Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

informed Hooker that his corps and division commanders were already muttering loudly behind the general’s back. Not that Lincoln intended to do anything about it. The grim news from Chancellorsville crushed Lincoln. “One newly risen from the dead could not have looked more ghostlike,” wrote the correspondent Noah Brooks. Lincoln vetoed a proposal for a new crossing of the Rappahannock that Hooker telegraphed to him on May 13, and the following month, seeing the handwriting on the wall, the exasperated Hooker resigned.20

By this time a certain paranoia had begun to set in among the officers of the Army of the Potomac: could the Army of Northern Virginia ever be beaten? By the summer of 1863, it seemed not. “Everywhere but here success crowns our arms,” complained Theodore Gates. “The Army of the Potomac which has been petted & lauded ad nauseam & drilled & dressed more and better than any other in the service has accomplished absolutely nothing. … So our Generals rise & fall one after another.”21 Even the Army of Northern Virginia was becoming convinced of its own invincibility. George Henry Mills of the 16th North Carolina went cheerfully into camp with his regiment after Chancellorsville, “where we put in the time drilling on the beautiful fields of the Rappahannock and waiting for Halleck to put up another General for us to whip.”22

The magnetic pole of that confidence, beyond any question, was the figure of Lee himself, and by the summer of 1863, Lee enjoyed a degree of adulation from his own army that few generals have ever seen. Confederate propagandist Edwin De Leon met Lee briefly in Richmond in 1862 and was struck by the “stately figure” who “induced one who passed by to turn and look again.” At Chancellorsville, Lt. Francis Hillyer of the 3rd Georgia saw Confederate “troops opened to the right and the left” around Lee and his staff, “and as the old Hero passed through, the line greeted him with tremendous cheers.”23 Wesley Lewis Battle of the 37th North Carolina watched Lee return the salute of his regiment at a review on May 29, 1863, and Lt. Battle’s reaction surprised even himself:

After the review was over & we were marching back to Camp, Gen. A. P. Hill rode up to Col. Barbour & told him to make his Regt. give three cheers for Gen. Lee. It is impossible for me to describe the emotions of my heart as the old silver-headed hero acknowledged the salute by taking off his hat, thereby exposing the most noble countenance I ever beheld. I felt proud that the Southern Confederacy could boast of such a man. In fact I was almost too proud for the occasion, for I could not open my mouth to give vent to the emotions that were struggling within.24

Actually, Lee’s success as a commander was due to more than just the inspiration he generated. The first important factor in that success was clearly his adroit choice and management of his subordinate officers. Lee succeeded in gathering around him a remarkable collection of military talent, especially “Stonewall” Jackson and James Longstreet, and he communicated with them on an almost intuitive level. With officers such as this on hand, it became Lee’s style only to give general shape to plans for a campaign or battle and to leave the actual execution to his subordinates, confident that they understood his intentions so perfectly that on-the-spot decision making could be left entirely to their own discretion. He told one of his corps commanders, “I only wish you therefore to keep me advised of your movements that I may shape mine accordingly, and not to feel trammeled in your operations, other than is required by the general plan of operations.” “I think and work with all my powers to bring my troops to the right place at the right time; then I have done my duty,” Lee explained to the Prussian observer Justus Scheibert. “My supervision during the battle would do more harm than good. I would be unfortunate if I could not rely upon my division and brigade commanders.”25

It was just as well that he could, for few of Lee’s senior officers—Jackson, Hill, Longstreet, Richard Ewell—showed much capacity to get along with each other. Jackson and Hill in particular carried on a spiteful and venomous vendetta against each other, culminating in 1863, when Jackson attempted to have Hill cashiered. Lee alone seemed exempt from the friction of the talented and prickly personalities in the upper command levels of the Army of Northern Virginia, partly because of his own personal reticence and partly because Lee could rely on his immaculate prewar service record and his membership in one of the preeminent families in Southern society to quell the flood of argument around him. For Lee, unlike his senior officers, was the only major representative of the planter aristocracy in the top hierarchy of the Army. “Stonewall” Jackson was an orphan, raised in the yeoman farmer counties of western Virginia, and most observers were struck by how much he looked like a farmer rather than a general. Captain William Seymour of the Louisiana Tiger battalion noticed that Jackson regularly wore nothing more impressive than “an old rusty, sunburnt grey coat and a faded blue cap of a peculiar pattern, the top of which fell forward over his eyes.” From his appearance, wrote George Henry Mills, “no one would have suspected that he was more than a Corporal in a cavalry company.”26

James Longstreet, another son of yeoman farmers, also lost his father at an early age and labored under the added disadvantage (in this army) of having no Virginia connections (born in South Carolina, Longstreet had grown up in Georgia under the tutelage of his slave-owning uncle, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet). Richard Ewell, a pop-eyed eccentric who lisped vulgarities and profanity, was the son of an alcoholic physician from a once-prosperous Virginia family. Only Ambrose Powell Hill’s family came close to conferring any kind of recognizable social status on any of