The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (24 page)

Johnston had many objections to the plan. Time had probably run out; he lacked supplies, as well as the mules and wagons needed to haul them; the Federals, in greatly superior numbers, would combine and jump him as soon as he got started, obliging him to fight at a disadvantage and with nothing to do, in case of defeat, but scatter his troops in the mountains. What he preferred, he told Bragg on March 18, was to stand where he was, letting the bluecoats crack their skulls against his works, then follow them up when they retreated. Meantime, he urged, the proffered reinforcements under Longstreet should be sent to him at Dalton for a share in the defensive battle, rather than have them wait in idleness to join him on the march. Bragg’s reply, three days later, was curt and stiff: “Your dispatch … does not indicate an acceptance of the plan proposed. The troops can only be drawn from other points for an advance. Upon your decision of that point further action must depend.” Alarmed at this evidence that he would not be reinforced on his own terms, Johnston was quick to assert that he had been misunderstood. “I expressly accept taking offensive,” he wired back. “Only differ with you as to details. I assume that the enemy will be prepared for an advance before we are and will make it to our advantage. Therefore, I propose as necessary both for offensive and defensive to assemble our troops here immediately. Other preparations for advance are going on.”

For two weeks there was no reply to this. The answer, when it came on April 7, was in a dispatch addressed not to Johnston but to Longstreet, who was told to prepare his two divisions for an immediate return to Virginia. Johnston was depressed by this lack of confidence, and outraged by reports that he had declined to move against the enemy. “I learn that it is given out,” he wrote to a senator friend whose son was on his staff, “that it has been proposed to me to take the offensive with a large army & that I refused. Don’t believe any such story.” Besides, he said, after outlining his objections to the plan he had rejected, Lee’s army, not his, was the one that should have been ordered to advance. “It would have been much easier to take the offensive (excuse such frequent use of that expression) in Va. than here,” he wrote, basing his statement on the erroneous double claim that Lee’s army was not only larger than his but also had a smaller blue army to its front. However, he was not greatly surprised at the way things had gone. The authorities in Richmond — Davis himself, Secretary of War James A. Seddon, and now Bragg, his erstwhile friend — had about as low an opinion of him, apparently, as he had of them;
which was low indeed. His consolation was in his men. “If this army thought of me and felt toward me as some of our high civil functionaries do,” he closed his letter, “it would be necessary for me to leave the military service. But thank heaven, it is my true friend.”

It was true the army was his friend; no general on either side, not even R. E. Lee or George McClellan, had more affection from the soldiers he commanded. “He was loved, respected, admired; yea, almost worshipped by his troops,” a Tennessee veteran was to say. Richmond had taken this quality into account in sending him to Dalton to repair the shattered morale of an army which had recently been thrown off Missionary Ridge and chased southward into Georgia by the opponent it faced there now. And in this he had succeeded. “He restored the soldier’s pride; he brought the manhood back to the private’s bosom,” the same veteran declared. The drawback, according to those who had advised against his appointment, was that he was too defensive-minded for the tactical part of his assignment. He had only assumed the offensive once in the whole course of the war, and that had been at Seven Pines, which might well seem to him the exception that proved the unwisdom of attacking, since all it had got him was the wound that had cost him the command he most preferred, now held by Lee, and a subsequent transfer to the less congenial West. Those who had opposed his appointment in December, on grounds that he would never go forward as intended, were quick to point out now in April that their prediction had been fulfilled. In fact, they said, if he continued to follow his accustomed pattern of behavior, he would be likely to fall back from Dalton at the first bristly gesture by the Federals in his front. Davis and Seddon, who had favored his appointment — primarily, it was true, because no one could think of another candidate for the job — were obliged to admit the strength of this, as evidence of what to expect, and so was Bragg after his exchanges with the general, by letter and wire, throughout the latter part of February and the first two thirds of March. It was then, on the heels of this admission by Davis and Seddon and Bragg, that the summons went to Longstreet for a quick return to Lee. They had given up on Johnston, who would neither go forward nor refuse to go forward, and who they knew from past experience (in northern Virginia, down on the York-James peninsula, outside beleaguered Vicksburg, and back in the piny woods of Mississippi) would wind up doing exactly as he pleased in any case. He always had. He always would. The only decision left was whether to keep him — and the fact was, they had no one to put in his place. So they kept him. And in keeping him, however regretfully, they committed the Army of Tennessee to the defensive and gave up all hope for a slash at the Union center as a means of disrupting at the outset the latest Grand Design for their subjugation.

