Becoming Confederates

Paths to a New National Loyalty

Gary Gallagher, Sarah Gardner

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Print ISBN: 9780820345406, 9780820344966
• eBook ISBN: 9780820344973
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

In Becoming Confederates, Gary W. Gallagher explores loyalty in the era of the Civil War, focusing on Robert E. Lee, Stephen Dodson Ramseur, and Jubal A. Early—three prominent officers in the Army of Northern Virginia who became ardent Confederate nationalists. Loyalty was tested and proved in many ways leading up to and during the war. Looking at levels of allegiance to their native state, to the slaveholding South, to the United States, and to the Confederacy, Gallagher shows how these men represent responses to the mid-nineteenth-century crisis.

Lee traditionally has been presented as a reluctant convert to the Confederacy whose most powerful identification was with his home state of Virginia—an interpretation at odds with his far more complex range of loyalties. Ramseur, the youngest of the three, eagerly embraced a Confederate identity, highlighting generational differences in the equation of loyalty. Early combined elements of Lee's and Ramseur's reactions—a Unionist who grudgingly accepted Virginia's departure from the United States but later came to personify defiant Confederate nationalism.

The paths of these men toward Confederate loyalty help delineate important contours of American history. Gallagher shows that Americans juggled multiple, often conflicting, loyalties and that white southern identity was preoccupied with racial control transcending politics and class. Indeed, understanding these men's perspectives makes it difficult to argue that the Confederacy should not be deemed a nation. Perhaps most important, their experiences help us understand why Confederates waged a prodigiously bloody war and the manner in which they dealt with defeat.

CHAPTER ONE
Conduct Must Conform to the New Order of Things

R. E. Lee and the Question of Loyalty

Robert E. Lee should not be understood as a figure defined primarily by his Virginia identity. As with almost all his fellow American citizens, he manifested a range of loyalties during the late antebellum and wartime years. Without question devoted to his home state, where his family had loomed large in politics and social position since the colonial era, he also possessed deep attachments to the United States, to the white slaveholding South, and to the Confederacy—levels of loyalty that became more prominent, receded, or intertwined at various points. Lee’s commitment to the Confederate nation dominated his actions and thinking during the most famous and important period of his life.

A letter from Lee to former Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard in October 1865 provides an excellent starting point to examine his conception of loyalty. Just six months after he surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox, Lee explained why he had requested a pardon from President Andrew Johnson. “True patriotism sometimes requires of men to act exactly contrary, at one period, to that which it does at another,” stated Lee, “and the motive which impels them—the desire to do right—is precisely the same. The circumstances which govern their actions change; and their conduct must conform to the new order of things.” As so often was the case, Lee looked to his primary hero, George Washington, as an example: “At one time he fought against the French under Braddock, in the service of the King of Great Britain; at another, he fought with the French at Yorktown, under the orders of the Continental Congress of America, against him.”¹ Although he did not say so explicitly, Lee’s “desire to do right” surely stemmed from his understanding of duty and honor. That understanding placed him in the uniforms of the United States, the state of Virginia, and the Confederacy within a period of a few weeks in 1861.

Lee’s complex loyalties too often get lost in both scholarly and popular assessments. Few historical figures are as closely associated with their native state. His decision to resign from the U.S. Army and cast his lot with Virginia has inspired intensive discussion. The issue typically is framed in binary terms: Was he, above all, a loyal Virginian or an American? Charles Francis Adams Jr. stands among a large group of authors and other commentators who, over the past century and a half, have stressed Lee’s identity as a Virginian. A Union veteran of the Army of the Potomac whose ancestors had labored alongside Lee’s in forging the nation, Adams addressed the subject in a lecture titled “Shall Cromwell have a Statue?” Speaking to the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity at the University of Chicago in 1902, Adams presented Lee as a man firmly moored to the Old Dominion. “Of him it might, and in justice must, be said,” averred Adams, “that he was more than of the essence, he was of the very quintessence of Virginia. In his case, the roots and fibres struck down and spread wide in the soil, making him of it a part.” Five years later, speaking at Washington and Lee University, Adams made his point even more strongly: “[T]he child’s education begins about two hundred and fifty years before it is born; and it is quite impossible to separate any man—least of all, perhaps, a full-blooded Virginian—from his prenatal traditions and living environment. … Robert E. Lee was the embodiment of those conditions, the creature of that environment,—a Virginian of Virginians.”²

The most influential writer on the topic of Lee’s Virginia identity has been Douglas Southall Freeman, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning R. E. Lee: A Biography remains by far the fullest reckoning of its subject’s life. A proud Virginian himself, Freeman described Lee’s decision to resign from the U.S. Army in a chapter titled “The Answer He Was Born to Make.” “The rapid approach of war,” wrote Freeman, “had quickly and inexorably revealed which were the deepest loyalties of his soul.” Anyone seeking to understand Lee, believed the biographer, need know only that Virginia always remained paramount in his thinking. Freeman reproduced the entire text of Lee’s letter to General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, dated April 20, 1861, that announced his resignation and included one of the most frequently quoted sentences Lee ever penned or spoke: “Save in the defense of my native State, I never desire again to draw my sword.”³

