Lee's Lieutenants Read online

  The tone of volume 3 (and of the last one-third of this abridgment) changes from the tone of volumes 1 and 2. There the mood is one of optimism and anticipation of final victory as Lee’s predecessors win the first Battle of Manassas and Lee himself leads the army to one triumph after another from the day he takes command on June 1, 1862, through the incredible victory at Chancellorsville. These two years are covered in the first two volumes; Lee’s first year of command alone takes up half of the whole three volumes, leaving only one volume for the final two years of the war. The abridgment faithfully preserves these proportions as well as the poignant tone of decline toward defeat that began with the retreat from Gettysburg.

  In Lee’s Lieutenants, Freeman employed the fog-of-war technique that he had perfected in R. E. Lee. He reveals to the reader only such information, often uncertain or ambiguous, as was available through the fog of war to Lee and/or his subordinate at the times they needed to make decisions or take actions. This technique has both disadvantages and advantages in comparison with the usual “omniscient author” approach. For the reader who is a beginner in military history, a clear description of the whole picture would make a campaign or battle easier to understand. Yet the fog-of-war technique is truer to the confusing reality of military operations and enables the reader to appreciate the commander’s problems as he picks his way through contradictory or inadequate information—or misinformation.

  As the astute literary critic Allen Tate also noted in his review of Lee’s Lieutenants, Freeman’s method focuses only on Lee and his army, with scant attention to the enemy or to the society for which the Army of Northern Virginia was fighting: “If Lee and his subordinates are not fighting anybody, they are equally not fighting for anybody.” But Freeman did not conceive his task to be the study of the Union army or of the Civil War as a whole. Other historians took up that duty. Freeman was writing about Lee and his lieutenants, and nobody has done it better. In this one-volume abridgment, the defects (if that is what they are) of the fog-of-war technique are less salient than in the original, for the paring away of many quotations and details of lesser importance causes the narrative to move at a brisker pace, action to follow thought more quickly, and the fog to dissolve as events and results follow hard upon information and decision. This one-volume distillation of the essence of Lee’s Lieutenants is the best place to start for anyone who wants to understand the story of the Army of Northern Virginia.

  Foreword

  DOUGLAS SOUTHALL FREEMAN

  After completing in 1934 a life of General R. E. Lee, the writer found that mentally it was not easy to leave the struggle about which one had been writing for twenty years and more. A question plagued and pursued: In holding the light exclusively on Lee, had one put in undeserved shadow the many excellent officers of his army? It did not seem permissible to pass on until that company of gallant gentlemen had been placed in proper relationship to their chief.

  It was assumed that this work could begin with a brief review of the status and personnel of the Confederate command on June 1, 1862, the date when General Lee opened the headquarters of the Army of Northern Virginia. It soon became apparent that many of Lee’s problems of personnel were set for him in advance. His hopes and plans were circumscribed by appointments and by organization, good and bad, that went back to the spring of 1861. Command was not created but was inherited by Lee. Most of his assigned lieutenants had been Johnston’s. The failures of the Seven Days could be explained in no other way than by tracing the men through whom Lee undertook his first major offensive.

  The officers Lee used in his first campaign in eastern Virginia had acquired their combat experience in one or more of Johnston’s three engagements or in Jackson’s Valley campaign. To understand why some men were entrusted confidently with field command in June 1862, while others were regarded as excitable or timid, it became necessary to make a detailed study of the battles of First Manassas, Williamsburg, and Seven Pines. Equally imperative was an examination of the operations from Kernstown to Port Republic.

  The choice of a method of presenting these sketches of individuals was a continuing puzzle. It sometimes would be necessary to write of as many as a dozen soldiers who had a conspicuous part in the same battle. If in separate studies of these men a reader was confronted with essentially the same details of, say, Sharpsburg, he would damn the battle, the soldiers, the method, and the writer. What alternative was there to this traditional method of treatment? That question prompted another: What had these Confederates in common; what bound together their lives in all the similarities and contrasts? Obviously the nexus was their service in the same army and, for three years of the war, under the same commander. It was in this connection that a letter of General Lee’s came to mind. The men of his army, Lee wrote in 1863, “will go anywhere and do anything if properly led. But there is the difficulty—proper commanders—where can they be obtained?” It was clear that Lee constantly was seeking “proper commanders.” Was not that a possible basis for a study of Lee’s lieutenants? Might not the work be a review of the command of the Army of Northern Virginia, rather than a history of the army itself?

  As this approach was examined, it was apparent that the high command of the Army of Northern Virginia was subject to a constant and heavy attrition—by death, by disabling wounds, by intemperance, by incompetence. The army always was being built up and torn down. Aside from manpower, no aspect of the whole tragedy meant more than “proper commanders—where can they be obtained?” The connecting thread of this work well might be that of the effort to create and maintain competent senior officers. As they emerged in battle or in administration of the army, the various leaders could be introduced. If they rose, the scene of their new successes would be the proper setting for their reappearance. In the event they fell, they could be appraised and committed to posterity. All the while, the army would be marching and fighting under such leaders as it had at a given moment. In describing battles, the viewpoint would not be that of Lee but that of the men executing his orders or making decisions for themselves.

