Dixie Betrayed (12 page)

Nonetheless, Lee planned his first battle, an attack on Cheat Mountain beginning on September 11. Lee clashed with the enemy
first at Conrad’s Mill, and the action proceeded up Cheat Mountain. But the Confederate objectives failed due to confused
logistics and terrible weather that made the roads nearly impassable. Newspapers attached a sobriquet to Lee that he most
certainly did not appreciate: “Granny Lee,” taunting his supposed timidity.

Near the end of September, he wrote Mary from a camp at Sewell’s Mountain, near Beckley: “It is raining heavily. The men are
all exposed on the mountain, with the enemy opposite to us. We are without tents, and for two nights I have lain buttoned
up in my overcoat. To-day my tent came up and I am in it. Yet I fear I shall not sleep for thinking of the poor men.”
¹³

With cold weather approaching, Lee could barely attempt another offensive movement; stalemate and disappointment were in the
air. Lee settled in, got to know his men, whom he lived with closely, and grew a gray beard. Seeing an opportunity, he clashed
with Federals again in early October at Sewell’s Mountain, where the enemy was now positioned. This also failed due to jealousies
between Lee’s subordinate commanders, who didn’t cooperate or communicate well, and poor logistics; rain-soaked roads were
occasionally impassable. “Poor Lee!” editorialized the
Charleston Mercury
on October 16. “Rosecrans has fooled him again . . . are the roads any worse for Lee than Rosecrans? . . . The people are
getting mighty sick of this dilly-dally, dirt digging, scientific warfare; so much so that they will demand that the Great
Entrencher be brought back and permitted to pay court to the ladies.”
¹⁴

Lee did in fact return to Richmond, visiting Mary at Shirley plantation for the first time since leaving her in April. “He
came back, carrying the heavy weight of defeat,” wrote Jefferson Davis. “And unappreciated by the people whom he served, for
they could not know, as I knew, that, if his plans and orders had been carried out, the result would have been victory rather
than defeat.”
¹⁵
Davis fixed blame for the failed campaign on Lee’s subordinates because of their omnipresent bickering. In truth a Southern
victory in western Virginia may have been irrelevant. Before year’s end the region’s citizens initiated a movement to break
away from Virginia, becoming a separate state loyal to the Union. It was not territory worth fighting over.

On November 1 Jefferson Davis learned that a large Federal naval force was moving southward toward the South Atlantic coast,
allegedly to Port Royal Sound, South Carolina. Four days later Lee was given the assignment of commanding the Department of
South Carolina, Georgia, and Eastern Florida, a duty that would last until March 5, 1862. He was not happy with the assignment
and, due to the public relations damage he had suffered during the western Virginia campaigns, neither were South Carolina
authorities. After his arrival, however, opinions changed. South Carolina governor Francis Pickens wrote Jefferson Davis on
November 24, saying, “I take this opportunity to say from the interviews I have had with Genl. Lee that I have a very high
estimation of his science, patriotism, and enlightened judgment. I am also delighted with his high bred cultivated bearing.
If he has a fault it is over caution which results from his scientific mind.”
¹⁶

In the words of Jefferson Davis, Lee arrived in Charleston and “his vigorous mind at once comprehended the situation . . .
directing fortifications to be constructed on the Stono and the Edisto and the Combahee, he fixed his headquarters at Coosawhatchee,
the point most threatened, and directed defenses to be erected opposite Hilton Head.”
¹⁷
Ten days later Lee and his staff witnessed the great fire in Charleston, when much of the city accidentally burned.

