Between Honor and Glory
Winik, Jay
LIFE IN FULL ...To grasp the full horror of the march it is necessary to make it yourself. The landscape constantly changes: open fields are exasperatingly punctuated by high hedges and dense...
...One plan called for an elite team of sharpshooters to shadow Mosby until he was either caught or destroyed...
...Before the coming of Christ the lightning strikes of the nomadic Scythians blunted the efforts of Darius I to subdue them...
...Lee was a badly shaken man...
...His fame rapidly spread with such exploits as the capture of a Northern general, Edwin H. Stoughton, in bed with a hangover—a mere ten miles from Washington, D.C., in March 1863...
...the line of advancing bluecoats wavered and broke...
...They systematically rounded up every man they encountered and then torched the town...
...They would be compelled to rob and steal in order to live.They would become...
...though after joining Jeb Stuart's cavalry, he proved himself to be a fearless courier and cavalry scout and, when he raised a company of his own under the Partisan Ranger Act of April 1862, a remarkable guerrilla leader...
...some experience a light-headedness, others even hallucinate...
...Playing for keeps, this time Grant refined his stratagem...
...Several hours later, around midday, Amelia itself came into view—a sleepy village of unpaved streets, with houses neatly tucked behind tumbled roses and weathered fences, and a few small shops converging around a grassy square...
...But this time could be whittled down to only one day if rations were rushed forward by train to Burkeville, a mere eighteen miles down the line...
...It showed in their very stamina: Union men, despite their own obvious exhaustion, now seemed corps had cut off a quarter of Lees army...
...And in autumn of 1864, General George Custer obliged, capturing six men and executing them all...
...Sitting on Traveller, on this small rise, the general found the sight astonishing...
...Could the South carry it out...
...Off-balance from lack of food, dazed by lack of sleep, the rebels were at first stunned, then, as one Confederate put it, they The fighting would outdo much of the war in its savagery...
...So it was in that direction that the Confederates picked up their step and began again, in one long, snaking line, to move...
...A close second was Bloody Bill Anderson, whose father was murdered by Unionists and whose sister was killed in a Kansas City Union prison disaster...
...Morning now seamlessly intermingled with evening, darkness with sunset, the fifth of April with the sixth, two hours with eight hours, eight hours with sixteen attacks that heightened panic and fatigue...
...Rather than having a restored United States, the country could come to resemble a Swiss cheese, with Union cities here, pockets of Confederate resistance lurking there, ambiguous areas of no-man's-land in between...
...In a guerrilla war, all bets would be off...
...HANG LEE...
...Topping the list was William Clarke Quantrill, a handsome, blue-eyed, twenty-four-year-old former Ohio schoolteacher...
...The destruction Mosby inflicted upon Union lines was considerable, and he was detested accordingly...
...Such a war would surely destroy Virginia, and just as surely destroy the country as well...
...BURN IT...
...The Northern home front had nearly crumbled first— and was saved only by the captures of Mobile and, more importantly, of Atlanta, which paved the way for a presidential reelection victory that Lincoln himself had, just weeks earlier, judged to be an impossibility...
...Day after day for over two years, dueling bands of Free-Soil abolitionists and pro-slavery marauders burned, robbed, and killed in an effort to drive the other from "Bleeding Kansas," a grim dress rehearsal for the Civil War to follow...
...To us, an extended troop march appears an anachronism...
...By this one momentous decision, he spared the country the guerrilla war that surely would have followed, a vile and poisonous conflict that would not only have delayed any true national reconciliation for many years to come, but in all probability would have fractured the country for decades into warring military pockets...
...at another, Genito Bridge, the materials to shore it up had never arrived...
...One Union general said it perhaps most poignantly: "there was something in the hearts of good and typical Christian[s...
...He did not want to follow Lee...
...I well remember the yell of demonic triumph with which that simple country lad clubbed his musket and whirled savagely upon another victim," observed one commander...
...One would be hard-pressed to find a place more thoroughly despised by Quantrill and his comrades than Lawrence...
...Just as he could no longer wait in Amelia for rations, no longer could he wait for an answer...
...Then he added tantalizingly, "I suppose Lee will...
...tomorrow on the old state road to Richmond between the picket lines of the two armies...
...But Lee weighed honor and glory against duty and will...
...Another's son was walked to the noose some seven times before he met his fate...
...they assault military targets, or, just as often, hunt down random civilians...
...Lincoln, too, was equally concerned, and he, as much as anyone else, understood the toll guerrilla war could take on the country...
...And then there was Missouri...
...Even granting the North's theoretical ability to put more than 2 million men under arms, it would be unlikely that the Federals could ever pacify, let alone manage and oversee, more than fragmented sections of the South against a willful Grant's strategy of exhaustion would be turned on its head...
...The battle itself began in earnest by the first brush of afternoon, when two dangerous gaps appeared in Lee's lines...
...Mahone's men fell deathly silent, and then this collective hush was punctuated by a scattered, spontaneous cry emanating from the frenzied survivors stumbling back: "Where's the man who won't follow Uncle Robert...
...Lee responded...
...His troops, at last able to eat and rest, still had two options: try again to turn south toward Danville, or set out for Lynchburg and the sheltering protection of the Blue Ridge mountains...
...Lawrence must be thoroughly cleansed...
...Never amounting to more than a thousand men, Mosby's partisans were confined to small platoons of several dozen...
...The road of escape— through Burkeville—had been cut off...
...We hear of some outrage every day," blithely confessed one Missourian...
...With Lee's army and other loyal Confederates—by some historians' estimates, there were still up to 175,000 men under arms who could be called upon—dispersed into smaller, more mobile units, they could make lightning hit-and-run attacks on the invading forces from safe havens in the rugged countryside and then invisibly slip back into the population...
...Kill...
...Suddenly, below them, concealed in the woodlands, lay the inexorable logic of the mathematics of war: a solid wall of blue, some two miles wide, was advancing— two Yankee infantry corps, with two other Union corps closing in on Lee's rear...
...overrun many sections they may never have occasion to visit...
...Astoundingly, in this jumble of conflict, they were no longer battling one another over territory or vital military advantage or even tactical gain, but out of sheer impulse: they were killing one another over battalion colors...
...The landscape constantly changes: open fields are exasperatingly punctuated by high hedges and dense windbreaks that are impossible to see through or over or around...
