Circa1865

After the absolute rout of the enemy at Chancellorsville, Lee rode into a clearing “where his soldiers rushed around him, waving their hats in celebration of the victory.” Some were in tears of worship, reaching out to touch him and his horse Traveller. Lee’s aide described the scene as “one long, unbroken cheer, in which the feeble cry of those who lay helpless on the earth blended with the strong voices of those who still fought, rose high above the roar of battle, and hailed the presence of the victorious chief.” The aide mused that “it must have been from such a scene that men in ancient times rose to the dignity of gods.”

Two American Generals with Such Perfect Rapport

“If Lee, outnumbered and initially outmaneuvered, had been someone else, he might have tried anything else than a venture so dangerous. After all, there was a prudent alternative and honorable under the circumstances: retreat to a more defensible position.

Instead of that, he chose to risk disaster – because he was Lee, and because the man beside him was Jackson. Whether it was because his opponent was Joe Hooker is less clear. Lee had known Hooker in Mexico, where the young officer earned his reputation before he earned his nickname. But Hooker had not been in a command position there – instead, he was the eager executor of others’ decisions. Yet Hooker’s record since as an aggressive division and corps commander should have told any sensible opponent that it was foolish to chance destruction in detail by his powerful force.

For Lee, however, Hooker’s performance in the previous two days, twice pulling back on Chancellorsville when his generals wanted to drive on, must have outweighed the rest of that war record. If Lee had not firmly concluded that Hooker would stay behind his fortified lines, he was willing to gamble on it. The clinching reason was Stonewall Jackson.

American history offers no other pair of generals with such perfect rapport., such sublime confidence in each other. Jackson had said, “Lee is the only man I know whom I would follow blindfolded.” Lee, from the beginning, had insisted that he was fighting to protect the Virginia of his fathers; Jackson could say he was fighting now to recover his own Virginia, the mountain land that was cut off as a new federal State.

But Lee upped the ante at Chancellorsville when he proposed going all the way around to hit Hooker’s army from its far flank. Jackson, as if challenged, upped it again when he told Lee he not only would go, but he would also take all three of his divisions along to do it right. Lee, fully realizing that this would leave him to hold Hooker’s overwhelming force with about one-fifth its number, met that challenge when he said calmly, “Well, go on.”

This was the climax of two great military careers, each made greater by the other.”

(Chancellorsville, 1863: The Souls of the Brave. Ernest B. Furgurson. Random House, 1992, p. 146)

General Lee visited Wilmington briefly in early 1870 after visiting father’s gravesite in coastal Georgia. This son of Gen. “Lighthorse Harry” Lee also fought bravely for political independence and led brave American soldiers who venerated him.

In a postwar address to the Association of the Army of Northern Virginia, Col. Charles Marshall alluded to Gen. Lee’s “wonderful influence over troops under his command, saying that that such was the love and veneration of the men for him that they came to look upon the cause, [the struggle for political independence] as General Lee’s cause, and they fought for it because they loved him. To them he represented cause, country and all.”

America’s Greatest Military Leader

“April 30, 1870.

At Wilmington, they spent a day with Mr. & Mrs. George Davis. His coming there was known only to a few persons, as its announcement was by private telegram from Savannah, but quite a number of ladies and gentlemen secured a small train and went out on the Southern Road to meet Lee. When they met the regular passenger train from Savannah which Lee was aboard, he was taken from it to the private one and welcomed by his many friends. He seemed bright and cheerful and conversed with all. Lee spoke of his health not being good, and on this account begged that there would be no public demonstration on his arrival, nor during his stay at Wilmington.

On reaching that place, he accompanied Mr. George Davis to his home and was his guest during Lee’s sojourn in the city. Mrs. Davis was the daughter of Dr. O. Fairfax of Alexandria, Virginia. They had been and were very old and dear friends and neighbors.

There was a dinner given to my father that day at Mr. Davis’s home, and a number of gentlemen were present.  He was looking very well, but in conversation said that he realized there was some trouble with his heart, which he was satisfied was incurable.

The next day, May 1^st, Lee left by train for Norfolk, Virginia.”

(Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee. Robert E. Lee, II. Garden City Publishing, 1904. pp. 400-401)

The first of Richmond’s 1861-1865 patriot memorials was that to Stonewall Jackson, dedicated in 1875. The impressive statue was “presented by English gentlemen” who greatly admired “the soldier and patriot” whose deeds it commemorated. Fifteen years would elapse before the impoverished American South could manage to provide a similar memorial to Robert E. Lee.  Of note, though colored militia units did not participate in the Lee Monument parade, they had marched in the funeral procession two days earlier in honor of Gen. George Pickett.

