Robert E. Lee, page 26
Lee said no more on politics until the election actually took place on November 6. Immediately, the legislature of South Carolina authorized the calling of a state secession convention, and on December 20 the Carolinians declared their participation in the Union at an end. They were joined in quick order by Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and eventually Texas. From department headquarters in San Antonio, Lee watched the secession tide creep closer and closer. “The lone star is floating all over this state,” he noticed irritably, as the Texas state flag began replacing the Stars and Stripes. The local San Antonio newspaper endorsed John Bell’s Constitutional Union Party and announced itself as promoting “the Conservative Union sentiment.” But as Lincoln’s victory loomed, the town was filled with meetings that “labored hard to establish the idea that each State was an independent nation” and “that Lincoln’s election would be sufficient cause for disunion.” Northern Texas ran wild with rumors of a new John Brown–style slave uprising; newspapers published crazed reports that “the North has gone overwhelmingly for Negro Equality and Southern Vassalage! Southern men will you submit to this degradation?” Governor Houston tried to stave off a rush to secession by refusing to convene the legislature. “If an attempt is made to destroy our Union, or violate our Constitution,” Houston swore, “there will be blood shed to maintain them.” But in December, even Houston’s opposition unwillingly crumbled. A secession convention was rapidly authorized, and just as rapidly voted to withdraw Texas from the Union on February 1.30
Lee’s incredulity now turned to apprehension. At the most personal level, the screams for secession would certainly derange the economy, and his own finances with it. “The political troubles of the country,” he warned Custis, “will curtail my resources,” and he urged Custis “to see what means you will have for the expenses of the house & farm.” On the national stage, the secession melodrama would, if successful, almost certainly force some kind of dissolution and reconstruction of the entire Union. And there were plenty of such schemes in play. The young Henry Adams, far away in Washington, heard the seceders talk about seizing Washington itself, then inviting “the northern States” to a restructuring “of the Union on terms which should suit the South” (and which would exclude New England but include New York City and California). Virginia’s governor, John Letcher, opened the state legislative session on January 7 by predicting that “when disunion shall come, we will have four organizations, independent and distinct”: New England and New York would form one new confederacy; Pennsylvania, the Northwest, and the border slave states would form another; the “cotton states” would form the third; and the Pacific coast the fourth. What Virginia would do was at that moment beyond his ken. Even the old general Winfield Scott believed that a breakup of the Union into “new Confederacies, probably four,” might be inevitable (although he added that “there is good reason to hope” that this would happen “without one conflict of arms, one execution, or one arrest for treason,” and once the secession passions had cooled, negotiations could then begin a process of rebuilding the Union). Perplexed, Lee could only promise Custis, “If the Union is dissolved, which God in his mercy forbid, I shall return to you.”31
Lee had a brief glimmer of hope in the pleas for restraint made by President Buchanan in his last official message to Congress on December 3. But it was only a glimmer, and that was doused by the reappearance on December 13 of David Twiggs in San Antonio. A Georgian and a slaveholder, Twiggs did not hesitate to assure Lee that “the Union will be dissolved in six weeks”; after that, there would be no more U.S. Army, and Twiggs would “then return to New Orleans.” Lee, packing his bags for Fort Mason and the headquarters of the 2nd Cavalry, shook his head in disbelief. If Twiggs was right, “I should not take the trouble to go to Mason,” but leave for Virginia at once.
He clung to the hope that “the wisdom & patriotism of the country will devise some way of saving it,” and “I will cling to it to the last.” The slaveholding states might have reason to complain of “the aggressions of the North” and Lincoln’s avowal that as president he would oppose the extension of slavery into the territories (the territories, Lee reasoned, were after all “the common territory of the commonwealth,” just as John Calhoun had argued a decade before, and Lincoln had no authority to exclude slaveholders from them). But the behavior of “the cotton states” was wholly beyond any justification, and he was worried that “their selfish & dictatorial bearing” would make life for Virginia miserable “should she determine to coalesce with them.” He had scant patience for the slaveholders’ argument that the Constitution was only a compact from which the states could legally secede at will. To one of his Carter cousins, Lee bleakly insisted that “secession…is revolution”—a radical break with the Constitution—and will be followed by “war at last and cannot be otherwise.”32
But if war and not reconstruction of some sort was the likeliest result of secession, on what side would Robert E. Lee find himself? Would there even be a side? Even as the Texas legislature was authorizing its secession convention, Lee wrote despairingly to Markie Williams that “a fearful calamity is upon us.” He still could not believe that “our people will destroy a government inaugurated by the blood & wisdom of our patriot fathers, that has given us peace & prosperity at home, power & security abroad, & under which we have acquired a colossal strength unequalled in the history of mankind.” For his part, he wished “to live under no other government” and to have “no other flag than the ‘Star Spangled banner.’ ” But if that government was now going to disappear, then the only alternative was to “go back in sorrow to my people & share the misery of my native state, & save in her defense there will be one soldier less in the world than now.”