...At one point, Grant himself ruminated, "To overcome a truly popular, national resistance in a vast territory without the employment of truly overwhelming force is probably impossible...
...Secretary of War Jefferson Davis knew all this...
...traitors must be punished and impoverished...
...With a triumphant yell, Quantrill began shouting, "Kill...
...Federal policies were at once muddled, incoherent, and ineffective...
...But if I were in his place, I think I could get away with part of the army...
...Like his men, he had scarcely slept since leaving Petersburg and Richmond...
...But then, without warning, the conflict degenerated, and the insensate killing began...
...Thoughts become woozy...
...for the second, the Confederates found a nearby railway pass that they neatly planked over...
...Neutrality became impossible...
...And so did a fifth, until the flag was firmly planted by a sixth in a low bush...
...every effort poured fuel on the fire...
...As in guerrilla wars throughout history, the Union would have to station outposts in every county and every sizable town...
...The citizens of Amelia County had already been cleaned out by Confederate impressment crews and the exigencies of war...
...Grant and Sherman certainly had no doubt about the Confederacy's ability to wage protracted guerrilla war—it was their greatest fear...
...Though Lee remained unaware, the fall of Richmond just six days before had already brought a spate of stinging calls for revenge, a grisly, thundering, roaring refrain, chanted and chanted again in an ever-rising crescendo, coming from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and, of course, Washington ("Burn it...
...Catching up to the Federals, they became entangled in vicious hand-to-hand combat...
...or, conversely, they run into long, muddy tracts, known euphemistically as Virginia quicksand...
...Switzerland against the Hapsburg Empire...
...When it was all over, these Midwestern counties lay like a silent wasteland, dotted by chimneys rising above the charred debris of blackened farmhouses...
...We must, he stressed, "consider its effect on the country as a whole...
...a little more blood more or less now makes no difference...
...The Union soldiers hunted the guerrillas like animals, and in return, eventually degenerated into little more than savage beasts, driven by a viciousness unimaginable just two years earlier...
...Nighttime fell...
...So were their homes, which were burned...
...Has the army been dissolved...
...Country be damned," roared former Virginia Governor Henry Wise to Lee...
...Late in the afternoon, he rode out to a high ridge overlooking the battlefield...
...Missouri was something that had never been witnessed before on American soil...
...After the methodical rebel order of "Fire...
...Still outwardly calm, Lee's face nonetheless looked "sunken," "haggard...
...they cried about Richmond...
...Few of these refugees returned before the war's end...
...Under a soft midnight sky, with a bright, nearly full moon overhead, Grant scanned Lee's letter, then handed it to his chief of staff to read aloud...
...Mosby completed the humiliation by brazenly retreating with his prisoner in full view of Federal fortifications...
...Riding down the retreat line, Lee cast a sidelong glance, lifted his field glasses, and gazed out at the freshly dug Union fortifications...
...Poignantly, while tears and grief enveloped his men, he would add, "it is our duty to live...
...Four whole counties were quickly depopulated...
...Men struck one another with bayonets, flogged one another with the butts of guns, and flailed at one another with their feet...
...With the buffer of the Appomattox Paver gone and crucial hours lost, Grants men were closing in...
...For good measure, he ordered another infantry corps to join the push in the rear...
...The temptation must have been vast...
...battle flags had been raised...
...LET HER BURN...
...And no milk, no coffee, no tea, no sugar...
...Limbs struggle to obey the simplest motor commands...
...We want to leave it to our children...
...Once replenished, their lead over Grant solidified, they would complete their dash to safety...
...The aide was furious at Lee's brash response, but Grant just coolly shook his head...
...A row of artillery batteries followed, decking Confederates who had been lingering in the dank and muddy swale...
...Or, alternatively, there was the anarchic, scarlet-stained face of Missouri...
...but for generations...
...For Lee, that was too high a price to pay...
...Lee hastily mounted his horse, Traveller, and immediately ordered his men to move toward Burkeville...
...This also failed...
...Petrified, Unionists ran, abandoning their houses and their farms, and converging on fortified towns—actually, by now they were garrisoned—which were reduced to nothing more than isolated enclaves in a sea of death...
...Lee raced ahead...
...but as far as your proposal may affect the C.S...
...Missouri was another matter...
...Union supplies could not move through his territory unless well protected, and even then they were likely prey...
...In one town, the population dwindled from 10,000 to a mere 600...
...They strike at night—or in the day...
...But it was worse than Lee realized...
...By April 4, they were dirty, unwashed, mud-splattered, exhausted, and, most of all, desperately hungry...
...bellowed the general, upon being so indiscreetly interrupted...
...Deadly Federal horsemen, swinging sabers and led by the dashing, yellow-haired general, George Armstrong Custer, rushed in through the holes...
...Trains were attacked...
...Lee paused, weighing his answer...
...But there was still the distinct prospect of escape...
...I have only to ride along the line and all will be over...
...indeed, the distance separating them was barely four miles...
...the Romans in Spain required several long centuries to subdue the Lusitanians and Celtiberians.The actual word "guerrilla" came from the Spanish insurgency against France in the early 1800s, a conflict Jefferson Davis frequently referred to and which at one point was largely responsible for containing three of Napoleons armies...
...But this is not all...
...Finally, in early 1865, the Confederate Congress did revoke the act and the government ended its sanction of all partisan groups, with two notable exceptions: Mosby's rangers in the north, and Jesse McNeill's partisans in western Virginia...
...and anarchy reigned in Unionist Kentucky, where brutal guerrilla bands led by Ike Berry, Marcellus Clark, and scores of others sprang up across the state...
...By 1864, most rural Missourians had become refugees, inside or outside the state...
...All were vulnerable...
...Even now, Bataan, where upward of 10,000 men died of thirst, exhaustion, beatings, torture, or beheadings, is a march that skews the modern military imagination...
...At 5 a.m., Quantrill and his men silently made their way into town...
...The event shocked the entire country and captured the attention of the world...
...At 5 a.m., just beyond Appomattox Court House, a fog hovered over the landscape like a thick, sprawling ghost...
...Neither the day nor its significance would have been lost on Lee or his men...
...But the Union's hard-line tactics collapsed when Mosby began (albeit reluctantly) hanging prisoners in retaliation...
...So did a fourth...