This idea that Lee’s Virginia identity, as displayed during the secession crisis, holds the key to understanding his life and career retains great vitality. A few examples will illustrate this phenomenon. Terry L. Jones’s The American Civil War, a massive volume published in 2010, observes that “[a]lthough he loved the Union and opposed secession, Lee’s greatest loyalty was to Virginia.” David Goldfield’s America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation, which appeared a year after Jones’s book, takes the same tack. “His fealty to his native state of Virginia,” writes Goldfield, “superseded his loyalty to the Union.” The most widely read single volume on the war, James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, similarly describes Lee’s decision to leave federal service after Virginia’s secession as “foreordained by birth and blood.” A literature critical of Lee’s generalship that developed between the 1970s and the 1990s likewise stressed the importance of Virginia. Thomas L. Connelly, prominent among those who questioned Lee’s contributions to the Confederate military effort, portrayed a man unable to look past the borders of his home state and thus blind to the conflict’s larger strategic landscape. “His concept of the war effort was almost totally identified with Virginia,” claims Connelly, “and he felt that other theaters were secondary to the eastern front.”⁴

Lee the parochial Virginian also appears in the realm of popular culture. Two films directed by Ron Maxwell include scenes that highlight the importance of Virginia to Lee’s actions and attitudes. In Gettysburg, an adaptation, released in 1993, of Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels, Lee and his lieutenant James Longstreet discuss their loyalties on the morning of July 2, 1863. Longstreet remarks that his lie with home state and family, a sentiment with which Lee concurs. Neither manifests a significant attachment to the Confederate nation. In Gods and Generals, which appeared a decade after Gettysburg, Lee makes the same point in a scene just prior to the battle of Fredericksburg. “There is something that these Yankees do not understand, will never understand,” comments Lee while gazing across the Rappahannock River toward Ferry Farm, where George Washington had lived. “You see these rivers and valleys and streams, fields, even towns?” he asks with rising emotion. “They are just markings on a map to those people in the War Office in Washington,” but for Lee and Confederates they are birthplaces, burial grounds, and battlefields where their ancestors fought: “They are the incarnation of all our memories and all that we are, all that we are.” Director Maxwell explained his interpretation of Lee, as well as of Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, succinctly: “Virginia was their home. They would fight for their home.”⁵

Although it illuminates only part of the whole story, Lee’s loyalty to Virginia certainly predominated during the momentous spring of 1861. It is useful to chronicle, in abbreviated fashion, his road to resignation from the U.S. Army. Stationed in Texas in early 1861, Lt. Col. Lee watched the Union he had served for more than thirty years drift toward disaster. The election of Abraham Lincoln had triggered South Carolina’s secession on December 20, 1860. In rapid order, six other states of the Deep South followed suit, including Texas, which departed from the Union on February 1. Shortly after Texas seceded, Lee received orders from Brig. Gen. David Twiggs, who had replaced him in December as head of the Department of Texas, to report to Winfield Scott in Washington. After a sad parting with friends in San Antonio, he began the long journey home, reaching Arlington on March 1.⁶

The national crisis deepened soon after Lee’s return to Virginia. Jefferson Davis headed a new Confederate government in Montgomery, Alabama, and tensions escalated regarding the fate of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. In early March, Lee met privately for several hours with Gen. Scott, an interview during which the senior commander likely urged his former staff officer to remain in the U.S. Army. Lee’s promotion to colonel of the First U.S. Cavalry Regiment followed on March 16. In the meantime, Confederate secretary of war Leroy Pope Walker offered Lee a brigadier general’s commission in the Confederate army. Walker’s letter, dated March 15, reached Lee after word of the promotion to head the First Cavalry. Lee apparently did not respond to Walker’s letter, but on March 30 he accepted the colonelcy and assignment to command the First Cavalry.⁷

The final storm broke in mid-April. Confederates fired on Fort Sumter on the twelfth, the federal garrison formally capitulated on the fourteenth, and Lincoln issued a call on the fifteenth for seventy-five thousand volunteers to suppress the rebellion. On April 17, Lee received requests to meet separately with Francis Preston Blair Sr., the patriarch of a famous Democratic family well known to Lee, and Winfield Scott. The meetings took place on the morning of the eighteenth. Empowered by Lincoln to “ascertain Lee’s intentions and feelings” and by Secretary of War Simon Cameron to make an offer to the Virginian, Blair asked Lee to assume command of the army being raised to put down the rebellion. Among several arguments he deployed, Blair said Scott was too old to take the field and observed that the people of the United States looked to Lee as a “representative of the Washington family”—an allusion to Lee’s marriage to Mary Anna Randolph Custis, the daughter of George Washington’s step-grandson. Lee, who thought Blair very “wily and keen,” declined the offer and proceeded immediately to Scott’s office, where he recounted his conversation with Blair and reiterated that he would not accept the proffered command. Tradition has it that Scott, a fellow Virginian, replied, “Lee, you have made the greatest mistake of your life; but I feared it would be so.”⁸

