CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A SEASON OF STORMS

Compared with the Washington-to-Richmond corridor, the Shenandoah Valley was a military backwater. It wasn’t in the far northwestern part of the state Jackson had told Davis he wanted, and Winchester’s gently rolling, open geography would be hard to defend. But Jackson was pleased anyway. Winchester, a pretty town of foursquare brick homes Jackson had fallen in love with during his brief time there with Johnston, had enormous strategic importance as the northernmost defensive post of the Confederacy. With a population of 4,400, it was a bustling commercial center, a crossroads where nine turnpikes and railroads converged. The town was also the northern gateway and military key to the fertile Shenandoah Valley—that slanting, 150-mile-long, 25-mile-wide alley between two muscular, smoke-blue mountain ranges whose agricultural yields in wheat, rye, hay, barley, oats, corn, and potatoes were unrivaled in the South. There was little doubt, moreover, that a Union occupation of the valley would be an outright disaster for the Confederacy, shutting off a critical food source and opening a tailor-made corridor of invasion to Richmond complete with its own railroad line and supply base.¹ When Jackson wrote Alexander Boteler that “if the Valley is lost, Virginia is lost,” he was simply stating what anyone with any knowledge of local geography would have known. His mission, at the extreme left of the Confederate line, 80 miles west of Joe Johnston’s headquarters in Centreville, was to prevent that from happening. He would have his hands full: in October a Union army of 5,000 had swept local militia aside and seized nearby Romney, Virginia, in a parallel river valley only 35 miles west of Winchester; that force had since swelled to 7,000 men. Fifty miles to the north, across the Potomac River in Frederick, Maryland, waited 16,000 troops under General Nathaniel Banks. And scattered along the Potomac and into the western mountains were some 22,000 troops reporting to General William S. Rosecrans.²

Against 43,000 Union troops Jackson had only a meager force. By December he had about 5,000 men: 2,000-plus in the battle-tested Stonewall Brigade, another 2,500 militia he had inherited or recruited, and some 500 cavalry under the brilliant but erratic Colonel Turner Ashby. The recruits did not daunt him; he had learned from his experience at Harpers Ferry how to deal with them. Officers would be summarily broken of their militia ranks; the men would be drilled five times a day until they learned real army discipline. The guardhouse waited for those who clung to their old freedoms. The difference now was that Jackson, as major general, was already a much harder man than the novice colonel, less forgiving of error, less tolerant of anything like a challenge to his authority. He was never angry or emotional and, indeed, as he laid out his camps around Winchester he was all business: rules were rules, violations were violations; consequences must follow.

This new order was on display in mid-November, when bad weather prompted enlisted men in the Stonewall Brigade to seek shelter inside the town of Winchester in spite of Jackson’s strict orders to stay in their camps. There had been incidents: men were drinking and making trouble. His solution was to expand the original restrictions to include officers, who reacted angrily at what they saw as an assault on their personal privileges. Nine colonels and majors, including the brigade’s temporary commander, sent a joint communiqué to Jackson huffily asserting that his order was “an unwarranted assumption of authority” and “an improper inquiry into their private matters” and freedoms “accorded in every other department of the army.” Jackson replied immediately, and sternly, that these officers were “in violation of Army regulations” and that, either out of “incompetency” or “neglect of duty,” they had been responsible for the arrests of several of their enlisted men in town. The carefully chosen term “neglect of duty” carried its own threat of court-martial. He then laid down the law in flat, uninflected language: “If officers desire to have control over their commands,” Jackson wrote, “they must remain habitually with them, and industriously attend to their instructions and comfort, and in battle lead them well, and in such manner as to command their admiration.”³ In case anyone wondered how serious he was, he moved immediately to replace the brigade’s commander. Business was business.

