Fall of Richmond
"...Lejeune's recently-published war memoir recounts the events of May 21st as "perhaps the most harrowing of my long career," in which he suggested that traveling to Heritage House to meet with Kernan, President Vardaman, and Secretary of War Robert B. Macon, an utter nonentity chosen for his likelihood of subservience towards the President and, crucially, ASO.
The "Pamunkey Meeting," as it has come to be known in only the short years since the end of the war, in many ways was the first time Vardaman had been forced to actually grapple with the notion that the Confederacy was losing the war and that, by Kernan's in the end optimistic estimate, there were perhaps seven to eight months of "fight remaining in Dixie." Kernan and Macon had both long since learned that Vardaman was not a man for facts and data, despite the former being an obsessive mind who pored over minute figures down to the number of wounded on daily bases in military hospitals across the Confederacy. This was impressed upon Lejeune as the general was brought into the Blue Room at Heritage House, where just less than three years earlier Tillman and Smith had made their fateful pact to go to war with the Union preemptively.
The news Lejeune brought was dire. The breakthrough at Fredericksburg a month prior had left much of central Virginia prone to the advances of the enemy, and as they gathered Lenihan's forces were seizing Charlottesville and placing themselves upon the South Anna River, which if they crossed would essentially negate Richmond's western defensive lines, or at least badly stretch them. The central thrust of the Yankee "Army Command East" was gathering north of Ashland, which would allow it to attack across the Pamunkey River - the so-called "trigger" which would presage an evacuation of Richmond, at least in theory, as it had after all been the mere suggestion of such a tactic that had ended Hugh Scott's career eighteen months earlier at Thanksgiving 1914.
Vardaman's main question was around the stability of Richmond's western defenses; Kernan replied that while the Yankees under Farnsworth had advanced past Williamsburg, they had been stopped in a bloody engagement at a chokepoint at the eastern end of the Middle Neck at the Battle of the Chickahominy and he was confident they were sufficiently pinned down. Vardaman asked all three men, then, what their suggested course of action was. Lejeune, hoping to play to Vardaman's vanity and political zeal for fighting on, noted that once the Yankees were across the Pamunkey there was very little that could be done to defend Richmond from attacks from north, east and west, but that the James River and the Roanoke River beyond it provided excellent defensive barriers and suggested at the very least that preparations begin to be made to prevent a breakout into east-central North Carolina. Kernan concurred, as did Macon, and Vardaman begrudgingly agreed to this course of action and asked that Congress, as well as Vice President Patton, head to Charlotte - seen as more defensible than Raleigh - while he stayed behind until the defense of Richmond was untenable. Lejeune was nonetheless not spared an angry tirade from Vardaman, who pointed a finger straight at him and noted that "this is the fault of you generals and your unwillingness to do what must be done," a remark that would haunt him to this day as he pondered in his memoirs whether he indeed did enough to keep Richmond out of Yankee hands..."
- The Last Days of the Old Confederacy: How the War Was Lost in 1916
"...on patrol at Monticello. Lenihan admired the structure and made sure to order that it be preserved entirely, and made it his headquarters for the push towards Roanoke and Lynchburg, which he viewed increasingly as just as important as Richmond. This in the end was highly ironic, as it was on a walk of the Monticello grounds with his chief of staff and a young officer name Dwight Eisenhower on the morning of June 6, 1916, that a sniper's bullet took Lenihan's life with a shot through the chest, and Lieutenant Eisenhower was badly injured with a shot to the lung himself.
The shock of Lenihan's assassination rippled across the United States; along with Liggett at the Susquehanna and Pershing's various campaigns, he was one of the three generals who had most placed himself in the public's imagination, and it was said that spontaneous weeping and other grieving occurred almost instantly as the news traveled. President Hughes ordered all flags flown at half mast for a week, and offered Lenihan's widow to speak at his funeral; along with Joseph Murdock at Hilton Head, he was the most senior United States officer to lose his life in the war, and their national martyrdom are the reason so many streets and schools today bear their names still.
Lenihan's death was, like Murdock's, doubly ironic as it occurred on the eve of his greatest triumph. With Charlottesville's fall on May 22nd and the successful breaking of Confederate lines along the South Anna on June 2nd, followed by the Battle of Ashland on June 8th, the paths to Richmond were entirely opened save for the small and ferocious defenders to its west holding off Farnsworth's increasingly large force on the Middle Neck. Herman Hall, Lenihan's most trusted and capable subordinate, was given new command of ACE and sent ahead a message to Lejeune in Richmond demanding the immediate surrender of Richmond and with it "ideally an end to this war."
On June 16th, the artillery defenses in the hills around Mechanicsville grew suspiciously quiet, and Hall's men - supplemented with landship and air cover - moved forward carefully, finding abandoned trenches all the way to the city. The Confederate government, it turned out, had evacuated all of Richmond north of the James and a new line of defenses set at Manchester to the capital's south, Petersburg, and the Appomattox and Roanoke Rivers. This choice to abandon a largely indefensible position saved Richmond the fate of cities like Nashville or Atlanta, and on June 17th, having cleared scattered defenders, Hall personally raised the Stars and Stripes over Heritage House, which he immediately declared his headquarters, and American soldiers used the Confederate Capitol building as sleeping quarters, with photographs taken of infantrymen putting out cigars on Senators Martin and Tillman's desks with their feet up, and others using Confederate flags as rags to clean their rifles. Richmond had fallen largely nonviolently, a symbolic victory for the United States that flew in the face of the chest-puffing "total resistance" rhetoric of Vardaman just four months prior and declaring louder than anything else could have - save events in Atlanta over the next three weeks - that the end was nearing for Dixie..."
