RATING:
Robert E. Lee. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION
Perhaps no general in any army at any time has been more universally admired than Robert E. Lee. His character commanded the devotion of his men as well as the people of the South (who, for the most part, idolized him) and won the ungrudging respect of his Union opponents. His ability to hold together the Army of Northern Virginia under conditions of crushing hardship was nearly miraculous. He possessed the topographical understanding of the brilliant engineer that he was; few commanders have so completely grasped the concept of what modern soldiers call battlespace. His approach to tactical problems was innovative and often daring, as when he deliberately divided his forces in the face of the enemy at the Second Battle of Bull Run and at Chancellorsville. His “big picture” concept of the appropriate Confederate strategy was persuasive, though ultimately unsuccessful. He believed that time was the South’s enemy and that the North had to be dealt a series of quick, aggressive offensive blows to break its will to fight and force its leaders to negotiate a peace favorable to the Confederacy. Lee was a commander of great personal courage, who also had an uncanny facility for seeing the battle from his adversary’s point of view.
Yet he was far from being a perfect general. His policy of offense, of offering battle at every opportunity, led to his sacrificing the very real advantages of fighting a defensive war on “home soil.” Even more critical was the deep flaw in his command style. Without doubt, Lee possessed compelling “command presence,” but his habit of couching in the consultative language of gentleman soldiers what should have been emphatic, direct, and absolute orders to subordinates sometimes led to a breakdown in coordination among the elements of his Army of Northern Virginia. At Gettysburg, the results of this command style were notoriously catastrophic. Lee seems often to have lacked the energy as well as the willingness to ride herd on his subordinates and to ensure the proper, prompt, and complete execution of his orders. For this, he and his army sometimes paid a heavy price.
Finally, speed and maximum aggression were the hallmarks of Lee’s strategy and tactics, and the foundation of his battlefield success. These, however, required a willingness to spend lives. Ultimately, Lee was unable to produce with this bloody prodigality the results he wanted—and the Confederacy needed—before he had bled his army white. When Ulysses S. Grant turned the Civil War into a contest of attrition, Lee and his force were doomed.
In the end, perhaps Robert E. Lee’s greatest contribution to the Civil War was the aura of nobility and honor he generated about himself. Thanks in large part to him, the Civil War definitively ended rather than petered out in the bitter “Bleeding Kansas”-style violence of a prolonged guerrilla resistance. Lee showed his men how to win battles, but, in final defeat, he also showed them how to surrender with a dignity and a humanity that contributed to the healing of the nation.
Principal Battles
PRE–CIVIL WAR
U.S.-Mexican War, 1846–1848
Capture of John Brown at Harpers Ferry, October 16–18, 1859
Civil War
By the time Robert E. Lee was born on January 19, 1807, at Stratford Hall, the Westmoreland, Virginia, plantation house of Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, his father was desperately juggling dwindling funds in a hopeless effort to satisfy his increasingly restive creditors. The hero of the American Revolution would enter debtors’ prison in 1810, when Robert was three, and the family was forced to move out of Stratford and into a tiny house in the old town of Alexandria. Two years later, when his fifth child was just five years old, on July 27, 1812, the Federalist Lee was severely injured when he came to the aid of his friend Alexander Contee Hanson, a Baltimore newspaper editor who had dared to oppose the War of 1812 and who was now under vicious attack by a Democratic-Republican mob. While struggling to recover—he never would—Lee abandoned his family, settled for a time in the West Indies beginning in 1813, then returned to the United States, taking up residence at Cumberland Island, Georgia, where he died in 1818.
The absentee father had left his family poor, and upon Robert, the youngest, increasingly fell the burden of caring for his mother through her long decline. Bereft of Stratford and all it said of Old Virginia, fortuneless, and having given up his freedom to look after his mother, Robert E. Lee nevertheless worshipped the man he knew far better as a bold figure of history than as a flesh-and-blood father. It was not so much that he idealized Light-Horse Harry’s historical memory as that he willingly suppressed the bad judgment, irresponsibility, and squalor that followed. A natural-born idealist, Robert E. Lee saw his father as the quintessential Virginian. Later, as a soldier himself, he would see Virginia as the land of his father, an ennobled place that was far more immediately his country than the United States was. For Lee, duty, honor, and country were supreme concepts, yet they were concepts seen through the narrow prism of his vision of Virginia. This would drive him to a passionate greatness as a general, it would profoundly influence the fate of the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War, and it would shape the character and destiny of one of America’s most universally and deeply revered generals.
