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

make matters worse, Johnston enjoyed the reputation of being one of the finest defensive strategists in the old army.

For the next three weeks, McClellan slowly felt his way up the peninsula, growing more and more convinced that Johnston had as many as 200,000 rebels defending Richmond (Johnston actually had only 60,000) and demanding that Lincoln send him more reinforcements, starting with McDowell’s troops, whom he wanted to move overland across the Rappahannock to join him around Richmond. By the last half of May, McClellan and the Army of the Potomac were beside the Chickahominy River, six miles from Richmond, with his right flank sitting to the northwest and expecting to be joined by McDowell. As he finally worked himself up to planning an assault on Richmond, he began feeding his army, corps by corps, across to the south side of the Chickahominy, closer to Richmond.

Unfortunately for McClellan, torrential spring rains swept away the Chickahominy bridges after only two of his five army corps had crossed the Chickahominy. On May 31, hoping to crush these two isolated corps before the river subsided, Johnston wheeled out his entire army and struck the exposed Federals at the battle of Seven Pines.49

For two days Johnston and the Confederates hammered at the two vulnerable Federal corps. The Federal generals handled their untested men well, and the Confederates drew off with the loss of more than 6,000 men, including Joe Johnston, who was severely wounded. Far from this putting spirit back into McClellan, however, the outcome of Seven Pines only operated against him. Frightened by Johnston’s unaccountable aggressiveness, McClellan cautiously slowed his advance across the Chickahominy. Far more ominous was the replacement of the wounded Johnston by an infinitely more skillful and aggressive Confederate general, Robert Edward Lee.

In Lee, the Confederacy possessed one of the purest examples of American military culture. The consummate Virginia gentleman, the son of a Revolutionary War general and grandson-in-law of George Washington, Lee had enjoyed a spotless career in the old army in Mexico and on the western plains, and had even served briefly as superintendent of West Point. Despite his faultless aristocratic bloodlines, Lee had actually spent a lifetime living down the dissipated reputation established by his dashing but improvident father, “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, who had been the commandant of George Washington’s cavalry. Chronically in debt and chronically in flight from his creditors, Light-Horse Harry abandoned his family for refuge in the West Indies and died in 1818, leaving his wife, Anne Carter Lee, and family to the tender mercies of his wife’s relatives and the open-armed community of Alexandria, Virginia.

Struggling to efface these stains on the family name, Robert Lee committed himself to the life of the army and to education at West Point. All of the Lees had a certain debonair wildness in their makeup, but Robert fought it back with a consciously cultivated aloofness and reserve that might almost have seemed arrogant had it not been wedded to a softness and gentility of manner. His four years at West Point were close to flawless—he had no behavioral demerits and was ranked second (by a fraction) in his class academically—and so he was commissioned in the army’s premier service, the Corps of Engineers.50

Behind the shield of Virginia gentlemanliness, Lee could be as aggressive as the most Napoleonic of generals. He had become one of Winfield Scott’s most trusted subordinates in Mexico. By the beginning of 1861 Lee had risen to the post of lieutenant colonel of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry, and he was promoted to full colonel by Abraham Lincoln on March 30, 1861. Old General Scott had wanted to give Lee even more: the full command of the Federal armies, which eventually went to George McClellan.

But Lee, unlike Scott, who was also a Virginian, could not tear himself away from his old family and state loyalties, especially when he owed so much of his boyhood redemption to them. He could not agree with Lincoln’s decision to “pin the States in the Union with the bayonet,” and on April 20, 1861, he resigned his commission. Lee had told Frank Blair, Lincoln’s personal emissary, that if it were up to him, he would free all the slaves in the South in order to avert civil war, but he could not “draw my sword… save in defense of my native State.” No Southerner went into rebellion with more professed reluctance. As he explained to his sister the same day, “With all my devotion to the Union, and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home.” He offered his services instead to Virginia, where he was made a major general of state volunteers; when Virginia was accepted into the Confederacy on May 7, Lee was commissioned a brigadier general in the Confederate forces, and for a year he served in a variety of capacities, especially as Jefferson Davis’s de facto chief of staff.51 With Johnston wounded, Davis would entrust the defense of Richmond to no one but Lee.

Lee had already made more than enough trouble for McClellan even before taking the field. In March Lee prevailed upon Davis to allow Thomas Jonathan Jackson, a former Virginia Military Institute professor and minor hero of the Bull Run battle, to take command of the small Confederate force in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and make a threatening feint down the Valley toward Harpers Ferry and the poorly defended Federal capital. Jackson, who had acquired the nickname “Stonewall” for his courage at Bull Run, moved menacingly toward the Potomac River, confirming all of Lincoln’s and Stanton’s fears that McClellan’s Peninsula operation was going to lay Washington open to capture. Lincoln threw three separate Federal forces of about 40,000 men after Jackson’s 16,000 “foot cavalry,” but Jackson easily eluded or trounced all three, and left all the Federal soldiers in northern Virginia tied securely in knots and unavailable to the increasingly nervous McClellan—including McDowell’s