Never Call Retreat (48 page)

This offered the South some reason for hope. If, by November, the Northern people had been made to feel that the war was too painful and discouraging to carry on any longer, they would vote Mr. Lincoln out of the White House. Then there might be an independent Confederacy. With other avenues to victory closed, the Confederacy might yet win by hanging on until the enemy got tired. A military program based simply on the necessity to stay alive through the autumn could gain what more ambitious programs had missed. The chance was slim, but the moral of what the two men had said was that it might be the only chance remaining.

As he looked ahead to the new year's activity, Lee did not at first think that the Federals would begin with a large-scale attempt to take Richmond. He had seen newspaper reports that the new Federal general-in-chief would make his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac, but he suspected the Federals of trying to conceal their real purpose. Their main offensive, he thought, might be a blow at General Johnston, with a thrust at Richmond coming later. It was necessary to make preparation on every front, but "should a movement be made against Richmond in large force, its preparation will no doubt be indicated by the withdrawal of troops from other quarters, particularly the Atlantic Coast and the West." If that happened the Confederacy could attack the weakened points, and "energy and activity on our part, with a constant readiness to seize any opportunity to strike a blow, will embarrass if not entirely thwart the enemy in concentrating his different armies, and compel him to conform his movements to our own."
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Lee did not then realize that the Federals were strong enough to take the offensive in great strength both in Virginia and in Georgia, and he did not yet conceive of a massive Federal attack all along the line. However, he was on the alert, and less than a week later he warned Richmond that there probably would be a heavy attack on his own front, with Grant present in person to direct it. If some Confederate blow could be struck in the west so as to disarrange Federal plans, all might be well; if not, Longstreet and his troops should be brought back to Virginia, either to operate in the Shenandoah or to rejoin the main army below the Rapidan. Lee still felt that if the Federals made an all-out attack on his front they would have to weaken their forces somewhere else, but as the time to begin the new campaign drew nearer he thought more and more in terms of what was going to happen in Virginia. He urged the Secretary of War to build up reserve supplies in Richmond, suggested that all of the residents of the capital whose presence there was not essential be forced to go elsewhere, and he bluntly told the President that if anything interrupted the flow of rations to the Army of Northern Virginia he might have to retreat all the way to North Carolina.
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In the middle of April he was pessimistic, and he told the War Department: "My hands are tied. If I was able to move, with the aid of Longstreet & Pickett, the enemy might be driven from the Rappahannock and be obliged to look to the safety of his own capital, instead of the assault upon us." Lee could not even draw in his own cavalry and artillery, for want of forage, although "the season has arrived when I may be attacked any day." The survival of his army apparently depended on the state of its supplies, and Lee asserted that all railroad travel should be suspended until his army's mobility had been restored.
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The War Department official to whom this gloomy note was addressed was General Braxton Bragg. Mr. Davis had removed him from command of the Army of Tennessee, but he still felt that the only thing wrong was Bragg's inability to get along with his fellow officers, and he believed that in a Richmond office this failing would not matter so much. Accordingly, he called him to his side and made him general-in-chief of Confederate armies. This title meant less than it said: Bragg was Mr. Davis' chief military adviser and little more, and as always final authority over everybody in uniform rested in the hands of the President. The anti-Davis contingent in Congress derided Bragg and denounced Mr. Davis for promoting him, but the move was sensible enough, and when Lee had problems there was at least a fellow-soldier in Richmond with whom he could discuss them.

At the end of the first week in April, Longstreet was ordered to come east and rejoin the Army of Northern Virginia. By April 22 he had his men in camp near Mechanics-burg, not far from the railroad junction town of Gordons-ville; and while the men rested there Lee came down, to talk to Longstreet and to look at the troops. Longstreet's veterans had not enjoyed their western adventure. They were proud of what had been won at Chickamauga, but after that everything had gone downhill, the whole east Tennessee expedition left a feeling of frustration, Longstreet and some of his chief lieutenants had quarreled bitterly, and when all was added together the winter had been unhappy. Now they were back in Virginia where they belonged, and it was like coming home; and they were drawn up on an open field in spring sunlight, long ranks motionless, ragged men precisely aligned . . . and then there was a bugle call, and the crash of artillery firing a salute, and Robert E. Lee rode out in front of them, brought his war-horse to a stand, took off his hat and looked at these soldiers who had come back to him. The men cheered, all of the emotions born of hard battles and bleak campaigning breaking out in the echoing cry of the Rebel yell; and a man who was there remembered, forty years later, and said that "the effect was as of a military sacrament."

A chaplain in Longstreet's corps, riding with the officers who followed the commanding general, turned to Colonel C. S. Venable, of Lee's staff, and asked: "Does it not make the general proud to see how these men love him?"

Venable shook his head.

"Not proud. It awes him."
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CHAPTERSIX

Act of Faith

1. The Last Barrier

DESIGNEDTO BE IDENTICAL, the two campaigns quickly became very different.

In Virginia it finally seemed that there was just one unending battle, measuring from the Rapidan to the Appomattox in one dimension and from May to April in another. In Georgia there were many separate battles, along with sieges and skirmishes and constant raids, tied together by prodigious marching to make at last a campaign that went all across the Confederacy. Utterly dissimilar, the two campaigns nevertheless ran parallel. They took the war to its climax and then to its end, and to this day no one is quite sure what either one cost or what the two together bought.

Grant was one sort of soldier and Sherman was another; equally important, Lee was a different sort than Johnston. Each campaign was the result of a grim collaboration between enemies, taking its shape from the man who lost quite as much as from the man who won; which is to say that Grant-plus-Lee gives one total and Sherman-plus-Johnston gives another. Four concepts of strategy were at work, and not just two.

