Never Call Retreat (25 page)

This rubbed Lee where he was raw, because he had badly missed Longstreet's men at Chancellorsville and he was only now beginning to get them back; and George Pickett's division, which seemed to be the one Mr. Seddon wanted, was one of Longstreet's best. Lee replied that Pickett would of course be sent if the administration insisted, but he warned that "it becomes a question between Mississippi and Virginia." He added that Pickett could hardly reach Pemberton before June; surely, when June's hot weather struck the lower Mississippi the unacclimated Federals would have to withdraw, bringing the campaign to a close. The next day Lee told Mr. Davis that the northern newspapers, which Lee read carefully, said that Hooker was going to be reinforced, which could only mean that Virginia again was to be the theater of action. It was therefore more than ever necessary to strengthen the Army of Northern Virginia; if it could advance it might ease pressures elsewhere.
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Beauregard worked out a plan—elaborate, like all of Beauregard's plans, but for once not reserving the leading role for Beauregard. Hooker, he said, had been bruised and must lie quiet for at least two months. Let Longstreet's whole corps, therefore, be sent to Tennessee, and then let Lee himself go there and use Longstreet and Bragg in a quick blow to crush Rosecrans. Losing Rosecrans' army, the Federals would lose Tennessee and no doubt Kentucky as well, and if that happened Grant's campaign against Vicksburg must be abandoned. Longstreet worked out a somewhat similar plan, except that it did not involve sending Lee himself to the west, and pressed it on the Secretary of War. Lee himself, meanwhile, had a plan for Beauregard: he believed that some Confederate troops could be drawn from Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas, and he wanted them brought to Virginia and put under Beauregard; this would help to free Lee's army for offensive operations, and would worry Washington.
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In the end, none of these plans was adopted. The western armies that faced Grant and Rosecrans must continue to face them alone, with such incidental reinforcements as could be scraped together. Lee's army would be kept intact, strengthened as far as possible, to face the Army of the Potomac, but it too would have to operate alone. There were too many threats, and Lee's warning that they might have to choose between Virginia and Mississippi showed the gravity of the situation. If Richmond really had to save one of these states and let the other be lost it was in profound trouble, because it could not afford to lose either; nor, for that matter, could it afford to lose Tennessee or South Carolina. The government could not weaken itself in any threatened area. It must simply go ahead and do the best it could everywhere.

Against this background Lee planned what presently became his great march into Pennsylvania. His aims were modest; he was on the defensive, this march was a defensive maneuver, and it is unlikely that he seriously thought that it would ease Grant's pressure on Pemberton.
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If he could go to Pennsylvania, Hooker would have to follow him, and this at least would compel Mr. Lincoln's administration to think about protecting Washington rather than about capturing Richmond. On the march Hooker's army might well expose itself to an attack in detail, and although Lee did not think the South strong enough to carry on a regular war of invasion and doubted that he could force a general battle in Pennsylvania the move should at least disrupt Federal plans for the summer. Lee's army could also collect supplies north of the Potomac, and if Federal armies left Virginia more supplies could be got at home. Altogether, Lee hoped that he could spend the summer maneuvering in the north, returning in the fall in better shape than when he left.
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Limited objectives, in other words: yet as the campaign came nearer the objectives inevitably expanded. There was, to begin with, the state of mind of the troops. Lee had given his own army the habit of victory and he had given the opposing army the habit of defeat; if he now moved to Pennsylvania both armies must believe that the great, final showdown was at hand. There was also the state of mind of the high command. Lee came to feel that his move might be part of a peace offensive. To President Davis he wrote that "we should neglect no honorable means of dividing and weakening our enemies," and this move seemed to offer an opening. With a Southern army in Pennsylvania the Northern people might well begin to feel that they were losing the war. If, at the same time, they were gently led to believe that by making peace they could restore the Union they might stop supporting the war; "and that," wrote General Lee, "after all is what we are interested in bringing about." Once Northern will power gave way there would be time enough to disillusion people, and it would be Yankees rather than Southerners who would be hurt thereby because "the desire of our people for a distinct and independent national existence will prove as steadfast under the influence of peaceful measures as it has shown itself in the midst of war."
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This thinking was a trifle mixed. It assumed on the one hand that the Northern friends of peace wanted reunion so much that it would be necessary to deceive them, and on the other hand that they wanted it so little that they would readily abandon the idea once they saw that deception had been practiced on them. To believe this was to expect more of the march into Pennsylvania than was likely to be forthcoming. Men even hoped that this march might finally bring them to the pot of gold that hid at the end of the rainbow, the happy ending for all Confederate hopes . . . British recognition.