The sculptor of the Lee monument was Jean Antoine Mercie’ was a graduate of the Paris Ecole de Beaux Arts and acclaimed throughout Europe. He also sculpted the Marquis de Lafayette Monument at Baltimore in 1891, and the Francis Scott Key monument at Baltimore in 1911. The Lincoln government arrested the latter’s grandson, a newspaper editor, in May 1861.

Robert E. Lee Monument at Richmond

“[The] Unveiling of the Lee equestrian statue at Richmond in 1890, on what later became Monument Avenue, was an event to which the South had been looking forward almost since the close of hostilities. Raising the money to pay for it was one problem, and calming the rivalry between two organizations that wanted to take the lead in raising it was another. There were also disagreements concerning the design.

The first competition awarded the contract to a “Yankee” sculptor from Ohio. This aroused the Confederate ire of the always bellicose General [Jubal] Early, who wrote [Virginia] Governor Fitzhugh Lee that “if the statue of General Lee is erected after that model,” he (Early) would “get together all the surviving members of the Second Corps and blow it up with dynamite.”

So, another competition was held, and the model submitted by Jean Antoine Mercie’ of France was chosen. This statue, showing Lee seated on Traveller, was received with universal satisfaction. When it arrived from Europe, hundreds of veterans and others turned out and pulled it with ropes to the site at what is today the intersection of Allen and Monument Avenues.

The unveiling went off without a hitch. There were fifteen thousand Confederate veterans in the parade, fifty generals in grey among them, along with ten thousand other citizens. The procession took two hours to pass by.”

(The Last Review: The Confederate Reunion, Richmond 1932. Virginius Dabney. Algonquin Books, 1984, pg. 7)

After Gettysburg: The Mule and the Grizzly Bear

“That night Gen. Lee decided that he must return to Virginia & began at once to dispatch his trains and wounded. But to give the latter a good start he determined to keep the army in place 24 hours longer. So, the next day I was started at a very early hour, with some engineer officers and staff to select a line of battle for our Corps upon which to fight if the enemy should attack.

This was now Sunday, July 5^th. The march was slow and tedious, our wagons were light of ammunition, and we had lost enormously of horses. We were authorized by Gen. Lee to impress horses from citizens & told to offer Confederate States money, or leave a descriptive list of animals, signed by an officer, on which the bereaved citizen could found a claim for damages upon his government.

During the day I had an accession to my staff, a Captain Stephen Winthrop who held a commission in Her Majesty’s 23^rd Regiment who had come to America to see some fighting. That very afternoon he got a chance to show the stuff he was made of. Anxious for a fight he joined a nearby cavalry regiment about to charge the enemy and led the attack with the colors flying though his horse was killed. After the repulse of that effort, he obtained another horse and went in on a second charge with only his saber – and got into the melee, in which he ran one of the enemy through, coming out with his saber bent and bloody all over.

I recall another incident of the march from Gettysburg. Our men had impressed the horse of and old Dunkard farmer from somewhere in this vicinity. He said he was a poor man & needed a horse for his crops, and that my men told him I had some footsore horses – from lack of horseshoes on the rocky roads. Being told I may abandon them and asked if I would give him one which I did.

Up to now the enemy had pursued us as a mule goes on the chase of a grizzly bear – as if catching up with us was the last thing he wanted to do. But at last, on Friday morning the 10^th of July, the whole of Meade’s army drew near. After making our defensive line how we all did wish that that the enemy would come out in the open & attack us, but they had had their lesson at Gettysburg. But they also had their lesson, in that sort of game, at Fredericksburg and did not care for another. Gen. Meade showed no disposition to attack us.

When it is remembered that Vicksburg had surrendered to the enemy on July 4^th, it does seem that the cumulative moral effect of another immense victory as the destruction of Lee’s army, would surely have ended the war & made Meade its greatest hero and a future president. But the man who could either not see it – or feared to play the game with the opportunities he had – did not deserve it.”

(Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander. Gary Gallagher, ed.  UNC Press, 1989, pp. 268-272)

Established in mid-March 1802 during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, West Point graduation became necessary for an officer commission through 1835, though a rising “Jacksonian Democracy” created a strong desire to end an academy which bred an aristocratic tradition. After Texas statehood, Sam Houston believed a regiment of Texas Rangers better to protect the frontier than US regular troops and officers who he saw as “unaccustomed to frontier life and therefore utterly incompetent” as an Indian fighting command. The Rangers “were men who could ride as well as the Comanches and Kiowas and who understood their dispositions, inclinations – as well as their points of foray and attack.”

