CHAPTER NINE
What Jackson and his brigade saw, when they emerged from the woods onto the top of Henry Hill—an open, gently swelling patch of land containing two homesteads, some fruit trees, and a small cornfield—was nothing less than a full-blown military disaster. There was absolutely no doubt about that, as there often was in the confusion of a battle, no room for misinterpretation, no sign of Confederate troops rallying or Yankees withdrawing, no dressing of gray-clad ranks, no pockets of stubborn resistance, no rebel field artillery moving resolutely forward to blast the Federals from the opposite hill. General Bee had not been exaggerating when he told Jackson that the enemy was “driving” his men. The scene stretching out in front of them was one of complete, bloody chaos.
There was, moreover, no sign of any of the upper command anywhere, no evidence of Beauregard or Johnston or any of their staffs. There were just these few brave little brigades and pieces of brigades—Bee’s, Bartow’s, Evans’s, Hampton’s—that had broken off from Beauregard’s line and without orders had taken on the advancing Union army. They had fought hard and even heroically, and had held off repeated, equally courageous Union assaults. But they had been greatly outnumbered and outgunned. “The wounded commenced passing us,” recalled one of Jackson’s soldiers, “some with blood streaming down their faces, some with legs broken and hobbling along assisted by a comrade, and some seriously wounded and borne on stretchers.”1 Jackson’s former VMI student Charles Copland White wrote, “As we approach the battleground we meet men straggling off. . . . They tell us that the enemy is in overwhelming numbers and that our men are in full retreat. . . . Now the shells pass over us with their strange hissing sound . . . exploding in the thickets and cutting the limbs off trees.”2
The scene was shocking, too, in its stark simplicity. In their immediate front, Jackson’s men could see what was left of the Confederate forces, either streaming toward the rear or wandering forlornly, often officerless, around the two farmhouses atop Henry Hill. At the same time, the Virginians could look a mere mile across open fields to Matthews Hill and Dogan’s Ridge to see the heart-stopping reason why: an enormous blue mass of soldiers, “thick as wheat in the field,” their bayonets flashing like silver in the noonday sun, their splendid batteries throwing flame and firing round after thunderous round—which were weirdly visible to the naked eye—at the retreating men.3 Having driven their enemies from the hill, the Federals now appeared to be massing for another assault that would drive them clear back to Manassas Junction.4 There was nothing to stop them. That would have been the assumption of anyone who saw the field of battle at noon. That is why what happened next was so remarkable.
Jackson’s reaction to the alarm in Bee’s voice said everything about his approach to the crisis. If McDowell’s splendidly equipped legions were cutting everyone and everything in their path to pieces, Jackson would simply give them the bayonet. The notion was quaintly old-fashioned—Napoleonic, in fact—though the point of it was clear: a bayonet was an intimate and intensely personal way to kill someone. Jackson meant business. His first concern was not whether he should retreat along with the others, or how he could get Johnston or Beauregard to send him reinforcements, or how 2,600 men with a few cannons were going to stop the Federal juggernaut that had just driven more than 4,000 men from the field. His reaction was instinctive: Fight. Fight now. Hold the line.
