chantilly

  Operations in Maryland, September 1862

  South Mountain, September 14, 1862

  Battlefield of Sharpsburg

  Stuart’s “October Raid,” 1862

  Battlefield of Fredericksburg

  Stuart’s winter raids

  The Fredericksburg-Chancellorsville front

  Chancellorsville battleground

  Jackson’s flank attack, May 2, 1863

  Chancellorsville defenses, May 3, 1863

  Early’s deployment, Fredericksburg

  Salem Church, May 4, 1863

  Battlefield of Brandy Station

  Routes north into Pennsylvania

  Stuart’s raid, Salem to Gettysburg

  Rodes’s attack, Gettysburg, July 1, 1863

  Gettysburg and vicinity

  Attack of Confederate right, July 2, 1863

  Attack of Confederate left, July 2, 1863

  Pickett’s Charge, July 3, 1863

  Advance to Bristoe Station, October 1863

  The Wilderness and Spotsylvania

  The Bloody Angle, May 10—12, 1864

  Sheridan’s raid and Stuart’s pursuit

  Drewry’s Bluff and Petersburg, May 1864

  Trevilian Station, June 11, 1864

  The lower Shenandoah Valley

  Third Winchester, September 19,1864

  Battle of Cedar Creek, October 19, 1864

  Five Forks battlefield, April 1, 1865

  The projected march to Danville

  Sayler’s Creek battlefield, April 6, 1865

  Appomattox Court House

  Introduction

  JAMES M. MCPHERSON

  In his four-volume R. E. Lee (1934-35) and three-volume Lee’s Lieutenants (1942-44), Douglas Southall Freeman wrote two million words about the Army of Northern Virginia and its commanders. These volumes were bestsellers in their time and achieved enormous influence on the writing of Civil War military history. R. E. Lee won a Pulitzer Prize. Lee’s Lieutenant’s was required reading for many years in British as well as American military schools. In rec
ognition of these achievements, Freeman received twenty-five honorary degrees—not only from Southern institutions but also from leading Northern universities including Princeton, Yale, and Harvard.

  Not all the influence of these volumes was salutary. So great was Freeman’s impact on the field that many readers gained the impression that almost the whole Civil War was fought in the Eastern theater between the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac. Freeman’s masterful volumes strengthened the dominance of the “Virginia school” in Confederate historiography. They also set a standard for Civil War military history that focused on command and strategy rather than on the experience of men in the ranks.

  Both the Virginia bias and top-down military history have undergone considerable revision in recent decades. The Western theaters of the Civil War have received their due, and most recent studies of Civil War campaigns and battles combine the view from headquarters with the view from the ranks. Nevertheless, Freeman’s studies of Lee and his lieutenants retain their extraordinary value. Nothing written since equals them for insights into the problems and techniques of Civil War command, strategy, and evaluation of intelligence. These volumes remain today the best top-down accounts of the Army of Northern Virginia and the best guide to primary sources for a student wishing to pursue further any of hundreds of subjects or individuals treated by Freeman.

  Most readers of Civil War history, however, have neither time nor inclination to wade through a million words on Lee or another million on his subordinates. In 1961, therefore, Richard Harwell published a one-volume abridgment of R. E. Lee, in time to meet the increased demand for Civil War books during the centennial observations of the war. But until now Lee’s Lieutenants has remained a daunting prospect for many readers. Stephen W. Sears, one of the foremost military historians of the Civil War, has performed a service of inestimable value (not to mention skillful, painstaking labor) in producing this abridgment of a classic in Civil War literature. In compressing the material into one-third of its original length, Sears has sacrificed none of the crucial narrative and interpretation of events as they pertained to command decisions and execution, and little of importance pertaining to the personalities of Lee’s lieutenants. He has achieved this goal by eliminating Freeman’s numerous appendices and most of the footnotes and by paring away all but essential details and quotations. What is left is more than a skeleton; it is a lean, muscular narrative.

  Freeman would surely have approved. He was lean and muscular in his youth, a star track athlete in high school and college. Born in 1886 at Lynchburg, Virginia, Douglas was the youngest of four sons of Walker Burford Freeman, a veteran of four years’ Civil War service in the 4th Virginia Battery of field artillery. General Jubal A. Early lived just down the street from the Freemans in Lynchburg. Douglas’s older brothers amused themselves by telling the five-year-old Douglas that General Early ate little boys for breakfast. “Later in life,” wrote Douglas’s daughter wryly in 1985, “Father won medals in running because he had learned to sprint past the General’s house when he was still very small. Respect for a Confederate officer was one of his strong concepts.” Whatever the truth of this anecdote, Freeman did describe Early in Lee’s Lieutenants as “caustic … snarling and stooped, respected as a soldier but never widely popular as a man.”

  It was not Early, however, but Freeman’s own father who first inspired his passion for Confederate history. Like most veterans who had served under Lee, Walker Freeman revered the memory of Marse Robert. He inculcated the same feelings in Douglas with countless old-soldier stories of his wartime experiences. The Freemans moved to Richmond in 1892, where the very atmosphere was filled with Confederate ghosts. Young Freeman attended a private school whose headmaster, also a Confederate veteran, gave the boys a weekly talk on moral conduct illustrated by anecdotes from the lives of Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and other Southern heroes. At the age of seventeen, Douglas attended with is father a reenactment by 2,500 Confederate veterans of the Battle of the Crater at Petersburg. Young Freeman there resolved, as he later recalled, “to preserve from immolating time some of the heroic figures of the Confederacy…. The memory of the tattered old ranks, the worn old heroes who charged up Crater Hill will ever be fresh in my memory.” Throughout his life (he died in 1955), Freeman never doubted that Confederate leaders and soldiers were “men of principles unimpeachable, of valour indescribable.”