Animated by the martial ideals exemplified by his father, Robert E. Lee enrolled at West Point in 1825 and compiled an exceptional record over the next four years. He was the first cadet to make sergeant at the end of his first year, he passed through all four years without earning a single demerit, and in the Class of 1829 he was second only to Charles Mason. Like virtually all top-performing cadets, he chose the Corps of Engineers as his branch and was duly commissioned a brevet second lieutenant in it.
His first assignment was seventeen months of supervising foundation work for Fort Pulaski on Cockspur Island, Georgia. This was followed in 1831 by work on Forts Monroe and Calhoun at the tip of the Virginia Peninsula. They were military engineering works in the grand tradition, and Fort Monroe was not unjustly dubbed the “Gibraltar of the Chesapeake.”
It was while he was stationed at Fort Monroe that he began a relationship with another paragon of Old Virginia when he courted Mary Anna Randolph Custis, daughter of George Washington Parke Custis, Martha Custis Washington’s son, whom George Washington had adopted. Mary’s father was not cheered by the prospect of his daughter marrying a landless, semi-impoverished professional soldier, but he recognized in Lee what everyone sooner or later saw in him: a nobility of vision grounded in the practical competence and exuberant imagination of an engineer. There was no getting around it. Robert E. Lee was a remarkable young man, and Mary’s father was soon won over. The couple married on June 30, 1831. They would have four daughters and three sons, and although a soldier’s life took Lee away from his family for long stretches, he proved the devoted father his own father had failed to be.
In the meantime, peace, the undoing of many young American military careers during the 1820s and 1830s, was just what Lee needed to develop as a remarkably creative engineer. He was based in the chief engineer’s office in Washington, D.C., from 1834 to 1837, but during the summer of 1835 worked on the survey of the Ohio-Michigan state line. In 1837, he was sent to St. Louis harbor to solve a problem of massive proportions as the Mississippi River inexorably moved away from the city’s levee system. Left unchecked, the consequences would be catastrophic for the economy of this key gateway. Lee devised a practical plan to redirect the river’s flow in a way that minimized the deposit of sediment, which had been driving the river from the city. This experience, along with a project to blast a navigation channel through the Des Moines Rapids of the Mississippi River at Keokuk, Iowa, taught Lee a great deal about solving big, complex problems with strategic elegance.
Promoted to captain in 1842, Lee was assigned as post engineer at Fort Hamilton, in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. His mission was to strengthen and waterproof the defensive works along Verrazano Narrows. Here Lee met Lieutenant Thomas J. Jackson—the future Stonewall Jackson, destined to serve in the Civil War as Lee’s right hand through the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863.
Lee was posted to Fort Hamilton for four years, until he was called to the service of Major General Winfield Scott in the spring of 1846 to fight in the war with Mexico. Despite his great success as an engineer, Lee identified himself first and foremost as a soldier, and, after more than two decades in the United States Army, he had yet to hear a shot fired in anger. He burned for action.
Although Captain Lee was assigned to Scott’s staff, his was hardly a desk job. Lee, along with George B. McClellan and P. G. T. Beauregard, was an engineer officer, which meant that his most important mission was topographical reconnaissance with the object of plotting out the best routes of advance and attack and identifying the most effective emplacement of artillery and fortifications. Such work was often hazardous in the extreme, requiring long-range solitary scouting rides, alone and far from the main body of troops. Throughout the march from Veracruz to Mexico City, Lee undertook the prime responsibility for reconnaissance. At the Battles of Cerro Gordo (April 18, 1847) and Chapultepec (September 12–13, 1847), he provided Scott with the intelligence he needed to make devastatingly effective flanking attacks through adverse terrain the Mexican commanders had left undefended. Promoted to brevet major after Cerro Gordo, he fought next at Contreras (August 19–20, 1847) and Churubusco (August 20, 1847), for which he was brevetted to lieutenant colonel. Slightly wounded at Chapultepec, he was subsequently brevetted to colonel.