Jackson, riding at the head of his column, which extended, four abreast, into the woods behind him, now met another distressed Confederate officer. This was John D. Imboden, a lawyer from Staunton, Virginia, who, from his position on the slope in front of Henry Hill, had waged a remarkably brave, one-battery duel with four small six-pounder guns against the assembled Federal artillery. But his three remaining guns were almost out of ammunition and many of his horses had been killed, so he, too, was retreating. Imboden, less scared than furious at General Bee for having left him alone for so long on Henry Hill, gave Jackson a bitter, invective-laced account of what had just happened. (Bee had actually ordered him to withdraw forty-five minutes before, but the messenger had died en route to him.5) Jackson seemed, oddly, more distressed by Imboden’s choice of vocabulary than by the Federal shells crashing around him. Imboden recalled, “I expressed myself with some profanity, which I could see was displeasing to Jackson.” Jackson then told him, “Unlimber right here. I’ll support your battery.”6 (A “limber” was a two-wheeled, horse-drawn wagon to which a cannon was attached for transport, and also carried ammunition. “Unlimbering” meant detaching the cannon for action; a Civil War battery was a large operation, usually consisting of four to six cannons, each of which was drawn by six horses, and accompanied by as many as six ammunition wagons—“caissons”—also drawn by six horses each, plus several other supply wagons. A single battery might thus include a hundred men and seventy-two or more horses.) Imboden protested that he had only three rounds left and suggested that he move to the rear to resupply. But Jackson, anticipating the swarm of bluecoats that was likely to be coming at him, and having no artillery yet in front, wanted at least the appearance of firepower. “No, not now,” he told Imboden. “Wait til the other guns get here, and then you can withdraw your battery.”7
Jackson now selected his defensive position. What he chose, quickly and under heavy artillery fire, was deeply unorthodox. Almost any other general would have made the textbook move forward to the northern edge of Henry Hill, the nominal “high ground” from which his guns and infantry would have looked down the slope to the Warrenton Pike, across which the Union soldiers would have to come. But Jackson instead chose the far southeastern edge of the plateau—the reverse slope—to place his infantry and artillery. As would soon become apparent, it was a brilliant tactical ploy. First, though the top of Henry Hill was largely an open field, this side of it was thick with pine trees. Jackson’s men could set up there, unseen by the Federals with their deadly rifled guns on Matthews Hill. There were also trees to give the Virginians at least some protection from artillery fire. Even better, Jackson’s own cannons would be able to roll forward over the lip of the hill, fire, then be carried back to safety by the recoil onto the downward slope, making them hard to see, too. Finally, this position offered Jackson a wide and largely unobstructed field of fire. Union troops cresting the northern side of Henry Hill would now have to cross three hundred murderous yards of open ground to get to him.
With his plan in mind, Jackson now went to work. Roving back and forth on horseback while enemy shells filled the air around him with lead and iron, he brought his artillery forward and carefully packed the woods in his center and on both flanks with his five regiments: the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 27th, and 33rd of Virginia. As he was doing this, Beauregard and Johnston—having at length concluded that the battle was not where they thought it was going to be, and that Ewell was never going to advance—finally arrived at the scene of the real fight. They took charge immediately. (Johnston would soon agree to Beauregard’s request to give him command of the battlefield, while Johnston assumed overall command from a farmhouse in the rear of Henry Hill.) They immediately saw the logic of Jackson’s unusual position, and moved to reinforce him.8 Jackson’s brigade was suddenly the center of the entire Confederate army, the very heart of the battle. Beauregard would build his new strategy around Jackson. One of the first things he did was give Jackson more guns. Now there were at least thirteen guns at the edge of the woods, all under his command. The fight for Henry Hill—and the hopes of the Confederacy—would pivot for the next few hours around Jackson’s 1st Virginia Brigade.
By about 1:00 p.m. the new line was in place, stretching for a quarter of a mile across the top of Henry Hill, fronted by those guns. Most of the men were on their bellies in the woods, lying “flat as flounders,” recalled the 4th Virginia’s John Lyle, as the Federal guns continued to boom from the far hill.9 Jackson, presenting a large and inviting target on horseback, seemed relaxed, unworried, almost unnaturally calm. “General Jackson rides several times along where we are lying and often goes over to the artillery,” wrote one of his men. “He seems to be very quiet, so we think that all is right, and that this is like battles generally.”10 Beauregard and Johnston went to work trying to patch together the scattered, disorganized, and demoralized Confederate brigades that sagged four hundred or more yards behind Jackson’s right. It was difficult work. “Every segment of line we succeeded in forming was again dissolved, while another was being formed,” wrote Beauregard, who for a change was making himself useful. “More than two thousand men were each shouting some suggestion to his neighbor.”11
• • •
Where was Union commanding general Irvin McDowell while the Confederates, outnumbered and threatened with destruction, were feverishly trying to patch up their lines? The answer was that he was making his first big mistake of the war. He didn’t see it that way. He was, at that moment, quite pleased with his situation, which looked to him very much like imminent victory. Though his flanking scheme had started badly, he had surprised and then routed the enemy. Burnside’s brigade had been bloodied, but McDowell still had the better part of eighteen thousand men on the hill. Before him he saw a rebel army in chaos, confusion, and retreat. Whatever force might be up there on Henry Hill—there was none that he could see—would be no match for the sort of firepower and infantry he had in place. But now, for some unknown reason, perhaps because he was momentarily stunned by his own success, or because he believed that, with such an astounding advantage in men and matériel, speed was no longer of the essence, McDowell paused. For two full hours, no orders came from his headquarters. It was as though, suddenly, there was no particular plan of battle, and no one running the army, which suddenly found itself standing about, awaiting orders.
