BOOKS: Generalship, With Examples

LEE’S LIEUTENANTS—Douglas Southall Freeman—Scribner ($5).

Turn your eyes to the immoderate past,

Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising

Demons out of the earth . . .

—Allen Tate, Ode to the Confederate Dead.

Douglas Southall Freeman’s R. E. Lee (TIME, Oct. 22, 1934; Feb. 11, 1935) stands as the definitive work on that illustrious soldier. In his new book, the first of three projected volumes, Virginia’s military historian portrays in action the principal officers who preceded Lee and served under him in the Army of Northern Virginia. Product of eight years’ research, Lee’s Lieutenants is, as its author styles it, a “study in command.”

If the inscrutability of early Civil War battles can now be penetrated by anyone, Freeman has done it.

His Volume I amply demonstrates that the year of Bull Run was as nerve-racking for the South as for the North. Its greater value for U.S. readers and soldiers lies in its lucid recreation of the conditions of battle, the political and tactical situations as they were glimpsed, guessed, judged and dealt with by responsible men on horseback.

A Napoleonic penman was Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, the hero of Fort Sumter, whom President Jefferson Davis first entrusted with the defense of Richmond. “Old Bory” had a bloodhound’s eye and a theatrical, martial look. Taking command at Manassas Junction, he showed a pardonable confidence in the fighting spirit of his troops, the first and fiercest volunteers. His notions of their tactical capacity—communicated in eloquent notes to Richmond—were purely visionary.

When Beauregard posted his army along the creek called Bull Run on July 20, 1861, he had Napoleonic strokes in mind but not much sense of the terrain. General Joseph E. Johnston, his superior, just arrived from Richmond, had to assume Beauregard’s knowledge of the country since he had none himself. Beauregard worked until 4:30 a.m. on an order for attack which Freeman calls “a gloomy instance of the manner in which . . . the ignorance of a commanding officer may be as gross as that of the men and infinitely more expensive in blood and misery.”

Beauregard’s order did not reach some brigades, reached others only to paralyze them. Not waiting for the Napoleonic stroke, Federal troops crossed Bull Run by the easiest route—also the most lightly defended—and fell on Beauregard’s left. The Confederates owed their victory not to Beauregard but to the common sense of some of his brigade commanders, who heard heavy firing and decided to take their men toward it. “What seemed in retrospect a marvel of distant control by Beauregard was, in reality, the work of Colonel [Philip St. George] Cocke”—one of the richest planters in Virginia.

At the height of this doubtful battle “Old Bory” had the face to ask Johnston to retire and leave him in sole command. In the months that followed, Beauregard’s weakness for putting his vainglory on paper—and in the newspapers—made Johnston and Davis weary of him. He finally departed to Kentucky.

A touchy strategist, popular with his officers but fatally careless of administrative detail, was Joseph Eggleston Johnston, who took over the army Beauregard left. “Small, soldierly and greying, with a certain gamecock jauntiness,” Johnston was already smoldering with rage at Jefferson Davis over being placed fourth in a list of full generals. Ceremonious, bad-tempered notes passed back & forth. The Secretary of War, Judah P. Benjamin, maddened Johnston by going over his head in military matters and out-arguing him afterward. At one sore point, Johnston beseeched Benjamin to help “create the belief in the army that I am its commander.”

Johnston should have been studying maps. When McClellan’s Union army began to loom in the despondent winter of 1862 and Johnston decided to retreat from Manassas on Richmond, he shocked Davis by “declaring himself ignorant of the topography of the country in his rear.” What shocked Johnston was to find that the secretly planned retreat was known all over Richmond. After that he drove Davis wild by keeping military secrets from him.

What was worse, the Union Commander did not do what Johnston, with perfect strategic soundness, thought he was going to do. Johnston “was put in the unhappy attitude of fleeing when no man pursued.” Many stores were unnecessarily lost. Two months later, on the Peninsula between the York and James Rivers, Johnston retreated again for good strategic reasons but, it seemed, precipitately. Bitterly he wrote of one unassailed though indefensible Confederate position: “No one but McClellan could have hesitated to attack.”

Johnston seemed relieved of bedevilment when 1) Confederate batteries unexpectedly stopped Union forces moving up the James, 2) “Stonewall” Jackson whipped the Unionists in the Shenandoah. Late in May, in a countryside boggy from deluge, Johnston’s great moment came: he attacked at Seven Pines. In reporting this totally erratic action, Dowlas Freeman reproduces the strain of a day from which one Confederate general retired physically paralyzed, not from fear but from sheer confusion. Johnston’s plan as ususal was good; his orders were, as usual, not clear or explicit enough. McClellan had been beaten, but Johnston’s army got nowhere and suffered greater casualties than McClellan’s. Johnston, hit in the shoulder and chest, yielded command to Robert E. Lee.

