Clouds of Glory by Michael Korda

Author:Michael Korda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Triumph and Tragedy—Second Manassas and Sharpsburg

“You must consider that no wars may be made without danger.”

—Sir Roger Williams* to the

Earl of Leicester, Siege of Sluys,

1557

Napoleon observed, “The most dangerous moment comes with victory,” and history bears him out. With victory come a natural slackening of effort and a period of self-congratulation, but Lee was immune to all such temptations. He had freed Richmond, a seemingly impossible feat, but he had failed to destroy McClellan’s army.

J. E. B. Stuart, with his gift for the grand gesture even when it was inappropriate, had reached the high ground that circled the Union encampment at Harrison’s Landing on July 2, but instead of riding back to let Lee know that it was still unoccupied, he had fired a single contemptuous howitzer shot into the Union camp. The Federals, alerted to his presence, drove him off, and rushed to fortify Evelington Heights with artillery and infantry, effectively preventing Lee from attacking them. He could not reach McClellan and McClellan could not reach him. By July 9 Lee was back at his headquarters in Richmond, and his army was marching back to its camps there. Only a brigade of Stuart’s cavalry was left to watch over the Army of the Potomac.

Lee had to reflect on his losses. He had begun the campaign with 85,500 men. A week later over 20,000 of them were dead, wounded, or missing, a little less than a quarter of the total, with a disproportionately high number of officers among the dead—in the age when officers led their own troops into action, sword drawn, this was inevitable—who would be increasingly difficult to replace. But Lee did little to reorganize his army and nothing to expand or change his own staff. He continued to act as his own chief of staff, laboring over reports and orders whose drafting should have been left to someone else. When a senior officer had clearly failed him, like Huger or Magruder, Lee moved the man—always with infinite courtesy—either to a routine staff job or to someplace where there was no immediate prospect of serious fighting. Lee’s faith in the man who had failed him the most in the campaign, Stonewall Jackson, remained undiminished. This was a “mystic bond” of personality, although in the future he would take care to give Jackson the greatest possible independence.

That Lee made little attempt to reorganize his army was not because he ignored its faults, or indeed his own or those of his staff, but because he recognized that time was his enemy. The North could quickly replace men, small arms, artillery, horses, locomotives; the South could not. Having struck a blow against McClellan, Lee had to take advantage of the fact that his adversary was for the moment stuck at Harrison’s Landing to strike a blow elsewhere.

The Union divisions that Jackson had defeated in the Valley had been reinforced and formed into a new army, the Army of Virginia, under the command of Major General John Pope, who was one

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