Lee was committed to the defensive, too, though not by inclination
or from choice. “At present my hands are tied,” he confessed in a mid-April letter to Bragg. “If I was able to move … the enemy might be driven from the Rappahannock and obliged to look to the safety of his own capital instead of the assault upon ours.” As it was, he added, writing from the stripped region about Orange where his infantry was camped, “I cannot even draw to me the cavalry or artillery of the army, and the season has arrived when I may be attacked any day.”

It was a question of subsistence for mounts and men. Scarcely a tree in the district wore its bark below the point to which a horse could lift its mouth, and few of the few animals on hand were fit for rigorous service; “Fully one half of them were incapable of getting up a gallop,” a cavalry officer complained, “a trembling trot being their fastest gait.” Conditions were nearly as bad for the leaned-down soldiers. Though Davis himself had managed to get hold of 90,000 pounds of meat for shipment to the Rapidan during a critical, near-starvation period that winter, this did not go far with troops whose usual daily ration comprised four ounces of bacon or salt pork, often rancid, and a scant pint of rough-ground corn meal. Sprouting grass was a help to the horses this rainy April, but hunger was still a condition of existence for the men. This pained Lee, who did not like to add to other people’s troubles by recounting his own, into making a formal complaint to the President, coupled with the strongest warning he had given at any time in the twenty-two months since he assumed command: “My anxiety on the subject of provisions for the army is so great that I cannot refrain from expressing it to Your Excellency. I cannot see how we can operate with our present supplies. Any derangement in their arrival or disaster to the railroad would render it impossible for me to keep the army together, and might force a retreat into North Carolina.”

That too was in mid-April — April 12 — one week after he had alerted the army to prepare for a Union crossing, any day now, of the river to its front. On that same April 5, having pored over information received from scouts, northern papers, and citizens beyond the Rapidan, he gave Davis his estimate of the situation. “The movements and reports of the enemy may be intended to mislead us, and should therefore be carefully observed,” he wrote. “But all the information that reaches me goes to strengthen the belief that Genl Grant is preparing to move against Richmond.” This was as far as he went at the time; he said nothing of his new opponent’s probable route (or routes) or schedule. Three days later, however, he wrote of receiving two more reports from reliable scouts, in which “the general impression was that the great battle would take place on the Rapidan, and that the Federal army would advance as soon as the weather is settled.” Continuing to study all the evidence he could gather — including much, of course, that was false or merely worthless — he arrived within another week at a considerably more detailed estimate, and he passed this too along to
Davis, saying: “We shall have to glean troops from every quarter to oppose the apparent combination of the enemy.”

He expected three attacks, all to be delivered simultaneously from three directions: 1) a main assault across the Rapidan, more or less against his front, 2) a diversionary advance up the Shenandoah Valley, off his western flank, and 3) a rear attack, up the James, to menace Richmond from the east and south. To meet this last, he proposed that General P. G. T. Beauregard be shifted from his present command at Charleston, which Lee believed was no longer on the list of Union objectives, and brought to Petersburg or Weldon to take charge of the defense of southside Richmond. The Valley threat he would leave for the time being to Major General John C. Breckinridge, who had a small command in the Department of Southwest Virginia. As for the main effort, the blue lunge across the Rapidan, he kept that as the continuing exclusive concern of the Army of Northern Virginia. Recent news that Longstreet would soon be coming back with two of his three divisions, after seven months in Georgia and Tennessee, made Lee yearn for a return to the old days and the old method of dealing with such a threat as he faced now. “If Richmond could be held secure against the attack from the east,” he told the President on April 15, “I would propose that I draw Longstreet to me and move right against the enemy on the Rappahannock. Should God give us a crowning victory there, all their plans would be dissipated, and their troops now collecting on the waters of the Chesapeake would be recalled to the defense of Washington.” Having said as much, however, he returned to such realities as the scarcity of food for his men and horses, then closed on a note of ominous regret: “But to make this move I must have provisions and forage. I am not yet able to call to me the cavalry or artillery. If I am obliged to retire from this line, either by a flank movement of the enemy or the want of supplies, great injury will befall us.”

