Four Days in July: The Players: Robert E. Lee

[This post has been edited. The content hasn't really changed, but the quality was significantly improved...] I think that we have a common misconception about Robert E. Lee. It’s one of those things that’s fairly common in history, I suppose. We put way too much stock in a particular person or event because we know what happened. Hindsight is, in many ways, the enemy of good history. We know the legend of Robert E. Lee. He was the officer both sides desperately wanted on their side. He was the general who was destined to run the Union ragged throughout the Civil War. He was the guy who would have won the fight in a few months for the Union. Those ideas don't actually add up, though. It’s true that both sides wanted him. He had a reputation as a brilliant engineer and a capable commander. Lincoln would have put him in a fairly high command position. Jefferson Davis did make him one of the first five full generals for the CSA. However, the legend of Lee as the general everyone wanted actually belonged to the ill-fated Albert Sidney Johnston. The interesting thing is that Lee didn’t want to fight for the South. He had nothing good to say about the CSA and intended to fight for the Union until Virginia seceded, at which point he took up arms for his state. Virginia even made him commander of all the state’s forces. He was quickly commission in to the Confederate Army. Although he was a general, he never wore a rank above Colonel, his las commission in the Union Army. Lee didn't believe he could wear the Confederate stars until the war was over and secession was complete. At the outset of the war Lee wasn’t put in charge of a major field army. Joe Johnston and PGT Beauregard were the Confederate commanders at First Bull Run. Lee’s first, and almost last, battle was in the sideshow over West Virginia (which didn’t much like Virginia as a whole and seceded from the larger state at the outset of the war). He lost at Cheat Mountain due, of all things, to being too timid. It's important to remember Lee’s reputation. He was a brilliant engineer and artillery officer, not a brazen field commander. There really aren’t any stories out of the Mexican-American War of Lee making audacious moves like Grant’s decision to sneak behind enemy lines and carry a howitzer up a bell tower. So after Cheat Mountain, Lee spent most of his time arranging defenses. He dug trenches around Richmond. Eventually he was made Jefferson Davis’s prime military adviser, a position that meant absolutely nothing in terms of influence. His most spectacular success in this role came in the spring of 1862 and didn’t involve the command of a field army. Lincoln was getting tired of McClellan’s inactivity on the Potomac. McClellan had some 130,000 troops at his command, which gave him a significant advantage over the Confederate forces, which probably numbered somewhere around 70,000 at the time. McClellan, however, believed his force was outnumbered. His Pinkerton spies consistently overestimated the numbers of Confederate forces, something the Southerners were only too happy to reinforce by building fortifications armed with “Quaker guns:” logs mounted on walls as if they were cannon. Still, McClellan had to do something. He finally decided that he couldn’t directly attack Richmond from Washington, so he’d go around. The Civil War is mostly thought of as a fight over a ninety mile stretch of ground. Washington D.C. and Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capitol, were that close. So both sides naturally assumed that all it would take was a few days’ march, a fight for one city or the other, and the war would be over. It’s pretty much a universal notion of conflict, but everyone thinks wars will be over fast. “We’ll lick ‘em good and be home by Christmas,” is the sentiment that starts pretty much every conflict. That rarely happens, especially for something as contentious as a civil war. It's especially true when you consider that Virginia wasn't the seat of rebellion. It was the last state to join the Confederacy and the relocation of the CSA's capitol from Montgomery, Alabama to Richmond was about politics, not strategy. The Civil War contained firsts on many levels. It was the first war that featured rifled weapons. It was the first war that featured combat between ironclad warships.* It was the first war to really take advantage of the speed of railroads. It was also the first war fought in newspapers. The American Civil War was revolutionary for the involvement of the press in ways that can only be paralleled by the Vietnam War. The conflict of a century later is the first time war footage was taken directly from the battlefields and put in to television sets on the home front. But the Civil War was the first war that was photographed. It was also the first war that involved telegraph dispatches, allowing newspapers to get immediate wire copy of the events on distant battlefields (if you’ve ever wondered about the origin of the term “wire copy,” look no further than the telegraph). In previous wars George McClellan might have been able to get away with sitting on his rump waiting for the right time. In the Civil War he had no chance. Daily reports went out with details of a complete lack of movement on the part of the massive Army of the Potomac. Political cartoons were placed in newspapers that ridiculed the general’s timidity. Of course those same newspapers would later carry the Matthew Brady's photographs of mangled corpses and burn in to human memory the names of such places as The Sunken Road, The Bloody Angle, and The Hornet’s Nest. Among the firsts of the Civil War, I suppose, we must add that it was the first war to burst the bubble of the romance of war for civilians as well as soldiers. From the war we got books like Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage that call in to question everything we’ve always assumed about the glory of war. Sadly, it seems that every generation has to re-learn that particular lesson from the Civil War. Either way, Lincoln finally got McClellan’s massive juggernaut moving south in the spring of 1862. Rather than head down to Richmond through Manassas Junction and re-fight the Battle of Bull Run, McClellan decided to out-flank Joe Johnston, head south by sea, land at the mouth of the James River, and head towards Richmond from the South. This actually managed to catch the Confederates by surprise, and Johnston ended up sitting at Manassas Junction with his pants around his ankles. The South had an ace in the hole, though. They knew that everyone in Washington would panic at even the thought of being undefended. So they moved