CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The South, meanwhile, sitting smugly on its various victories, was in no hurry to make war, either. In the long, dry, warm autumn of 1861, while McClellan painstakingly built the prodigious war machine he refused to engage, the Confederate army quaintly built breastworks around Centreville, did little to reinforce Johnston’s army, basked in the sun of its own supposed invincibility, and waited for recognition or intervention from the European powers, which most Southerners supposed would surely come. Furloughs were freely granted. Officers and privates alike returned to tend the harvests at their farms and plantations.1 If European and other foreign diplomats in Washington believed that the Union was irretrievably broken, why shouldn’t the Confederates themselves? Though Jefferson Davis’s top generals in the East—Beauregard, Johnston, and G. W. Smith—pleaded with him to reinforce the Army of Northern Virginia and order a northward advance, the Confederate president, like McClellan but for vastly different reasons, steadfastly refused. There would be no great offensive strikes. Instead, armies would be recruited and dispersed over a vast defensive perimeter—a theory of war, propounded by the famed military tactician and historian Antoine-Henri Jomini and studied closely at West Point, that favored the holding of cities and other real estate over the mass destruction of enemy armies.2 That theory would soon be discredited.
Jackson, predictably, was horrified. Camped with his brigade just a few miles from the Manassas battlefield, the man who had advocated total war even before the first shot at Fort Sumter was fired waited with growing anxiety and frustration as the weeks and months passed and no advance was ordered. “It does not appear that he was at all elated by the early successes of the Confederacy,” wrote Henry Kyd Douglas, who was on his staff. “Nor did he concur in the opinion which so extensively prevailed in the fall of 1861, that the war would be a short one and our independence easily gained.”3 On September 30, Jackson and three of his colonels paid a call on President Davis, who was visiting at General Beauregard’s headquarters. It was not a casual call. Jackson was no longer a shy college professor with unusual ideas. He was a general in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States, and he had an agenda.
It was his second encounter with the Confederate president. The first, which the thin-skinned, grudge-holding Davis would certainly have remembered, occurred when he arrived moments after the rout of the Federal army at Manassas, pale with rage and under the mistaken impression that all was lost. Jackson had loudly and unceremoniously informed him that he was completely mistaken. That meeting set the tone for much of their prickly relationship. Surprisingly, the two men had many traits in common. Davis had attended West Point, graduating in 1828. He had been a hero of the Battle of Buena Vista in the Mexican-American War, advancing and fighting gallantly with a bootful of blood. He had spent time at various outposts in the regular army. Though as a senator from Mississippi he had emerged as one of the ideological leaders of the South, like Jackson he had been a moderate, opposing secession until his home state actually seceded. He was fair, paternalistic, and progressive in his relations with his slaves. He was like Jackson in other ways, too. He could be warm and kindhearted around friends and allies, but his public persona was often stiff, cold, and unemotional. He was known for refusing to compromise. Like Jackson, he was a chronic dyspeptic. And he was a stickler for detail, once challenging General Winfield Scott, to the latter’s everlasting chagrin, over $300 in mileage expenses on his army report. Unlike Jackson, he was transparently ambitious. “He is not a cheap Judas,” said Winfield Scott of Davis, who as secretary of war from 1853 to 1857 had been Scott’s boss. “I do not think he would have sold the Savior for thirty shillings. But for the successorship to Pontius Pilate he would have betrayed Christ and the Apostles and the whole Christian Church.” Sam Houston of Texas found Davis “ambitious as Lucifer and cold as a lizard.” That fall Davis had been engaged in a public fight with Pierre Beauregard over the latter’s self-aggrandizing and misleading battle report. Davis argued, with justification, that Beauregard had attempted “to portray himself as the sole designer and executant of the Manassas triumph.”4 (Beauregard would lose, and be shipped to the western theater in January.) Davis also fought with the hypersensitive Joe Johnston, who, outraged that he had been ranked fourth on the list to be promoted to full general, wrote Davis a long and shockingly intemperate letter.
