Lee Takes Command

Here Burke Davis, succesful biographer of Lee, Jackson, and Stuart, writes of the momentous time in Confederate history at which Lee was assigned direct command of the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee Takes Command BURKE DAVIS through the warm, noisome eveningof may 31, 1862, as Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee rode among streams of wounded from the field of Seven Pines, there took place one of the most portentous changes of command in modern military history: R. E. Lee became chief of the Army of Northern Virginia, to succeedthe wounded Joseph E. Johnston. It is typical of Lee's modest restraint that the moment went unrecorded, except for the almost casual sketch left by Davis in his memoirs. Details of the transfer are so vague as to be virtually unknown. Surely most of Lee's peers, in any age, would have spread a considerable record of this event for posterity. But Lee, out of his almost painful reticence to speak of his personal prowess, left this historic moment of his life to be reconstructed from a small set of unsatisfactory sources, even by his most thorough and devoted biographer, Douglas S. Freeman. History knows only that Davis, in a moment of rare inspiration (or perhaps sheer frustration), turned to a man of lesser military reputation to supplant the wounded Johnston. Candidly reviewed, Lee's record in the war to date must have been regarded as undistinguished. Davis knew well his heroic labors to build an army for Virginia and his trials in the effort to bolster crumbling Confederate fronts in West Virginia and South Carolina. But until this evening after the badly mishandled battle of Seven Pines, there was no evidence that the President was aware of Lee's genius. That morning, Lee had risen an almost obscure figure in the Confederate hierarchy, something less than chief of staff, something more than military secretary. Davis styled him his "military adviser"; he had been freely and, considering Lee's personality, rather humiliatingly, used as diplomatist, strategist, general trouble shooter, and military court of last resort. 377 378burke davis There was every reason to suppose that Lee might spend the war in these shadows, quietly maneuvering, as he had before First Manassas, to prepare the South for the shocks of war. Logicians, in fact, could have persuasively predicted for Lee a career without distinction. Davis had been in intimate contact with him for months and had surely weighed his military talents to his own satisfaction. As one who prided himself as an old soldier, and was in addition ruled by rather rigid habits of mind, Davis had obviously sized up Lee, and determined upon his wartime role. As in many such moments of history, accident and necessity guided the hand of Davis as he installed in command the soldier who would change the Civil War almost beyond recognition. The decision of May 31 may have begun with the air of a casual, even temporary, expedient; it grew with the passage of days. By the end of three months, so many military miracles would be traceable to this moment that another commander for the Army of Northern Virginia than Lee would be unthinkable. It is possible, in the light of subsequent events, that Davis, after months of difficult dealings with Joseph Johnston, might have replaced him with Lee in any event. That he did so after Johnston's wounding, at a moment when the young Confederacy fought with the capital under virtual siege, the enemy within sight of Richmond, is one of the central facts of the military story of the war. Johnston and Davis were not destined to work well in harness, and their increasingly troubled relations perhaps bore directly on the faltering of strategy, tactics, and field staff work in the Virginia theater. Not long after First Manassas, when Davis began to insist upon the brigading of Southern troops, state by state, and Johnston stoutly refused to do so, their contest of wills had begun. This first disagreement, which trailed over the records for an incredible time as Johnston stubbornly resisted, seemed to color all their later dealings. As a result, Johnston's every act in the retreat from the...