T
he dawn light came up behind Richmond’s imposing statehouse, spreading inexorably across the eight marble columns fronting the building. Already the streets around Capitol Square were stirring with slow-moving figures and horse-drawn wagons that clattered on the cobblestones. Dark rectangles on the faces of a hundred nearby houses glowed from within as the population roused itself to face another day at war. This one was Friday, May 15, 1863.

Thousands were soon making their way to government and industrial offices, a daily ritual necessary to administer and supply the field armies fighting for the Confederacy. Those entering the Tredegar Iron Works passed the still-smoldering ruins of the Crenshaw Mill. This neighboring five-story brick building had burst into flame at around two o’clock that morning, sending “volumes of sparks far away through the night.” Some 140 workers, men and women, now discovered that they were without jobs.

The hardship their families would suffer through this loss would be exacerbated by the price inflation then gripping the Confederate States of America, or C.S.A. By 1863 it took ten dollars to buy what one dollar had purchased just three years earlier. Nearly lost among the worried minions entering their workplaces this day was a clerk in the Confederate War Department named John Beauchamp Jones. Jones scrutinized his finances constantly, fearful and wary of what he called the “gaunt form of wretched famine,” which hung about the city like the odor of burned wood from the overnight conflagration.

Jones had been with the War Department long enough to know many important military men by sight. Today he spotted a number of such notables, among them major generals Samuel Gibbs French and James Ewell Brown (“Jeb”) Stuart and General Robert E. Lee. Lee had come to symbolize both the hopes and the grim resignation of
Richmond’s citizenry. In the first week of May he had commanded the Army of Northern Virginia as it defeated a much larger enemy force at Chancellorsville, near Fredericksburg. The details of this action had reached the city largely through Lee’s dispatches, adding in no small measure to the celebrity of the otherwise unassuming officer.

Any public commemoration of this incredible victory had been instantly muted, however, by the news that Lee’s charismatic second in command, Major General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, had been seriously wounded in the fighting. Even so, his recovery had seemed assured until pneumonia-like complications set in; on May 8, Jackson died. All of Richmond had turned out for the funeral four days later, including the ubiquitous Jones. “The grief is universal,” he noted, “and the victory involving such a loss is regarded as a calamity.” The prospects of renewed fighting had kept Lee near Fredericksburg while the capital mourned. Perhaps his knowledge of that fact colored Jones’s view of Lee this day: the War Department clerk thought the general appeared “thinner, and a little pale.”

The man on whose shoulders so much of the war now rested had been, in 1861, just another Southern former army officer in search of an appointment. His first assignments, in western Virginia and along the lower Atlantic coast, had been competently managed, if nothing more. Then, in March 1862, C.S.A. President Jefferson Davis had brought Lee to Richmond and made him his military adviser, a position with little actual authority. But fate had intervened in late May of the same year, when a massive Union army under Major General George B. McClellan bulled its way to Richmond’s gates. After General Joseph E. Johnston, then commanding the Confederate forces defending the capital, was wounded, Davis had surprised everyone by putting his military adviser in charge. Lee had immediately transformed Johnston’s defensive program into a series of costly offensives that turned back McClellan’s grand army. There had followed a sequence of hard-fought battles—Second Manassas, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville—most of which were Southern victories. Lee was now hailed as “one of the great military masters.”

Although he did not often display a sense of irony, Lee must have reflected on the paradox that his “victory” at Chancellorsville threatened him more than a defeat might have. He had won the battle with almost 16,000 out of his 72,000-man army on detached service below Richmond. In the minds of some in the government, this suggested that Lee’s
soldiers might be better employed elsewhere in the Confederacy—a speculation that would have been a pointless rhetorical exercise had there not been another military front then in desperate need of more Southern fighting men.

That place was Vicksburg, Mississippi, the fortress city representing the South’s grip on a stretch of the Mississippi River adjoining the C.S.A.’s eastern and western wings. The river port’s defenders had already repelled several attempts on the part of Federal land and naval forces to capture it. Now a fresh campaign was under way, and this time the prognosis was not good for the Confederates. On May 14, word reached Richmond that Vicksburg’s vital inland link, the city of Jackson, had been taken by Union forces under a general named Grant. “This is a dark cloud over the hopes of patriots,” John Beauchamp Jones noted. He added in his diary that Vicksburg’s loss “would be the worst blow we have yet suffered.”

Men were so urgently needed on that front that a number of government officials wondered aloud if Lee might not be able to spare some troops. Among the prominent figures demanding such reassignment was the Confederate secretary of war, James Seddon, a man consumed by inner fires. War Department clerk Jones mused that Seddon looked like a “dead man galvanized into muscular animation.” But if his body was failing, the forty-seven-year-old’s determination was firm. Even before the Chancellorsville battle, Seddon had suggested to Lee that he ought to part with “two or three brigades” that could then be combined with others to create “an encouraging re-enforcement to the Army of the West.”