Apparently Lee retained certain reservations. He got his army into shape, and by the end of May he could record a total, present for duty, of all arms, of nearly 75,000 men. He divided this army into three corps, keeping stout Long-street as one corps commander and giving the other two corps to newly created lieutenant generals, Richard S. Ewell (who had fought so well under Jackson in the faraway Valley campaign) and A. P. Hill, a good leader and a furious fighter; each would command some 20,000 men, and for the most part the men were veterans of high morale. Yet even as he made these arrangements Lee notified Mr. Davis that he began to fear that "the time has passed when I could have taken the offensive with advantage," saying that "there may be nothing left for me to do but fall back." He also told Secretary Seddon that Hooker apparently planned to turn the Confederate left while Federal troops on the peninsula advanced directly on Richmond. This last was a serious threat. The Federal commander at Fort Monroe, Major General John A. Dix, had some 32,000 men arrayed on both sides of the James, and to oppose him Richmond had fewer than 8000 under Major General Arnold Elzey. Richmond could get some help from Major General D. H. Hill's 20,000 in North Carolina but it probably could not get very much because Hill was under a good deal of pressure himself. A simultaneous advance by Hooker and Dix could present a most difficult problem.
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But anything was better than to wait idly for the storm to break, and on June 3 Lee began to move. Longstreet's corps started for the Blue Ridge, with Ewell following, while Stuart's cavalry rode off to screen the move and Hill stayed in Fredericksburg to guard the rear. The army would go through the Blue Ridge gaps and move on down the lower Shenandoah Valley for the Potomac crossings, and although for a while it would be badly strung out Lee believed that Hooker could be deceived long enough to make the march relatively safe. By June 8 Lee himself, with the two leading army corps, was in the vicinity of Culpeper Courthouse, and Stuart jauntily put on a grand review of his cavalry for the edification of the commanding general.

Perhaps the review was a mistake. It had the scent of holiday warfare, with pretty ladies applauding the gallant cavalrymen, and Stuart gave it just a little too much of his attention; the result being that on the next day Federal cavalry crossed the Rappahannock unexpectedly and brought on the biggest cavalry battle of the war on the fields and hills near Brandy Station. Yankee cavalry was no longer totally outclassed by Confederate cavalry, it knew how to ride and fight now, and this battle was a hard one. Stuart's men gave ground, and for a time seemed in danger of being driven from the field altogether, and although Stuart rallied them and at last forced the Federals back to their own side of the river he had obviously been taken by surprise, which was most humiliating. Also, the new Federal cavalry commander, Brigadier General Alfred Pleasonton, had discovered what was going on, and he was able to tell Hooker that Lee's army was going north. Pleasonton got a major general's commission for his efforts, and Hooker began to suspect that Lee was making a bad move. He thought that he himself ought to march at once for Richmond.

He suggested this to President Lincoln, who shared Hooker's suspicion but had a different idea about the proper response. He told Hooker that Lee's army, not Richmond, was the proper objective. If Lee went north of the Rappahannock, Hooker ought to follow him, stick to his flank, attack him when he could—and, "if he stays where he is, fret him and fret him."
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Hooker took the advice, the Army of the Potomac moved up to the line of the Orange & Alexandria Railroad, and A. P. Hill got the last Confederate infantry out of Fredericksburg and moved on to overtake the rest of the army.