McDowell’s strange entr’acte had been a miraculous gift to the beleaguered Confederates, and they had used it well. But it would not last. At 2:30, the Union army finally started moving. Like the old Napoleonic armies, it came with its field artillery out in front. Their attack began when two batteries with eleven guns crested the northwestern side of Henry Hill, a mere three hundred yards from Jackson’s line, unlimbered, and opened fire. In artillery terms, three hundred yards is virtually point-blank range. Jackson’s guns now roared to life, too, and thus began a furious hour-long duel between Jackson, who at VMI had been one of the first to test and recommend for adoption the rifled Parrott guns now aimed at him, and the Union batteries commanded by Captains James B. Ricketts and Charles Griffin. For Jackson’s men, who had already had shells lobbed at them for more than an hour by the more distant guns, it was a harrowing experience. A storm of ordnance now flew at them, not just solid shot but also antipersonnel projectiles such as “shell,” which exploded into shrapnel, and “spherical case,” which was hollow and loaded with smaller balls that sprayed in all directions. Tedford Barclay of the 4th Virginia Regiment described what happened to his regimental mates: “William Patterson shot . . . with a cannonball through his breast killing him instantly. Ben Brady, struck on the right hip with a piece of bomb shell, he lived for five or six minutes. Charlie Bell was killed with a piece of the same bomb, lived about two hours, his whole right shoulder was torn off.”12
Jackson continued to ride up and down his line on Little Sorrel, who was as unperturbed by gunfire as he was, repeating, “Steady, men, steady. All is well.” He moved, according to one admiring soldier, “in a shower of death as calmly as a farmer about his farm when the seasons are good.” He seemed to be a different man in the heat of battle; his eyes blazed, his whole being seemed to glow with the ardor of the fight. One soldier in the 33rd Virginia recalled that former VMI cadets, observing the cool confidence of their commander, now “saw the warrior and forgot the eccentric man.”13 At one point, as shells exploded in fragments that embedded themselves in trees, men, and horses, Jackson, speaking with Imboden, had thrust his left hand into the air—a characteristic gesture that seemed to accompany prayer. According to Imboden, “as he spoke, he jerked down his hand, and I saw that blood was streaming from it. I exclaimed, ‘General, you are wounded.’ ‘Only a scratch, a mere scratch,’ Jackson replied, and binding it hastily with a handkerchief, he galloped away along his line.”14
Though Jackson was clearly getting the better of the Union in his artillery duel—at short range the Federals’ technologically superior rifled cannons lost their advantage over the old-fashioned Confederate smoothbores—he was worried about his flanks. At 12:30 he had repulsed a brief attack on his right by a Union brigade that had come upon the field by way of the Stone Bridge. Now he split Jeb Stuart’s 300 cavalry and deployed them to his right and left, looking for advancing Union columns. They did not have to wait long. A courier from Stuart told Jackson of Union infantry moving on his left, to which Jackson, his eyes lighting up, replied, “Good! Good!” As he had intended, the enemy had not seen his men in the woods. The Federals heard the crack of rebel muskets, and soon a sharp fight was raging on his left between his 33rd Virginia Regiment and two Union regiments. (The Federals had initially mistaken Confederates for their own, which made this somewhat worse for them.) The Virginians loosed successive volleys and drove the Federals back. As they were reeling down the hill toward the Sudley Road, Jeb Stuart and 150 horsemen, who had been itching for a fight all day, now slammed into them, driving them from the field with heavy casualties. One of Stuart’s horsemen described the killing of a Union soldier, a brutal act unimaginable the day before but already commonplace on this battlefield. “I leaned down in the saddle,” he wrote, “rammed the muzzle of [my] carbine into the stomach of my man and pulled the trigger. I could not help feeling a little sorry for the fellow as he lifted his handsome face to mine while he tried to get his bayonet up to meet me; but he was too slow, for the carbine blew a hole as big as my arm clear through him.”15
