Never Call Retreat (41 page)

For Mr. Davis, it was immediately necessary to pick up the pieces after the disaster in Tennessee. General Bragg asked to be relieved of his command, there being nothing else he could possibly do. He blamed his defeat on "the bad conduct of veteran troops who had never before failed in any duty," and considered this partly due to "the effect produced by the treasonable act of Longstreet, Hill, and Polk in sacrificing the army in their effort to degrade and remove me for personal ends." He also blamed "drunkenness, most flagrant, during the whole three days of our trials"; General Breckinridge and Major General B. F. Cheatham could not be counted on in time of adversity because "they take to the bottle at once, and drown their cares by becoming stupid and unfit for any duty." Then, coming down to the real difficulty, he told the President frankly: "I fear we both erred in the conclusion for me to retain command here after the clamor against me."
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For Bragg to keep his command any longer was of course out of the question, and Mr. Davis reluctantly removed him, putting Hardee in his place temporarily while he looked for a permanent successor.

Once again he looked first at General Lee, and for a time it seemed likely that Lee would be sent west. In the War Department some men argued that Lee and most of his army ought to go, leaving in Virginia just enough force to garrison Richmond, and striving to recover Tennessee at all costs: this idea arising after the Commissary General, Colonel Northrop (who was gloomy even in the best of times), reported that with Tennessee gone the Confederacy could not possibly get enough meat to feed both the army and the civilian population. Bragg told Mr. Davis that a counter-stroke ought to be built up with the Army of Tennessee as a nucleus, so that "with our greatest leader at the head— yourself if practicable" the inspired host could strike the Yankee invader "and crush him in his power and glory." Lee tactfully suggested that if the President would like to put Beauregard in Bragg's place it would be easy to find another competent man for the defense of Charleston. Lee agreed that the situation was desperate, remarking that "upon the defense of the country threatened by General Grant depends the safety of the points now held by us on the Atlantic and they are in as great danger from his successful advance as by the attacks to which they are at present directly subjected."

Beauregard, in turn, called for "a sudden and rapid concentration upon some selected, decisive, strategic point." Such a point, he believed, lay in the Tennessee-Georgia area, and Beauregard wanted 40,000 men drawn from other parts of the Confederacy and added to Hardee's army, believing that it would then be able to drive Grant back to the Ohio River. He doubted that the administration would accept any plan that came from him direct, so he sent his proposal to his Louisiana friend, Pierre Soule, suggesting that he pass it around in Richmond wherever he thought it might have effect. He added: "I am filled with intense anxiety lest golden opportunities shall be lost—lost forever."

At one point Lee took it for granted that he himself would be sent to Georgia, and he told Jeb Stuart that the most he hoped was that he could someday come back to Virginia. He did not want to go at all, and he offered quiet but firm resistance. He could do little, he told the President, if sent west as a temporary commander; if he got the job as a permanent assignment he did not think he would get cordial co-operation, it would be necessary to find somebody to command the Army of Northern Virginia, and "I have not that confidence either in my strength or ability as would lead me of my own option to undertake the command in question."
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Lee was always most deferential when he wrote to Mr. Davis, and these mild remonstrances coming from him were the equivalent of another man's slamming his hat on the floor and stamping his feet; the idea that Lee might be sent to Georgia was abandoned, and in the middle of December Mr. Davis did what he had rebuked Longstreet for suggesting after Chickamauga: that is, he gave the job to Joe Johnston. He disliked this prickly little general as much as ever and he distrusted his fighting capacity, but the man still looked like a good one to call on in a crisis. Besides, it seemed likely that the long-suffering Army of Tennessee would not accept anybody else.

The President gave Johnston the army but he could give him nothing more. Neither he nor anyone else doubted that the price of Confederate salvation might be the defeat of Grant's army, but Johnston's army was much too weak to inflict such a defeat—Hardee had just warned that it would have to retreat if Grant made a serious advance—and how it was to be reinforced substantially was more than Mr. Davis could say. The available figures gave him no comfort whatever.