Robert E. Lee as a captain in the Corps of Engineers at the time of the U.S.-Mexican War. FROM FRANK MOORE, ED., PORTRAIT GALLERY OF THE WAR (1865)
One of the most dramatic aspects of the U.S.-Mexican War was that it brought together in comradeship so many officers who would take up arms for the opposing sides in the Civil War. Union general-in-chief Winfield Scott, who thought Lee the “very best soldier [he] ever saw in the field,” would unsuccessfully seek him for an important Union command in the Civil War. And it was in the conflict with Mexico that Lee met his ultimate adversary, Ulysses S. Grant. Yet Lee gained more from his experience in Mexico than an acquaintance with fellow officers and a taste of combat. As an engineer charged with understanding the connections between topography and battle, he conceived his early notions of the very landscape of war. Mostly, this would prove invaluable to him in the conflict nearly two decades later; however, some military historians have speculated that he may also have received a distorted impression of the sovereign power of frontal attacks. For the U.S. Army in Mexico, such attacks invariably worked well, but they were directed against poorly trained soldiers of low morale who carried weapons charged with notoriously low-performing Mexican gunpowder. Such would not be the case in the Civil War, and while Lee was characteristically an innovative tactician on the battlefield, his resort to the grand frontal assault in “Pickett’s Charge” on day three of the Battle of Gettysburg would prove tragic on a vast scale.
Peace was a letdown for Lee, as it was for many other officers. From 1848 to 1852, he was assigned to the garrison at Fort Carroll in Baltimore Harbor with interruptions for various mapping and surveying expeditions, including one to update maps of Florida. Through President Franklin Pierce’s secretary of war, Jefferson Davis, he received an offer to assist Cuban rebels in their ongoing struggle for independence from Spain. Lee was not interested in what he considered a foreign adventure.
Nor, however, was he especially pleased with his next assignment, which he received in 1852, a coveted appointment as superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He preferred active service commanding troops, even in peacetime, to leading the academy, and he also craved an assignment closer to Arlington, the Virginia estate that had become his home after he married into the Custis family. Separation from his wife and children was hard on him, but he undertook his new mission with professional zeal, introducing major improvements in West Point’s buildings and facilities and, more important, expanding its academic program, focusing more intensely on military tactics and strategy and generally raising the level of demand placed upon cadets. His ambition was to ensure that West Point would become a center of military excellence, not just a place for well-connected young men to get an education at taxpayer expense. Lee was also hands-on with the cadets and made it his business to get to know them. In the two years he served as superintendent, Lee met many of the younger generation of officers who would play important roles in the Civil War, including the man who would lead the Army of Northern Virginia’s cavalry, J. E. B. Stuart. He also had the satisfaction of seeing his eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee, graduate during his tenure, first in the Class of 1854.
The U.S. Congress authorized the creation of four new regiments in March 1853, and in 1855, when the 2nd U.S. Cavalry was actually formed, Lee was thrilled that Secretary of War Davis assigned him as the regiment’s second in command, at the rank of brevet lieutenant colonel. (Lee had reverted to his regular army rank of captain after the U.S.-Mexican War.) He willingly left the Corps of Engineers to accept the cavalry post in what was intended as an elite unit assigned to Camp Cooper, Texas, with the mission of protecting settlers against Apache and Comanche raiders. His commanding officer was regimental colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, who would become one of the giants of the Provisional Confederate Army early in the Civil War.
Lee was forced to interrupt his western service with the 2nd Cavalry in 1857 when his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, died, leaving behind a shambles of a will and a large estate encumbered with massive debts. Taking on the burden of executor, Lee also committed himself to reforming management of the Arlington plantation and took a series of protracted leaves of absence from active duty. He was also concerned about the deteriorating health of his wife, Mary, who was becoming increasingly disabled by arthritis. Poorly paid in the military and often forced to live apart from his needy family, Lee contemplated resigning his commission. In the end, however, he could not bring himself to do so.