to exploit this fear and put Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley with about 8000 troops. It was Jackson's campaign, but Lee's brainchild and strategy. The Shenandoah Valley was one of the most important bits of territory in the Civil War. It was fertile larder for the South and a dagger pointed straight at Washington. The danger was quite real. Late in the war Jubal Early would take a force all the way up the Shenandoah Valley to the suburbs of Washington. But we’re still in 1862. Stonewall Jackson was in the Shenandoah Valley with about 8000 troops and no intention of actually marching on Washington. No one in the Union capitol knew that, however. So they pulled Irvin McDowell’s corps out of the Army of the Potomac, meaning that McClellan effectively started the Peninsula Campaign with 40,000 casualties. The already worried commander would be going to Richmond with only 90,000 troops. The Federals sent two armies in to the Shenandoah Valley after Stonewall Jackson, one from Washington under Nathaniel Banks and the other from West Virginia under John C. Fremont. Each army outnumbered Jackson two-to-one. From the end of March to the beginning of April, Jackson ran the Union ragged. His army slogged up and down rain-choked roads, staying just barely ahead of the Union forces with every step. Eventually Lee managed to free up enough troops to roughly double Jackson’s army and the rain stopped. He won brilliant victories on June 8 and 9 at Cross Keys and Port Republic,** then slipped out of the battle. Jackson’s 17,000 troops had tied up about 50,000 Union troops at a critical moment. Meanwhile, Joe Johnston was injured at Fair Oaks facing off against McClellan. Lacking any better option, Jefferson Davis put Lee in charge of the Army of Northern Virginia. This move angered a lot of people, who thought Lee would be a lousy commander. Their nickname for him was “Granny Lee.” That nickname didn’t last long. At the tail-end of June and in to July Lee lead his army, reinforced to 92,000, against McClellan, who now had 106,000 troops. Lee couldn’t take everybody with him, though, so when he struck he only had 65,000 troops. They were too close to Richmond. It really didn’t matter. McClellan was already worried and 25,000 of his troops were separated from the main body by the Chickahominy River. The situation was ripe for exploitation by a quality commander and Lee turned out to be the right man for the job. For seven days the two armies fought the prosaically-titled Seven Days’ Battles. Lee won every engagement, but missed chances to bring McClellan to the point of annihilation at Mechanicsville and Frayser’s Farm when expected attacks by Stonewall Jackson didn’t materialize. He claimed to be sick at Mechanicsville, an excuse I have a hard time dismissing. I imagine it’s tough to force march your troops for three months, constantly looking for momentary advantages against forces superior in number if not leadership skill, then make another force march in order to engage in a desperate fight at the gates of your own capitol. It would be the last time Jackson would fail. Unfortunately for Lee, those failures at Mechanicsville and Frayser’s Farm would make life much more difficult. The Union managed to avoid disaster. Even so, the Army of Northern Virginia under "Granny Lee" would prove too much for anyone in the theater to handle as the Confederates marched towards their high-water mark. -------------------------- *The first two purpose-built ironclads were the French La Gloire and the HMS Warrior. La Gloire was launched in 1859 and Warrior in 1860. Both followed the conventions of steam-powered warships of the day in that they looked like wind-powered warships and retained all their rigging. Naval designers were afraid of giving their ships a single power plant and leaving them stranded in the event of engine failure. The CSA's first ironclad, CSS Virginia, was built without sails from necessity. She started her life as the USS Merrimac, a wooden screw frigate***. As the Union was pulling out of Portsmouth Naval Yard in Virginia (now Norfolk), they burned the Merrimac. She sank before being completely destroyed, however, and when Confederate engineers needed a way to break the Union blockade at Hampton Roads they raised the Merrimac, at that point just a hulk, and built an iron superstructure. The re-christened CSS Virginia would serve as the model for many Confederate ironclad rams. Virginia's opponent in the first battle between ironclads, however, was designed from the very beginning as a self-powered turret ship. USS Monitor may well have been a "cheesebox on a raft," but she, more than any other ship, ushered in the modern age of naval warfare. **Should you ever be in the mood for a fascinating book that covers the Civil War in detail from the perspective of the troops on the ground, I cannot recommend Conquering the Valley: Stonewall Jackson at Port Republic by Robert K. Krick enough. Krick brilliantly covers the battles, which were probably the largest battles of the war that could have been covered in great detail in a single volume. It's a great read in general, too. ***Yay, age of sail naval terminology! Okay, right around the beginning of the 18th Century the British started standardizing their naval designations. The big ships, designed to fight in a line of battle, were known as Ships of the Line or Line of Battle Ships, from which was eventually derived the term "battleship." Eventually the ships were divided in to six categories, or "rates." The First Rates were the big ones, constructed with 100 or more guns on three decks. Second through Fourth Rate designated smaller and smaller ships. The Fifth and Sixth Rates were given the alternate name of frigate (I don't know where the word comes from, but it has an interesting etymology) and were swift, single-decked warships that generally carried 30 to 40 guns and were used as scouts and messenger ships when working in conjunction with a major fleet. Frigates were also the natural ships to experiment with steam power and iron armor. The earliest steam ships were paddlewheelers, a type of propulsion that has been around for a surprisingly long time. They were considered highly reliable, in warships the massive wheels were vulnerable and had the added disadvantage of blocking valuable real estate on the gun deck. The next advancement, then was the screw propeller. The propeller solved every problem created by the paddlewheel in a simple and elegant fashion. EDIT: Meanwhile, this post has been edited significantly. I'm shocked I posted it in such atrocious condition. Also, both footnotes on naval warfare are brandy-spankin' new...