...And remarkably, once more, they complied...
...That afternoon, he had learned that more than 80,000 rations of meal and bread—and even such delicacies as French soup packaged in tinfoil along with whole hams—were definitively waiting in Farmville...
...Yes, I say HANG him twenty times...
...No less than for Davis, surrender was anathema to him...
...But inexplicably, one of Lee's generals had neglected to blast High Bridge—a massive steel and brick structure spanning a floodplain half a mile wide, at a spectacular height of 126 feet...
...The marches he knew were not Bataan, but heroic efforts by Hannibal, Alexander the Great, and Napoleon, for whom the distinction between genius and insanity was often measured by the razor-thin line of success...
...For several tense moments, he considered one last massive and final assault...
...HANG LEE...
...they would halt for a few moments' rest, and fail to rise, their dazed eyes gazing haplessly at Lee's line, still lumbering west...
...Thus the ominous choice was finally set before Lee: surrender or throw his life on one last murderous fight—Lincoln's feared Armageddon...
...Instead, Alexander suggested a Confederate trump card, in fact, the specter most dreaded by Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman: that the men take to the woods, evaporate into the hills, and become guerrillas...
...The Union never had any systematic plans to cope with such an eventuality—all of Grant's efforts were principally designed to break up the Confederacy's main armies and to occupy the main cities...
...Damp from the day's rain, their senses numbed from too little nourishment, they stumbled along with scarcely a word of complaint...
...Six straight days of the relentless march had not dimmed Lee's audacity, or his desire for victory...
...Groups of revenge-minded Federals, militia and even soldiers became guerrillas themselves, stalking tormenting, torturing, and slaying Southern sympathizers...
...Stoughton harrumphed: "Yes...
...Bedlam followed...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 73 Lincoln bluntly telegraphed to Grant: "Let the thing be pressed...
...they would be forced to put a blockhouse on every railroad bridge and at every major communications center...
...For the next six weeks, Quantrill and the partisans skirmished...
...In every direction, the dead—men, mules, and horses—began to litter the roadside...
...The first crisis was apparently over...
...Even if it worked, and perhaps especially if it worked...
...In effect, Davis was proposing that Lee disperse his army before it was finally cornered...
...On this day, it was no idle gesture...
...Ruthless reprisals and random terror became the norm...
...No general, here are troops ready to do their duty...
...There were no more miracles to be performed, but there were indeed certainly still options...
...But to eat now meant halting the march to find food—which meant squandering his priceless lead over Grant...
...convinced that it was only cavalry in the way, he briskly attacked...
...The smallest tic in speech came to mean something ominous...
...Bill Mahone, the tall, bearded general, was there, riding at his side...
...It was only a prelude to fighting that would outdo much of the rest of the war in its savagery...
...With little sleep and even less respite, the men continued to march under the cover of darkness...
...To be frank, I do not think the emergency has arisen to call for the surrender of this Army, but as the restoration of peace should be the sole object of all, I desire to know whether your proposals would lead to that and I cannot therefore meet you with a view to surrender...
...Would it work...
...they rain terror when troops are eating or THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 75 when they have just concluded an exhausting march...
...The Confederacy was well supplied with long mountain ranges, endless swamps, and dark forests to offer sanctuary for a host of determined partisans...
...they would be reduced to combing every sizable valley and every significant mountain range with frequent patrols...
...And he concluded: "I will get you out of this...
...But Robert E. Lee was not of a twentieth-century mind...
...It was the Souths worst defeat of the entire campaign...
...It is no accident that one of the most famous military marches of the twentieth century was neither a strategic retreat nor a tactical feint, both of which were part of Robert E. Lee's stock-in-trade, but a journey into captivity known as the Bataan Death March, made over ten days and seventy-five miles by 36,000 defeated American servicemen in the Philippines...
...Over 150 innocent civilians, all men and young boys, had been murdered in cold blood...
...With enemy artillery roaring in the background, that night Lee and his weary lieutenants gathered around a campfire in the woods near Appomattox Court House...
...I know that the men and animals are Excerpted with permission from April 1865: The Month That Saved America, to be published this spring by HarperCollins...
...As dawn broke on April 5, he received his answer...
...At dawn the next day, April 6, he dispatched Sheridan on a northwest swing—no longer aimed at Lee's rear but intended to move ahead of him, directly positioning the hot breath of Union armies against Lee's face...
...The Yankees kept coming, and the battered rebels, their assaults increasingly uncoordinated and disjointed, could not keep up the ferocity By day's end, they were overwhelmed...
...General John Gordon, one of Lee's most daring officers, was chosen to lead the breakout...
...Townsfolk couldn't trust their own neighbors, not even those they had known for years...
...Thus did Robert E. Lee, revered for his leadership in war, make his most historic contribution—to peace...
...the Netherlands against Philip II...
...This is what he found: 96 loaded caissons, 200 crates of ammunition, 164 boxes of artillery harnesses...
...they need only be incessant...
...From New York to Philadelphia, and Washington to Boston, targets would abound: banks, businesses, local army outposts, and even newspapers and statehous-es...
...Wartime conscription would have to continue, with all its attendant political difficulties and war-weariness...
...Riding past Mahone's assembled troops, he held the flag staff high in one hand...
...Month after grinding month, year after year, who would be under siege: the victorious Union or the hardened guerrillas...
...four grueling days by foot...
...Just that morning, gloomily staring off into the distance, into the lifting mist, he had cried out, "How easily I could be rid of all this and be at rest...
...Deeply touched, he took a moment to steady his voice, then quickly offered words of encouragement...
...The Union army would then be forced to undertake the onerous task of occupying the entire Confederacy—an unwieldy occupation at best, which would entail Federal forces having to subdue and patrol and police an area as large as all of today's France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Poland combined...
...Only the heartening prospects of sure and relatively sudden victory had sustained the Federals to this time...
...Not completely...
...His only option now was a hard, forced march toward Danville—where a million and a half rations were stored...
...Then, in 1863, the revenge-minded Quantrill set his sights on a new target: Lawrence, Kansas...
...Sam Hildebrand roamed the woods of southern Missouri slaying scores of Unionists...
...Brother would be set against brother, not just for four years, was surely a political decision...
...The wind caught the flag, draping his body in Confederate red...
...Lee's plans had called for his vast columns of men and material to cross over three separate bridges...
