Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided (6 page)

The proposal raised a firestorm of protest. Opponents warned that it lacked support from the Lincoln administration and would plunge Virginia's western counties into the midst of revolution. Carlile did not flinch. “It is represented that a proposition looking to a separate State government is revolutionary in its character,” he said. “I deny it. It is the only legal, constitutional remedy left this people if they do not approve the action of the Virginia Convention.…[I]s there a man here that needs to be told it that the Constitution of the United States provides expressly and in terms plain and unmistakable for the separation of a State and the erection of a new State?”
⁵⁶

A tall, raw-boned Morgantown attorney named Waitman T. Willey rose in dissent. The nearly fifty-year-old Willey bore an extensive political résumé. He had been an elector on the
Harrison–Tyler ticket of 1840, a member of the Virginia constitutional convention of 1850–51, a candidate for Congress in 1852, a candidate for Lieutenant Governor in 1859, and a delegate to the Richmond convention. He was a “Wheel-horse” of the old Whig party, staunchly conservative and a slaveholder. Yet Willey was also pious and caring—a man of integrity.

He was modest, even retiring, though blessed with a power of speech “rarely found in man.” It was said Willey could move an audience at will, that the sweep of his oratory was “utterly irresistible,” that an electric current seemed to dance from the ends of his long, bony fingers.
⁵⁷

He was perhaps the only delegate in Wheeling who could fend off John Carlile. Summoning his magnificent gift, Willey assailed the statehood proposal. He styled it “triple treason”—treason against the State of Virginia, treason against the U.S. Constitution, even treason against Virginia's alliance with the Confederacy.
⁵⁸

Willey maintained that the Wheeling convention had no legal authority. His discourse stretched into May 15, the convention's third and final day. Willey's “triple treason” argument was hotly debated. Some recalled his behavior at the Richmond convention and thought him a “lukewarm” Unionist at best. Spectators jeered Willey's name, but his forceful filibuster paved the way for another speaker.
⁵⁹

That delegate was Francis H. Pierpont. Born in a log cabin at “Forks of Cheat,” Monongalia County, Virginia, in 1814, he came from pioneer stock. The corpulent Pierpont was a rugged, self-made man. Even his surname had a robust ring, derived as it was from a medieval stone bridge.
⁶⁰

As a youth, Pierpont had labored on a farm. He had walked nearly one hundred eighty miles to attend Allegheny College in Pennsylvania and by 1842 gained admission to the bar. He was a life-long friend of Waitman Willey and shared his Whig politics, but decried slavery as a “social and political evil.” Pierpont once defended a free black man charged with aiding slaves on the Underground Railroad. He had endured taunts of “Abolitionist,”
“Black Republican” and “the big-bellied slanderer from Fairmont!”
⁶¹

Pierpont was greatly admired in Wheeling. Now he took Carlile and his noisy supporters to task. He quelled fears that Virginia state troops were marching to break up the convention, reassuring delegates that “there would soon be any amount of men and money” to protect Union men in Western Virginia—Ohio Governor Dennison and General McClellan would see to that.
⁶²

Frank Pierpont offered a compromise to the advocates of “New Virginia.” Article IV of the U.S. Constitution inspired his plan: “The United States shall guarantee to every state in this Union a republican form of government, and shall protect them from invasion; and…against domestic violence.” Pierpont used it as a guide to hammer out resolutions in committee. The specter of treason offered by Willey had cooled the ardor of Carlile's supporters—the tide of popular opinion had turned.
⁶³

Withdrawing his statehood proposal, John Carlile moved to adopt resolutions declaring Virginia's Ordinance of Secession to be “unconstitutional, null and void.” Loyal Unionists were urged to condemn the ordinance on May 23 at the polls. If it was ratified, delegates would be appointed to a second Wheeling convention on June 11 to devise measures for the safety and welfare of Virginia's western counties.

The resolutions were adopted; a Central Committee made up of Carlile, Pierpont, Latham, and six others was appointed to represent Virginia's Union interests. Carlile made a conciliatory address, but renewed his commitment to a “New Virginia.” “[C]ome life or come death,” he avowed to hearty applause, “it shall be accomplished.”
⁶⁴

Calls rang out for Waitman Willey to speak. Willey had nearly skipped the convention—he suffered from an aching back, and his father was near death. But lingering fears that the charismatic Carlile would push delegates into a rash and illegal act had carried him to Wheeling.
⁶⁵

Now Willey rose stiffly and summoned a voice that grew in passion and intensity. When the law failed, when the Constitution was exhausted, and when the Secession Ordinance was ratified—then he would stand with those who demanded a new state. Willey invoked the blessings of God and recited patriotic couplets. His speech literally “brought down the house.” It was a masterstroke, the Whig wheel-horse at his finest, charging the audience with an electricity that caused old men to jump and shout like schoolboys.

“Fellow citizens,” Willey exclaimed, “it almost cures one's backache to hear you applaud the sentiment. But then the time for speaking is done.” He squared his jaw and looked over the assembly:

Fellow citizens, the first thing we have got to fight is the Ordinance of Secession. Let us kill it on the 23d of this month. Let us bury it deep within the hills of Northwestern Virginia. Let us pile up our glorious hills on it; bury it deep so that it will never make its appearance among us again. Let us go back home and vote, even if we are beaten upon the final result, for the benefit of the moral influence of that vote. If we give something like a decided…majority in the Northwest, that alone secures our rights. That alone, at least secures an independent State if we desire it.

The convention of Virginia Unionists adjourned in a blaze of wild cheers.
⁶⁶

“
My husband has wept tears of blood over this terrible war, but as a man of honor and a Virginian, he must follow the destiny of his state.”

