The death of Stonewall Jackson had one silver opportunity concealed within its black folds, and that was a further reorganization of the command structure of the Army of Northern Virginia “to simplify the mechanism … as much as possible.” Under Jackson and Longstreet, Lee had created two corps large enough (with 30,000 to 35,000 men each, in four or five divisions) for both men to use their own discretion and judgment without requiring Lee to overseeing the tactical details of battles. As Lee himself explained to the Prussian engineer and military observer
Justus Scheibert, “I plan and work with all my might to bring the troops to the right place at the right time; with that I have done my duty.” From that point on, it was his corps commanders who must take charge: “It is my generals’ turn to perform their duty.” Happily, in Jackson and Longstreet, Lee had officers who could fill that bill. But in anyone else’s hands, a corps the size of Jackson’s or Longstreet’s might prove so big as to become clumsy, or worse, might call for a degree of micromanagement
that Lee and his diminutive staff might not be able to deliver. “Some of our divisions exceed the army Genl Scott entered the city of Mexico with, & our brigades are larger than his divisions,” Lee explained, and that created stupendous headaches in “causing orders & req[uisitio]ns to be obeyed.”
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Rather than merely appoint a successor to Jackson, Lee peeled off brigades from Jackson’s and Longstreet’s old commands, and together with the addition of new levies from
North Carolina, created an entirely new third corps in the Army of Northern Virginia. Each corps in the Army of Northern Virginia would now contain three divisions, or about 25,000 to 30,000 infantrymen, and each division between three and five brigades. There would necessarily be a good deal of shuffling and reshuffling—new staffs would have to be created, old ones redistributed, colonels in command of regiments would find themselves scratching heads over the manner and personalities of new brigade commanders, and so on up the ladder—but Lee felt no unease over the ordinary soldiers’ ability to adjust. “There were never such men in an army before,” Lee believed. “They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led.”
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But this, of course, was the catch. “Nothing prevented my proposing to you to reduce” the size of the army’s corps as far back as the winter, he told Davis, “but my inability to recommend commanders.” At least in the case of
James Longstreet, the senior corps commander, he had “a Capital soldier” who was already “the Staff of my right hand.” Longstreet was forty-two years old that summer, an imposing six-feet, two-inches tall and a bulky 220 pounds, with a heavy brown beard, and a short Austrian-style gray officer’s jacket “on the collar of which the devices indicating his rank were scarcely distinguishable.” He had pig’s-eyes, vigilant and inspecting, was grudgingly deferential, and “a man of very few words.” But he had the knack, rare in the Civil War armies, of knowing how to “handle and arrange large numbers of troops … and he seems to manage a division of eight or ten thousand men with as much ease as he would a company of fifty men.” His weakness was a streak of “obstinacy and self-assertion,” and his “jealousy of advice was so great that really at times it seemed as if he preferred that of the enemy rather than to take it from one of his subordinates.” But even if he could not take advice, Longstreet could certainly take orders, and along with that, he had a slugger’s instinct for knowing how to drive into an enemy where it hurt most. In 1862, it was Longstreet who urged Lee to keep attacking the Federal army at Malvern Hill, despite the superior position the Federals had on the hilltop, and at Antietam, Lee hailed him as “my old
war-horse!
” His soldiers regarded him as “a bully general” and “real bulldog fighter” who “drives the Yankees whenever he meets them,” and they loaded him with nicknames—“Old Peter” and
the “Bull of the Woods.” In the estimate of the Austro-Hungarian soldier-of-fortune
Bela Estvàn, Longstreet was simply “one of the ablest generals of the Confederate army.”
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Filling the slots for the other two corps was a dicier affair.
Richard Stoddert Ewell and
Ambrose Powell Hill were next in seniority among the Army of Northern Virginia’s generals, and both had served as division commanders under Stonewall Jackson. But Powell Hill, a nervous, wiry man with a persistent chip of underappreciation on his shoulder and a bevy of chronic illnesses when under stress, had managed to antagonize nearly everyone else in Jackson’s corps, including Jackson himself, whom Hill denounced as “that crazy old Presbyterian fool.” The pity was that Powell Hill was precisely the kind of cantankerous, combative officer that Lee wanted in command; at Antietam, Hill had driven his division unmercifully on the roads up from Harpers Ferry, hit the Federals by surprise, and saved the Army of Northern Virginia from destruction. Lee thought Powell Hill was “upon the whole … the best soldier of his grade with me.” But Jackson’s staff neither forgot nor forgave Hill’s “very hot-headed and badly disciplined temper,” and so it was easier, both in terms of seniority and personalities, to let Jackson’s old corps go to Richard Ewell, and assign Hill to command the newly minted third corps.