Two weeks later, he again displayed what seemed to his men to be a new, strangely unyielding, unforgiving view of war. A soldier named James A. Miller, of Harpers Ferry, had gotten drunk and shot and wounded his captain. An army court-martial had found him guilty and sentenced him to death by firing squad. Because Jackson was in a position to commute the sentence, a number of pleas for leniency were made to him on Miller’s behalf, including an impassioned one from Jackson’s friend Reverend James Graham. Jackson refused. He upheld the court-martial, and Miller was shot to death by the 2nd Virginia in Winchester on November 6. (It was later learned that Jefferson Davis, more sympathetic than his major general, actually did commute Miller’s sentence, but a messenger bearing his order got drunk and never delivered it.⁴) The men were learning quickly that, in Jackson’s command, unlike most of the rest of the army, or the army they thought they knew, there would be no bending of the rules. Jackson may have had trouble enforcing discipline in his section room with mischievous, fresh-faced college boys, but he had no trouble doing so in a rough army camp.

What Jackson mainly wanted was to attack a Union army. He had been made to wait passively for months in the camps around Manassas. Now, with something approximating an independent command, he was eager to advance. He was aware that with such a numerical disadvantage his only chance was to keep the enemy off balance. The way to do that, it seemed to him, was with tactical strikes. Two weeks after his arrival he wrote to Confederate secretary of war Judah Benjamin in Richmond with a plan, endorsed by Johnston, for a winter campaign “to capture the Federal forces at Romney.”⁵ He would need more men, and he proposed that three brigades in the Allegheny Mountains south and west of Winchester, under the command of Brigadier General William W. Loring, be ordered to join him. Thus reinforced—he would have more than ten thousand men—he would seize Romney.

Once in possession of Romney, he proposed to cross a sizable chunk of the Allegheny Mountains in winter and strike deep into northwestern Virginia (now West Virginia). The latter proposal was interesting for two reasons. First, it reflected Jackson’s persistent, terrier-like refusal to give up on the idea of attacking and occupying his Union-leaning homeland. Second, it was, as Jackson modestly noted, “an arduous undertaking” that would involve “the sacrifice of much comfort.” This was a spectacular understatement. While his scheme did not quite come up to Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps with his army in the year 218 BC, the Alleghenies were steep, forbidding mountains. They were often covered with snow in December. They were subject to bitter cold and ice storms. Romney would be difficult enough. Probing, as Jackson suggested, into the country of the Little Kanawha and Monongahela Rivers could, in bad weather, prove disastrous. Still, Jackson was persuasive; Benjamin and Johnston approved the plan, pending the arrival of Loring’s brigades in Winchester. Without Loring’s men, Jackson could not even dream of attacking at Romney and beyond.

On paper, the forty-three-year-old Loring was everything the Confederacy wanted in a brigadier general. At age fourteen he had enlisted in the Florida territorial militia to fight Seminole Indians. After a brief career as a lawyer and legislator, he enlisted in the US Army and fought with distinction in the Mexican-American War. He was breveted a colonel for bravery at the Battle of Chapultepec, then had his arm shattered by a bullet as he was running through one of the gates to Mexico City in the company of his fellow officer Ulysses S. Grant. Though Loring later had the arm amputated, he stayed on active duty, fighting Indians in the Northwest and on the Texas–New Mexico frontier. In 1857 he tracked and killed the notorious Apache war chief Cuchillo Negro. Loring’s weaknesses, which would soon be on display, were a belligerent, self-righteous streak that led him into confrontations with fellow officers, and a McClellan-like tendency to exaggerate the difficulties he faced.⁶

Jackson had wanted Loring in Winchester in early December. But the last of Loring’s troops would not arrive until Christmas. Jackson, impatient for action, had occupied himself by doing minor mischief: he managed to break a dam on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, one of the main transportation routes between Washington and the Cumberland—part of his larger strategic plan to shut off Washington’s coal supply. (The Federals quickly repaired it.) Occasionally his frustration with Loring’s tardiness flashed into anger. When Colonel John M. Patton of the 21st Virginia in Loring’s command reported for duty, he complained to Jackson that his men had had a desperately hard march. “I feel it my duty to say to you that my men are so foot sore and weary that they could just crawl up barely,” he said. “Jackson snapped back, ‘Colonel, if that is the condition of your men, I will not send them on this expedition. Take them back and report to your brigadier.’ ” Patton quickly decided that his men were not quite as exhausted as he had suggested they were.