Lee had not rejected Seddon’s request outright; he had simply enumerated all the things that could go wrong with such a complicated troop transfer. Then the army’s adjutant and inspector general had entered the arena on Seddon’s side, and in so doing had upped the bidding to a full division from Lee’s army. Lee had countered by proposing that he make an aggressive move into the North, thereby remedying the problem by drawing the enemy’s potential western reinforcements toward him. It almost came as a relief when the Federals launched their operation at Chancellorsville.

Just two days after the fighting ended, Lee had resumed the telegraphic exchange. He tried to turn everyone’s attention deeper to the south, where General P. G. T. Beauregard commanded Confederate forces defending the Atlantic coast from South Carolina to Florida. Arguing that the summer swamp fevers common to the coastal lowlands would prevent the Federals there from mounting any major operations, Lee suggested that Beauregard’s troops might be better deployed closer to Richmond. This in turn would free up units from Lee’s army that were assigned to the capital’s defenses, which could then be returned to him. Lee invited himself to Richmond to meet with C.S.A. officials, but before he could set out for the capital, there was another telegraphic exchange as Seddon renewed his original request.

Having already pointed out the risks of transferring troops via the South’s undependable rail system, and having hinted that units elsewhere were more disposable, Lee now prophesied disaster. Any such reduction in the size of his army, he said, would force him to relinquish the line he was holding at Fredericksburg and fall back on Richmond, thus abandoning much of northern Virginia to the enemy. War Department clerk Jones monitored this exchange and recorded its conclusion, when President Jefferson Davis intervened with the opinion that it was “just such an answer as he expected from Lee, and he approves it. Virginia will not be abandoned.”

Lee met with President Davis and Secretary Seddon throughout the afternoon of May 15. No notes have survived regarding this discussion, but we know that Lee was not by nature given to making specific promises or outlining his intentions in any detail. He would later summarize his argument by saying, “An invasion of the enemy’s country breaks up all of his preconceived plans, relieves our country of his presence, and we subsist while there on his resources.” Lee undoubtedly reiterated his claim to Major General George E. Pickett’s division, then detailed to Richmond’s defense. Seddon likely restated his concerns about the growing crisis in the West and the need to direct scarce Southern military manpower to Vicksburg.

Jefferson Davis was no pushover, despite his still being weak from a recent illness. At first, as Lee would much later relate, “Mr. Davis did not like the [prospect of the] movement northward.” The Confederate president worried about Richmond’s safety were it to lose its principal shield. But Lee expressed his belief that “by concealing his movements and managing well, he could get so far north as to threaten Washington before they could check him, & this once done he knew there was no need of further fears about their moving on Richmond.” With his army moving, Lee was confident he could “baffle and break up” any enemy schemes. Davis listened, then decided: Lee could reinforce his army for a northward advance.

The next day, Saturday, May 16, Davis called in his full cabinet to discuss the Vicksburg matter. Only Postmaster General John H. Reagan left an account of this session, which was held in the second-floor council room of Davis’s house. Reagan was from the west side of the Mississippi and understood more clearly than most the importance of holding Vicksburg. Everyone present, Reagan would later declare, “realized the grave character of the question to be considered.” The cabinet members, he recalled, “assembled early … and remained in session in the anxious discussion of that campaign until after nightfall.” To his dying day the Texan would believe that a critical decision was made during this meeting, though in fact everything important had already been decided during Lee’s May 15 conference with Davis and Seddon. The army commander was not present during the cabinet discussions; he did not have to be. War Department clerk Jones knew immediately who had won as he watched the “long column” of Pickett’s Division marching “through the city northward,” even as Reagan and his colleagues struggled for
consensus. “Gen. Lee,” Jones noted, “is now stronger than he was before the battle [of Chancellorsville].” When Lee paid a social call that evening, he seemed anything but thin or pale. One young man who saw him would never forget the “superb figure of our hero,” and judged Lee the “most noble looking mortal I had ever seen.”

It is impossible to know precisely what Lee’s thoughts may have been concerning his next operation. Many of the arguments he had used to win its approval were more opportunistic than real. It would not be unfair to suggest that he considered a range of possibilities at that moment, varying only in their probability. At worst, a march into Maryland and beyond would significantly alleviate his logistical difficulties. By taking his army into the enemy’s breadbasket, Lee could help himself to a rich larder of livestock and grains, as well as a large, ambiguous category of goods euphemistically termed “military supplies.” Drawing the point of battle away from northern Virginia would also allow Old Dominion farmers to harvest their crops free of enemy interference.

But there was another, even more important reason for Lee to move north. While a later generation of writers would tout Chancellorsville as “Lee’s greatest victory,” there is evidence that its principal architect did not see it that way. He had, in a postbattle proclamation to his men, pronounced the results a “glorious victory,” but such occasions always demanded inflated language. More likely, he would have agreed with the reporter covering the campaign for the
Richmond Enquirer
, who wrote, “I believe General Lee expected a more brilliant result.” Lee said as much when he berated one of his subordinates for failing to press the enemy at the end of the fighting: “You have again let these people get away he exclaimed. “Go after them! Damage them all you can!” He was equally candid when he reviewed the results of Chancellorsville with an aide sent by President Davis. The Confederate “loss was severe,” Lee said, “and again we had gained not an inch of ground and the enemy could not be pursued.”

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