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Not that Dick Ewell was everyone’s first choice, either. Ewell was another West Pointer, two years ahead of Longstreet and seven ahead of Powell Hill, who had served in Mexico and in Arizona, chasing Apaches, and who was accounted on all hands to be “a superb rider” and “upright, brave and devoted.” But he was also “a queer character, very eccentric,” with a peculiar pop-eyed look and a bald, domelike head which gave him something of the appearance of a nervous pigeon. Under Jackson (who took all prizes for eccentricity), Ewell developed into a first-rate division commander, and during Jackson’s lightning campaign in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862, Ewell showed a commendable willingness to take matters into his own hands by attacking the Federal defenders of Winchester “without instructions” from Stonewall. But Jackson could be a quixotic master. (Ewell once complained that he never knew when his next orders would be for a march on the North Pole.) What this taught Ewell was to use his own judgment when he was on his own, but to wait for point-by-point orders when his superiors were close at hand and he could determine whether or not “his advice will be ungraciously received & perhaps his interference rebuked.” It did not help Ewell’s sense of self-reliance that he had been out of action for ten months, after a Federal bullet crushed his left kneecap and splintered the bone below at the
second battle of Bull Run. All of the leg from thigh downward had to be amputated, and he now got around mostly on crutches or with an “ill-contrived” wooden prosthesis.
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As a result, all that Robert E. Lee saw in Ewell was a “want of decision.”
But he could not vault Powell Hill over Ewell’s place on the army list, and he quieted his reservations with the reflection that Ewell was “an honest, brave soldier, who has always done his duty well.” It would not have given Lee more ease if he had known that Ewell had reservations of his own about both the war and his aptness for corps command. “I don’t feel up to a separate command,” he wrote, with more humility than his record under Jackson justified, and after the trauma of the amputation Ewell had no desire to “see the carnage and shocking sights of another field of battle.” Still, Ewell was “the choice of all the soldiers as well as the officers” of Jackson’s corps. And Lee did not have a large pool of experienced division commanders from which to choose.
Jubal Early, who had also commanded a division under Jackson and who now became the senior division commander under Ewell, was “active, enterprising, and diligent,” but also “never blessed with popular or captivating manners” and generally regarded as sarcastic, brusque, and irascible. (It was probably Early who, “looking at the Yankees with a dark scowl on his face, exclaimed most emphatically, ‘I wish they were all dead,’ ” only to earn the rebuke from Lee, “I wish they were all at home, attending to their own business, leaving us to do the same.”)
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The reorganization of the Army of Northern Virginia would eventually boost more (and better) up-and-coming officers from brigade to division command, but it would take time for them to prove themselves equal to their new rank, much less one beyond it, and it would sometimes make for serious misjudgments. Harry Heth was a particular example of this. Heth’s grandfather and father had fought in the Revolution and the
War of 1812, and the family’s coal-mining business gave the young Harry expensive tastes. But when his father’s death spelled the end of the Heth family’s good living, Harry was packed off for an education to West Point, where he enjoyed the reputation of a “gay reveler” and an abominable student. He managed only two promotions between graduating in 1847 and the outbreak of the Civil War and then spent most of his time in garrison duties and in the West. But Heth had a certain aristocratic dash and charm that took the notice of
Jefferson Davis and he became a particular protégé of Lee’s. In February 1863, Heth was given a brigade to command in Powell Hill’s division, and then promoted again to division command in Hill’s new corps.
This was a mistake. Heth had little experience under fire, and an earlier petition for Heth’s promotion had been turned down by the Confederate Senate. His primary strength, apart from Lee’s sponsorship, was that he was one of the few people who could call Powell Hill a friend.
William Dorsey Pender, a serious, pious North Carolinian who had only graduated from West Point in 1854, was also given one of Hill’s divisions, and also partly because Pender and Hill got along. But much as Pender was recommended by Lee “on
account of valour & skill displayed on many fields, & particularly at the
battle of Chancellorsville,” Lee had also erupted at Pender after Chancellorsville for failing to pursue the retreating Federals. “That is what you young men always do,” Lee upbraided him. “You allow these people to get away. I tell you what to do, but you don’t do it.”