...So great was the wave of disgust over this bloodletting that news of the guerrilla war in the West actually supTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 79 planted—temporarily at least—the clash of armies in the East...
...hours, and eventually, twenty-four hours with forty hours...
...They had to be mutilated and, just as often, scalped...
...They mauled and killed eighty-five men, including the band musicians and James O'Neal, an artist for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper...
...A veteran of Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, Cold Harbor and Petersburg, Alexander was so valued by Lee that Jefferson Davis once noted, he is "one of a very few whom Gen Lee would not give to anybody...
...Thus was delivered what many regimental commanders considered to be "the most cruel marching order" that they had ever given...
...Another Confederate quickly reached for the colors and also fell...
...The skirmishing at Sayler's Creek, across three separate battle sites that would eventually merge into one, began early on April 6 and mounted as the sun climbed...
...They drove Federal cavalry from their positions, captured several guns, duly cleared the road of bluecoats, and then swept forward to the crest of a hill...
...Toenails would be pulled off, one by one...
...What is right...
...In a telling instance of the relative ease with which guerrillas operated, Quantrill himself spent much of the time in comfort, neatly residing at a house near Blue Springs with his mistress, Kate King...
...Not one single ration...
...He read Shakespeare, Plutarch, Washington Irving, and Hazlitt's Life of Napoleon, and his words and writings were frequently sprinkled with passages from the classics...
...Finally, Grant ordered that any of Mosby's men who were captured should be promptly shot...
...The dreadful consequences were inevitable: without food and deprived of sleep, the body begins to feed on itself, consuming vital muscle, raping invaluable tissue, robbing itself of what little energy is left...
...Lee was forced to quickly withdraw his men from Farmville and recross the Appomattox to escape the threat, even as Union cavalry drew so close that fighting broke out in the town's streets...
...And, if necessary, there remained a fallback position: they could make their way to the Blue Ridge mountains, where, Lee had once said, he could hold out "for twenty years...
...On treason: "Treason is the highest crime known in the catalogue of crimes, and for him that is guilty of it...
...It was now April 7. Lee's remaining forces had again crossed the Appomattox to arrive in Farmville, where the first rations of the march awaited them...
...Sheridan's cavalry and three infantry corps continued to race alongside the retreating rebels, bludgeoning them with sledgehammer blows and quick, in-and-out lightning incapable of straggling, some handily marching upward of thirty-five miles per day...
...Rebel batteries swung into position, anchored their lines, and trained their barrels on the advancing Federals, while infantry crouched and pointed muskets at the enemy...
...He had already told his immediate staff with a heavy heart: "Then there is nothing left for me to do but to go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths...
...Go through them...
...But Lee, more so than most other generals, also shunned making political decisions...
...As one officer put it, the order was carried out "to the letter...
...Never...
...To the contemporary mind, it is as difficult to contemplate the westward march of the Army of Northern Virginia as it is to step outside all the history that has come after...
...Throughout the years variously referred to as "guerrillaism," or "guer-rilleros," or "partisans," or "Partheyganger," or "bushwhackers," guerrilla warfare is and always has been the very essence of how the weak make war against the strong...
...While Mosby still roamed freely, a frustrated General Sheridan, whom Mosby relentlessly foiled in the Shenandoah Valley, once thundered about the restless guerrilla: "Let [him] know there is a God in Israel...
...Keep your command together and in good spirits," Lee reassured his son Rooney...
...The drum of history rarely beats for the men on the losing side in wars...
...forces under my command & tend to the restoration of peace, I shall be pleased to meet you at 10 a.m...
...Countering numerical superiority, guerrillas have always employed secrecy, deception, and terror as their ultimate tools...
...Don't let them think of surrender...
...the partisan war against Revolutionary France...
...And before the opportunity slipped away, Lee hoped to turn the momentary lull to his advantage...
...In a war without fronts, boundaries, and formal organization, the distinction between civilians and soldiers/partisans almost totally evaporated...
...We have now entered upon a new phase of a struggle the memory of which is to endure for all ages," he declared...
...So a sleep-deprived Robert E. Lee— now unable to move west, or south, or east, only north, the very last direction he wanted to go—listened to one of his most trusted advisers in the cool early morning hours of April 9. Hearing Porter Alexander out, he was doing some quick calculations in his head about the effect that generations of bushwhacking—guerrilla warfare—would have on the country...
...The men would be without rations and under no control of officers...
...But Sheridan's horsemen were now backed by two Federal corps strung out between Lee and North Carolina...
...Quipped one soldier at glimpsing this awesome sight: "Lee couldn't go forward, he couldn't go backward, and he couldn't go sideways...
...If he were to surrender his troops, it would be against the advice of Jefferson Davis, against the advice of his civilian authority...
...Still, after months of languishing in the trenches, their morale and elan were surprisingly strong...
...Lee improvised: in the first case, three separate corps—Gordon's, Longstreet's, and Mahone's—were densely wedged onto a single bridge...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 81 on Lee himself, a chorus cried: "HANG LEE...
...What is honorable...
...It looks as if Lee still means to fight...
...Shortly before dusk on April 8, as he dismounted to make camp for the night, Lee received a letter from Grant offering generous terms for the surrender of Lee's army and the only condition that he demanded was that the officers and men "be disqualified from taking up arms" until exchanged...
...My God...
...So all civilians were seen as enemies...
...Some of the Confederate's guerrillas became legendary, feared not simply in the North, but known internationally on both sides of the Atlantic...
...The Confederates were almost entirely surrounded, outnumbered nearly six to one, with little food, little hope of resupply, little prospect for immediate reinforcement...
...On October 6, his gang again struck with considerable fury, overcoming a Federal wagon train at Baxter Springs...
...When a moment of vacillation came and an opening occurred, Alexander, one of the most talented and innovative men in Lee's command, took it...
...And this option—guerrilla warfare—was not one to be lightly ignored...
...But confronted with a guerrilla phase, the Union would not be able to demobilize its armies, always problematic for a democracy...
...Instead, the discussion turned to surrender...
...Thousands of Federal troopers and Kansas militiamen quickly pursued the bushwhackers, but by the next day, they were safely nestled in the woodlands of Missouri...
...Moreover, on April 4, a fleeing President Jefferson Davis had issued his own call for a guerrilla struggle...