Grant and Sherman were on the offensive, but they instinctively interpreted the offensive task in different ways. Grant always thought in terms of the opposing army, and Sherman thought geographically. If one man wanted to come to grips with the enemy's soldiers, the other wanted to possess the enemy's land, cities and farms and rivers and hills. One man would drive his foe and the other would be more likely to go around him; curiously enough, Grant saw the human beings beyond the rival army as people who would someday be his fellow citizens again, and Sherman saw them as the ultimate targets of his military wrath and would reach past the opposing army to get at them.

Lee and Johnston also saw their roles differently. Lee was offensive-minded even when he was on the defensive; he was born to make the attack, and his idea of the way to parry a blow was to strike before the blow could be delivered. Any Federal general who began a "forward to Richmond" campaign was apt to learn, before much time had passed, that his chief concern had suddenly become the defense of Washington. Given the slightest opening—a pause between attacks, a breathing spell during which his antagonist waited for supplies or reinforcements—Lee would seize the initiative. He wanted to use his army rather than protect it, and he thought about victory rather than about the fear that victory might cost more than he could afford to pay.

Johnston was more passive; in an odd way, more courtly, as if the formalities that came down from seventeenth-century warfare had not yet been eradicated from the military art. The defensive seemed to fit him. He made war like an overmatched fencer, moving rapidly to meet every thrust and shift, always conscious that his opponent was the stronger, delaying his own riposte until some of that strength had been spent. At times it seemed that he fought for points rather than to draw blood, but he was pugnacious enough; he would let his counterstroke wait until his opponent had finished his maneuver. Like Lee, Johnston had the complete affection and confidence of his soldiers, and this thought sustained him when he reflected that the administration disliked him. With mingled pride and bitterness, he told a friend this spring that "if this army thought of me & felt toward me as some of our high civil functionaries do it would be necessary for me to leave the military service, but thank heaven it is my true friend."

Richmond had been impatient all winter, urging him to take the offensive and fretting because he did not. He believed he was not nearly strong enough—when May came he had about 55,000 men, and Sherman had nearly twice that many—and he thought the administration could have reinforced him if it had tried: there were plenty of idle troops in the deep South, he said, but Richmond would not send them to him. As spring came he feared that "Grant's arrival on the Potomac will turn the eyes of our authorities too strongly in that direction to let them see in this." Doubting that the Confederacy ever had the power to invade the North successfully, he still felt that it had one advantage; its soldiers believed they were defending their homes, and so had higher morale than their foes. (One reason he wanted to delay action as long as possible was the fact that the term of service of Sherman's veteran regiments would expire in May and June. Johnston did not think many of these men would re-enlist.) He was not enthusiastic about some of his general officers, among whom jealousies and rivalries remained from the Chickamauga and Chattanooga campaigns, and he told a friend: "If I were President I'd distribute the generals of this army over the Confederacy."
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He was at least satisfied with the generals who commanded his two army corps. One was Hardee, stolid, unspectacular, and reliable, who had been given temporary command of the army after Bragg's removal but who refused to keep it because he thought the place belonged to Johnston. The other was a transfer from Lee's army, John B. Hood, one of the most famous combat commanders in all the Confederacy.

Johnston was glad to get Hood, although physically the man was almost a wreck—at thirty-two years of age—with one arm permanently disabled by a Gettysburg wound and one leg gone entirely from a wound at Chickamauga. Hood clumped about on crutches, when he rode he had to be strapped in the saddle, and the stump of his amputated thigh gave him much pain; but he remained the perfect picture of a warrior. He still had the long, tawny beard everyone recognized, and the sad drowsy eyes that had an uncanny way of lighting up when he rode into battle, and he was obviously an asset for any army. Not until much later did Johnston learn that Hood bore a watching brief for the administration. Hood kept sending confidential letters to the President, the Secretary of War, and General Bragg, and these letters steadily and methodically undercut Johnston's own reports. Hood assured Richmond that Johnston's army was in better shape than Johnston said, and had better prospects, and Mr. Davis' dark suspicion that Johnston was more defensive-minded than he needed to be got constant confirmation.
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Later on this would lead to catastrophe, but for the moment all was serene. When Joe Wheeler's cavalry sent back word on May 5 that the huge Federal host was advancing, Johnston and his army were ready.

Sherman was leading three armies: one army, to all practical purposes, broken into three operating units, but technically three separate armies. Largest was the sturdy Army of the Cumberland, under Thomas, 60,000 men, veterans of everything since Shiloh, devoted to Pap Thomas and full of self-confidence. Next came the Army of the Tennessee, once Grant's and later Sherman's, led now by a curly-haired young major general who was a particular favorite of these two soldiers, James B. McPherson; in this army were 30,000 men, with more to join up later. Finally there was the Army of the Ohio, really no more than an army corps but denominated an army for administrative reasons; it contained slightly more than 17,000 men and was commanded by John M. Schofield, who had held the prickly Missouri command until Rosecrans was sent there in the shake-up that followed Chickamauga. Altogether, Sherman had about 112,000 men present for duty, although he reported that his effective marching strength would be around 100,000. Of this total, perhaps 15,000 were cavalry.
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These men were full of bounce, and Johnston's belief that they would refuse to re-enlist was wrong. In Thomas' army alone, seventy-one regiments—more than 30,000 men in all —had signed up for another three-year hitch; a larger number than the entire Army of the Potomac could show. The proportion was about the same in the other armies. In one of McPherson's corps it was proudly reported that every regiment from Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin and nearly all of those from Illinois and Iowa had re-enlisted. These westerners thought that they were winning and they wanted to be around for the finish.
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Now Sherman was taking them down to attack Joe Johnston, his drum beats echoing those that took the far-off Army of the Potomac across the Rapidan; and this one time, at the start of the campaign, Sherman tried for a battle of annihilation and a quick ending to everything.