On October 16, 1859, John Brown, who had earned a national reputation in “Bleeding Kansas” as a ruthlessly militant abolitionist, led a party of sixteen white men and five black men in a nighttime raid on the federal arsenal and armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. To ensure that he could hold his prize, Brown took about sixty townspeople hostage, among them the great-grandnephew of George Washington. Hunkered down in an arsenal building, Brown sent two of his raiders to rally local slaves. Brown was confident that a slave army of thousands would soon rally to his command.
By daybreak of October 17, however, no such army materialized, and local residents had surrounded Brown, his raiders, and their hostages and began to exchange fire with them. By the afternoon, after two of Brown’s sons had been killed, the surviving raiders hauled their hostages to a firehouse adjacent to the armory building and holed up there.
Lee, immersed in the tangled affairs of Arlington, was the nearest available field-grade officer when he was summoned to command an ad hoc assemblage of Maryland and Virginia militiamen and a Washington-based detachment of U.S. Marines to recover control of the armory and arsenal. His second in command was Lieutenant James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart. If it was unusual to put marines under army officers, it was perhaps even stranger that Lee had not even found the time to change out of the civilian clothes he was wearing when he was ordered to Harpers Ferry.
On his arrival, he found the locals frantic to free their fellow citizens, friends, and family members. Lee, the military professional, explained to them that launching an immediate attack in what was then the failing light of the end of the day risked killing many of the hostages. He let the night pass, then, at sunup on the 18th, sent out Jeb Stuart with a flag of truce to call on Brown to surrender.
If Lee’s calm and deliberation were characteristic of the engineer, his orders to Stuart foreshadowed the wily tactician of the Civil War to come. Battles, he knew, are not won by doing what is expected. Before he sent Stuart to Brown, he instructed Stuart to wave his hat if the man refused to surrender.
As Stuart emerged from the firehouse, he held his broad-brimmed cavalry hat by its crown, then waved it in a broad arc above his head. Lee launched his militia and marines. They targeted the firehouse door, smashed it down, poured in, and instantly ran bayonets through the first two raiders they encountered. Lee had instructed them to save what hostages they could. When it was over just three minutes after it had begun, all but four townsfolk were still alive. As for Brown and his men, only four escaped death, including Brown himself, deeply gashed by a marine saber.
Judging from his official report on Harpers Ferry to Colonel Samuel Cooper, U.S. Army adjutant general, Lee did not regard Brown’s raid as a prelude to civil war, but merely as the “attempt of a fanatic or madman.” The five African Americans in Brown’s party, Lee believed, had been pressed into service against their will, “forced from their homes in this neighborhood.” After he returned to Texas, however, Lee became part of an action whose significance he could not minimize, let alone deny.
Soon after the secession of Texas on February 1, 1861, Brevet Major General David E. Twiggs, commanding the Department of Texas, surrendered—without authorization and without firing a shot—his entire command to Confederate authorities, resigned his commission (though not before he was dismissed from the U.S. Army on charges of treason), and became a general officer in the Confederacy. Lee immediately returned to Washington, where he was promoted to colonel and assigned to command the 1st Cavalry on March 28, 1861.
His colonelcy was among the first the newly inaugurated president, Abraham Lincoln, signed, having been urged to do so by U.S. Army general-in-chief Winfield Scott, who told the president that he intended to put Lee in a major army command. But when he was offered the rank of major general in the U.S. Army on April 18, 1861—at the time, it was the highest rank in the army—Lee declined. Fellow Virginian Scott was appalled. He knew that, privately, Lee had not only denounced secession but had even heaped scorn and ridicule on the very idea of a “Confederacy.” Scott may or may not have known, however, that, earlier, in response to a subordinate’s question about whether he intended to fight for the Confederacy or remain with the Union, Lee had replied both ambivalently and ambiguously, “I shall never bear arms against the Union, but it may be necessary for me to carry a musket in the defense of my native state, Virginia, in which case I shall not prove recreant to my duty,” even as he refrained from responding to an offer of a commission from Confederate authorities. Scott made a last-ditch effort to talk Lee out of defecting, but when Lee resigned on April 20, all Scott could say to him was that he had “made the greatest mistake of [his] life.”