...was among the most dashing and prominent...
...There is no country...
...He concluded thus: "Let us but will it, and we are free...
...By luring their adversaries into endless, futile pursuit, guerrillas erode not just the enemy's strength, but, far more importantly, the enemy's morale...
...they hit hard in the rain, or just as hard in the sunshine...
...Lee's forage wagons came back virtually empty: there were no pigs, no sheep, no hogs, no cattle, no provender...
...Noted one high-ranking military man in Richmond, "they recognize the life of a man less than you would that of a dog killing a sheep...
...As the Romans had found out 2,000 76 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 years earlier, cities could become useless baggage weighing down the military forces, what the ancient commanders memorably called "impedimenta...
...Then the killing began...
...And all this among honest men...
...Pint-sized, plucky, and daring, he was a bit of a Renaissance man...
...After Sayler's Creek, Phil Sheridan tersely wired Grant: "If the thing is pressed, I think that Lee will surrender...
...The army had failed dismally even in the more limited guerrilla war in Missouri...
...Of all the sentiments it reflects, despair and surrender are not among them: Genl I received at a late hour your note of today...
...The letter was sealed, and the courier dispatched...
...The Federals swiftly retaliated, issuing the harshest order of the war by either side against civilians, known as General Orders Number 11...
...But these delays, costing the Confederates in manpower, in stamina, and, most precious of all, in ticks of the clock, held up the completion of the crossing until the following evening...
...He pushed his men that much harder...
...Nor is it idle to speculate that at such a late date such a mode of warfare might well have accomplished what four years of conventional war had failed to do: cleave North from South...
...And then there were the most honorable examples of all: The Swamp Fox, Francis Marion, Sumter, Pickens, Green, the Liberty Boys in Georgia...
...Now it was Lee who sought to cheat fate...
...Then he waited...
...In 1864, a ragtag group of twelve Confederates, without horses, plus ten lookouts, and financed by a mere $400 in cash from the Confederate secretary of war, had crossed the Canadian border, plundered three Vermont banks, stolen $210,000, and turned the entire state into chaos...
...Officers dispensed with their guns, fighting with swords and, when they no longer worked, with fists...
...Longstreet had already sought to dislodge them...
...Yet it was Lee's judgment— and not Davis's—that would be most decisive...
...Here, surely, was seduction...
...By day's end, the deed was done...
...You don't care for military glory or fame," he protested, "but we are proud of your name and the record of this army...
...earthworks were blocking the retreat path like a dam...
...the slightest arched eyebrow would be feared...
...In early 1862, Quantrill and his band of bushwhackers launched a series of strikes into Kansas that all but paralyzed the state...
...Kill...
...On pardons: "Never...
...To the chivalric Southerners, war was about noble sacrifice...
...Once more, Lee pushed his men to the outer limits of human endurance...
...New and no less bloodthirsty gangs of bushwhackers rose up, led by George Todd, John Thrailkill, and others who roved virtually unchecked, baiting and murdering Federal patrols, and bringing all affairs in Missouri to a halt...
...Lee was stunned...
...exhausted," he bluntly told one of his generals, "but it is necessary to tax their strength...
...which had exploded...
...All were expecting a council of war...
...HANG him...
...Hungry, with barely one night of rest in three days, many of the men wandered forward in a giddy, phantasmagoric state, slipping in and out of sleep and confusion as they walked...
...Consider the nearly insuperable difficulties that he would face: up to that point, no more than roughly a million Union men had been in arms at any one given time...
...HANG LEE...
...At the outset of the war, he was actually opposed to secession and was an "indifferent soldier" at best...
...Sheridan wasted no time in capitalizing on their diminished state...
...Few are venerated in civic halls and history lessons...
...The wind caught the flag, and it snapped and curled around his silver mane, flapping about him and draping his body in Confederate red...
...Early in the morning of August 21, Quantrill and his 400 bushwhackers—including Frank James and Coleman Younger—struck...
...of Wellington in Portugal...
...Another promised massive arrests of local civilians in Mosby's confederacy and a wholesale destruction of their mills, barns, and crops...
...So what mattered now was each new stride, each new landmark, bringing them closer to the 350,000 rations they expected at Amelia Court House, and taking them a step farther away from Grant's huge force, eagerly trailing behind...
...On May 24,1856, John Brown and five other abolitionists brutally murdered and mutilated five Southern settlers at Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas...
...the experience of Frederick the Great in Bohemia...
...Operating on horseback at night, with stealth, surprise, and swiftness, he soon earned the sobriquet of the "Grey Ghost," and the romance surrounding his exploits brought recruit after recruit to his doorstep...
...Soldiers were pinned down at their posts in a countryside dominated by guerrillas, their men as much hunted as hunters...
...From a military point of view, the plan had considerable merit...
...What is proper...
...Confronted with a guerrilla phase, the Union would not be able to demobilize its armies...
...And in this fateful moment the aging general would affect the course of the nation's history for all time...
...By 1864, the guerrilla war had reached new peaks of savagery...
...Insurrectionist, subversive, chaotic, its methods are often chosen instinctively, but throughout time, they have worked with astonishing regularity...
...The twenty-nine-year-old had been expelled from the University of Virginia—he shot a fellow student—yet he later finagled a pardon from the governor, and then, of all things, took up the law...
...virtually every citizen was deported...
...Whatever draconian measures the Union instituted, including confiscation of property and executions of five guerrillas for every loyalist killed, accomplished little...
...In the words of historian Michael Fellman, life in Missouri became a "life of secret impeachments, divided loyalties, and whispered confidences...
...Various strategies were employed—without success—to subdue him...
...Missouri produced the most bloodthirsty guerrillas of the war...
...the dead lay so close and dense that bodies had to be dragged away to let a single horse pass...
...In most instances their deaths came at the hands of some unseen sniper...
...Beyond that, there was the shining example of his own Carolina ancestors against the British Lord Cornwallis...
...In all likelihood, a guerrilla war countrywide would be a combination of the two, and, even at this late date, it could likely have an awesome impact: total conquest could be resisted, until, perhaps, attrition and exhaustion would lead the North to sue the South for peace...
...he wanted to get ahead of him...
...Said one, guerrilla warfare is "the external visitation of evil...
...How much longer would the country countenance sending its men into war...