  In sketching persons in this manner, they will appear and disappear, speak or hold their peace, according to their share in particular scenes. The case of Dorsey Pender is typical. He appears first, casually, in a Richmond hotel lobby, where he asks a question of Johnston. He is seen again in the Seven Days and at Second Manassas, but it is not until Chancellorsville that he becomes a major character in the drama. On the road to Gettysburg, for the final scene in Pender’s life, the reader spends a night or two in the camp of the North Carolinian and, over his shoulder, reads some of the last letters written to the young wife at Salem.

  Equal to the challenge of finding a suitable method of presentation has been a second, that of making a few score of men stand out as distinguishable individuals where hundreds of actors, literally, crowd the stage. Animation and reality inhere in Stonewall Jackson and Dick Ewell, because of their eccentricities, though there is always danger of historical distortion in overstressing peculiarities. Some more than others have personalities that can be caught, as it were, and held. The frequent eulogies in the Richmond Examiner and the details of the quarrel with Jackson may fix, in some measure, the elusive personality of A. P. Hill. One may not say even that much of that modest gentleman, the easy-going, generous Dick Anderson. Certain of Lee’s lieutenants were unsensational in behavior or had emotional control so complete that they seemed colorless or even stolid. For the painting of other portraits, the pigments were scanty and dim. Nothing remains but the monochrome of formal, impersonal reports with which to paint a personality. To help visualize all these men, there follows a Dramatis Personæ. It may be consulted if, from the mise-en-scène, some man of remembered name but forgotten qualities steps out.

  In order to adhere to the realities of a war in which old idols fell fast and new demigods rose overnight, few have been characterized upon their first appearance. Such a man as Beauregard showed his essential ego at a glance. Nothing
ever was disclosed that was not plain after one day’s association with him, except such a peculiarity as his mastery of his tongue and his utter lack of control over his pen. Jackson, on the other hand, had a nature not shown in all its contrasting lights until one had been with him for months. Presentation of Jackson must be by a process of color printing, where each impression brings out something different. Longstreet presents the same problem. His was not a nature to flash or flame. He talked little, but his silence should not be assumed to cover some deep mystery. A day would come when the flash of the guns in the Peach Orchard made every line of his face stand out. Consequently, the actors in the drama are not presented as definite personalities until they attract some attention by their performance. Jeb Stuart, for example, is treated as one of many promising but not pre-eminent officers of the army until, in June 1862, he made his “ride around McClellan.”

  After method had been determined and a gradual introduction of the actors arranged, the third question was: Who of Lee’s many companions in arms should be presented? No arbitrary standard has been applied. It was apparent that some of the chiefs of division in 1862 were not historically important, and that some who never attained to the coveted rank of major general, or even to that of brigadier general, had a place in the history of the army command or of the army morale. Joseph E. Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard stood in another category. Was it proper to list them among Lee’s lieutenants when he had no command over Beauregard until June 1864, and none over Johnston until January 1865, when Lee became general in chief? On the other hand, both Beauregard and Johnston bulked large—perhaps out of proportion to their true military stature—in the history of the army command in Virginia. General Johnston, in particular, did much to shape the military outlook and esprit de corps of many of the higher officers who served under Lee. Were Johnston and Beauregard omitted, molding influences would be disregarded. In the main, it may be said that each man treated here won his own place, as it were, and determined by his deeds the extent of the treatment he received.

  When the relevant facts, somber and sunny, concerning Lee’s principal lieutenants had been examined, four surprises were encountered. First among them was the disregard in the Confederacy of officers’ training. Prior to secession, much reliance was placed on the leadership of those Southerners who had or previously had held commissions in the United States army. Former officers of volunteers in the Mexican War and the graduates of Southern military schools were expected to supplement the regulars. Virginia listed more men in each of these categories than any other Confederate state, but the total was low—at the most, trained officers for the equivalent of fourteen regiments only. Small as was this number, virtually nothing was done in any organized way to train the required hundreds of new officers. These had to acquire the elements of tactics on the drill ground, with troops, and in the tent at night with copies of Hardee’s Tactics. Reports of early battles contain grim admission that some officers had to direct troops in action before they themselves knew even the simple evolutions of the line.

  The rapid improvement of the troops in drill and discipline would be inexplicable were two facts overlooked. One was the immense service rendered by graduates of the Virginia Military Institute and the South Carolina Military Academy as drillmasters and then as company and regimental officers. Second was the success of the few professional soldiers of the Confederacy in having their government accept and support the standards of discipline and of military usage that had prevailed in the “old army.” They administered the army as if there always had been and always would be a Confederacy. One never gets the impression, after the first few months of war, that one is reading of a revolutionary, haphazard organization.