In early August 1858, Houston made his harshest Senate speech against the professional military establishment. He attacked West Point as aristocratic and undermining the liberties of American citizens. And it was the untutored frontier military leader Ben McCulloch who peacefully settled the Mormon standoff in Utah circa 1857-58.

West Point’s Aristocratic Traditions

“Early in the nineteenth century, the image of the citizen soldier was strengthened by the hostility that flared against the institution that seemed to embody all the negative elements of a professional military force: the United States Military Academy at West Point. In an era of mass democracy and egalitarian aspirations, West Point became a symbol of aristocratic privilege. It was regarded as a potential threat to popular rule . . . [and] Jacksonian Democrats believed, the caste system created by the professional officer corps would inevitably degrade the enlisted men.

Critic David Crockett spoke for the majority on the frontier when he declared that “this academy did not suit the people of our country, and they were against it.” The officers it trained and commissioned, he maintained, “are too nice to work; they are first educated there for nothing, and they must have salaries to support them after they leave there – this does not suit the notions of the working people, of men who had to get their bread by labor.”

Sam Houston, addressing the United States Senate in 1858, declared that “a political influence” was “growing upon the country in connection with the army,” and “its inception is at the Military Academy.” Its “inmates,” he charged, were “the bantlings of the public” and were nursed, fostered and cherished by the government.” Upon their graduation, the army must be annually enlarged as places must be found for the newly commissioned officers. “The danger,” Houston warned, “is that as they multiply and increase, such will be the political influence disseminated through society that it will become a general infection, ruinous to the liberties of the country.”

As Crockett’s and Houston’s outspoken opposition would suggest, nowhere was the military academy more reviled than on the western Tennessee frontier where the area was yet raw and largely unsettled, and already producing a remarkable number of solider-statesmen whose names would dominate American political and military history until the Civil War. Foremost among them was Andrew Jackson, whose fame and untutored military genius and popularizer of a frontier brand of democracy propelled him into the White House in 1829. Second to Jackson was his political protégé Sam Houston, another product of the frontier as well as an untutored but highly successful military leader. Other Tennesseans of the Jacksonian mold were San Jacinto veteran and Southern cavalry general Tom Green, Texas Ranger John Coffee Hays, and two extraordinary brothers – Ben and Henry McCulloch.”

(Ben McCulloch and the Frontier Military Tradition. Thomas W. Cutrer. UNC Press, 1991, pp. 4-5; 147-149)

On April 12, 1864, Fort Pillow, located north of Memphis on the Mississippi River, was surrounded by some 1,500 troops under Gen’s. Nathan Bedford Forrest and James Chalmers. After sending an ultimatum to surrender or suffer “no quarter” and the enemy rejecting capitulation, Forrest’s men attacked and caused most of the enemy’s 600 soldiers to flee into the river. As northern colored troops were half of the fort’s garrison, they suffered great loss along with their white counterparts, and the usual cries of “massacre” were heard from northern reporters anxious to sell newspapers to a gullible public. The Radical Republicans were also quick to establish a congressional committee to investigate Fort Pillow for political purposes.

This pattern was repeated late in the war as the northern public was fed atrocity stories of Georgia’s Andersonville prison stockade. Missing from the stories were the pleas of President Davis and other Southern leaders for prisoner exchanges, including safe passage for medical supplies and food to sustain the inmates. These were all refused by Grant, with Lincoln’s approval.

Conquest, Not Union

“What exactly did the [Committee on the Conduct of the War] uncover and how objective was its investigation? Critics have assumed that the committee deliberately exaggerated Southern atrocities to smear Forrest’s reputation, inflame public sentiments, and serve its own narrow partisan agenda.

The committee’s most thorough historian, T. Harry Williams, for instance, argues that Benjamin Wade used this investigation, as well as previous atrocity reports, as a means to create a consensus for an even more radical reconstruction. By deliberately exaggerating Rebel brutalities, he would cause the public to support a reconstruction policy that would treat the South as a conquered territory.

There is little doubt that the issue of reconstruction was on the minds of committee members and other Republicans during the Fort Pillow investigation. George Julian, chairman of the House Committee on Public Lands, was already busy sponsoring legislation to confiscate the large holdings of Rebel planters and redistribute them to veterans of the Union armies, both white and black.

In remarks to the House of Representatives shortly after Fort Pillow, Julian castigated the Confederates as “devils” and argued that the [alleged] massacre provided additional reasons to support the program of confiscating [Southern property].