  After graduating from Richmond College (now Richmond University) in 1904, Freeman entered the graduate program at the Johns Hopkins University. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1908 at the age of twenty-two. Freeman wrote his doctoral dissertation on Virginia’s secession convention. We will never know how he interpreted this fateful moment in his beloved state’s history, for the sole copy of the dissertation burned in a fire that destroyed the downtown campus of Hopkins in 1908. But Freeman had already published his first book, A Calendar of Confederate Papers, a survey and classification of the resources of the Virginia State Library and the Confederate Museum for the study of Confederate history. Despite this accomplishment, Freeman did not pursue a traditional academic career. In 1909 he joined the staff of the Richmond Times-Dispatch; within six years he became editor at the age of twenty-nine of the afternoon Richmond News Leader, a position he held for the next thirty-four years.

  In 1911, Freeman had one of those serendipitous experiences that most historians can only dream of. Out of the blue he received a telephone call from an acquaintance in Savannah, who invited Freeman to lunch. It proved to be a power lunch long before that term was invented. The acquaintance turned over to Freeman two leather-bound volumes containing Robert E. Lee’s confidential wartime messages to Jefferson Davis. Long thought to be lost, these dispatches filled a large gap in Confederate military history. Freeman edited and published them in 1915, accomplishing the task with such skill and writing such a brilliant introduction that he became overnight one of the most prominent historians of the Confederacy.

  Lee’s Confidential Dispatches caught the eye of the chief editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, who commissioned Freeman to write a 75,000-word biography of Lee. Freeman expected to complete the book in two years. Eight times two years went by, the editor died, and still no manuscript was forthcoming. The cause was not Freeman’s failure to work on the book. Quite the contrary; he worked too hard, digging into every available source, mining archives and libraries for sources no previous biographer had used, spending at least fourteen and sometimes as many as twenty-five hours a week on the project and accumulating thousands of color-coded note-cards, carefully organized notebooks, and detailed chapter outlines. Freeman did all this in addition to putting in at least a fifty-hour week at the newspaper where he set editorial policy, wrote editorials, edited copy, and prepared twice-daily (at 8:00 A.M. and 12 noon) radio broadcasts that he delivered from 1925 onward. Freeman awoke each day at 2:30 A.M., worked at the News Leader office until the paper went to press, then returned home or to a library to work on the Lee biography.

  Freeman flourished on this schedule that would have burned out a lesser man, while maintaining an active social life, enjoying a happy marriage, and raising three children. He also served on several boards and delivered dozens of lectures every year. In the fall of 1934, volumes 1 and 2 of R. E. Lee were published, followed in the spring of 1935 by volumes 3 and 4. The biography won superlative reviews as well as the Pulitzer Prize. But Freeman did not rest on his laurels. He immediate began work on a biography of another Virginia general, George Washington.

  But Freeman’s wife detected a certain restlessness, even depression in his manner. He could not let his preoccupation with the Army of Northern Virginia go. He had gathered much more material on Lee’s principal subordinate than he had been able to put into the biography. In 1936, Freeman set aside the Washington project (he would eventually complete a seven-volume biography, which won a second Pulitzer Prize) and turned to Lee’s Lieutenants. During the next six years Freeman, now in his fifties, cheerfully mainta
ined the same punishing schedule as formerly. In 1937, for example, in addition to the newspaper, his radio broadcast, and fifteen or twenty hours of work each week on Lee’s Lieutenants, he gave eighty-three public speeches and delivered ninety lectures as a visiting professor of journalism at Columbia University. He held this professorship for seven years, commuting twice a week between Richmond and New York.

  When Lee’s Lieutenants appeared one volume at a time during another war from 1942 to 1944, they won an even wider readership than R. E. Lee. Freeman was also prouder of these volumes than of his other books because, as he explains in the Foreword, the problem of writing multiple military mini-biographies while keeping the narrative driving forward presented a difficult challenge, which he solved by bringing his actors into and out of the story where relevant without interrupting the flow of events. The result is a tour de force akin to a juggler keeping a half dozen balls in the air without missing a beat of the tune to which he is dancing. By the end of the story, at Appomattox, the reader has learned much about the personalities and qualifications for command, the strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures of the 47 men who served under Lee with the rank of lieutenant general or major general and the 146 who served as brigadier general.

  Freeman pulls few punches in his evaluations of these men. Just as Lee himself did not hesitate to get rid of subordinates (usually by exiling them to a Western command) who did not measure up to the stern demands of his offensive-defensive strategy and tactics, so Freeman does not hesitate to detail the weaknesses and mistakes of many of these 193 generals. At the same time, however, Freeman remained true to his vow nearly four decades earlier to preserve the memory of “the heroic figures of the Confederacy … men of principles unimpeachable, of valour indescribable.”

  The subordinate who most closely fit this description was Stonewall Jackson. This doughty warrior dominates volumes 1 and 2, which end with Jackson’s death and the resultant reorganization of the army’s command structure after Chancellorsville. James Longstreet dominates volume 3 until, in an ironic parallel with Jackson’s fate, Longstreet is mistakenly shot by his own men a year and four days later and four miles distant from where the same tragedy had befallen Jackson. Longstreet survived, but was out of the war for five months while he recuperated. In R. E. Lee, Freeman had been sharply critical of Longstreet for sluggishness and occasional mulish insubordination, especially at Gettysburg. Freeman revised some of these negative judgments of Longstreet in Lee’s Lieutenants, though echoes of them remain.