One of Loring’s three brigade commanders, William B. Taliaferro (pronounced “Tolliver”), offered a classic example of how quickly the war had changed men’s fortunes. Taliaferro was from an old-line, aristocratic Virginia family. He had attended Harvard and William and Mary, and had served in the Virginia legislature. He had also been president of VMI’s governing Board of Visitors during Jackson’s tenure there. That meant, of course, that he knew all about the eccentric professor and the complaints against him and had witnessed firsthand the attempt to get rid of him. Now Taliaferro was a mere colonel in Major General Jackson’s army. After the war he wrote about how this shifting perspective had changed his opinion of the man. “Jackson disclosed to me a trait which had not struck me before,” he wrote. “There is a real difference in looking at a brevet major and a full major general. At [VMI] he was more than ordinarily passive. The fire was there, but he was a soldier in grain, and he believed it to be his duty, in his subordinate place, to execute, not to suggest. I had not noticed the saliency of his character—I will not say restlessness, but the desire to do, to be moving, to make, to embrace opportunity.”⁷

Jackson could do none of this until Loring arrived. So he waited impatiently, reported to Johnston by telegraph once a week, tried unsuccessfully to convince Virginia governor John Letcher to send him more troops, complained about Loring’s lateness, and attempted to sidestep the rising number of people who wanted to look at Stonewall Jackson, the hero of Manassas.

But there were compensations. Anna arrived just before Christmas, and the couple found warm, welcoming quarters in the house of the Reverend James Graham. The man who could, in effect, order one of his own soldiers shot was as playful and affectionate as ever in private with his beloved esposa. The food was good, and Jackson’s messmates, most of them from Lexington and all with personal ties to him, were lively company. They included Jackson’s chief of staff, John T. L. Preston, who was not only Maggie’s husband but also Jackson’s business partner and VMI colleague; Ellie’s cousin George Junkin; Jackson’s own cousin Alfred Jackson; and Sandy Pendleton, the charming twenty-one-year-old son of Jackson’s friend the Lexington minister and Rockbridge artillery chief W. N. Pendleton. Such nepotism was so obvious that when Jackson asked another cousin from western Virginia, Judge W. L. Jackson, to join his staff, he declined, saying that “to appoint another of your relatives will occasion dissatisfaction.”⁸Jackson, as usual, was much less guarded among friends and family. “We have a merry table,” wrote Preston to Maggie, “I as much a boy as any of them, and Jackson grave as a signpost, til something chances to overcome him, and then he breaks out into a laugh so awkward that it is manifest that he never laughed enough to learn how. He is a most simple-hearted man.”⁹

•  •  •

Jackson’s Romney Expedition, as it would be known to history, began on New Year’s Day 1862 in unseasonably warm weather. His plan was to move north to seize the town of Bath, thereby covering his flank and rear, then swing west and south to attack Romney. The plan sounded simple enough. It turned out to be anything but. The temperature started dropping on the first day, falling below 32 degrees by evening. A biting wind made it feel even colder. Overcoats, blankets, tents, and food that had been left behind on supply wagons never made it to camp, which meant that most of the men spent the long, freezing night without cover of any kind. They resumed the march at dawn, still exposed and without food, but now in wind-driven snow. Temperatures fell into the 20s. When Loring ordered his brigades into bivouac short of Jackson’s destination for the day, Jackson, furious, ordered them all to pack up and move forward, without dinner, in the freezing darkness. Loring, who had been complaining bitterly about the mismanagement of the supply train, and about Jackson’s failure to tell him anything about his plans or military objectives, was appalled. “By God, sir,” he cried in the presence of his troops, “this is the damnedest outrage ever perpetrated in the annals of history, keeping my men out here in the cold without food!”¹⁰ The men themselves were nearly mutinous, blaming “Tom Fool” Jackson for their misery.