Even before the war, there were many in the North who viewed the South as backward and in need of radical reordering along the outline of Northern free labor institutions. The war accelerated such beliefs. “The war is quickly drawing to an end,” the Continental Monthly predicted in the summer of 1862, “but a greater and nobler task lies before the soldiers and free men of America – the extending of civilization into the South.”

In formulating its Fort Pillow findings, the committee reflected Northern opinion as much as it sought to shape it.”

(“These Devils Are Not Fit to Live on God’s Earth”: War Crimes and the Committee on the Conduct of the War, 1864-1865”. Bruce Tap. Civil War History – A Journal of the Middle Period, John Hubbell, ed. Kent State University Press, June 1996, Vol. XLII, No. 2, pp. 121-122)

Basil W. Duke of Kentucky first achieved notoriety as a colonel and second-in-command to brother-in-law General John Hunt Morgan. Upon Morgan’s death in September 1864, Duke assumed command; during President Jefferson Davis’s flight from Richmond, he was escorted by some of Duke’s cavalry. Below he speaks of Albert Sidney Johnston who he considered to be one of the great men who defended the American South.

Fiscally-Responsible Future Confederate General

“He was appointed paymaster in the United States Army, October 31, 1849. The appointment gave him the nominal rank of major but conferred no authority or command. It necessitated, however, much travelling and upon the frontiers of Texas where his duties were performed, a great deal of arduous work, not unaccompanied by danger. He accepted the office only because he hoped it would assist him ultimately to enter [front line command].

In 1853 he sold his plantation, which he had greatly improved, upon terms which enabled him to discharge his entire indebtedness; but, by a curious freak of fortune, he had no sooner obtained relief from a condition which had long oppressed him than he was confronted with another which threatened him even more seriously.

He discovered that someone was systematically plundering the US government funds placed in his charge. His accounts were kept very carefully, and he could detect almost the exact dates at which the money was taken, although he failed for some months to catch the thief. As much as $1700 were stolen from the fund in 1853. He made no report of these losses to the US government but bore them himself; thereby forfeiting the almost entire benefit of his meager salary, besides being harassed with the constant fear that the robberies might eventually amount to sums so large that that he would not be able to replace them.

All efforts to discover the perpetrator of the thefts was for a long time unavailing, although every device and the utmost vigilance was employed; but in 1855 they were brought home to a Negro servant of General Johnston, who had been for years in constant attendance upon him, was a great favorite and implicitly trusted.

Indignation against the Negro was strongly aroused among all who had known of these peculations, and there was a general clamor for his exemplary punishment. General Johnston was urged to compel him to reveal the names of his accomplices, as it was believed that other parties had incited him to the thefts.

General Johnston would not listen to this suggestion. “Evidence so obtained is worthless,” he said, “is worthless. Besides the whipping will not restore what is lost; and it will not benefit the Negro whom a lifetime of king treatment has not made honest. It would be a mere act of revenge to which I cannot consent.”

His friends, however, insisted that the Negro should be sold so that the proceeds of the sale might in part replace the money he had stolen. General Johnston agreed to do this permitting the Negro to select his new master but informing the purchaser of the crime he had committed.”

(The Civil War Reminiscences of General Basil W. Duke, 1911. Cooper Square Press, 2001. pp. 110-111.)

The Virginia Military Institute furnished the most generals of any Southern military school, 20; VMI also furnished 92 colonels, 64 lieutenant-colonels, 107 majors, 310 captains and 221 lieutenants. Author Bruce Allardice points out that though the North in 1861 “had a two-to-one advantage over the South in West Point-trained officers, this was counter-balanced by the six-to-one edge the South enjoyed in men who had attended private military schools.”

West Points of the Confederacy

When Francis Henley Smith, an 1833 graduate of West Point, assumed the superintendency of the newly established VMI, he sought to make it “the West Point of the South.” Since many Southern schools modelled themselves after VMI, often hiring its graduates as teachers, the VMI model, with its distinctly non-military spread throughout the South. By 1843 South Carolina had converted its Columbia Arsenal and Charleston Citadel into interconnected military schools; in addition to the education, the cadets relieved the State of the expense of providing guards for its armories.

If the Civil War had taken place five or ten years later, the State military school programs would have given the South a huge edge over the north in potential officer candidates with military training. In 1861 the programs in many of the Southern States had scarcely begun; the numbers educated were small and the graduates too young to play a significant part in the war.

Douglas Southall Freeman recognized that Virginia’s VMI graduates “constituted a large, immediate and indispensable officers reserve corps” at the start of the war and concluded “that the Army of Northern Virginia owed to the Institute such excellence of regimental command as it had. I do not believe the campaign of 1862 could have been fought as successfully without VMI men.”