...Equally familiar to nineteenth-century Americans were the Thirty Years War and the French Religious Wars...
...Unless they are poorly equipped, or the battlefield has collapsed around them, they do not march on foot, and, if they do, they certainly do not THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 69 expect grand victory...
...With Union soldiers approaching, Lee's army stood nearly naked to assault...
...Across most of the South, the situation would be even more daunting...
...And in either case, there was no guarantee that he would secure food—that day, the next, or the next after that...
...Then the killing began...
...Earlier in the fighting, one flag bearer had been brought down by an artillery shell, only to have his brother grab the standard and promptly be shot through the head...
...haversacks still open, muskets in hand, men turned and raced across bridges that were already burning...
...Likely recalling Missouri, he quickly reasoned that a guerrilla war would make a wasteland of all that he loved...
...They may hit at the rear of the enemy, or at its infrastructure, or, most devastating of all, at its psyche...
...Dug in, "thick and high," the Federals were waiting...
...Early in the war,in an attempt to tap the growing discontent behind enemy lines, the Confederate government had legitimized guerrilla organizations with the Partisan Ranger Act of April 1862.Yet, as time went by, and even as the roaming guerrillas tied down Union troops and Union energy, a number of Confederate authorities found the guerrillas' methods distasteful...
...Upon locating the boxcars, he ordered them to be opened...
...As he had once said, "it [is] better to do right, even if we suffer in so doing, than to incur the reproach of our consciences & posterity...
...All told, Grant's army had captured an astonishing 6,000 rebels—Lee's son Custis and the one-legged General Richard Ewell among them—and destroyed much of their wagon train...
...I had seldom seen a fire more accurate nor one that had been more deadly," one rebel noted...
...Where would the stamina come from...
...Mosby shot back: "Do you know Mosby, General...
...Yet fear78 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 some as he was, Mosby, like his spiritual predecessors Marion, Pickens, and Sumter, represented the civilized face of "little war...
...At the sight of the Yankees, they rallied...
...For the next few hours, his fierce and sweaty longhaired men, unshaven and unwashed, rumbled up and down the streets of Lawrence, looting stores, shops, saloons, and houses...
...Conscription would continue...
...Lee's surely in a bad fix," he announced...
...the only constant is that they move when least expected, and invariably in a way to maximize impact...
...But the Union troops were too well entrenched, and his army was in no condition for an all-out battle...
...How long could it tolerate the necessary mass executions, the sweeping confiscations, the collective expulsions, and all the other agonies and cruelties of a full-scale guerrilla war, which would inevitably pervert its identity as a republic...
...they thought him crazy, that is, until he did it in fifteen days and swept down upon the unsuspecting Romans...
...On and on, hour after hour, from hilltop to hilltop, for the better part of two solid nights and one continuous day, they struggled to keep their lead...
...And Alexander was already prepared to take to the bush rather than surrender—and so, he later indicated, were countless other men...
...When that was no longer enough, the dead were stripped and castrated...
...Instead, Lee set his men back in motion, again...
...Grant wasted no time.This was the opportunity that he had hoped for...
...He and his men knew the countryside personally, and friends and relatives provided them with shelter, fresh horses, and timely warning in case of pursuit...
...Its application is classic and surprisingly simple: shock the enemy by concentrating strength against weakness...
...their guns shattering the unearthly silence of the rolling hills...
...So meeting with Sheridan and Major General George Meade, he reiterated his central plan...
...Suppose, he told Porter Alexander, that "I should take your suggestion...
...And the Union was utterly unable to cope with the ongoing terror...
...Two thirds" would get away, Alexander contended...
...But there was suddenly the prospect of food to spur his men on...
...Three were shot, two were hanged, and a seventeen-year-old boy was dragged bleeding and dying through the streets by two men on horses until a pistol was finally emptied into his face—while his grief-stricken mother hysterically begged for his life...
...and at the thought of food in Amelia, so were their spirits...
...In Charles Adams's famous warning, "The Confederacy would have been reduced to smoldering wilderness...
...On those who had lifted their hands against the North: "Treason must be made odious...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 81...
...This time, the rebels inflicted more casualties than they suffered—in fact, the Union had lost some 8,000 men in just the last week alone—and by moonlight, the road west to Lynchburg now beckoned...
...I would arrest them, I would try them, I would convict them, and I would hang them...
...As Mahone and his men drew into a line to hold back the Federals, Lee's temper again flared...
...In the swamps of Florida, John Jackson Dickison outmaneuvered, outfought, and outfoxed the bluecoats...
...Before he was eventually captured— and summarily hanged—Ferguson personally extinguished over a hundred lives...
...Lee himself was instrumental in the Congress's decision...
...In moving to occupy vast stretches of land defended only by small, dispersed forces, Grant's strategy of exhaustion would be turned on its head...
...People must have thought Hannibal especially crazy, setting out from Spain with 40,000 men and an ungodly number of elephants to traverse two hazardous mountain ranges—the Pyrenees and the Alps— and a deep, rushing river, the Rhône, and to endure landslides, blinding snowstorms, and attacks by hostile mountain tribes...
...Soon, three Union "blanched," and finally, they were "awestruck...
...Indeed, the Chicago Tribune had recommended just that...
...They move quickly, attack fast, and just as quickly scatter...
...So does thirst...
...the rolling hills soon echoed with the staccato 74 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 rattle of artillery...
...Yet this only how this would affect us...
...That day had come and gone, and much more hard marching lay ahead of them...
...It was 104 miles by railroad...
...In a tactful combination of diplomacy and insight, he suggested that Lee could be spared the humiliation of surrendering in person...
...Soon, Quantrill and his men were riding about wearing scalps dangling from their bridles, as well as an assortment of other body parts—ears, noses, teeth, even fingers—vivid trophies of their latest victims...
...Yet despite a massive sweep through the woodlands of western Missouri by Federal cavalrymen, Quantrill escaped...
...So were stage lines...
...he, too, was drawn to the fight...
...J ust outside Jetersville, itself a ragtag town consisting of little more than a collection of weathered wooden houses scattered alongside the rail line, Union cavalry had beaten the rebels to the punch...
...But they mauled Union outposts with such effectiveness and a whirlwind fury that the regions stretching from the Blue Ridge to the Bull Run mountains were quickly dubbed, by friends and foes alike, "Mosby's confederacy...