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It did nothing to ease the friction between the army’s personalities to discover that the Army of Northern Virginia was a divided house in political respects, as well. Its name made it a Virginia army, and its commanding general was a Virginian, and so were the commanding general’s personal and general staff. (Even Lee’s personal military escort were two companies from the
39th Virginia Cavalry Battalion.) But Virginia’s forty-three regiments amounted to less than a quarter of the Confederate infantry on the march up to Gettysburg in 1863;
Georgia contributed thirty-six regiments,
Mississippi eleven, distant
Louisiana ten, and
North Carolina outstripped them all (including Virginia) with forty-four. Nevertheless, the two new corps appointments went to Virginians, which made for “no little discontent” and a “serious feeling” of what
James Longstreet called “too much Virginia” on the part of the rest of the army. “Do you know,” asked one of Longstreet’s division commanders, a Georgian, that “there is a strong feeling growing among the Southern troops against Virginia, caused by the jealousy of her own people for those from every other state? … No matter how trifling the deed may be which a Virginian performs it is heralded at once as the most glorious of modern times.”
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Added to these slights was the growing suspicion directed by the Richmond government at the political steadiness of the army’s Georgia and North Carolina troops. Georgia’s governor,
Joseph E. Brown, was notoriously critical of
Jefferson Davis, and by the summer of 1863 a “sudden lukewarmness had come over many of our people,” to the point where “the State will stand a chance of being handed over to the Lincoln government.” North Carolinians were made to feel that their state had been “slow to leave the old Government” (or “did not secede quite soon enough to suit some other slave states”) and remained a “source of Unionism.” True enough, some of the North Carolina regiments were not all that tactful about suggesting that “the State of South Carolina ought to be sunk” because that “was where the trouble started.” But that meant, in turn, that pro-secession partisans like
John Bell Hood, who commanded a division in Longstreet’s corps, professed “no confidence in his Carolinians.”
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The chill of suspicion cast in the direction of North Carolina was exacerbated by “a most disgraceful spirit of desertion” in North Carolina regiments.
Leonidas Torrance in the 13th North Carolina gloomily reported on the embarrassing seepage of deserters from North Carolina units in the spring
of 1863. “There was 4 men run the gantlet [i.e., whipping by the whole regiment] in the 5th N.C. Regt the Saturday before … for going Home with out lief,” and “one of them died the 8th day after he was whipped.” In his own regiment, Torrance could count “14 of this Regt in the guard house for the same crime.” In the 43rd North Carolina, an anxious captain wrote that “men are running away very bad,” as poor whites from the western mountains, with a much lower investment in defending
slavery, registered their dissent by taking French leave and deserting “in squads, with their arms.” But the response of the Richmond government was to appoint politically reliable secession enthusiasts like
Alfred Iverson to command North Carolina brigades, and to practice “a studied exclusion of all ones termed anti-secessionists” from promotion. “If these facts taken together do not constitute a class of suspicion against the great body of our people,” complained North Carolina’s governor,
Zebulon Vance, “I am unable to conceive what would.”
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Governor Vance’s worry about the play of politics in the Army of Northern Virginia was, as it turned out, hugely overmatched by the political travails of the Federal army camped opposite Lee on the north bank of the
Rappahannock River. “Unquestionably,” wrote
Horace Greeley, the first six months of 1863 were “the darkest hours of the National Cause,” in both political and military terms. The Democratic opposition in the
U.S. Congress had found a new voice to rally around, that of
Clement Vallandigham, the charismatic congressman from Ohio who was boosted to the level of near-martyr in May 1863 when Federal troops arrested him, after a campaign rally in his native Ohio, for denouncing this “wicked, cruel, and unnecessary war.” The great campaign to capture Richmond in 1862 had fizzled into failure, and with only a brief respite at Antietam it had stumbled bloodily into defeat again at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. A massive naval assault on Charleston harbor in April likewise fizzled despite the use of new
ironclad warships. Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation and the first authorization to recruit
black soldiers for the Union Army had been met with howling indignation by white Northerners who imagined that the war was being waged solely for the purpose of national reunion. “I am a strong union man,” insisted one Massachusetts artilleryman, “but I am not willing to shed one drop of blood to fight Slavery up or down.” In the West, Federal forces were plagued by “the wholesale desertion of the troops who leave a hundred at a time.”
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