Almost to a man, the cadets, former and present, joined the Southern armies. And whereas 304 West Point graduates joined the Southern army, at least 12,000, and possibly many more, matriculants of ninety-six Southern military schools donned the Rebel grey and filled the high ranks of command. Thirty-seven of the matriculants became Confederate generals, about 8 percent of the total number of Confederate generals.”

(West Points of the Confederacy: Southern Military Schools and the Confederate Army. Bruce Allardice. Civil war History – A Journal of the Middle Period. Vol. 43, No. 4, December 1997, pp. 315; 317; 321-322)

The following is underscored by the words of Gen. U.S. Grant, III in a Sept. 1960 centennial address in Oswego, NY. He refers to the Cambridge Modern History’s assertion that: “between Oct. 26, 1864 & Jan. 1865 it was possible for 8.5 million pounds of meat, 1.5 million pounds of lead, 2 million pounds of saltpeter, 546,000 pairs of shoes, 316,000 blankets, 500,000 pounds of coffee, 69,000 rifles and 43 cannons came into the port of Wilmington alone.” (New York History, Jan. 1961, pg. 49).  

Defeat Did Not Come from Lack of Material

“Despite its obvious economic impact, the north’s naval cordon never really prevented the American Confederacy from acquiring more plentiful supplies of blankets, clothing and armaments than it had men to employ. Stephen Wise, the foremost contemporary expert on the blockade-running trade, concluded unequivocally: “Defeat did not come from a lack of material.”

Confederate States agents operating primarily in England and France under the direction of Ordnance Chief Josiah Gorgas’ specially established Bureau of Foreign Supplies provided a steady stream of wares despite limited means. By 1864 cotton sold at twenty-eight pence per pound compared to only nine pence in 1860. This seller’s market funded a massive Confederate credit line.

During the last six months of 1864, purchasing agents obtained $45,000,000 of credit on the basis of only $1,500,000 of government cotton. As the war continued and Southern resources dwindled, this trade increased in importance to the Confederate States war effort.

During the second half of the war, at least 127 known British-built steamers did much to sustain the South’s war effort. An estimated sixty percent of the Confederate States total small arms, one third of its lead shot, and two thirds of its gunpowder had slipped through the north’s blockade. The most celebrated State-owned and operated vessel, North Carolina’s Ad-Vance, made eight round trips from Nassau between June 1863 and September 1864 before her eventual capture. As a result of this, Tar Heel troops enjoyed better and more plentiful supplies than any other State troops as a direct result.”

(“A Notorious Nest of Offense: Neutrals, Belligerents and Union Jails for Blockade Runners. Samuel Negus, TCU, 2010, pp. 8-9)

Neglect of the South’s Navy

“John Newland Maffitt was convinced that Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory failed to understand the needs of the Confederacy; and Mallory dismissed Maffitt as commander of the Florida in 1862 at Mobile Bay, and finally, Mallory showed favoritism to a small circle of friends.

In perceptive reflections, Maffitt summarized the important role of sea power in the war. He belonged essentially to what might be termed “western theater school of thought.” Particularly critical, as Maffitt now saw it, was the fall of New Orleans which occurred in the spring of 1862, relatively early in the war and which was the result of superior northern sea power.

“The grand mistake of the South was neglecting her navy. All our army movements out west were baffled by the armed federal steamers which swarmed on western waters, and which our government had provided nothing to meet.”

Maffitt – perhaps thinking of his dismay at the outcome of his discussion with Mallory in Montgomery – pointed out that prior to the capture of New Orleans, the South should have had a navy strong enough to prevent its capture and to hold the Mississippi River and its tributaries.  Concluded Maffitt, “This would have prevented many disastrous battles; it would have made Sherman’s march through the country impossible, and Lee would have still been master of his lines . . . neglect of the navy proved irremediable and fatal.”

There were other factors contributing to the fall of New Orleans, such as the general poverty of the South, and high water in the river that sept away obstructions, but Maffitt was generally correct in his assessment of sea power in the war.

The setback at New Orleans, which Confederate Secretary of War James A. Seddon termed the “darkest hour of the struggle,” had been foreshadowed at Port Royal, where Maffitt’s suggestions were ignored just as they had been at Montgomery. Northern success at Port Royal [and at Roanoke Island, North Carolina] prepared the way for more important operations against Southern fortresses. It is doubtful if the north would have risked its fleet at New Orleans without the precedent of Port Royal.”

(High Seas Confederate: The Life and Times of John Newland Maffitt. Royce Shingleton. University of South Carolina Press. 1994. pp. 102-103)