A Dependable General, or if possible several of them, would enable Lee to carry out his careful and tactful plans. One man who had everyone’s confidence was James (“Old Pete”) Longstreet. In the retreat on the James peninsula, Longstreet had capably fought a rear-guard action for Johnston, complacently reporting: “My part in the battle was comparatively simple and easy, that of placing the troops in proper positions at proper times.” It was a rare achievement.

The secret of Longstreet’s power, says Freeman, was “his incredible nervous control.” A broad-shouldered man with cold grey-blue eyes and a thick beard, Longstreet once told another officer: “I never felt fatigue in my life.” He kept discipline among his troops and clear understandings with his subordinates. A private grief, the death of three of his children, left him a somber man and a complete soldier.

A Crazy Deacon was the only one of Lee’s generals who had shown brilliance and had won a decisive engagement. Thomas Jonathan (“Stonewall”) Jackson, 38, a mediocre instructor at Virginia Military Institute, a devout Presbyterian deacon, had been wounded in the hand at Manassas and had fought for the rest of the day with one arm upraised to stop the bleeding. Some of his men thought he was invoking the blessing of heaven. When another officer rode up to say, “General, they are beating us back,” Jackson replied: “Sir, we’ll give them the bayonet.”

Freeman’s narrative of Jackson’s first Valley Campaign is perhaps the best thing in Lee’s Lieutenants. Among his fresh details is the fact that Jackson dug out an expert cartographer and had him make good maps of the whole Blue Ridge region. He also drew up tables that would show him at a glance the distance between any two points in his territory. Other officers, unaware of Deacon Jackson’s attentive preparations, sometimes agreed with Cavalryman “Dick” Ewell that he was crazy.

Jackson’s gentle domestic manners, his low voice, soft blue eyes and intellectual forehead, his delight in theological discussion, all masked the most furious fighter of the Confederacy. If retreat was necessary, he prayed that “a kind Providence may enable us to inflict a terrible wound.” An officer who rode with him noted: “In advance, his trains were left far behind. In retreat, he would fight for a wheelbarrow.” He marched and starved his men, if necessary, without mercy.

Jackson, like Johnston, was wary of councils of war. He exasperated other officers by telling them little or nothing of his plans. His defeat of the Union General Banks, and his capture of Winchester in May, 1862, was accomplished through a long chain of decisions and actions that involved the closest kind of calculation; he probably struck Banks’s rear on the only day he could have done so. To reach the ridges south of Winchester before the Union forces could man them, he drove his men beyond exhaustion. “I am obliged to sweat them tonight,” he said, “that I may save their blood tomorrow.”

Other Confederate officers (“Jeb” Stuart, D. H. Hill, Jubal Early) had shown gallantry and what Freeman calls “the feel of action.” In 1861-62, “Old Blue Light” Jackson alone showed generalship.

Lee’s Lieutenant at Heart is Douglas Southall Freeman, the amazing editor of the Richmond News Leader. “Dr.” Freeman to Richmond, less by virtue of his youthful Ph.D. than in recognition of his Nestorian standing in the community, he knows more about the Army of Northern Virginia than any man alive and has for years lectured on his subject at the Army War College in Washington. Now 56, Freeman adheres to a famous daily schedule that would tax the nerves of “Old Pete” Longstreet.

Up at 4:30, he makes his own breakfast and gets to his office about 5:20. By 8 a.m. he has whisked through the Associated Press copy and typed out three solid columns of editorials. At 8:10 he holds an editorial conference; at 8:25 he walks downstairs, across a catwalk on the second-story roof and into the broadcasting studio of WRNL. Half of Richmond is giving ear when the Doctor goes on the air at 8:30 with his morning news and homily. The station people are awed by his ability to spin out a steady, mellifluous 15-minute newscast without notes or script; they are awed still more by his occasional frank admission: “You can take it easy today—there’s no news of any particular importance.”

Between 8:45 and 1 p.m., Editor Freeman sees visitors and conducts business. At 1 he puts on his second daily broadcast. Then he goes home, lunches and at 3 p.m. takes a nap. When he wakes up he feels that a second day is beginning—his day to study history and do his scholarly writing. Instead of using a typewriter, Biographer Freeman prints his manuscript in a microscopic hand. At 6:30 he dines with Mrs. Freeman; at 8:45 he retires.

Dr. Freeman almost never makes a night of it, but he dressed as a Confederate general to lead the Gone With the Wind ball. He was home by 9:30; he did not stay for the picture.