January 19, 2007
Robert E. Lee II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:35 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes, on and of Robert E. Lee’s 200th birthday, that Lee was a superb and daring tactician, and wonders whether if Lee had accepted a command in Union army, “the Civil War might have been a lot shorter and a lot less bloody than it was.” This thought—what if Lee had fought for his country, rather than against it?—is a hardy perennial on the what-if list. Lee did have great abilities his initial opponents lacked, but how much would his decision to fight for our country have changed the outcome of the war? There is a case that such a decision would not necessarily have greatly shortened the war. The Confederacy was on the defensive, in an age in when the greatly increased effective range of rifled muskets had suddenly conferred a significant advantage on defenders, in part because the range and destructiveness of field artillery had not increased in proportion. When entrenched, inferior numbers of infantry armed with rifled muskets could often hold their ground, exacting a dreadful toll on comparably armed attackers. A fascinating chapter in a book by John Terraine, primarily known as a military historian of the First World War, compares the Civil War to the world wars of the twentieth century, argues that our Civil War was the first and necessarily attritional war of the industrial age, and observes that barring flukes, such wars were very likely to be long and bloody. The book containing that chapter is titled The Smoke and the Fire: Myths and Anti-Myths of War, 1861-1945. It has just been republished and is very much worth reading. Part of the case against Lee’s decision changing everything might go like this: The Confederacy had a number of able generals, so Lee could have been replaced, in some respects with advantages—more on this below. Raising and training the Union’s armies would have taken a lot of time, no matter who commanded that effort (and McClellan was in fact very good at building and inspiring armies). In the earlier part of the war, the loss of Richmond seems unlikely to have constituted a knockout blow, any more than the capture of Madrid or Moscow secured Spain and Russia for Napoleon, or the loss of successive capitals cost the Patriots the American Revolution. Neither would a few more defeats necessarily have broken the Confederacy’s will; cumulative losses over four years were a large part of what did that. In the latter part of the war, had Lee commanded our army at places like Cold Harbor, Petersburg, the Wilderness of Spotsylvania, it is not clear to me that he would have done any better than Grant did. Lee also had recurring flaws. While fighting on the strategic defensive, he much preferred offense, and his troops and his cause paid the price. Had he stayed out of Maryland and Pennsylvania, the Confederacy might have outlasted the political will of its enemies, so if the Confederacy had any chance, those campaigns threw it away. Lee’s two great offensives doomed what he took to be his country, and may have saved ours. In terms of tactics rather than strategy, Lee also had his flaws. He was sometimes unwilling to break off a losing attack. This happened most famously at Cemetery Ridge, but also happened at Malvern Hill, the final battle of the Peninsular Campaign. Of that attack, entirely unnecessary from the point of view of the Confederacy, one of Lee’s generals (D. H. Hill) later wrote, “It wasn't war; it was murder,” and Lee’s troops took 5,355 casualties. It is worth noting that many people who stress and in some cases overstate Lee’s gifts have a tendency to unduly deprecate Grant’s and Sherman’s abilities. Sherman did something like Malvern Hill once, at Kennesaw Mountain, and never did it again—luckily for the Republic, Lee was not such a quick study. Grant repeatedly displayed remarkable abilities; for various reasons, Grant’s iron resolve is better remembered than his daring and occasionally remarkable finesse, but the Vicksburg Campaign is a good place to look at those latter qualities. Grant’s image as nothing but a clumsy butcher is part of the myth of the Glorious Cause, and the cult of Lee is another part of that myth. The cult of Lee may owe less to his generalship than to his being taken to be the sort of man the Confederacy wanted to imagine defended it. Lee was thought to be supremely chivalrous and vastly appealing in various other ways. His chivalry can be exaggerated. According to the testimony of Wesley Norris, in 1859 Lee ordered that 2 of his 63 slaves, who had fled for their liberty and been recaptured, be flogged and have brine rubbed into their backs. One of those slaves was a woman, and flogging women is normally thought to be an imperfect mark of chivalry. Interestingly, the two slaves Lee ordered flogged thought themselves to have been freed, for Lee had inherited them under a will requiring him to do that within five years, a provision apparently intended only to allow the legal work of manumission to be done under no terrible pressure of time. Lee instead kept the slaves as long as he legally could, which does not seem to have been their former owner’s intention. Lee is widely reputed to have been opposed to slavery, but there is evidence on both sides of that question. There is also evidence on both sides of the proposition that he was a military genius. At Chancellorsville, concerning which John Steele Gordon says Lee “played Joseph Hooker like a fiddle, bluffing him into a defensive posture when he had overwhelming superiority,” Hooker in fact brilliantly outmaneuvered Lee and got 70,000 men over the Rappahannock and Rapidan with no loss of any kind. The first portion of the Chancellorsville campaign is better evidence of Hooker’s gifts than of Lee’s. However Hooker, under the influence of the catastrophe at Fredricksburg and ill-served by several incompetent subordinates, gave Lee an opportunity, one Lee brilliantly exploited, but I have never thought that Lee achieved his opportunity by success at bluffing. Hooker, in his own words, that day lost faith in Joe Hooker, and he did it pretty much unaided, rather than being outwitted. While my memory is that most commentary on the battle argues that Hooker’s fatal error was waiting to be attacked, my memory is also that Lee had committed himself to attacking superior numbers with no knowledge of Hooker’s fautly deployments. Had Hooker been better served by his subordinates, Chancellorsville might have been another battle where Lee’s habitual aggressiveness wrecked his own army. It is an oddity of what-if history that almost no counterfactuals imagine better Union decisions bringing the war to an earlier conclusion. For whatever reasons, most Civil War counterfactuals imagine the worst of outcomes, Confederate victory. Similarly, few counterfactuals imagine better Allied luck in World War II. The devil doesn’t only get all the best tunes; his causes seem to elicit the most protracted daydreams as well. If Terraine is right, of course, generalship, which matters enormously on many occasions, was not necessarily the decisive element in protracting the great industrial wars. But counterfactuals are very often invented by people who are sure that it is.
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