But the Federals weren’t finished. They advanced again on the 33rd Virginia, this time with two howitzers they placed less than two hundred yards from the Confederate line. Alarmed by the Federal guns that were almost on top of his soldiers, regimental commander Colonel A. C. Cummings ordered a volley that cut down men and horses. Then his Virginians charged across the open ground. Before anyone knew quite what had happened, the whooping rebels had seized the Union battery. It was the first Confederate victory of the day. Cheers went up as the members of the 33rd, many of them merely boys just a month or two from the plow handle and mechanic’s shop, exulted. They would not be able to hold this position long. But what they had done would become, in fact, the turning point of the battle, the instant when that great and apparently irresistible blue-clad wave finally hit an immovable wall. Jackson had thus repulsed attacks on his right and left, and his artillery had been devastating against the larger, rifled Union guns. And most of his men had yet to fight; they were still in the woods, invisible, flat on their bellies, impatient and a bit shell-shocked, waiting to attack.
It was at about this time that Barnard Bee, who had been busy since his retreat trying to locate what remained of his brigade, finally came upon the 4th Alabama, wounded, exhausted from their morning fight, and resting in the woods five hundred yards behind the storm of artillery and musket fire along Jackson’s line. He did not recognize them at first. He rode up and asked, “What regiment is this?” Informed that the men were his own, he replied, “This is all of my brigade that I can find. Will you follow me back to where the fighting is going on?” The men—one hundred of them—responded with a resounding yes. Now Bee pointed to his left, up the slope toward the pine woods on the edge of Henry Hill. “Yonder stands Jackson like a stone wall,” he said. “Let’s go to his assistance.”16
At the time, his statement, overheard by four witnesses, probably sounded like an inspiring bit of metaphorical language, something to help spur the men into the fight. But Bee’s words would become one of the most famous utterances of the war, noteworthy both because they gave birth to a name and a legend, and because they were among the last words ever spoken by the dashing warrior from South Carolina, one of the battle’s greatest heroes, who at that moment had less than an hour to live.
Now the battle changed. Up to this point it had been largely an artillery duel, but the charge by Jackson’s Virginians and their seizure of Griffin’s guns marked the start of a more personal struggle. This time it would be infantry against infantry, regiment against regiment, man against man. It began when the 14th New York, a regiment from Brooklyn wearing red trousers and red kepis, trained a murderous fire on Cummings’s 33rd Virginia, which retreated from its captured guns under fire, losing an astonishing third of its men. Suddenly, after their great success, the troops on Jackson’s left were collapsing. The emboldened New Yorkers, scenting victory, now came straight on against the Confederate’s center—the 4th and 27th Regiments—who had been on their bellies in the woods for several hours. The usually reserved Jackson was all animation now, eyes alight, face glowing with the heat of battle, moving along his line, telling his men, “Reserve your fire until they come within 50 yards, then fire and give them the bayonet, and when you charge, yell like Furies.”
The New Yorkers moved forward, and Jackson’s men did what they were told, waiting, then opening on the enemy with a furious volley of canister and bullets. (Canister consisted of tin cylinders filled with iron shot that, when fired from a cannon, created the effect of a sawed-off shotgun and was extremely destructive to human beings at up to 250 yards.17) The Federals were driven back; they regrouped, came on again, and were repulsed yet again by rolling volleys of canister and lead. Undeterred, and acting more like veterans than the green troops they were, they attacked a third time, many of them this time coming within a few yards of Jackson’s line in a loud and savagely close fight. They paid for it. At such short range, the Virginians cut them to pieces. The Yankee battle line faltered, stood as though frozen for a moment in the swirling eddies of smoke, and then broke.