...Dense columns of smoke rose from exploding vehicles, and shells burst THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 71 after being touched by flames...
...Now Lee and his veterans, some 35,000 men, had a roughly 140-mile march to make and a solid twelve- to twenty-four-hour lead...
...Among their disciples were young men destined for later notoriety: Frank and Jesse James, and Coleman Younger...
...The city lay in ashes...
...The military balance would be almost meaningless...
...But this morning, his hopes—and theirs—rose at the stirring thought of the relief waiting for them in Confederate boxcars on the Danville line at Amelia...
...A favorite torture tactic was repetitive hanging...
...As its columns sought to put down the guerrilla resistance of Abdelkader in North Africa in 1833, one urgent dispatch to King Louis-Philippe stated sadly: "We have surpassed in barbarity the barbarians we came to civilize...
...Grabbing one another with dirt-sodden fingers, callused, sweaty hands, 72 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 and sharp fingernails, they rolled on the ground like wild beasts, biting one another's throats and ears and noses with their teeth...
...no longer did they fear seeing "the elephant" of battle...
...Leaning forward in his saddle, he snatched a single battle flag, to rally fresh troops as well as retreating men...
...And once the war started, across the Confederacy, Southerners quickly took to guerrilla tactics...
...Before dawn on April 9, in the pitch black, the advance was to begin...
...And on Lee himself, a chorus cried: "HANG LEE...
...Union troops fared little better...
...But now, the shards of Lee's army successfully fended off the Union, smashing the bluecoats along both their front and their flank, even taking some 300 prisoners, including a Union general—all under the direct eye of Lee himself...
...Have you got the rascal...
...Their molestations need not be constant, or even kill many people...
...the line of advancing bluecoats wavered and broke...
...I would say death is too easy a punishment...
...At the top of the rise, he stopped and waited...
...Pleading with his chief not to give up, Alexander saw another recourse: a third option...
...The stoic Lee himself made it across the Appomattox River only on the morning of April 4, at 7:30 a.m...
...Typically, when most rebel generals thought of guerrillas, they thought of Mosby...
...Prospects for Northern victory had seemed dim as recently as August 1864, largely because Northerners had grown weary of the war...
...Frantically riding back, an officer finally torched it, but the delay was fatal...
...Hadn't he gotten to Cold Harbor first...
...He devised another plan for breaking through the enemy lines: his men would attack as soon as possible, attempting to slice a hole through Grants slumbering army, and if successful, they would resume the march southward...
...His men had left Richmond and Petersburg with only one day of rations...
...After the methodical rebel order of "Fire...
...In truth, more frightening to the Union than the actual casualties it might suffer would be the psychological toll as prolonged occupiers, the profound exhaustion, the constant demoralization...
...and the Sunday stillness was again shattered by the piercing cry of the rebel yell...
...it was to be gentlemanly and Christian, and there was an aristocratic code of honor to be adhered to...
...The elements, too—the sun, the wind, and the rain— become merciless...
...Missouri was dragged into a whirlpool of vengeance...
...On the Confederates who had graduated from West Point: "Those who have been fed, clothed, and taught at the public expense ought to stretch the first rope...
...Indeed, the Chicago Tribune had recommended just that...
...Judas Maccabeus waged successful guerrilla operations against the Syrians...
...In mine of yesterday I did not intend to propose the surrender of the Army of N. Va.—but to ask the terms of your proposition...
...200 homes were burned to the ground...
...Do you know who I am...
...Both those who sheltered the guerrillas and those who collaborated with the Unionists placed their lives in peril...
...And there would be no breakfast that morning for the men...
...Thus on that morning of April 9, 1865, Lee had two very different faces of guerrilla war to consider: the first was the face of a Mosby...
...Already, weakened men and animals were slowly dropping in their tracks...
...It functioned as a Free-Soil citadel during the 1850s, then as a haven for runaway slaves, and, during the war, as a headquarters to the Redlegs, a band of hated Unionist guerrillas...
...guerrilla onslaught...
...He was uncompromising about the unique American ethos of respecting the primacy of civilian leadership to make judgments about affairs of state...
...Kill...
...Lee summoned General Longstreet, who brought Mahone and Lee's chief of artillery, the twenty-nine-year-old brigadier general, E. Porter Alexander...
...One father, as his family watched helplessly, was strung up three times—and only on the last try was the deed done...
...Gordon's men fought with a special fury...
...In turn, he was sheltered and fed by a large and sympathetic population in northern Virginia, which served as his early warning network—and his refuge...
...Before the Civil War even began, guerrilla activity had already made its mark on the North-South conflict...
...Almost as ruthless as the Lawrence raid itself, it was designed to strike at the heart of the guerrillas' power—the support given them by the civilian population...
...We would be like rabbits or partridges in the bushes," he said, "and they could not scatter to follow us...
...There would be no real rest, no real respite, no true amity, nor any real sense of victory...
...Champ Ferguson tormented the Cumberland in Tennessee, knifing, mangling, and bludgeoning luckless Federals whenever he encountered them...
...But no bread, no beef, no bacon, no flour, no meal, no hardtack, no pork, no ham, no fruit, no cornmeal...
...At one point, Jesse McNeill and his partisans slipped into Cumberland, Maryland, and in a daring raid captured two Union generals...
...Many never did...
...Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities and particular points, important but not vital to our defense, with an army free to move from point to point and strike in detail detachments and garrisons of the enemy, operating on the interior of our own country, where supplies are more accessible, and where the foe will be far removed from his own base and cut off from all succor in case of reverse, nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain but the exhibition of our own unquenchable resolve...
...Pandemonium itself seems to have broken loose, and robbery, murder and rapine, and death run riot over the country...
...By the time war erupted in 1861, many on the bloodstained Kansas-Missouri border were already veterans of irregular warfare...
...It was Palm Sunday, the day that marked the start of the Holy Week and Jesus' arrival in Jerusalem...
...While the food was dispensed, campfires were hastily built...
...The priceless supply train quickly rolled away, while thousands of starving soldiers, who had not yet drawn their rations, watched in agony...
...We know what the French once said of a comparable experience...
...Now it was no longer enough to ambush and gun down the enemy...
...Thus escalated the vicious cycle of retaliation and revenge...
...HANG LEE...
...The temptation must have been vast...
...he cried out...