On April 23, Lee accepted command of Virginia state forces but was soon transferred to the Provisional Army of the Confederate States as one of its first five full generals. His first field command, in western Virginia—present-day West Virginia—hardly proved auspicious. He was saddled with insubordinate militia officers and was operating among a hostile local population. On September 11, 1861, he decided to attack Cheat Mountain, high ground controlling a major turnpike and several mountain passes. Federal troops his men had captured earlier persuaded Lee that some four thousand Union soldiers held the Cheat summit, far outnumbering his own force. Actually, a mere three hundred bluecoats occupied the summit, but the disinformation was sufficient to prompt Lee to hesitate, and he thereby lost the element of surprise. Because of this, when he finally attacked, he found himself facing all-too-genuine Union reinforcements. After a two-day skirmish, Lee withdrew. Although his casualties were light, the Richmond press mocked him as “Granny Lee” and “Evacuating Lee.”
Having come up short in his maiden Civil War battle, Lee was removed from field command and assigned to organize the coastal defenses in the Carolinas and Georgia. Without a credible Confederate navy, however, the assignment was hopeless, and, once again, the press was critical. President Jefferson Davis took him on as his personal military advisor and also tasked him with overseeing the fortification of Richmond—another unglamorous job.
On June 1, 1862, Joseph E. Johnston was severely wounded at the Battle of Seven Pines. Although the press was unkind to Lee, his fellow officers were confident that he had the makings of a great commander. President Davis chose him to replace Johnston as commanding officer of the Army of Northern Virginia—a move the stricken Johnston praised in the highest possible terms.
Johnston had responded to Union general George B. McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign with his customary tactic of the strategic retreat. In sharp contrast, Lee gave fierce battle in the so-called Seven Days (June 25–July 1, 1862). Essentially, a series of attacks on the Army of the Potomac, the Seven Days Battles took a heavy toll on the Army of Northern Virginia, but they broke McClellan down in mind and spirit. Although he substantially outnumbered Lee, McClellan was always convinced that the Union had the lesser numbers, and instead of advancing toward Richmond, he steadily retreated from it. “No captain that ever lived,” the Richmond Dispatch now crowed, “could have planned or executed a better plan.” In fact, Lee’s tactics and execution were far from perfect, but his willingness to be unremittingly aggressive was precisely the element required to defeat a man like McClellan.
After driving McClellan away from Richmond, Lee continued his aggressive approach to the war by targeting Major General John Pope’s Army of Virginia while it was near Manassas—site of the First Battle of Bull Run (July 21, 1861)—isolated from the Army of the Potomac, which was withdrawing at a snail’s pace to link up with Pope. Lee possessed a keen appreciation of the dynamic nature of opportunity in combat. Give Pope time to unite with McClellan, and the resulting force would be virtually unbeatable. Act now, however, before the Army of Virginia could consolidate with the Army of the Potomac, and Pope was vulnerable to defeat in detail.
At the Second Battle of Bull Run, Lee deliberately violated one of the most basic tenets of battle tactics by dividing his army in the presence of the enemy, assigning one “wing” to Stonewall Jackson and the other to James Longstreet. Jackson went into action with his wing on August 28, and by the next day Pope was convinced that he had trapped him and that victory was within easy grasp. What he failed to understand was that Jackson held him and continued to do so as Longstreet counterattacked with his wing on August 30, catching Pope entirely by surprise. His attack simultaneously brought to bear all twenty-five thousand men of his wing and was the greatest mass assault of the Civil War. Overwhelming, the attack collapsed Pope’s left flank, driving his army into retreat and defeat that were narrowly redeemed from total rout by heroic rear-guard action.
