The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 1 (of 2) / A Narrative and Critical History

by George Cary Eggleston

But apart from these small differences the two armies that confronted each other on the Potomac were composed of substantially the same materials. Later in the war the large enlistment of immigrants gave to the Union army an element that did not at any time exist in the armies of the South. But at the outset there was no important difference. Each army was made up of American youths, full of patriotic fervor, brave, heroic upon occasion, but utterly untrained in the profession of arms.

On the Northern side in the early contests of the war there was the advantage of small bodies of regulars, trained to obey orders at all hazards and to stand firm in every moment of danger. These regulars proved themselves of inestimable value in the early actions of the war; but their numbers were so small that their service scarcely counts in the historical reckoning.

For the rest, both armies were made up of volunteers, men wholly unused to military discipline and wholly untrained in that subjection of their own minds and wills to superior authority which constitutes the distinction between the soldier and the raw recruit—between an army and an armed mob. They were brave fellows, all of them. They were devoted to the causes they severally served, but they were not yet soldiers. They retained the unsoldierly habit of thinking and judging for themselves, where they should instead have let their officers think and judge for them. Under the discipline of service and of fighting they presently reduced themselves to the ranks, as it were, and became soldiers equal and even superior to the best regulars that any army on earth has ever brought into the field. Their deeds at Cold Harbor, at Fredericksburg, at Chancellorsville, in the Wilderness, at Petersburg, at Antietam, at Gettysburg, and on a score of other desperately contested battlefields leave no possible room for doubt that the men who composed the Federal and Confederate armies were the peers and even the superiors of any other men who ever fought anywhere. But at the first they were not such. They were undisciplined and subject to such panics as that sort of individual thinking in which they indulged is inevitably bound to produce. It is important to bear these facts in mind if we would read the early history of the war understandingly.

The first blood shed in the war, however, was not shed in formal military action. On the nineteenth of April, two days after Virginia's secession, a Baltimore mob assailed a Massachusetts regiment on its passage through the Maryland city to Washington, and several persons were killed in the melée. It is not historically recorded that any of the men who constituted the mob and made the assault ever afterwards served in the Confederate army. On the contrary there is every reason to believe that these men, so ready for mob violence, very carefully avoided a service in which legitimate fighting was to be the daily routine of life. That, however, is a detail—illustrative, perhaps, but not otherwise important to history.

The secession of Virginia carried with it one event of vital and even of supreme importance, namely, the secession of Robert E. Lee, without whose genius the Confederate War would almost certainly have ended in McClellan's capture of Richmond in the summer of 1862.

General Winfield Scott had called Lee "the flower of the American Army." He had earnestly recommended Lee as his own fittest successor in supreme command of the United States Army and such command had been definitely offered to Lee. The secession of half a dozen Northern or border states could not have been of greater consequence either to the North or to the South than the decision of Robert E. Lee to resign his commission and go with his native state Virginia into a war of secession for which he saw no occasion or justification. His problem, like that of Farragut and George H. Thomas and other officers of Southern birth in the United States Army and Navy, was a very perplexing one, involving a divided duty such as few men are ever called upon to confront in the course of their lives. He himself set forth the considerations that finally determined his course, in a letter to his sister, the wife of a Union officer, which it is proper to quote here in explanation. To this sister he wrote on the twentieth of April, 1861: "We are now in a state of war which will yield to nothing. The whole South is in a state of revolution, into which Virginia after a long struggle has been drawn, and though I recognize no necessity for this state of things, and would have foreborne and pleaded to the end for the redress of grievances real or supposed, yet in my own person I had to meet the question whether I should take part against my native state. With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the army, and, save in defense of my native state, with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed, I hope I may never be called upon to draw my sword."

Surely no more tragic, no more pathetic letter than that was ever written. Yet it represented and reflected the struggle which at that time was going on in the soul of every army or navy officer of Southern birth and kindred. It was a part of the tragedy of a war which divided families and set brother against brother in a strife that knew neither mercy nor relenting for four, long, terrible years.

Lee went at once to Richmond and was promptly appointed to the task of organizing first the Virginian and afterwards all the Southern armies for effective service. For such work of organization he had a peculiar genius which General Scott recognized, at the same time congratulating the Union cause upon the fact that it had some weeks the start of Lee in the task of creating an army out of untrained and undisciplined volunteers.

Lee was not yet placed in any active military command, but at every step he was the supreme military adviser of the Southern authorities. When Beauregard, with all the laurels of popular praise upon him, reached Richmond he and not Lee was the idol of the hour. His spectacular and rather theatrical reduction of Fort Sumter had advertised him to the popular attention as nothing had advertised Lee. But Lee was his superior in rank as in genius and everything else, and it was he who directed Beauregard to establish himself at Manassas and along Bull Run as the fittest vantage ground from which to repel the first serious advance of the Federal Army which was then assembling at Washington.

At that period of the war there prevailed at Washington what a military wit and critic afterwards called "the pepper box policy." That is to say, the policy was to send forces into all quarters at once, to defend large and small positions equally, and thus to scatter an army which if concentrated upon a single point might have achieved decisive results. Thus if the whole force available for eastern service had been brought at once to Washington and pushed thence toward Richmond it seemingly might have enveloped its adversary in superior numbers, and except for the uncertainty due to the untrained character of its men it might have been reckoned upon to achieve decisive results.