Now Jackson prepared to charge. He ordered his artillery from the field—to clear the way for the infantry—then rode over to the commander of the 4th Virginia Regiment, Colonel James Preston. “Order the men to stand up,” he said. “We’ll charge them now and drive them to Washington!” Obeying their orders and screaming like whatever they conceived the Furies to be, Jackson’s Virginians swept straight out of the woods, toward the retreating enemy, and toward those lethal Federal batteries on the far edge of Henry Hill. The peculiar, piercingly loud noise the advancing men made was something neither rebel nor Union troops had heard before, and whose exact inspiration is unknown. It was the implausible result of each man giving a sequence of three sounds that registered somewhere between the screech of a bird and the bark of a fox: a short, high-pitched yelp, followed by a short, lower-pitched bark, followed by a long, high-pitched yelp. Collectively, the noise sounded feral, unearthly, and inhuman, like an ululation from the pit of hell. It would become the stuff of Union nightmares throughout the war. As one Federal soldier put it: “There is nothing like it on this side of the infernal region. The peculiar corkscrew sensation that it sends down your backbone . . . can never be told.”18 The practice would spread through the entire Confederate army and it would soon have a name: the rebel yell.19
On came Jackson’s Confederates across Henry Hill, toward Henry House and the two Federal batteries, where the remaining Union men maneuvered around dead and dying horses and fired canister that tore through the Confederate ranks. Still, Jackson’s men came on, bravely crossing three hundred yards of open ground with all that flying death in the air around them. There had been nothing in their lives before to prepare these young men for this, for the astounding sense of pure vulnerability of so much soft human flesh in the presence of so much buzzing lead and iron. Some were scared and expected to die; others, like gunner William Thomas Poague, described a strangely calm feeling that might have been something like what Jackson himself experienced in battle. “This was a most novel sensation,” he wrote later, “hard to describe, a sort of warm, pleasing glow enveloping the chest and head with an effect something like entrancing music in a dream. [But] my observing, thinking, and reasoning faculties were normal.”20 The time was about 3:30.
Jackson’s two regiments drove forward, “piercing the enemy’s center,” in Beauregard’s words, and capturing the Federal guns. “The charge of Jackson’s men was terrific,” wrote Private John Casler of the 33rd Virginia. “The enemy were swept before them like chaff before a whirlwind. . . . The men seemed to have caught the dauntless spirit and determined will of their heroic commander.”21 More Confederate troops were now on the field, having been ordered forward by Beauregard, and suddenly, as he observed, “the whole of the open surface of the plateau was swept clear of federals.”22
But nothing was settled. As dramatic as it had been, Jackson’s charge was only the beginning of a bitter fight for possession of those two Federal batteries, which would change hands at least three times as the battle surged forward and backward across the top of the hill. For whatever reason, these new troops on both sides fought fearlessly and stubbornly and went down in staggering numbers. Colonel Francis Bartow, one of the heroes of the morning, was shot dead. Barnard Bee was mortally wounded. Jackson, on a horse that was limping due to a leg wound, was holding his wounded hand aloft, his military tunic torn at the edges by several bullet holes. His five regiments were at the battle’s white-hot center for the next hour and took by far the heaviest casualties of any brigade.