The combination of the Seven Days and the Second Bull Run moved the battle lines in Virginia back from a position no more than a half-dozen miles outside of Richmond to just twenty miles outside of Washington. This Lee achieved in a span of three months. Such speed would prove to be the hallmark of his strategy. He believed that time was not on the side of the South because the Union possessed the resources to outlast the Confederacy in any prolonged war of attrition. Lee therefore concluded that the best strategy was to act aggressively, inflicting so much damage on Union forces that the people of the North would lose their will to fight and would demand a favorable negotiated peace. Having dealt the Union two severe blows on Southern soil, he decided next to invade the North, in Maryland, on September 5, 1862.
In one of the most incredible episodes of the war, a Union soldier discovered a detailed copy of Lee’s invasion plan, “Special Order No. 191,” which had been lost or discarded on the site of an abandoned Confederate encampment. When Major General George B. McClellan read it, he remarked gleefully, “Here is a paper with which, if I cannot whip Bobby Lee, I will be willing to go home.” Nevertheless, McClellan’s attempt to strike at both of Lee’s flanks at Antietam Creek and then attack the center with his reserves faltered in the execution, and the Battle of Antietam became a bloodbath of unprecedented volume and horror. Of 75,500 Union troops engaged, 12,401 were killed, wounded, captured, or missing. Of 38,000 Confederates, 10,316 became casualties. These figures meant that the battle was a tactical victory for Lee, but a strategic victory for McClellan, since he forced Lee to withdraw from Maryland.
Fortunately for Lee, McClellan was insufficiently aggressive to pursue his retreat. This prompted President Lincoln to relieve McClellan as commander of the Army of the Potomac and replace him with Ambrose Burnside, who, though reluctant to accept the command, was eager to strike a decisive blow once he had taken the position. His plan was to advance through Fredericksburg, Virginia, in a headlong move against Richmond. In this, speed was of the essence—yet it was speed that Burnside seemed utterly incapable of achieving. Delays, especially in throwing bridges across the Rappahannock River, gave Lee, the veteran engineer, the time he needed to create extremely strong defenses, including artillery positions, along Marye’s Heights, the high ground behind the town of Fredericksburg. By the time Burnside attacked on December 13, 1862, he was up against an enemy established in virtually impregnable positions. The outcome was catastrophic for the Army of the Potomac, which suffered 12,653 killed, wounded, captured, or missing out of some 114,000 engaged, while Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, with some 72,500 engaged, lost 5,377 killed, wounded, captured, or missing.
Defeat at Fredericksburg moved Lincoln to replace Burnside with Joseph Hooker, who worked vigorously to restore the battered Army of the Potomac both materially and in spirit, then set out to renew the advance against Richmond via a fresh attack on Lee. Instead of simply throwing the whole of his army against the formidable Fredericksburg defenses as Burnside had done, Hooker planned to send a third of his forces under John Sedgwick in a diversionary attack across the Rappahannock above Lee’s Fredericksburg entrenchments. At the same time, Hooker would lead another third in a swing up the Rappahannock so that he could descend upon Lee against his vulnerable left flank and rear. Except for about ten thousand cavalry troopers under George Stoneman, who were tasked with disrupting Lee’s lines of communication to Richmond, the rest of the army would be held in reserve at Chancellorsville, prepared to reinforce either Sedgwick or Hooker as needed.
It was a good plan, but Lee was a great general. He soon grasped Hooker’s intentions. Lee dispatched cavalry under Jeb Stuart to take control of the roads in and out of Chancellorsville. This prevented Hooker from sending out his own cavalry patrols, thereby depriving him of vital reconnaissance. Thrown into blind confusion, Hooker set up defenses at Chancellorsville instead of advancing to the battlefield he had selected some twelve miles east of town. Thus Lee had forced him to relinquish the initiative and play by his rules.
After sending Jubal Early with some ten thousand men to delay the Union troops at Fredericksburg, Lee led the rest of his army against Hooker’s main position at Chancellorsville. Much as he had done against Pope at the Second Battle of Bull Run, Lee boldly divided his army. He allocated twenty-six thousand men to Stonewall Jackson to make a surprise attack against Hooker’s flank. Lee would use seventeen thousand men to attack against Hooker’s front while Early employed the rest of the troops to continue to hold the Union forces at Fredericksburg.
