Lee's Lieutenants: A Study in Command: Volume Iii

WITH this eagerly awaited volume, Dr. Freeman completes his great trilogy. In Volume I, “Manassas to Malvern Hill,” published in 1942, the author set so high a standard that one felt it could hardly be sustained. Indeed, to this reviewer, the Second Volume, “Cedar MOUNTAIN to Chancellorsville,” published the following year, seemed slightly less powerful and incisive than its predecessor. That impression may have been due to the fact that the surprise, the novelty of his presentation and approach, was missing. However, the Third Volume, “Gettysburg to Appomattox,” the present one, resolves all doubts. Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command is a truly magnificent work. There are no more close and captious critics than the members of that freemasonry which call themselves students of the Civil War.” Yet I believe very few of them can read these volumes and lay them down at the last without saying, “Well done, oh, well done!”

Where the usual historian of the War Between the States has treated his stupendous material primarily as a series of events. Dr. Freeman, while maintaining a logical historical structure, has been concerned primarily with men in war: what war did to them, how they rose to the supreme test of battle, how they met the responsibility of command. The terrific drama rolls on to the inevitable end, but its tragedy and glory are not only in the event, but in the development, in the lives and deaths of its actors, the dramatis personœ.

What men they were! “Stonewall” Jackson and Longstreet; “Jeb” Stuart and Wade Hampton; Gordon, “the prettiest thing you ever did see on a field of fight ; little “Billy” Mahone, Fitzhugh Lee, Pelham and the two Pegrams, boys in years but proved commanders in battle; “Jube” Early, Ewell, the two Hills, Ramseur, Dorsey Pender, and Rodes — even in Northern ears their names ring like bells. The author asks, “Were ever men more consistently themselves?” So varied and contrasted, such marked originals, they stand like islands of soldierly integrity. “ Devotion and that same quality of individualism are all they had in common.”

John Buchan, reading as an undergraduate at Oxford, “discovered” the American Civil War. “Then, he wrote shortly before his death, — and I can quote only approximately, from memory, — “I felt for the first time that I was dealing with men whom I could wholeheartedly admire.” They were not all great, but there were elements of greatness in most of them. Longstreet, as Dr. Freeman says, may have sulked at Gettysburg. He had a fine strategic plan and Lee would do no more than listen to him politely. Ewell, after a brilliant march to that battle and a sure, swift attack, suddenly lost his power of decision and let opportunity pass by. Even “Stonewall” Jackson, in the Peninsula Campaign, failed inexplicably when needed. The career of Jubal Early, “that strange, bitter, and devoted man,” ended in frustration and defeat. The failures were astonishingly few, and proved only the humanity of their successes.

Of those general officers of the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee’s Lieutenants, who met the test of war, Dr. Freeman finds only two or three who had not previously had professional military training. Wade Hampton, John B. Gordon, and perhaps Kershaw, were civilians who rose to high command through sheer inherent soldierly merit. All the others had been trained at West Point, the Virginia Military Institute, the South Carolina Military Academy, or other military colleges. Civilians often developed into competent colonels and sometimes brigadiers, but almost never held higher rank in fighting command.

Professional training alone, however, was not enough. “The Battle,” as we say nowadays, “was the Pay-off.” Not one battle, but a campaign. “Some of the men most applauded for their conduct in the First Battle of Manassas disappointed the South later. Scarcely any officers who earned a good name during the Peninsula Campaign failed to sustain it.” General officers in that war were in the field, exposed to danger and sudden death, surrounded by the confusion, the noise and “fog” of battle. Their testing was one of character as well as training. It could not have been more searching or more rigorous.

Their mortality, their attrition, were tremendous. Between May 4 and June 3, 1864, 37 per cent of the general officers of Lee’s Army were put out of combat, for the most part killed or seriously wounded. The Army of Northern Virginia consumed its leaders. There was no reservoir of military talent left to supply trained and competent brigadiers and major generals. Toward the end, the troops, worn down by hardship, developed an alarming tendency to desert. Their amazing morale, their spirit, while never broken, were insidiously weakened. More and more it became necessary for general officers to expose themselves by leading their weary men against ever greater odds; wherefore they died in ever increasing ratio. On the retreat to Appomattox only the skeleton of command remained.

In tracing the careers and appraising the qualities of these men, Dr. Freeman writes with careful fidelity, with great sympathy and understanding, and with impartial judgment. He has his favorites — as who has not?

— but he is eminently fair. There is a manly and robust quality in his standards of behavior and performance, but if he abhors incompetence, weakness, or cowardice, he never dwells on their display, there is too much to praise, too many whom one can “ wholeheartedly admire.”

Obviously the author of R. E. Lee and Lee’s Lieutenants is more concerned with the great central figure of the Commander in Chief than with any — or all of his subordinates. It would have seemed impossible to add anything to Lee’s already superb stature; yet this “Study in Command,” by its revelation of difficulties overcome, of personal relations with all sorts of men, will throw, for most of us, new light on that great American.

To heap the measure, Dr. Freeman brings from unpublished manuscripts some new material which is of considerable value. There is, it seems to me, one omission in Dr. Freeman’s estimate of Lee — which I mention with some hesitation. Perhaps the greatest captain of them all said armies travel on their stomachs, Too often the Army of Northern Virginia traveled on an empty stomach and with unshod feet. At times it faced downright starvation. I have never read an adequate excuse for this condition. Dr. Freeman mentions “the notorious incapacity of the Commissary” as though such ineptitude were a normal fact of military life.

With all respect for General Lee’s meticulous adherence to channeled authority, I cannot believe that he was not ultimately responsible for the supply of his army with food and fodder and horses and clothing. Surely — at least during the first three years of the war the South could supply these prime necessities. If they did not reach troops, it must have been due to incompetence or worse. Competent men were certainly available. Why were they not used? Few students of Lee’s career have answered that question. Dr. Freeman does not even ask it.

After closing this book one recalls the noble words of Cardinal Mercier at the funeral of the heroic Belgian girl, Gabrielle Petit, executed in 1916: “ De telles vies apprennent à bien mourir, et de telles morts a bien vivre.” Scribner, $5.00.

RICHARD ELY DANIELSON