Before the battle of Chattanooga a War Department functionary tried to discover exactly how many soldiers the Confederacy had under arms in that fall of 1863. Counting every unit in existence—Lee's army and Beauregard's and Bragg's, troops in the Virginia and Carolina mountains, garrisons of coastal fortifications, men guarding the innumerable openings along the Carolina sounds and in Florida, troops in Alabama and along the Gulf Coast, and finally the faraway soldiers in Arkansas, Texas, and other lands beyond the Mississippi—he came up with a tabulation showing a total effective strength of 227,000. Forty thousand of these were in Edmund Kirby Smith's domain beyond the river, and they might as well be in the moon for all the direct use Richmond could make of them. Ten thousand more were in various partisan units that were often useful for plaguing the Yankees but could not be counted on for combat duty; and 26,000 of the remainder were cavalrymen. Thus east of the Mississippi and available for line-of-battle service Mr. Davis had slightly more than 150,000 men, infantry and artillery. Johnston already had upwards of 50,000 of these; which meant that there were in existence, outside of his own force and responsive to Richmond's orders, not quite 100,000 Confederate soldiers. Beauregard had talked hopefully of giving Johnston 40,000 reinforcements, which would seem to be a minimum if Johnston were to take the offensive, although by the December troop returns even this would have left Johnston's army smaller than Grant's. But those 40,000 would have to come out of the less-than-100,000 total, and to perform such subtraction without wrecking the Confederacy's defense elsewhere called for an extremely special kind of arithmetic. Mr. Davis did not try it.
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So Johnston got about what Bragg had left him, along with a cheerful letter from Secretary Seddon bidding him restore "the discipline, confidence, and prestige of the army," to build up its numbers and to do all he could to strengthen its ordnance and transportation departments. As soon as possible Johnston was to take the offensive; a point also emphasized by the President, who strongly hoped that "you will soon be able to commence active operations against the enemy." Johnston had no such hopes. He privately told Senator Wigfall "We cannot take the offensive," adding that in consequence "I may fairly expect, in a month or two, such denunciations as have been heaped upon my predecessor." He did his best to increase the size of his army, and the return of absentees and the recovery of sick and wounded men presently made good the losses incurred on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. In addition, Johnston tried to increase his combat strength by getting slaves to do all of the army's "extra duty" work—the jobs ordinarily done by cooks, engineer laborers, pioneers and so on. Even for an army no larger than his, he told Senator Wigfall, such details normally kept 10,000 men away from the firing line.
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Johnston was going to have to make the best of it with an inadequate force, and the same thing was true of Lee. Lee had escaped being torn away from his Army of Northern Virginia, but he had to get through the autumn with that army sadly understrength. Longstreet's corps had been detached in the hope that it would quickly return once a western victory had been won. The victory had been won but the missing corps had not returned; after sharing in the long failure to exploit the victory it had been sent off toward Knoxville to destroy Burnside, and this move had accomplished nothing better than to worry Mr. Lincoln and to alarm the East Tennessee Unionists, who feared that the Secessionist power might re-establish itself among them and inflict horrid indignities. Longstreet did make Burnside withdraw inside his fortified lines at Knoxville, but when he attacked those lines he was repulsed and not long afterward Sherman came on the scene with a powerful relieving column from Chattanooga. Longstreet had to withdraw, and now he was marooned in the mountainous border country along the Tennessee-Virginia line. He would rejoin Lee in the spring, lighter by the loss of various illusions. Meanwhile, it was necessary to realize that Tennessee probably had been lost for good.
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Lee's army had been active enough all summer and fall, but the most that could be said was that it had avoided disaster and had kept the Federals from mounting a real offensive.