Two hours before dusk on May 2—an unusual time for an attack—Jackson hit Hooker’s right flank so unexpectedly that one Union soldier likened it to “a clap of thunderstorm from a cloudless sky.” The blow routed one entire corps and knocked Hooker’s main force out of its prepared defensive positions. By May 4, the Army of the Potomac, twice the size of the Army of Northern Virginia, was in full retreat.
Of nearly 134,000 men engaged, Hooker suffered 17,197 killed, wounded, captured, or missing. Lee fielded almost 61,000 men, losing 13,303 killed, wounded, captured, or missing. Among the fallen was “Stonewall” Jackson, mortally wounded by friendly fire. The Union would recover from its losses, terrible as they were, but the Confederacy could never replace all that it had lost, especially Jackson.
Costly as it was, Lee’s victory at Chancellorsville heartened Richmond, but Davis’s top advisors, concerned about the deteriorating situation in the war’s Western Theater, wanted to draw resources from Lee to be used to hold Vicksburg against Grant’s siege. Lee persuaded Davis to keep the focus on the Eastern Theater. He proposed another invasion of the North, again designed to sap the Union’s will to continue the fight. By invading Pennsylvania this time, Lee intended to achieve three objectives. First, he would plunder provisions from the fertile farmlands. Second, he intended to demonstrate Southern military might, which would not only erode Northern morale but could also win allies in France and England. Third, he wanted to open up an avenue of attack against Washington. Achieving all of these objectives, Lee believed, would influence the elections that were coming in November 1864, perhaps costing Lincoln reelection and ushering into the White House a Democratic candidate far more likely to negotiate an immediate end to the war with terms favorable to the Confederacy.
The Army of the Potomac that Lee would face at the point of encounter, a Pennsylvania crossroads town called Gettysburg, was now under the command of Major General George Gordon Meade, a conventional but competent commander whom Lee respected far more than he had McClellan, Pope, Burnside, or Hooker. As the opposing armies maneuvered prior to battle, they knew little or nothing of one another’s whereabouts. Jeb Stuart was leading the cavalry in a roundabout raid that accomplished little and deprived Lee of critically important intelligence precisely when he needed it most. Nevertheless, at first contact on July 1, 1863, the Confederates had the advantage of numbers and carried the day, forcing the elements of the Army of the Potomac present in Gettysburg to give up the town. Lee’s subordinate, General Richard Stoddert Ewell, was insufficiently aggressive and yielded important high-ground positions at Cemetery Hill and Cemetery Ridge. Possession of these would prove to be the key to Union victory.
Day two of the battle, July 2, saw intense combat that failed to dislodge the Union from its high-ground positions and that bought time for the arrival of the main part of the Army of the Potomac. Lee, however, was persuaded that victory could still be achieved by an overwhelming attack against what must surely be an exhausted enemy. Against the earnest counsel of his chief lieutenant, James Longstreet, Lee mounted on July 3 the twelve-thousand-man “Pickett’s Charge” in a frontal assault against the Union high-ground positions and suffered a defeat comparable to what he had dealt Burnside at Fredericksburg.
In the end, casualties from the three-day battle were the highest in the war on both sides. Of 93,921 engaged, the Union lost 23,055 killed, wounded, captured, or missing. Lee, who fielded 71,699 men, lost 23,231 killed, wounded, captured, or missing. Had Meade made the difficult decision to pursue Lee after the collapse of Pickett’s Charge, he might have substantially wiped out the Army of Northern Virginia before it had withdrawn below the Virginia border. But he did not, and Lee escaped with his army much reduced but still intact.
That Lee managed to hold the army together is a powerful testament to his command presence. Yet his defeat at Gettysburg exposed two weaknesses in even this extraordinary commander. The most glaring was the tragic lapse in judgment that moved him to order Pickett’s Charge in the first place. As Longstreet and others saw, it had virtually no prospect of success. The product of a strange spasm of unrealistic optimism, Pickett’s Charge was a suicide mission. But even before this, Gettysburg threw into relief the danger inherent in Lee’s style of command. He did not so much issue orders to key subordinates as he made gentlemanly requests of them. In the case of Stuart and Ewell, Lee’s choice to avoid absolute and urgent commands invited fatal consequences: Stuart’s absence from battle at a critical time and Ewell’s failure to secure terrain that the engineer Lee must have understood was essential to victory.