On April 18 he ordered all surplus baggage sent to the rear, a sort of ultimate alert well understood by the troops to mean that fighting might begin at any time. Still Grant did not move. Lee’s impatience mounted during the following week — in the course of which Breckinridge was warned to brace for action in the Valley and Beauregard, in compliance with orders from Richmond, reached Weldon to assume command of the region between the James and Cape Fear rivers — though he acknowledged that the gain was worth the strain, if only because the half-starved horses thus were allowed more time to graze in peace on the new-sprung grass. “The advance of the Army of the Potomac seems to be delayed for some reason,” he wrote Davis on April 25. “It appears to be prepared for movement, but is probably waiting for its coöperative columns.” He closed with an invitation for the President to visit the army, “if the enemy remains quiet and the weather favorable,” by way of affording himself a diversion from the
daily grind in Richmond. Davis declined, under pressure of business; Congress would convene next week, for one thing. But four days later Lee enjoyed a diversion of his own.

Longstreet’s two divisions had arrived at last from Tennessee and were in camp around Gordonsville, nine miles south of army headquarters at Orange. Lee did not know whether Meade would cross the Rapidan on his left or right, taking John Pope’s intended route down the Orange & Alexandria Railroad or Joe Hooker’s through the Wilderness. He rather thought (and certainly hoped) it would be the latter, but since he lacked solid evidence to that effect he kept Longstreet’s hard-hitting veterans off to his left rear, in case the bluecoats came that way. On April 29 he rode down to review them for the first time in nearly eight months, which was how long it had been since they left the Old Dominion to supply Bragg’s Sunday punch at Chickamauga. They were turned out in their ragged best, leather patched, metal polished, their shot-torn regimental colors newly stitched with the names of unfamiliar western battles, and when Lee drew rein before them, removing his hat in salute, the color bearers shook their flags like mad and the troops responded with an all-out rebel yell that reverberated from all the surrounding hills, causing the gray-haired general’s eyes to brim with tears. “The effect was as of a military sacrament,” an artillerist later wrote. Lee wept, another veteran explained, because “he felt that we were again to do his bidding.” Deep Southerners or Westerners to a man — South Carolinians and Georgians, Alabamians and Mississippians, Arkansans and Texans — there was not a Virginian among them, and yet it was as if they had come home. A First Corps chaplain riding with the staff turned to a colonel as the yell went up and Lee sat there astride his gray horse Traveller, uncovered in salute, and asked: “Does it not make the general proud to see how these men love him?” The colonel shook his head. “Not proud,” he said. “It awes him.”

Awed or proud — no doubt with something of both, despite the staffer’s protest — Lee felt his impatience mount still faster next day, back at Orange, when he got word that a four-division corps under Ambrose Burnside, formerly encamped at Annapolis and thought to be intended for service down the coast, had passed through Centerville two days ago and had by now reached Rappahannock Station, from which position it could move in direct support of the Army of the Potomac. Perhaps it was for this that Grant had been waiting to put his three-pronged war machine in motion. As for Meade, Lee informed Davis on this final day in April, “Our scouts report that the engineer troops, pontoon trains, and all the cavalry of Meade’s army have been advanced south of the Rappahannock.… Everything indicates a concentrated attack on this front.” His faith was in God and in the “incomparable infantry” of the Army of Northern Virginia, but now as he awaited
the onslaught of the blue juggernaut whose numbers were roughly twice his own, he displayed more urgency of manner than those closest to him had ever seen him show on his own ground. Evidence of an early assault continued to accumulate, and still the Federal tents remained un-struck beyond the Rapidan. Lee’s aggressive instinct, held in check by hard necessity, broke its bounds at last. “Colonel,” he told a member of his staff, “we have got to whip them; we must whip them!” Apparently that was the high point of his impatience, for having said as much he paused, then added with a smile of amused relief: “It has already made me better to think of it.”