When Lee crossed the Potomac on his way south from Gettysburg Meade followed, going east of the Blue Ridge and planning to strike Lee's flank when the Confederate army came through the mountain passes. Meade maneuvered skillfully, and late in July he found the opening he wanted at Manassas Gap, with almost half of Lee's army east of the Blue Ridge and the rest of it still trying to get out of the Shenandoah Valley. The opportunity was glittering, but Meade tripped over the same thing that had tripped Bragg— inability to get a subordinate to execute a good battle plan. He ordered the new commander of his III Corps, Major General William H. French, to go through the gap and attack, and a vigorous blow might very well have disposed of Ewell's corps and possibly a good part of A. P. Hill's; and this, coming on the heels of the terrible losses at Gettysburg, would almost certainly have brought the curtain down on the Army of Northern Virginia. But French skirmished weakly with one brigade when he should have struck with his entire corps, backed by all the rest of the army, which was coming up fast, and the opportunity quickly vanished. Lee brought his separated corps together safely and took up a good defensive position south of the Rapidan River. And here, halfway between the two capitals, separated by a river that had seen much campaigning and would see much more, the two armies caught their breath and waited to see what would happen next.
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As they waited, Mr. Lincoln noted an oddity in the military art and raised an interesting question: a civilian's question, awkward and somewhat innocent, but hard to answer.

Meade had asked Halleck whether the government wanted him to take the offensive; he thought the risk would be substantial and he did not think he could accomplish much, but he would move forward if Washington wanted him to. Lincoln told Halleck he had neither orders nor advice to give, but he said there was this one point that bothered him: Lee had with him, and available at Richmond, of all arms, counting extra-duty men, probably 60,000 soldiers; Meade, estimating numbers in the same way, had about 90,000, for a good three-to-two advantage. But apparently to stand on the defensive on ground of one's own choosing (as Lee would do, if Meade moved against him) gave such an advantage that three could not safely attack two, and so when the two went on the defensive the three were immobilized.

"If the enemy's sixty thousand," said the President, "are sufficient to keep our ninety thousand away from Richmond, why, by the same rule, may not forty thousand of ours keep their sixty thousand away from Washington, leaving us fifty thousand to put to some other use? Having practically come to the mere defensive, it seems to be no economy at all to employ twice as many men for that object as are needed.

With no object, certainly, to mislead myself, I can perceive no fault in this statement, unless we admit that we are not the equal of the enemy man for man. I hope you will consider it."
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By a singular chance, Mr. Lincoln wrote this letter the day the Battle of Chickamauga began. Before the week was out he provided his own answer; that is, he had Stanton and Halleck take two army corps away from Meade and send them to Tennessee.

It may be interesting to speculate on the reply he would have got if he had been able to ask his question of General Lee. Lee had no intention of going on the defensive, even though he had the two and the other man had the three; early in October he boldly marched up the Rapidan, crossed the river and swung northeast around Meade's flank, looking for a chance to use his smaller army to beat the larger one. He had done it before, and he was trying it now even though Longstreet's corps was gone. But Meade was more alert than the other Federal generals had been and he handled his army better; Lee could neither interpose between him and Washington nor compel him to stand and fight, and the one solid contact between the two armies came when Lee's advance struck incautiously at the Federal rear guard at Bristoe Station, near Broad Run, not a great way from the historic Bull Run battlefield. A. P. Hill's corps was repulsed here, with substantial loss, Meade drew his army together at Centreville, and Lee realized that a further advance would simply cause the Federals to get into the fortified lines around Washington, where it would be impossible to attack them.

In a somewhat similar situation in the fall of 1862, Lee had crossed the Potomac and invaded the North, pulling the Yankee army after him. He wanted to do the same thing now but he finally concluded that he could not, and he told Secretary Seddon why: the move would take him a long way from Richmond, "and the condition of the roads and the stage of the streams at this season of the year are so uncertain that I think it would be hazardous"; besides, his soldiers were too miserably shod and clothed for an invasion. The sublimest sight of the war, Lee said, "was the cheerfulness and alacrity exhibited by this army in the pursuit of the enemy under all the trials and privations to which it was exposed," but this sublimity should not be tried too far. In a letter to Mrs. Lee he revealed that he had ruled out a further advance entirely because of his feeling for the soldiers: "If they had been properly provided with clothes I would certainly have endeavored to have thrown them north of the Potomac. But thousands were
barefooted,
thousands with fragments of shoes, and all without overcoats, blankets or warm clothing. I could not bear to expose them to certain suffering on an uncertain issue."
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