Conditions would get worse, much worse. The next day the temperature dropped to 18 degrees. Still, Jackson pushed them, upbraiding Stonewall Brigade commander Richard B. Garnett when he allowed his men, who had not eaten in thirty hours, to stop and cook rations for the day. (He had never liked Garnett anyway and had worked to block Garnett’s appointment to command his beloved brigade.) At sunset on the third day, as the column approached Bath, one of Loring’s brigades, under Jackson’s VMI colleague Colonel William Gilham, clashed with Union skirmishers. As darkness fell, Gilham ordered the men to bivouac in the snow-covered field. Jackson immediately overruled him, sending John Preston with orders for him to advance into Bath. Loring, again astounded by Jackson’s orders, immediately countermanded them. Jackson arrived, just as angry, and the two exchanged heated words. Jackson gave up the advance.

The next day Gilham committed what was, for Jackson, an unforgivable sin. Though he had been given direct orders to advance into the town of Bath, he had failed to do so. His skirmishers had been fired on again by the rear guard of the retreating Union forces, and, out of fear or caution, he had simply stopped. Then he had compounded his error by neglecting to tell Jackson what he had done. Gilham’s mistakes would mean the end of his brief war career. Jackson brought charges against him, specifying that he had neglected his duty by failing “to attack the federal forces after overtaking them near Sir John’s Run Depot on Jan. 4, 1862,” and that he “did fail to report either directly or indirectly . . . the cause of his having failed to attack.”¹¹ (Gilham later wrote critically of Jackson, saying that it was Jackson’s fault—choosing poor roads and ordering militia to do regular army work—that they had not captured the Federals at Bath.¹²) There would be no court-martial for Gilham. Instead, Jackson would place him on indefinite furlough, and send him back to VMI to resume his duties there.

It is worth noting exactly who Jackson had just pushed so abruptly out of the army. During the years Jackson had taught at VMI, William Henry Gilham had been the institute’s highly respected commandant. He was the academic star of the institution, its most brilliant professor, the man responsible for much of its curriculum. A graduate of West Point and a veteran of the Mexican-American War, he was smart, elegant, self-possessed, and enormously popular with cadets. He was considered a brilliant drillmaster. He was, in short, everything that Jackson was not. In 1859 he had commanded the VMI expedition, in which Jackson had taken part, to Charlestown to provide security for John Brown’s execution. But Gilham was more than just Jackson’s colleague. He was also Jackson’s friend and business partner in several ventures. There are no records of what happened between the two men, or how Jackson told Gilham what was going to happen to him, or how Gilham reacted to the news, or whether he was grateful, on some level, that Jackson did not drag him through a court-martial. It was probably no consolation to Gilham, who came so far short of expectations, that Jackson would be much less kind with other officers who got in his way.

The misery continued, unabated. January 7 was, for many of the men, the most horrific noncombat experience of the war. In a fierce north wind, with temperatures hovering in the 10-to-20-degree range, the men, wagons, and horses moved across icy roads frozen hard as a rock and covered with six inches of snow. “It was a desperate time,” wrote acting chief quartermaster Michael Harman. “Sleet, snow, horses falling and braking [sic] their legs; wagons stalled and overturned, soldiers shrieking from painful, frozen wounds.”¹³ Other accounts described the same horrors. “Men were frozen to death,” wrote John Worsham of the 21st Virginia (Gilham’s regiment). “Others were frozen so badly they never recovered, and rheumatism contracted by many was never gotten rid of. Large numbers were barefooted, having burned their shoes while trying to warm their feet at fires.”¹⁴ Sometimes men waited, shivering in the storm, up to ten hours while the army’s 160-wagon supply train labored past. Men, horses, wagons—everything was slipping, falling. “Limbs were broken as well as guns and swords when a dozen soldiers went down at the same time,” wrote Henry Kyd Douglas. “Horses fell and were killed.”¹⁵ To add to such appalling misery, the men also became infested with lice.¹⁶The final march was brutal, too, as the ice thawed to a muddy slush and the men plodded forward in a sleeting rain. Many of them were encased in icicles. On January 14, Jackson and his soldiers marched into Romney after two harrowing weeks. They discovered that the seven thousand Union troops and artillery who had occupied the town, alerted to Jackson’s advance, had evacuated and fled north.