—Mary Custis Lee

It was an agonizing decision, the most difficult of his life. Colonel Robert E. Lee had just resigned from the United States Army. “With all my devotion to the Union,” he wrote on April 20, 1861, “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.”
⁶⁷

Two days earlier, Lee had left his Virginia home for Washington to meet with Francis P. Blair Sr., an emissary of President Lincoln. Blair was authorized to offer Lee command of the army of seventy-five thousand called out by Lincoln. It was the opportunity of a lifetime—the supreme honor to which any American soldier could dream. Yet Lee barely hesitated. “I declined the offer…as candidly and as courteously as I could,” he recalled, “though opposed to secession and deprecating war, I could take no part in an invasion of the Southern States.”
⁶⁸

Winfield Scott, the general-in-chief, then summoned Lee. Scott was a giant in stature and reputation. He was a towering
six-feet-five-inches tall. He was older than the Constitution, a battlefield hero since Lundy's Lane in the War of 1812, the acknowledged genius of the Mexican War, and the 1852 Whig nominee for president. Winfield Scott was a bona fide American legend.

West Point cadet Grant had called Scott “the finest specimen of manhood my eyes had ever beheld.” But that had been many years ago. In 1861, Winfield Scott was nearly seventy-five years old. Known as “Old Fuss and Feathers” for his dress and decorum, he was grossly overweight and in poor health, suffering from dropsy and vertigo—unable to mount a horse or even to walk more than a few steps without aid.
⁶⁹

During the Mexican War, Scott had mentored Lee and McClellan. Both had served ably under his critical eye. Yet when asked to pass judgment, Scott had called Lee “the very best soldier I ever saw in the field.” He had even suggested that in time of war, the government should insure Lee's life for five million dollars a year.

Now, as war loomed again, Lee faced his aged mentor. “These are times,” began Scott, “when every officer in the United States service should fully determine what course he will pursue and frankly declare it.”

Lee said nothing.

“Some of the Southern officers are resigning,” Scott continued, “possibly with the intention of taking part with their States. They make a fatal mistake. The contest may be long and severe, but eventually the issue must be in favor of the Union.”

There was a long, awkward pause. Lee remained silent.

“I suppose you will go with the rest,” Scott sighed. “If you propose to resign, it is proper you should do so at once; your present attitude is an equivocal one.”

Lee replied in a tone of finality, “The property belonging to my children, all they possess, lies in Virginia. They will be ruined, if they do not go with their State. I cannot raise my hand against my children.”
⁷⁰

Scott, a native Virginian himself, became deeply emotional. “Lee, you have made the greatest mistake of your life; but I feared it would be so.”
⁷¹

Robert E. Lee had agonized over that decision, hoped to delay it until Virginians ratified the Ordinance of Secession. But at any hour he might be ordered to invade his homeland—a duty he could not conscientiously perform. To resign under orders would have been a disgrace. Lee did not approve of secession; he had called it “nothing but revolution.” He thought little better of slavery. But like the generations of Lees before him, he was first and foremost a Virginian.

His ancestors had embraced revolutionary causes. In 1776, Richard Henry Lee stood before the Continental Congress to offer a motion for American independence. Robert's own father, “Light Horse Harry” Lee, had fought in the American Revolution for his native Virginia. Would his son now be forced to do the same in yet another revolution?
⁷²

And so Lee made a fateful choice. Sequestered in an upstairs room at the family home known as Arlington, he began a letter to Winfield Scott. “I shall carry to the grave the most grateful recollections of your kind consideration, and your name and fame will always be dear to me,” Lee told the aged general. “Save in defense of my native State, I never desire again to draw my sword.” He then drafted a one-sentence letter to Secretary of War Simon Cameron: “I have the honor to tender the resignation of my commission as Colonel of the 1st Regt. of Cavalry.”
⁷³

That same day, April 20,
The Alexandria Gazette
said of Lee, “There is no man who would command more of the confidence of the people of Virginia, than this distinguished officer; and no one under whom the volunteers and militia would more gladly rally. His reputation, his acknowledged ability, his chivalric character, his probity, honor, and—may we add, to his eternal praise—his Christian life and conduct—make his very name a ‘tower of strength.'”
⁷⁴

On the morning of April 22, Robert E. Lee boarded a train for Richmond. Governor John Letcher had summoned him. Although
Lee probably did not imagine it, he had spent his last night at Arlington.

The reserved Virginia gentleman who shook Governor Letcher's hand that day made quite an impression. “The noblest-looking man I had ever gazed upon,” thought one observer. Lee was a robust fifty-four years of age. Standing five-feet-eleven-inches tall, he weighed not 170 pounds, yet an enormous upper body and head made him appear larger. He wore a short mustache, and his dark hair was sprinkled with gray. Lee's brown eyes were animated, but his overwhelming expression was a calm self-assurance.
⁷⁵

The governor directly asked Lee to take command of Virginia's military forces, with the rank of major general, and he accepted. For his entire adulthood, Lee had been a soldier—it was the only life he knew. He stood before the Richmond convention the next day, in the shadow of his father, “Light Horse Harry” Lee.

Born Henry Lee III in 1756, Light Horse Harry had been a brilliant if erratic cavalry leader during the American Revolution, had been a member of the Continental Congress and governor of Virginia. But he had also been a foolish speculator, and fled the country in disgrace. He had died far from his family in 1818, remembered mainly for a eulogy to his friend George Washington: “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”
⁷⁶

Those very words were now paraphrased as tribute to his son Robert, Virginia's new major general. Lee followed with a modest speech. On April 23, 1861—the very day that Major General George McClellan began the Herculean task of organizing Ohio troops—Major General Robert E. Lee took command of the military forces of Virginia.
⁷⁷