What might have happened if Hooker had marched on Richmond belongs with the might-have-beens and is subject to debate, but the President had seen one thing clearly: wherever Lee was, the center of the stage was there and not elsewhere. His army had to be looked at because it meant trouble, and now its advance was going into action. Ewell had gone past Longstreet's corps and was in the lead. He was bald, eccentric, oddly bird-like, with a nose like a hawk's beak jutting out between the bulging eyes of an affronted owl. He wore a wooden leg, carried crutches, and rode in a buggy because the Yankees had shot a leg off of him at Groveton, nine months earlier, but he was full of bounce and energy all the same. Now he took his corps down the lower Shenandoah Valley as if the furies were on his back, and at Winchester he smashed a Federal force of 6900 men under the excitable Major General Robert Milroy. Swell's men overwhelmed these Federals, capturing more than half of them and driving the rest off in hopeless confusion; then they crossed the Potomac and moved on, over Maryland and into Pennsylvania, and there was no longer any question about what Hooker's objective was.

A. P. Hill followed Ewell, Longstreet faded back through the mountain gaps to bring up the rear, and Hooker took his own army up close to the Potomac to look for an opening. And Jeb Stuart, who was under orders to go north and protect the army's front and flank, got permission to do it by riding clear around Hooker's army en route. (This would be spectacular, bringing shame to the Yankees and restoring the Stuart image that was so badly tarnished at Brandy Station; also, being cavalry would be fun once more, as in the old days.) But Hooker's army was not where Stuart thought it was, so Stuart got crowded off the roads he wanted and his cavalry spent eight days on a trip that should have taken two, and could not rejoin the army until July 2, which was much too late. When Lee entered Pennsylvania he moved in darkness; he had cavalry (for Stuart took only three brigades) but he had no Stuart to handle it for him, and he never knew where his enemies were until he collided with them.

Although Lee did not know it and could not have been expected to know it, his real opponent now was Abraham Lincoln, a man not trained for command but nonetheless commanding. No one on either side saw Lee's advance into Pennsylvania quite as Mr. Lincoln did. He recognized it, of course, as a dire threat, but he also saw it as a limitless opportunity for the Union cause. He had grasped a strategic point of importance: when a Confederate army left its own territory and went north it exposed itself to outright destruction. It could be cut off, forced to fight its way out of a trap, and in the end removed from the board; by the mere act of invasion it risked its very existence, and the chief responsibility of the Federal commander was to make sure that what was risked was lost.

It was hard to get generals to see it. McClellan had not seen it in Maryland, and Buell had not in Kentucky, so two armies of invasion had got away. As a civilian Mr. Lincoln could not be entirely certain that he was right and that the trained soldiers were wrong. Yet the belief grew on him, and as this invasion month of June passed the President actually seemed to grow more composed. In the middle of the month he abruptly stopped leaning over General Hooker's shoulder, anxious to counsel about every move, and turned the man over to the War Department.

Until now, Hooker had ignored Halleck and had dealt solely with the President, and although this arrangement was grossly irregular it had worked tolerably well and Mr. Lincoln obviously had liked it. Now, with Lee's vanguard about to cross the Potomac, Hooker was growing querulous. He began to complain that he was outnumbered, he alternately chafed at the orders that came from Washington and then complained because the orders were not specific enough, and at last he protested that he did not enjoy the confidence of General Halleck. At this point Mr. Lincoln cut him off.

Lee, the President told Hooker, was definitely moving north, an action which "gives you back the chance I thought McClellan lost last fall." To be sure, the President might have been wrong then and he might be wrong now, "but in the great responsibility resting upon me I cannot be entirely silent." Meanwhile, Hooker hereafter must communicate through channels: "To remove all misunderstanding I now place you in the strict military relation to Gen. Halleck, of a commander of one of the armies to the General-in-Chief of all the armies."
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From this moment the flow of messages between Hooker and the President ceased, as the flow between McClellan and the President had ceased after Harrison's Landing, a year earlier. Hooker was a professional, and now he must answer to a professional. As far as possible (and this to be sure might be no great distance) the President would keep his hands out of it.