Jackson showed no sympathy at all for his troops’ suffering. Though he had shared every bit of this misery with his men—often walking beside them, sometimes dismounting to “put his shoulder to the wheel of a wagon to keep it from sliding back”—he kept on driving forward, stopping for a few days only when he had no choice but to put winter shoes on his horses, whose falls had created mayhem in the ranks.¹⁷ He seemed to feel only frustration at the failure of his column to move faster. For that he held his officers responsible. Before he had even returned to Winchester, Jackson was writing to Secretary of War Judah Benjamin to request that Richard B. Garnett, the brigadier general commanding the Stonewall Brigade and a soldier with an excellent reputation in the army, be relieved of command. “General G. is not qualified to command a brigade . . . he is not able to meet emergencies even in the proper management of his brigade in camp and on the march.” It did not matter to Jackson that Garnett was an experienced soldier and a popular Virginia aristocrat with deep connections in the political and military community. Those were the very reasons his request was denied. As the coming months would prove, Jackson was not finished dealing with Garnett.

Nor was he finished, having seized Romney at such enormous cost to his men, with his plan to push deeper into northwestern Virginia. He now proposed to add reinforcements and march west into even more mountainous country, to capture the Federal supply depot at Cumberland, which was garrisoned with eleven thousand Union soldiers. When Benjamin denied him the troops, he came up with yet another idea—to destroy railroad bridges seventeen miles west of Romney. But it could not be done. Morale had been shattered, especially in Loring’s brigades. Officers were despondent, defeated. As Jackson informed Benjamin in a January 20 letter, “General Loring’s leading brigade, commanded by Col. Taliaferro, was not in a condition to move, the enterprise had to be abandoned. Since leaving Winchester, the 1st instant, the troops have suffered greatly, and Gen. Loring has not a single brigade in a condition for active operations.”¹⁸

The hard march had also reduced the size of his army. Even the Stonewall Brigade had less than two-thirds of what it started with. There were many desertions, and much sympathy for the deserters. Men cursed Jackson openly, even members of the Stonewall Brigade. “That Jackson was not popular with his officers and men, even of his old brigade, at that time, is undeniable,” Taliaferro wrote later. “For the true secret of the power of the American soldier is his individuality—the natural result of American citizenship; and Jackson’s men thought, and, thinking, did not think that the ends accomplished by the Romney campaign justified the sacrifices which were made.”¹⁹ Jackson might have helped his cause with men and officers if he had given them even the most rudimentary idea of what they were doing, or where they were going. He had told no one anything of his plans, not even his second in command.

And now he would pay for that neglect. When Jackson put his army to winter quarters, he ordered Loring and his three brigades to stay in Romney to make sure Union forces did not reoccupy it. The Stonewall Brigade would return to Winchester, while various militias were posted in other towns. Once the orders were given, Jackson rode forty-three miles on the astoundingly resilient Little Sorrel through the mountains to Winchester, changed out of his mud-covered uniform, and hastened to the Graham house, where, according to Anna, “he came bounding into the sitting-room as joyous and fresh as a schoolboy” and took her in his arms. It would have been obvious to anyone who saw him that he had no regrets about what he had just done. He was, in fact, very pleased with the results of the expedition.²⁰