  The second surprise in studying the command of the Army of Northern Virginia was the unhappy sharpness of the contrasts of character in the portrayals following the war. If any veteran went over to the Republican party or consorted with Negroes, that never was forgiven him. It canceled his military record, no matter how fine that had been. Apart from such distinctions, there was democracy in defeat. A certain sacredness that attached early to the name of General Lee came in time to embrace the high command generally. Bickering and rivalries were forgotten. Criticism was disloyalty. To mock was to betray.

  On cold reappraisal, after the passage of decades, some generals have diminished in stature. The failure of two or three of them is found to have been due to definite and discoverable peculiarities of mind. There is, for example, no mystery about the unwillingness of President Davis to give Beauregard or D. H. Hill a post commensurate with their rank. Beauregard never could be rid of his Napoleonic complex or be induced to shape his strategical plans in terms of available force and practical logistics. Hill, a fine combat officer, would not accept the responsibilities of departmental command. Other men, in unpleasant number, were boastful and willing to warp the historical verities in order to glorify themselves or to extenuate error. Some of Lee’s lieutenants were jealous and some were stupid; some were self-seeking and many were vaingloriously ambitious. In two or three cases, the evidence is all too explicit that men of honored name were physical cowards. Several military blunders and no little of chronic inefficiency had their source in the bottle.

  In contrast with this dissipation, this smallness, this indiscipline, and this selfishness stand gloriously the character and the fortitude of Lee and of other morally unshakable leaders. In case after case, Lee patiently assuaged the victims of hurt pride, stimulated the discouraged, appealed to the better nature of wavering men, and by force of his own righteousness more than by the exercise of his authority, reconciled bitter differences or induced personal enemies to work together. The seeming absence from the Army of Northern Virginia of such rivalries and animosities as hampered nearly all the other large forces, Confederate and Union, was not in reality absence but control. In the hearts of Lee’s subordinates were all the explosive qualities that existed elsewhere, but Lee himself possessed the combination of tact, understanding, prestige, firmness, and personal character necessary to prevent the explosion.

  It may be remarked, also, that details of Jackson’s ceaseless controversies with his subordinates, and review of his failure to maintain efficient divisional and brigade leadership, are an all-sufficient answer to the question whether Jackson, separated from Lee, would have been a great army commander. Strategically he would have been; administratively, he could not have been. Longstreet’s case is similar. His corps was conspicuously free of disputes when he was with Lee. No sooner was Longstreet in semi-independent command in Tennessee than trouble began. As an army commander, Longstreet scarcely would have been able to make his proud, ambitious subordinates pull together as a team.

  The next surprise was the discovery that skill in the administration of a command had an even closer relationship to morale than had been supposed. Army morale does not depend exclusively, or even primarily, on the commander-in-chief. He can do little more than give the dynamic of his personality, the stamp of his character, to that which his subordinates have achieved. Insofar as it reflects the command, morale is the mirror of the faith, the administrative skill, and the leadership in training and in combat displayed by the average officer. What is shown in battle is created in camp.

  The final surprise came in the study of the third major reorganization of the Army of Northern Virginia. Those successive periods of large-scale promotion form an essential part of the history of the command. When the army was organized in 1861, few responsible leaders foresaw difficulty in procuring qualified commanders. The South was thought to be opulent in leadership. Arms were as readily the avocation of the gentleman as the profession of the soldier. In terms of confident ambitions, the material for a corps of officers seemed abundant. Joseph E. Johnston felt, in the winter of 1861-62, that he had numerous officers qualified for brigade command at the least. By the summer of 1862, General Lee, who was more cautious in his judgment of leadership, was not so sure that colonels in large numbe
r could be promoted to the grade of general officer. He was hampered then and increasingly thereafter by the necessity of maintaining a rough balance of commissions among the generals from the different states. Still more was he hindered in the upbuilding of command by the rules of seniority, which, at least in theory, prescribed that the senior colonel or, in any event, a colonel within a given brigade, should be elevated to its command if the general were slain.

  Despite these rules, which are among the inherited abominations of military service, little difficulty was experienced in maintaining at a promising level the quality of general officers in the first major reorganization, which followed the campaign of the Seven Days, and in the second, which was necessitated by the losses at Cedar Mountain, at Second Manassas, and in the Maryland expedition. In the study of the third reorganization, that of May 1863, undertaken after the death of Stonewall Jackson, the evidence quickly proved that the Army of Northern Virginia did not then have a sufficient number of qualified colonels of the line to fill vacancies. The school of combat did not graduate men enough to make good the casualties of instruction. Stated explicitly, after the second year of hostilities, in an army of 9 infantry divisions, roughly 150 regiments, two officers only, John B. Gordon and William Mahone, added materially to the vigor of the high command. A few others suggest the possibility of development; at least three who might have become noteworthy commanders—Dorsey Pender, Dodson Ramseur, and Robert Rodes—were killed in action. The remaining new general officers scarcely attained to the standard of performance established prior to Gettysburg.