For Robert E. Lee Christmas 1861 would be spent away from his family, this time in Coosawhatchie. He wrote to Mary:

I cannot let this day of grateful rejoicing pass without some communion with you. As to our old home [Arlington], if not destroyed
it will be difficult ever to be recognized. Even if the enemy had wished to preserve it, it would almost have been impossible.
With the number of troops encamped around it, the change of officers, the want of fuel, shelter, etc., and all the dire necessities
of war, it is vain to think of its being in a habitable condition. I fear, too, the books, furniture, and relics of Mount
Vernon will be gone.
¹⁸

On the same day he wrote one of his daughters. “Having distributed such poor Christmas gifts as I had around me,” he penned,
“I have been looking for something for you. . . . I send you some sweet violets that I gathered for you this morning while
covered with dense white frost, whose crystals glittered in the bright sun like diamonds.”
¹⁹

L
EE
was not the only general officer who enjoyed the unbridled confidence of the president. Albert Sidney Johnston was perhaps
the closest military friend of Jefferson Davis’s. No relation to Joe Johnston, this Johnston was a Kentucky-born soldier who,
at age fifty-eight, was among the senior military minds adhered to the Confederacy at its outset. A veteran of the Black Hawk
War, Sidney Johnston, as he was called, had been caught up in the Texas revolution after migrating there and served as secretary
of war for the Republic of Texas. He had gone to West Point with Jefferson Davis and there, at a young age, formed a close
friendship with the Mississippian. Sidney Johnston had served as a staff officer in the Mexican War and, thereafter, was consumed
with frontier duty as colonel of the Second U.S. Cavalry, serving mostly in Texas. He became renowned in the 1850s for leading
an expedition to Utah Territory to quell the so-called Mormon Rebellion, a reported uprising. Sidney Johnston then reverted
to frontier post duty, and at the outbreak of war, he had been stationed in California. When the Southern states began to
secede, he resigned his army commission and made a long, circuitous journey from California back east. His travels were reported
widely in the newspapers, making him something of a Southern hero before the war even started, and his close friendship with
Jefferson Davis ensured him an important place in the military hierarchy of the new nation.

Sidney Johnston had been placed in charge of the significant, large area known as Confederate Department Number Two, a tract
of land that encompassed much of Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, and Louisiana. He was, thus,
the preeminent western departmental commander of the Confederate armies, and he would be the chief architect of strategy to
thwart the Yankees, who—as yet unknown to the Confederates—planned to cut southward along the rivers and deep into Southern
territory. Additionally, Sidney Johnston would command the Army of Central Kentucky, organizing and drilling it to prepare
for major battles that might erupt in the spring of 1862.

F
OR
now, the military situation was relatively quiet. August had brought the battle of Wilson’s Creek in Missouri, where the
Yankees were beaten back after a bloody fight. The following month the Federals had laid siege to the small town of Lexington,
Missouri. In the east scattered fighting continued in the mountains of western Virginia, and in the autumn, a sharp fight
broke out at Ball’s Bluff, along the Potomac near Leesburg, the elegant village named for Robert E. Lee’s more famous relatives,
where the Declaration of Independence had been hidden during the War of 1812. A massive Federal naval expedition threatened
the sea islands near Port Royal, South Carolina, a site of naval actions during the Revolutionary War. As the year waned battles
flared at Belmont, Missouri, where a little-known Union commander, Ulysses S. Grant, pushed his force forward, and Alleghany
Mountain, Virginia, back in the mountains of the western part of the state.

Meanwhile, the North was having its share of problems with military commands. In November Lincoln replaced Winfield Scott,
the old and infirm general-in-chief, with the young and vigorous Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan. This apparent salvation of
the Union command structure was a brief illusion. “Little Mac” was energetic and famous for his quick succession of victories
in western Virginia and came to Washington with excellent credentials as the ranking major general of the regular army with
experience in army organization, training, and military planning. But it didn’t take Lincoln long to realize that McClellan
was an overcautious tactician, eager to underestimate his readiness and prone to overestimating the strength of the Confederate
armies he faced. Moreover, McClellan began to side with the opponents of Lincoln’s Republican administration.

Politically, the Union had its hands full late in 1861. Both Missouri and Kentucky seceded in part and were, thus, counted
as member states by both the U.S. and C.S. governments. Embarrassingly for the Lincoln government, Confederate diplomats James
M. Mason and John Slidell were captured while aboard the British ship HMS
Trent,
which nearly brought England down against the United States until Mason and Slidell were released, and the affair blew over.
(“One war at a time!” Lincoln had quipped.)