At the end of the third successful Federal surge forward—their battle line just at that moment was “gigantic in proportions, crescent-like in form,” wrote one observer—it seemed that the Union boys had finally cleared the plateau and had won the battle.23McDowell certainly thought so. He wired Washington to that effect. “It was supposed by us that the repulse was final,” McDowell wrote later in his official report of the battle, “for [the enemy] was driven entirely from the hill, so far beyond it as to be not in sight, and all were certain the day was ours. . . . The enemy was evidently disheartened and broken.”24
He was desperately wrong. Though he did not know it, he was about to pay one final time for his earlier, two-hour delay. Suddenly it was McDowell’s army—which had started the day with a brutal march and was now exhausted, thirsty, and out of ranks in large numbers—that was in trouble. His midday lapse—plus the heroism and hard-nosed fighting of brigades such as Evans’s, Bee’s, and Jackson’s—had bought Johnston and Beauregard time, and time had brought them reinforcements both from their old Bull Run line and from Johnston’s arriving Army of the Shenandoah. New, fresh Virginia regiments now collided with the Federals at the Henry House, driving several surprised New York regiments off the hill. Suddenly the Union boys, who had exulted in their victory a few moments before, were in full retreat. After two hours of brutal fighting, the Confederates held the precious hill again. The scene was horrific: the ground was thick with dead and dying men and horses, the wreckages of wagons and cannons and of the house where old Mrs. Henry had been killed that day by an artillery shell. But the hill was theirs.
Now, with astounding speed, Federal elation gave way to despair. McDowell, understanding that Henry Hill was lost, launched a final attack from a long rise just to the west called Chinn Ridge, trying yet again to turn the Confederate left flank. But as he was preparing his attack two more fresh brigades from Johnston’s army, commanded by Jubal Early and Arnold Elzey, crashed into the Federal right, surprising those troops and sending them staggering backward. Union commanders tried to rally them but soon saw that it was hopeless. McDowell ordered them to withdraw. The retreat began in an orderly fashion. But a retreat, as it turned out, required as much skill and precision as an attack. And because these men had no experience of what it was like to retire before a victorious enemy, the retreat soon became a rout, and the rout a full-scale panic. Soldiers by the thousands now merged into an unruly, terrified, disorganized mob several hundred yards wide and several miles long whose single thought was to flee to the safety of Washington, DC. They reeled across the same Bull Run fords they had crossed earlier in the day. They left behind them their provisions, overcoats, knapsacks, blankets, muskets, canteens, and cartridge boxes.
There was a slightly surreal cast to this chaos. Many civilians from Washington, including socialites and politicians and people who wanted to see the rebels receive a good whipping, had ridden out with picnic baskets and blankets to see the battle. They were now subsumed into—or trampled by—the wild, panicked mob. Some of the onlookers tried to get the fleeing soldiers to change their minds. “We called to [the soldiers],” recalled one US congressman, “tried to tell them there was no danger, called them to stop, implored them to stand. We called them cowards, denounced them in the most offensive terms, put out our heavy revolvers, and threatened to shoot them, but all in vain; a cruel, crazy, mad, hopeless panic possessed them.”25
Jackson, meanwhile, had gone to a field station to have his wounded hand dressed. The first surgeon to see it told Jackson that the finger would have to be amputated. But Jackson received a second opinion from his young medical officer Hunter McGuire, who thought it could be saved. While McGuire was dressing the wound in a tent full of wounded men, President Jefferson Davis rode up, his face stern and deeply unhappy and pale as death. He had just arrived on the battlefield, and had been told by Confederate stragglers far in the rear of the terrible Southern defeat. He had believed every word of it, and was now a knot of despair, disappointment, and rage. According to McGuire, “he stood up in his stirrups . . . and cried to the crowd of soldiers: ‘I am President Davis! Follow me back to the field!’ ” Jackson had not heard him say this, but when McGuire told him, he stood up, took off his cap, and said loudly, omitting all honorifics, “We have whipped them. They ran like sheep. Give me 10,000 men and I will take Washington tomorrow!”26
The magnitude of the victory soon became apparent to everyone, including Davis, who reluctantly allowed the men to wrap him in Confederate flags. Cheers rang through miles of Confederate soldiers, all the way back to Longstreet’s troops at Blackburn’s Ford, who had missed the entire show. The men were wild with excitement. As one wrote, it “passed all bounds, it approached madness. Every man of the thousands assembled threw their caps in the air, officers and all.” Some of them even believed, as they stood amid the wreckage on Henry Hill, that this was the end of the war.