Powerful emotions must have pulled at Lee as he pondered his future that evening and the next day. Word of Virginia’s secession appeared in local newspapers on April 19, and in the early morning hours of April 20 he composed a one-sentence letter of resignation to Cameron. Later that day Lee wrote a much longer letter to Gen. Scott, the penultimate sentence of which contained the already quoted statement with regard to raising his sword only in defense of Virginia.⁹

The War Department took five days to process Lee’s resignation, which became official on April 25. By then he had received an offer from Governor John Letcher to take command of all Virginia’s military forces. The fifty-four-year-old Lee traveled to Richmond on April 22, checked into the Spotswood Hotel, and then made his way to the capitol. There he talked with Letcher, who explained that discussions within the state convention had resulted in a recommendation that Lee be given charge of Virginia’s troops. Letcher already had dispatched a courier with the offer; that man was en route to Arlington as Lee made his way to Richmond. Lee accepted his native state’s call, and Letcher immediately sent his name forward for confirmation—accompanied by a brief text explaining that Lee had resigned his U.S. commission before learning that a major generalcy would be in the offing from Virginia.¹⁰

On the morning of April 23, Lee set up headquarters and wrote his first order, denominated General Orders No. 1. It stated simply: “In obedience to orders from his excellency John Letcher, governor of the State, Maj. Gen. Robert E. Lee assumes command of the military and naval forces of Virginia.” A four-man delegation soon arrived from the convention to accompany Lee to the capitol. Shortly after noon, the five men entered the building, where the delegates were in private session. As he waited for a few minutes outside the closed room, Lee doubtless contemplated French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon’s life-size statue of George Washington—his model of military and republican virtue. Walking into a crowded chamber, Lee drew the attention of an audience that included notables such as Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens, oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury, and Superintendent Frances H. Smith of the Virginia Military Institute. The welcoming remarks came from John Janney of Loudoun County, a former Whig and the convention’s president. Like Lee and a majority of the delegates to the convention, Janney had opposed secession until Lincoln’s call for seventy-five thousand volunteers.¹¹

Janney offered effusive praise of the new major general, recounting his service in Mexico and situating him alongside earlier Virginia heroes. The vote for Lee had been unanimous, observed Janney, who then summoned the memory of “Light-Horse Harry” Lee’s famous tribute to Washington: “We pray God most fervently that you may so conduct the operations committed to your charge, that it will soon be said of you, that you are ‘first in peace,’ and when that time comes you will have earned the still prouder distinction of being ‘first in the hearts of your countrymen.’” The glowing tribute probably made Lee uncomfortable, especially the suggestion that he might become the Confederacy’s Washington. None in the chamber really could have imagined what we now know to be the truth, that four years of cruel war would raise Lee to a position in the Confederacy very like that of Washington during the American Revolution. After Janney finished, Lee offered a three-sentence acceptance, closing with this: “I devote myself to the service of my native State, in whose behalf alone will I ever again draw my sword.”¹²

Lee the Virginian indisputably held center stage during the momentous weeks in early 1861. Letters to family members underscored this fact. As he put it to his sister Anne Lee Marshall, “I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home.” Many members of Lee’s extended family were staunch Unionists, including his sister Anne and many cousins, several of whom fought for the United States during the ensuing conflict. Some relatives never again spoke to Lee after he left U.S. service. Within his own household, Mary Anna Custis Lee and most of their children harbored Unionist sympathies. Only one daughter, Mary, fully embraced her father’s decision to resign from the army. Moreover, approximately one-third of all Virginians who had graduated from West Point remained loyal to the United States. Among the six Virginian colonels in U.S. service in the winter of 1861, only Lee resigned his commission. In short, many Virginians, including some very close to Lee, did not consider the severing of long-held ties to the United States to be their only realistic option during the secession crisis.¹³

Very strong ties to the United States—the second of Lee’s four loyalties under consideration—certainly complicated his decision on April 20. Indeed, much in his background pointed toward a different “Answer He Was Born to Make.” As already noted, George Washington, the greatest of all Virginians, was Lee’s idol, and the Revolutionary general and first president had been a consistent advocate of a national point of view. There would be no nation without Washington, no regular army, no sense of the whole transcending state and local concerns. Lee came from a family of Federalists who believed in a strong nation as well as the need to look after Virginia’s interests. In 1798, his father had opposed the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, with their strong advocacy for state power, because they would have denied the national government “the means of preserving itself.” The Virginia Resolutions, Light-Horse Harry Lee argued, “inspired hostility, and squinted at disunion.” If states could encourage citizens to disobey federal laws, “insurrection would be the consequence.”¹⁴

Lee’s devotion to the American republic made sense for one who had served it as a gifted engineer, a staff officer who ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Conduct Must Conform to the New Order of Things
• Chapter Two: He Died as Became a Confederate Soldier
• Chapter Three: Consistent Conservative
• Chapter Four: For His Country and His Duty
• Notes
• Index