Though we have no record of what Davis thought of his meeting with Jackson, the latter was deeply disappointed. “I called on him this morning at about half-past ten o’clock,” Jackson wrote Anna. “He looks thin, but does not seem as feeble as yesterday. His voice and manners are very mild. I saw no exhibition of that fire which I had supposed him to possess.”5 Davis asked about the status of Jackson’s homeland—the northwestern part of Virginia. Thus cued, Jackson made his case for a strong military campaign in the region. Though it had strong Union sympathies, he believed it could be saved for the Confederacy. But Davis demurred. According to Jackson, he “did not even so much as intimate that he designed sending me there.”6 Davis changed the subject, instead chatting about what a fine general Robert E. Lee was. If Jackson’s reaction was disenchantment, Davis took away something else entirely. From these two meetings, he got the not altogether inaccurate idea that Jackson was an offense-crazed fanatic—a notion that would soon have unfortunate consequences for Jackson’s career.7
By October, when the Confederate army retreated from a position nearer the Potomac, Jackson could no longer contain his anxiety. He took his concerns to his superior officer, Major General G. W. Smith. A Kentuckian by birth, Smith was a smart, literate, illness-prone West Pointer and a veteran of the Mexican-American War who, from 1858 to 1861, had served as streets commissioner in New York City. Jackson, who found Smith sick in his tent, sat down on the ground near the head of Smith’s cot and began talking. He was concerned, he said, that by spring the huge numbers of new recruits streaming into the Union ranks would become “an organized army” and would “have greatly the advantage over us.” His solution was to march north immediately. “We ought to invade their country now,” he said, “and not wait for them to make the necessary preparations for them to invade ours.” He believed strongly, he said, that “McClellan’s raw recruits could not stand against us in the field.”
But Jackson had come with more than just vague nostrums for an offensive war. He had been busy doing what newly minted brigadiers were not supposed to do: thinking in sweeping geopolitical, military, and economic terms. He proceeded to lay out for the amazed Smith a full-blown plan to lay waste to the North, its armies, its industries, and its cities that would see Philadelphia in flames and Confederate armies camped on the shores of the Great Lakes. “Crossing the Upper Potomac, occupying Baltimore, and taking possession of Maryland,” he told Smith,
we could cut off the communications of Washington, force the Federal government to abandon the capital, beat McClellan’s army if it came out against us in the open country, destroy industrial establishments wherever we found them, break up the lines of interior commercial intercourse, close the coal mines, seize and, if necessary, destroy the manufactories and commerce of Philadelphia, and of other large cities within our reach; take and hold the narrow neck of country between Pittsburgh and Lake Erie; subsist mainly on the country we traverse, and making unrelenting war amidst their home, force the people of the North to understand what it will cost them to hold the South in the Union at the bayonet’s point.8
The vision was as prescient as it was breathtaking: the last quoted sentence is a nearly perfect summary of the logic behind the brutally destructive, punitive late-war campaigns of Union generals William Tecumseh Sherman in Georgia and South Carolina, and Philip Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley.9 Jackson’s proposal to have Southern armies operate without their supply lines deep in enemy territory was made fully eighteen months before Grant stunned the nation by doing that very thing—which he and Jackson had both learned from Winfield Scott in Mexico—on the way to his critical victory at Vicksburg in the summer of 1863. When he had finished, Jackson asked Smith to use his influence with Johnston and Beauregard to sell them on the idea. Smith said he didn’t think that would work, whereupon Jackson launched into another lengthy discourse, pointing out again the advantages of his plan. Such impassioned advocacy would have been unimaginable from Jackson the VMI professor. The new rank was opening him up, giving him a new sense of his own abilities, of how far he could push things. He was flexing new muscles. At length he said, “General, you have not expressed any opinion in regard to the views I have laid before you. But I feel assured that you favour them, and I think you ought to do all in your power to have them carried into effect.” Smith then told Jackson “a secret”: a plan to advance north of the Potomac had been “laid before the Government” at a meeting in early October by Johnston, Beauregard, and himself, he said. That plan had been rejected.