Politics in the South took the form of elections. Early in the year the Provisional Congress had ordered congressional elections
to be held on the first Wednesday of November 1861. Unlike the United States, the Confederacy permitted politicians to hold
military office concurrently, and many politicians found the lure of the battlefield irresistible. The men were technically
still members of Congress, but they were absent from Richmond and unable to engage in helping run the government. According
to one observer, Congress had gotten rid of “nearly all it had of worth and talent.”
²⁰

Transfixed with military affairs, most citizens voted quietly on that Wednesday in November. Some soldiers could cast absentee
votes in the field, while the organization of Indian voting was left by the Confederacy to tribal officials. Most candidates
were fairly well known and declined to campaign due to the exigency of the military situation, though some candidates unimaginatively
advertised in newspapers, calling attention to either their state rights advocacy or vigorous prosecution of the war. Candidates
in the field handed over their campaign to be run by friends. Candidate John Goode of Virginia recalled a stump speech by
his opponents. “After they all had spoken . . . some friend of mine would arise in the audience and say, ‘Gentlemen, you must
remember that Mr. Goode is also a candidate. . . . He cannot be here to-day because he is down at the front with the other
boys in the army.’”
²¹
Such proxies were common. The situation was completely different in the Confederate Senate. There, the Constitution required
that senators be selected by the state legislatures, not the people, so Senate candidates did no campaigning whatsoever, and
a good-ol’-boys network of state politics made the decisions.

For the majority of Southerners, the experience of the Confederacy up to this point was one of relative harmony, of unity
in purpose and action. The rifts that occurred politically were mostly hidden behind the seams of the new nation’s fabric.
But even among such tepid campaigning, some good old-fashioned politics began to shine through. In Alabama Clement C. Clay
and John Ralls were accused of land speculation. In North Carolina a debate between two candidates came to a near riot. In
Mississippi Henry Chambers forced Col. W. A. Lake into a duel over their contest and shot him dead with his rifle.

Despite such scattered turbulence, the election came off, resulting in a hodgepodge of a now almost meaningless state of various
political parties—Unionists, Democrats, Whigs, Secessionists. Now that all were loyal Confederates, the standard political
party affiliations lost meaning.

Though few took notice at the time, from state to state within the Confederacy, tiny divisions were beginning to show. The
psychology of where various states seemed to stand within the Confederate hierarchy began to play out in the real world. South
Carolina’s politicians, for example, considered their state the “birthplace of secession” and, therefore, the linchpin of
the Confederacy. It should be central to important decisions, the state’s citizens felt. This attitude of supremacy began
to take effect in the bold actions and the air of superiority among men like William Porcher Miles, James Chesnut, Milledge
Bonham, and Lawrence Keitt. The governor, Francis Pickens, also behaved demandingly toward Jefferson Davis, as if Davis owed
South Carolina the very reason for his position. Virginia’s politicians also began to see themselves as the central focus
of the Confederacy; Governor John Letcher, situated right in the beehive of the national Confederate government in Richmond,
considered himself uniquely privileged. Those among the Virginia delegations who felt a boost from state influence included
Robert M. T. Hunter, James A. Seddon, Thomas S. Bocock, and Roger A. Pryor.

Other states, of course, had less political pull. Texas, for example, began the war as a relatively isolated arena that seemed
detached from the “action” out east. Consequently, Texas politicians, and those of other western states, felt left out as
the new session of Congress approached. Western politicians who overcame this feeling, like Texas’s Louis Wigfall, did so
by sheer energy and conniving political tactics, something that not all members of Congress could muster.

Amid this swirl of growing political intrigue, the fifth session of Congress assembled in Richmond on November 8, 1861, with
the Senate and House meeting in separate chambers and with separate agendas. There was one special day off, on January 21,
1862, allowing members to attend the Richmond funeral of John Tyler, the former president of the United States who had been
a member of the Confederate Congress. Otherwise the session would last until February 17, 1862, and be a relatively quiet
gathering as far as legislation was concerned.