The convening of the Texas secession convention only increased the churning of his fears. “Secession is nothing but revolution,” he repeated to Custis on January 23 and to Rooney six days later, and he poured contempt on the idea that the Union “was intended to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will.” He had been reading Edward Everett’s brief new Life of George Washington, and reading it filled him with the conviction that “the framers of our Constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom, and forbearance in its formation” only for the purpose of erecting a temporary dalliance. In the same terms Abraham Lincoln would use, Lee insisted that the Constitution “was intended for ‘perpetual union’…and for the establishment of a government, not a compact.” Secession was “anarchy…and not a government.” Even worse, he wrote to Rooney, “in 1808 when the new England States resisted Mr. Jeffersons Imbargo Law & the Hartford Convention assembled, secession was termed treason by a Virga statesman. What can it be now?”33
He would have that conviction tested sooner than he thought. On February 6, three representatives of the Texas secession convention met with David Twiggs in San Antonio to negotiate the surrender of federal military property in the state. Twiggs easily agreed to turn over forts, supplies, and equipment and on February 18 ordered all federal troops in Texas to abandon their posts and proceed to Indianola on the coast for transportation. The San Antonio garrison, humiliated and enraged at Twiggs’s betrayal, insisted on marching out in full-dress uniforms and with band blaring.34
Lee paled at the rumors of Twiggs’s betrayal, and even as the secession convention was severing Texas’s ties to the Union, he began quietly testing the loyalty of the garrison at Fort Mason and whether they would rally behind him and “defend his post at all hazards” if the secessionists attacked. As he warned Samuel Heintzelman, the Texans would not get Fort Mason or its stores “without fighting for them.” But on February 13, Lee received preemptory orders directly from Washington: he was “relieved from duty in this department, and will repair forthwith to Washington and report in person to the General-in Chief.” Mystified and “distressed,” Lee packed at once, heading for San Antonio, only to arrive on the same day Twiggs ordered the evacuation of federal troops from Texas. The plaza was teeming with Texas Rangers who eyed with an unexpected hostility the military ambulance in which Lee had arrived (because this was the only wagon with springs and padded benches available), and he might have come to harm on the spot had not the wife of the departmental paymaster’s clerk run out to warn him, “General Twiggs surrendered everything to the State this morning, and we are all prisoners of war.”
This was not entirely true; there was no war, and thus no prisoners, and federal military personnel were allowed to depart freely. But Jefferson Davis, now the Confederate government’s newly elected provisional president, was already preparing orders to arrest Army personnel and treat them as prisoners. “Has it come so soon as this?” Lee wondered in dismay. Indeed it had, and he took the precaution of changing into civilian dress while he waited for the next coach that would take him to the coast.35
That did not save him from suspicious questions. But to them all, he returned bland and inoffensive answers. “In conversations,” Lee “declared that the position he held was a neutral one.” He was returning to Virginia to “resign and go to planting corn,” and though he “would never bear arms against the United States,” he might “carry a musket in defense of my native state, Virginia,” if it was assailed by some unnamed party. He was anxious enough, though, that he consigned his trunks (“seven boxes containing papers and baggage”) to the care of a Texas unionist, Charles Anderson—whose brother Major Robert Anderson was at that moment commanding the last holdout federal garrison in secessionist South Carolina, Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor.
On February 22, Lee finally arrived at Indianola, where he took passage for New Orleans. By March 1, he was at Arlington. He would never see the trunks again.36
Chapter Nine
The Decisions
Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as the sixteenth president of the United States three days after Lee’s return. There is no evidence that Lee attended the inaugural festivities, although that had always been G.W.P.’s custom. However, on March 12, Lee did yield to another custom, which brought all the serving officers of the Army resident in or near the District of Columbia to the White House for a presidential reception. Lee left no record of his impressions of the homely, stoop-shouldered Illinoisan with the broad backwoods accent. (Eight months later, Julia Ward Howe would be perplexed at Lincoln’s “unusual pronunciation” of “heerd” for “heard.”) But four days later, Lincoln promoted Edwin Sumner of the 1st Cavalry to brigadier general (to replace David Twiggs), and that left a colonelcy vacant at the head of Sumner’s regiment that Lincoln nominated Lee to fill. Now the whispers began to thicken that Lee’s recall from Texas was the first step toward making him the successor to Winfield Scott, because “Lee of Virginia” is “the only man the Army acknowledges to be fit to be the successor of Gen. Scott.”1
Lee was summoned to a preliminary meeting with Scott “directly after his return” from Texas in which Lee asked Scott “what was going to be done.” There was no talk as yet about Lee’s commanding armies or inheriting Scott’s office. But if there was some kind of military action in the offing, Lee “wanted to know,” because if that involved coercion of Virginia, “he might at once resign.” Scott, however, assured him that his recall from Texas was purely for administrative reasons—to assist in updating the Army’s official Regulations—and Scott soothed Lee’s anxieties by showing him “letters” from both Lincoln and William Henry Seward (in his new role as secretary of state) indicating that “a peaceful solution would be attained,” and so Lee went back to Arlington “much relieved.”