Robert E. Lee accepted full responsibility for the defeat at Gettysburg and tendered his resignation, which Jefferson Davis refused to accept.
Lee reluctantly adopted a defensive strategy aimed at preventing Ulysses S. Grant, now the Union’s general-in-chief, from capturing Richmond. The Union effort to do just this was the Overland Campaign, which was conducted by Grant and Meade in May and June 1864 and included major battles at the Wilderness (May 5–7, 1864), Spotsylvania Court House (May 8–21) and Cold Harbor (May 31–June 12). In each of these, Lee dealt Grant a tactical defeat, inflicting on the Union more casualties than Grant inflicted on him. Yet, as both Grant and Lee well knew, the Union could make up its losses, while the Confederacy, short on manpower, short on supplies, short on matériel, short on everything needful, could not. What is more, unlike ordinary commanders, who retreated in defeat, Grant merely sidestepped Lee after each blow and advanced farther south, inexorably drawing closer to Richmond.
Late in the spring of 1864, Grant suddenly shifted his advance from Richmond to Petersburg, the crucial rail link that supplied Richmond. The inept leadership of Union general William F. “Baldy” Smith cost him a very real opportunity to take Petersburg before it was reinforced and, once that opportunity had passed, Lee did not let it return. Drawing on all his engineering skill, he improved the already elaborate system of trenches and other works that defended Petersburg and conducted a fierce campaign of static trench warfare that anticipated World War I’s Western Front by a half-century.
Lee sent Jubal A. Early through the Shenandoah Valley to raid Washington, D.C., hoping that this would force Grant to abandon the Siege of Petersburg to defend the capital. Instead, Grant sent Philip Sheridan into the Shenandoah Valley to counter Early, and thus the siege continued unabated, steadily grinding away at the poorly supplied Army of Northern Virginia.
On January 31, 1865, Jefferson Davis named Lee general-in-chief of the Confederate armies—but there was now precious little left to command. All Lee could do was focus on leading his Army of Northern Virginia in a desperate breakout from the Petersburg entrenchments at the end of March. He knew that giving up Petersburg meant the loss of Richmond, but he also believed that if he could keep his greatly reduced army intact and find a way to link it up with Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee in the Carolinas, the fight could go on, and there would be a chance to achieve something better than unconditional surrender.
Lee on his beloved horse Traveller, shortly after the war. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
But the effort was hopeless. From one battle to another—the most important were at Five Forks (April 1) and Sayler’s Creek (April 6)—Lee led his ever-dwindling army in retreat, finally falling back upon Appomattox Court House on April 9, the day he sent to Grant for surrender terms.
The circumstances of the surrender are narrated in Chapter 18 of this book. By this time, Lee’s chief concern was to prevent starvation among those who had survived battle and to obtain some guarantee that the war would indeed end and the national healing begin. The terms he drew up with Grant allowed his army, having laid down its arms, to go home, “not to be disturbed by United States authority so long as they observe their paroles.” To ensure that this promised generosity would actually be practiced, Lee steadfastly resisted the call from some of his subordinates to continue the war as guerrillas. That no guerrilla or insurgent phase of combat began was not only exceptional in a civil war, it was due in no small measure to Lee’s still-commanding influence. As great a general as he was in battle, his most important achievement may well have been the example he set in surrender after battle. Hardly abject, his capitulation was dignified, inviting rather than begging for the generosity of the victors even as it renounced the bitterness and hunger for vengeance that so often accompanies defeat.
Robert E. Lee. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION
The war had aged Lee prodigiously, and he looked far older than his fifty-eight years in 1865. He accepted the presidency of little Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, in October 1865 and transformed this obscure Southern institution into a school that boasted a national identity. (After Lee’s death, it was renamed Washington and Lee College.) He remained at the helm of the college until his death on October 12, 1870, from the pneumonia that had followed a stroke suffered two weeks earlier. No general, Northern or Southern, is more universally revered, although a few have both merited and received higher praise as tacticians and strategists.