“When I had finished,” said Smith, “he rose from the ground on which he had been seated, shook my hand warmly, and said, ‘I am very, very sorry.’ Without another word he went slowly out to his horse . . . mounted very deliberately, and rode sadly away.”10Friends later said that Jackson found the South’s indolence in the days after Manassas to be “the darkest period of our struggle.”11
Meanwhile, in Jackson’s and other Confederate camps near Manassas, autumn slid by, with little to mark the days. Drills were conducted four or five times a day. The men lived mostly in huge, conical Sibley tents, eighteen feet wide and twelve feet tall, supported by a center pole and open at the top to allow smoke to escape. Designed to fit twelve men, they often held twenty, and they were afflicted with the usual run of camp pests. Their canvas roofs and walls were often covered with black flies and mosquitoes—“gallinippers,” as some soldiers called them. There were blood-sucking buffalo gnats that dived into ears and nose, blowflies, chiggers, fleas and, worst of all, lice (“gray backs”) that roamed freely over the body and took up residence in its more hirsute areas.12As always, there was disease. Diarrhea and dysentery were universal. Men who had never seen combat and never would see combat were already dying at a steady rate. If Jackson himself suffered from these afflictions, which he almost certainly did, he never mentioned it.
The highlight of Jackson’s time in camp was a mid-September visit from Anna—one of the perquisites of his new rank. The journey from her parents’ home in North Carolina, where she now lived, was difficult. Because her escort did not have a military “passport” to the front, she was forced to travel alone by rail from Richmond to Manassas—something Southern ladies in antebellum times did not often do—and because of a missed connection was compelled to spend the night in the train car at Fairfax station. She spent a few hours at a house that was being used as a hospital—a “place of horrors,” as she called it—where she saw soldiers building coffins.13
Jackson was thrilled to have her with him. In just a few months, their lives had changed dramatically. Their home in Lexington was abandoned and closed up, their slaves placed with other families. Their happy domestic routines—Jackson’s job, the church, the black Sunday school, the Franklin debating society, their visits to the local springs—had all vanished from their lives. Jackson’s garden, and his little farm outside of town, lay untilled and untended. Their beloved Amy had died that fall, and both had grieved for her. For the moment they had only each other, and they made the most of their time together. Jackson secured them a room near his camp. They attended church in a small farmhouse, and ate together at a mess table under the trees, which Anna enjoyed immensely. She met General Johnston, was impressed by his “polished manners,” and watched a Grand Review of his entire command, finding it “the most imposing military display I have ever witnessed.” She received many social calls from officers and enlisted men of the Stonewall Brigade, all intensely curious to see what their general’s wife was like. The highlight of the visit was a tour of the Manassas battlefield, conducted by Jackson and his artillery chief, W. N. Pendleton, the minister from Lexington. She found the geography itself surprisingly ordinary, writing that Bull Run was “a small, insignificant stream,” and that there was “nothing remarkable” about the terrain of the battlefield. But she was fascinated to hear Jackson and Pendleton describe the movements of the two armies. They toured Henry House, now famous, half destroyed with shot and shell; they saw human bones and the carcasses of horses.14
And then Anna had to leave. If the machinery of war was moving slowly or not at all in the larger army, Jackson’s own situation was much more fluid. On October 7 he was promoted to major general, thus completing a dizzying ascent from a disregarded major of engineers to high command in six months. He was in rarefied company, now one of four division commanders in Johnston’s army (the others were James Longstreet, Earl Van Dorn, and G. W. Smith), and earning three and a half times his salary at VMI—$4,812 annually compared with $1,300.15 The promotion was perhaps the final measure of how his performance on Henry Hill was seen in the Confederate army’s high command. Jackson’s skill and courage as a field commander were undeniable.
Still, there were doubters. Many—if not most—of the officers in the army, while they acknowledged his performance at Manassas, questioned his aptitude for higher command.16 “I fear the Government is exchanging our best Brigade Commander for a second or third class Major General,” said one of them.17 In late October, in response to lobbying from Congressman Alexander Boteler and others, Jackson was given command of what was to be called the Valley District—the area between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Mountains that consisted mainly of the Shenandoah Valley. On the chilly afternoon of November 4, Jackson arrived in the northern valley town of Winchester to take command. It was, among other things, a heartbreakingly beautiful place to make war.