...Knives would be thrust into bellies—but only partially...
...Moreover, given that most of them would be battle-hardened and well-trained veterans, arguably an organized Confederate guerrilla army could be among the most effective partisan groups in all of history...
...When Lincoln read this, his melancholy spirits soared...
...As General John D. Sanborn, who served under Grant's command, would later admit: "No policy worked...
...Then a spontaneous cry from the frenzied survivors...
...Mosby: "No, but he has got you...
...He continued his counsel to Alexander: "Then, General, you and I as Christian men have no right to consider If Lee were somehow to succeed with guerrilla warfare, his place in history would be assured...
...By 1864, because of the atrocities committed by bushwhackers in the West, as well as the penchant for plunder that virtually all guerrilla bands displayed, powerful Southern voices eventually called for repeal of the Partisan Ranger Act...
...A collective sociopa-thy reigned in Missouri, civil society was torn apart...
...But by now they were fighting a second struggle, this one from within...
...no one should think otherwise...
...To survive, people cheated, lied, and bore false witness against their neighbors—anything to appease the other side...
...Yet somehow, Lee's men inched forward...
...and corn bread was devoured...
...Unknown to Lee, Grant had labored more than six hours to compose this letter...
...but one of them, Bevil's Bridge, was washed out...
...The general wasted little time, quickly giving the bad news to his division commanders and then writing out an appeal to "the Citizens of Amelia County" in which he called on their "generosity and charity" and asked them "to supply as far as each is able the wants of the brave soldiers who have battled for your liberty for four years...
...If he were somehow to succeed 80 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 with guerrilla warfare, his place in history would be assured...
...Even Confederate generals were dismayed at the wanton carnage...
...Lee, however, principled to the bitter end, was thinking not about personal glory, but along quite different lines...
...There was no time to waste...
...On Jefferson Davis: "HANG him...
...To run the gauntlet on the Missouri, pilots started to request—and received—a thousand dollars for a single trip to Kansas...
...Revenge and retaliation follow...
...To leave Grant behind now would enshrine him among history's great commanders and tacticians...
...West Point graduate and former U.S...
...All order broke down...
...Finally, Lee said, "And as for myself, you young fellows might go bushwhacking, but the only dignified course for me would be to go to General Grant and surrender myself and take the consequences of my acts...
...And with each hour, the situation worsens: initiative is deadened, and judgment becomes impaired, giving many the mental capacity of a small child...
...Lee was confronted with one last chance, one last opportunity for vindication...
...Its people knew the countryside intimately and instinctively and had all the talents necessary for adroit bushwhacking, everything from the shooting and the riding, the tracking and the foraging, the versatility and the cunning, right down to the sort of dash necessary for this way of life...
...Even in early April 1865, the Union had actually conquered only a relatively small part of the South—to be sure, crucial areas for a conventional conflict, like Nashville, New Orleans, Memphis, and, of course, the crown jewel of Richmond—but that would be largely meaningless in a bitter, protracted guerrilla war...
...We would bring on a state of affairs it would take the country years to recover from...
...he shouted angrily...
...all morals disintegrated...
...bands of marauders, and the enemy's cavalry would...
...It is hard to imagine Americans willing to pay this price for Union...
...Wrote the Kansas City Journal of Commerce in 1864, even before the worst of it: "East of us, west of us, north of us, south of us, comes the same harrowing story...
...Steamboats were not safe, coming under repeated sniper fire...
...Lee understood the odds, but ever the gambler, hadn't he bested them before...
...Every foul bird comes along, and every dirty reptile rises up...
...Today, great military machines race across terrain in high-speed tanks and armored personnel carriers...
...Six straight days of Lee's relentless march westward had not dimmed his audacity, or his desire to avoid surrender and somehow salvage victory...
...and well-fed bluecoats were peering over the lines...
...On the other side, they seamlessly merge into swamps, or dense, claustrophobic woods, or undergrowth so thick as to be a second forest...
...There is no final list of how many innocent people died in the process—although some estimates suggest it surpassed the carnage in Lawrence...
...I have fought my corps to a frazzle," he wrote...
...And I fear I can do nothing...
...And as military men have often learned the hard way, guerrilla warfare does the job...
...They're demoralized as hell...
...Now there was no river between Lee and Grant's lead troops...
...Three hours later, around 8 a.m., a courier from Gordon hastily carried the apocalyptic message to Lee...
...The day after Richmond fell, Davis had called on the Confederacy to shift from a static conventional war in defense of territory and population centers to a dynamic guerrilla war of attrition, designed to wear down the North and force it to conclude that keeping the South in the Union would not be worth the interminable pain and ongoing sacrifice...
...Some of Lincoln's aides put it even more fearfully...
...Adding up the killed and wounded, Lee had lost up to 8,000...
...a hard-marching Federal column reached the accompanying wagon bridge in time to stomp out the flames...
...This time due west, for Lynchburg...
...Fueled by the prospect of victory, the Federals had at long last begun to show a fighting spirit that had been sorely lacking since the Grant-Lee slugfest began almost a year before: gone were the shock and dread of another Wilderness or Cold Harbor...
...But on that Palm Sunday morning of April 9, he forged ahead...
...You are the country to these men...
...bacon sizzled...
...On the Missouri guerrilla conflict he lamented, "Each man feels an impulse to kill his neighbors, lest he first THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 77 be killed by him...
...The hollow-eyed Confederates sprang to their feet with empty muskets, starting after the retreating Yankees...
...Both sides snapped...
...No matter how much he believed in the Cause—his daring attempts over the last nine days were vivid testimony to that—there were limits to Southern independence...
...their crops and their forage were destroyed...
...The evening was little better: as the long, black night wore on, more troops fell by the wayside...
...Even the North would not be safe...
...Once more, Federal and Confederate soldiers clashed...
...During the Revolutionary War, Lee's own father had fought the British as a partisan...
...It failed...
...Nineteen miles away...
...It didn't matter...
...Lee dispatched an order by wire...
...Following alongside, Lee learned from two captured Federal spies that the Union was gaining ground...
...Nor is the list of total refugees in this mass exodus fully complete...
...Of these, John Mosby Riding past Mahones troops, at the top of the rise Lee stopped and waited...
...Lee himself felt the sting of defeat sharply...
Vol. 34 • March 2001 • No. 2