- Making Sense of the Senseless: The Great American War at 100
The "Pamunkey Meeting," as it has come to be known in only the short years since the end of the war, in many ways was the first time Vardaman had been forced to actually grapple with the notion that the Confederacy was losing the war and that, by Kernan's in the end optimistic estimate, there were perhaps seven to eight months of "fight remaining in Dixie." Kernan and Macon had both long since learned that Vardaman was not a man for facts and data, despite the former being an obsessive mind who pored over minute figures down to the number of wounded on daily bases in military hospitals across the Confederacy. This was impressed upon Lejeune as the general was brought into the Blue Room at Heritage House, where just less than three years earlier Tillman and Smith had made their fateful pact to go to war with the Union preemptively.
The news Lejeune brought was dire. The breakthrough at Fredericksburg a month prior had left much of central Virginia prone to the advances of the enemy, and as they gathered Lenihan's forces were seizing Charlottesville and placing themselves upon the South Anna River, which if they crossed would essentially negate Richmond's western defensive lines, or at least badly stretch them. The central thrust of the Yankee "Army Command East" was gathering north of Ashland, which would allow it to attack across the Pamunkey River - the so-called "trigger" which would presage an evacuation of Richmond, at least in theory, as it had after all been the mere suggestion of such a tactic that had ended Hugh Scott's career eighteen months earlier at Thanksgiving 1914.
Vardaman's main question was around the stability of Richmond's western defenses; Kernan replied that while the Yankees under Farnsworth had advanced past Williamsburg, they had been stopped in a bloody engagement at a chokepoint at the eastern end of the Middle Neck at the Battle of the Chickahominy and he was confident they were sufficiently pinned down. Vardaman asked all three men, then, what their suggested course of action was. Lejeune, hoping to play to Vardaman's vanity and political zeal for fighting on, noted that once the Yankees were across the Pamunkey there was very little that could be done to defend Richmond from attacks from north, east and west, but that the James River and the Roanoke River beyond it provided excellent defensive barriers and suggested at the very least that preparations begin to be made to prevent a breakout into east-central North Carolina. Kernan concurred, as did Macon, and Vardaman begrudgingly agreed to this course of action and asked that Congress, as well as Vice President Patton, head to Charlotte - seen as more defensible than Raleigh - while he stayed behind until the defense of Richmond was untenable. Lejeune was nonetheless not spared an angry tirade from Vardaman, who pointed a finger straight at him and noted that "this is the fault of you generals and your unwillingness to do what must be done," a remark that would haunt him to this day as he pondered in his memoirs whether he indeed did enough to keep Richmond out of Yankee hands..."
- The Last Days of the Old Confederacy: How the War Was Lost in 1916
"...on patrol at Monticello. Lenihan admired the structure and made sure to order that it be preserved entirely, and made it his headquarters for the push towards Roanoke and Lynchburg, which he viewed increasingly as just as important as Richmond. This in the end was highly ironic, as it was on a walk of the Monticello grounds with his chief of staff and a young officer name Dwight Eisenhower on the morning of June 6, 1916, that a sniper's bullet took Lenihan's life with a shot through the chest, and Lieutenant Eisenhower was badly injured with a shot to the lung himself.
The shock of Lenihan's assassination rippled across the United States; along with Liggett at the Susquehanna and Pershing's various campaigns, he was one of the three generals who had most placed himself in the public's imagination, and it was said that spontaneous weeping and other grieving occurred almost instantly as the news traveled. President Hughes ordered all flags flown at half mast for a week, and offered Lenihan's widow to speak at his funeral; along with Joseph Murdock at Hilton Head, he was the most senior United States officer to lose his life in the war, and their national martyrdom are the reason so many streets and schools today bear their names still.
Lenihan's death was, like Murdock's, doubly ironic as it occurred on the eve of his greatest triumph. With Charlottesville's fall on May 22nd and the successful breaking of Confederate lines along the South Anna on June 2nd, followed by the Battle of Ashland on June 8th, the paths to Richmond were entirely opened save for the small and ferocious defenders to its west holding off Farnsworth's increasingly large force on the Middle Neck. Herman Hall, Lenihan's most trusted and capable subordinate, was given new command of ACE and sent ahead a message to Lejeune in Richmond demanding the immediate surrender of Richmond and with it "ideally an end to this war."
On June 16th, the artillery defenses in the hills around Mechanicsville grew suspiciously quiet, and Hall's men - supplemented with landship and air cover - moved forward carefully, finding abandoned trenches all the way to the city. The Confederate government, it turned out, had evacuated all of Richmond north of the James and a new line of defenses set at Manchester to the capital's south, Petersburg, and the Appomattox and Roanoke Rivers. This choice to abandon a largely indefensible position saved Richmond the fate of cities like Nashville or Atlanta, and on June 17th, having cleared scattered defenders, Hall personally raised the Stars and Stripes over Heritage House, which he immediately declared his headquarters, and American soldiers used the Confederate Capitol building as sleeping quarters, with photographs taken of infantrymen putting out cigars on Senators Martin and Tillman's desks with their feet up, and others using Confederate flags as rags to clean their rifles. Richmond had fallen largely nonviolently, a symbolic victory for the United States that flew in the face of the chest-puffing "total resistance" rhetoric of Vardaman just four months prior and declaring louder than anything else could have - save events in Atlanta over the next three weeks - that the end was nearing for Dixie..."
- Making Sense of the Senseless: The Great American War at 100
