Prologue

Afterwards the old men who had been the sweating generals with bushy beards, brass buttons and gold braid would argue with each other from their rocking chairs and produce leather-covered and seldom-read books about that summer, the battle they had fought and the decisions they had made. Historians would mention the short-lived campaign in a footnote, calling it just a nuisance "raid." But in the hot, dry summer of 1864, Robert E. Lee, now commander of all Confederate forces, faced a very real and a very difficult choice. The war, which had begun so brightly, was now grinding into its fourth bloody year, and the chances of the rebellious South and of his way of life surviving were growing slimmer with every frightful battle south of the Rappahannock. For all practical purposes Richmond, his forlorn capital, was already under siege and surely doomed without a miracle of some sort.

The reports on Lee's desk showed that he had fewer than 75,000 tired and hungry soldiers thinly stretched across the muddy fields in the Richmond-Petersburg area while the Union army led by Sam Grant and George Meade could muster at least 125,000 well-armed men in the same region and many more up near Washington and out in the Valley. That, Lee knew, was not the most frightening difference. He had faced and beaten long odds before. The real problem was that Grant could spend 60,000 men a month, as he had just done in May, and replace those shattered bodies with fresh troops, both black and white. For Lee there were no more replacements, no reinforcements especially since Cump Sherman threatened Atlanta and the enemy now held the whole Mississippi frontier while the Confederate Congress debated the use of slaves.

In the past month, Lee had lost nearly 25,000 men killed and wounded in a series of seemingly unending conflicts near the seat of the Rebel government. Perhaps more importantly to the future of his army and to his cause, he had buried many of his most trusted generals. In the burning Wilderness, the wooded lanes near Spotsylvania Court House and most terribly at Cold Harbor's bloody angle Lee's lean veterans had stopped the Union's desperate regiments over and over again, often in hand-to-hand combat. But instead of retreating toward the safety of Washington's sheltering forts as McClellan, Burnside, Hooker and the others had done over the long years of bloody fighting, the battered Army of the Potomac staggered back on its heels, licked it wounds, slid to its left and attacked again. Grant drove Meade's blue clad troops from defeat to defeat and had been widely quoted as saying he intended to fight it out on the Richmond line "if it takes all summer."

Lee's immediate problem, as dusk settled through the trees on this warm June evening, was the threat posed by Union General David Hunter in the Shenandoah Valley. Hunter had taken the crossroads at Staunton, and was tearing up the railroad, confiscating horses and food stuffs, and causing the croakers in Richmond to scream even louder than usual. Confederate President Jefferson Davis demanded that the Valley be cleared.

General Lee had already sent John Breckinridge with men he really could not spare to block Hunter's advance. Now word had come that the town of Lexington had fallen into Union hands and that Hunter's troopers had put the governor's home and the buildings of the Virginia Military Institute to the torch. Lee responded to Richmond's increasingly frantic demands for action by informing President Davis that it would take at least a corps to clear the Valley and that he could not risk the defense of Richmond to do so. "I think this is just what the enemy would desire," Lee had written.

But on this evening as the first cook fires kindled, the cicadas tuned up and the lightning bugs flickered in the deep woods, Robert Lee made a different decision and a half-hour past had sent a galloper to his old friend Jubal Early asking him to report at once. It had to be done, and Lee silently cursed his lack of choices as he heard horses arrive.

"Come in, General. Come in," said Lee with a tired gesture at his tent's front flap. He dismissed his aide, removed his glasses and resumed the straight-backed chair behind his cluttered desk. "Congratu-lations on your promotion. It was overdue, sir, long overdue."

Early felt uncomfortable in his new, full-dress uniform complete with its gold-chased sword, especially since his commander was plainly dressed in blue trousers and a white shirt with a string tie. "Thank you, sir," he said. "Kind of you to say so. I know I owe you much for it and for the Second Corps. I'm only sorry our old, bald-headed friend took it so hard."

"No one likes to lose a field command," Lee said, "but Ewell was never the same after they cut off his leg. Besides, I think his missus took it harder than he did. Jackson's old bunch is a fine command, and I'm glad to have you there, permanently, and at long last."

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