1 We Should Assume the AggressiveJohn Beauchamp Jones, the observant, gossipy clerk in the War Department in Richmond, took note in his diary under date of May 15, 1863, that General Lee had come down from his headquarters on the Rappahannock and was conferring at the Department. "Lee looked thinner, and a little pale," Jones wrote. "Subsequently he and the Secretary of War were long closeted with the President." (That same day another Richmond insider, President Daviss aide William Preston Johnston, was writing more optimistically, "Genl Lee is here and looking splendidly s costliest single casualty, of course, was Stonewall Jackson. "It is a terrible loss," Lee confessed to his son Custis. "I do not know how to replace him." On May 12 Richmond had paid its last respects to "this great and good soldier," and this very day Stonewall was being laid to rest in Lexington. Yet the tides of war do not wait, and General Lee had come to the capital to try and shape their future course. For the Southern Confederacy these were days of rapidly accelerating crisis, and seen in retrospect this Richmond strategy conference of May 15, 1863, easily qualifies as a pivotal moment in Confederate history. Yet the record of what was discussed and decided that day by General Lee, President Davis, and Secretary of War James A. Seddon is entirely blank. No minutes or notes have survived. Only in clerk Joness brief diary entry 1 are the participants even identified. Nevertheless, from recollections and from correspondence of the three men before and after the conference, it is possible to infer their probable agenda and to piece together what must have been the gist of their arguments and their agreements - and their decisions. Their decisions were major ones. It was the Vicksburg conundrum that triggered this May 15 conference. The Federals had been nibbling away at the Mississippi citadel since winter, and by mid-April Mississippis governor, John J. Pettus, was telling Richmond, "the crisis in our affairs in my opinion is now upon us." As April turned to May, dispatches from the Confederate generals in the West became ever more ominous in tone. In a sudden and startling move, the Yankee general there, U. S. Grant, had landed his army on the east bank of the Mississippi below Vicksburg and was reported marching inland, straight toward the state capital of Jackson. On May 12 John C. Pemberton, commanding the Vicksburg garrison, telegraphed President Davis, "with my limited force I will do all I can to meet him.... The enemy largely outnumbers me...." Pemberton offered little comfort the next day: "My forces are very inadequate.... Enemy continues to re-enforce heavily." Grants march toward Jackson threatened to drive a wedge between Pemberton in Vicksburg and the force that Joseph E. Johnston was cobbling together to go to Pembertons support. On May 9 Johnston had been put in overall charge of operations against the Federal invaders of Mississi Excerpted from Gettysburg by Stephen W. Sears All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