Meanwhile, Virginia’s legislature authorized the calling of a state secession convention to weigh appeals from the seven seceding states to join the new Southern Confederacy they had organized in February. Lee made no further comment on secession, but Mary did, hotly asserting that “those who have been foremost in this Revolution will deserve & meet with the reprobation of the world either North or South, for having destroyed the most glorious Confederacy that ever existed.” If Virginia was to play any role, she hoped it might be to act as a mediator and “obtain the mead promised in the Bible to the peacemakers.”2
Still, for a month thereafter, the situation stalled, with the standoff in Charleston harbor over Fort Sumter becoming the theater of national agony. The new Confederate government effectively sealed off Major Robert Anderson and his garrison from resupply or reinforcement with a ring of artillery emplacements around the harbor, but hesitated to do more. Lincoln likewise hesitated to rush to Major Anderson’s rescue. His cabinet counseled against it, understanding all too well that any provocative gesture from Lincoln would trigger an equally provocative response from the Confederates that would leave no practical alternative to civil war. That, in turn, might stampede the remaining slave states—and especially Virginia—into the arms of the Confederates. Hopefully, desperately, Lincoln played for time, knowing that the longer the Confederates waited on him, the less substantial the secession strategy looked. He even offered to trade an evacuation of Sumter’s garrison for the dismissal of the Virginia secession convention, which up to this point had done little except talk and wait.
But Lincoln also had to reckon with the rising impatience of Northern public opinion and the Northern governors, who demanded action. Lincoln proposed a compromise: he would resupply Fort Sumter, but only with food and medicine, not weapons or reinforcements. To the Confederacy’s provisional president, Jefferson Davis, this meant little more than running out a clock he could not afford to leave running, and on April 12, Confederate artillery began a bombardment of the fort. Major Anderson and his beleaguered garrison held out for two days, until their supplies were exhausted, and then surrendered. The next day, citing the authority of the federal militia acts, Lincoln called on the remaining states of the Union—including Virginia—for 75,000 militia to suppress “combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”3
The militia callout was the moment of crisis for Virginia. The Virginia secession convention was bitterly divided between a hard core of secession sympathizers and a larger but less certain unionist majority, much of which was drawn from the western part of the state. On April 4, the convention decisively voted down a secession resolution, and it was this vote that gave Lincoln the hope that he could swap an evacuation of Sumter for a dissolution of the convention. But it stayed in session all the same, still debating whether “we shall be expected to rush off like a flock of sheep, right into the embrace of the Southern Confederacy,” or “remain in the Northern free-soil Confederacy,” or even create a “middle confederacy” formed by “a tier of friendly States between the slaveholding States and the States of the extreme North and North-west.” There was little enthusiasm for embracing the seceders, and if the Confederates planned to seize the national capital by marching across Virginia, Virginians would stop them. One defiant western delegate, Jubal Early, declared that “the idea of marching an army from the Confederated States through our borders to Washington…will be promptly resisted.” But after the fall of Fort Sumter, the call upon Virginia for its militia to join in a movement against the seceders swung the convention the other way, and on April 17 a secession ordinance was adopted, 88 to 55. And yet the deed was not entirely done. The secession ordinance would have to be put to a statewide referendum on May 23, and in the meantime disgruntled western Virginia unionists met in Clarksburg to organize their own convention in Wheeling on May 13.4
Robert E. Lee would not have the luxury of waiting on the referendum. On Thursday, April 18, he was summoned to a meeting with Francis Preston Blair, the veteran Washington political operative whose extended family was in “control of Mr. Lincoln’s administration.” The message specified a rendezvous at the Washington town house of Montgomery Blair (Francis Preston Blair’s son and Lincoln’s new appointee as postmaster general) at 1651 Pennsylvania Avenue. There, Blair, with the blessing of Lincoln, asked Lee whether he would “take command of the army” Lincoln was calling into being and serve once more under Winfield Scott as the overall general in chief.5
* * *
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At least seven contemporaneous descriptions of this interview—one from Montgomery Blair in 1866, one from the then secretary of war, Simon Cameron, three from Lee himself between 1868 and 1870, and one each from Mary Custis Lee and Francis Preston Blair in 1871—exist. They are by no means consistent with one another. The earliest of these accounts, from Montgomery Blair, positions Lee as a reluctant but unapologetic defender of Virginia, and for the sake of Virginia (but not for secession) Lee declines to take command of troops that could conceivably be used to invade the Old Dominion:
General Lee said to my father, when he was sounded by him, at the request of President Lincoln, about taking command of our army against the rebellion, then hanging upon the decision of the Virginia [secession] convention, “Mr. Blair, I look upon secession as anarchy. If I owned the four millions of slaves in the South, I would sacrifice them all to the Union: but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native State?” He could not determine then; said he would consult with his friend General Scott, and went on the same day to Richmond, probably to arbitrate difficulties; and we see the result.6