He was naive. Back in the muddy, icebound “hog pen” that was the tiny town of Romney, with snow, sleet, and rain falling, raw sewage running in the streets, and a courthouse full of rotten meat, Loring and his officers were ready to explode. They felt deeply wronged, not only because of the brutality of the march and Jackson’s strange penchant for secrecy but also because he had left them perilously exposed, with fewer than five thousand soldiers in close proximity to vastly larger numbers of Federals. (They were not, as it turned out, completely wrong. Jackson’s own engineer had pronounced Romney indefensible with the forces Loring had, and Union records would later show that Union general Frederick Lander was preparing to attack Romney on February 3, until his health prevented it.²¹ Jackson, on the other hand, had accepted his huge numerical disadvantage as the premise of the entire campaign, and it had not changed. He had tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to secure more troops.) They even accused Jackson of favoritism—allowing his “pet” Stonewall Brigade to return home to the relative comforts of Winchester. They pointed to the large numbers of sick men in their ranks, all presumably the result of Jackson’s shocking neglect. In fact, according to Jackson’s surgeon Hunter McGuire, many of the claims of sickness were false: “I organized a guard and guard-house, arrested hundreds of Loring’s men who claimed to be sick, had them examined by the surgeons and returned to duty unless they were sick enough to stay in the hospital. In this way in a very few days I sent back to Loring’s camp fully 1,000 men.”²²

Once they realized that Jackson was not going to change his mind, two of Loring’s officers—Colonel Samuel Fulkerson and Colonel William Taliaferro—now opened a campaign against him, appealing directly to the political establishment in Richmond. Fulkerson was old-line Virginia and a district judge. Like Taliaferro, he was a veteran of the Mexican-American War and knew Jackson from having served on the governing board of VMI in the 1850s. (It was more than a little ironic that the two men behind this campaign were both subordinate to Jackson and both his former overseers at VMI. Perhaps they could not quite accept the idea of the eccentric science teacher’s transformation.) Fulkerson, who was well connected in Richmond, wrote a letter bearing a note of endorsement from Taliaferro to Virginia congressmen Walter Preston and Walter R. Staples. He told them that he wanted their help in persuading Secretary of War Benjamin and President Davis to free Loring and his brigades from Jackson’s command. Mostly, they were just desperate to get out of the frozen mud of Romney. Fulkerson said that Jackson had subjected his soldiers to great hardship in an unnecessary and fruitless winter campaign and that the exposure to the cold had “emaciated the force almost to a skeleton” and would discourage reenlistment. In his long postscript to Staples, Taliaferro wrote:

My Dear Staples: I take the liberty with an old friend, which I know you will pardon, to state that every word and every idea conveyed by Colonel F. in his letter to you is strictly and most unfortunately true. The best army I ever saw of its strength has been destroyed by bad marches and bad management. . . . It will be suicidal in the Government to keep this command here.²³

After these chummy appeals, next came a formal petition to Loring, drafted by Taliaferro and signed by Fulkerson, six regimental commanders, and Colonel Jesse Burks, who had replaced William Gilham, running through the same complaints and asking Loring to take the matter up with the War Department. Loring added a note to the petition saying he agreed completely with its charges, then sent one copy to Jackson, as military protocol required, and gave the other to Taliaferro, who used his furlough to hand-carry the note to Richmond. Once there, he called on old friends and associates in the capital and the legislature, and lobbied hard to have Loring’s command recalled. Fulkerson and several other officers from Loring’s brigades were in Richmond, on furlough, doing the same thing. According to Jackson ally Alexander Boteler, “several prominent officers of Loring’s command took every opportunity while there to deprecate Jackson and manufacture public opinion against him. They said he was rash, foolhardy, and fanatical; that he had no common sense; was, unquestionably, crazy and entirely unfit to be at the head of an army.”²⁴ Not everyone believed this Loring-sponsored campaign. When Representative Walter Preston was approached by one of the officers, he replied, so that others could hear, “It’s a great pity, sir, that General Jackson has not bitten some of his subordinates on furlough and affected them with the same sort of craziness that he has himself.”²⁵

It was all very odd, informal if not underhanded, unmilitary, and in gross violation of army protocols. As such, the Confederate high command should never have tolerated it. Instead, it was in the presence of Vice President Alexander Stephens and President Jefferson Davis that Taliaferro found his most receptive audiences. Stephens, Taliaferro told Loring, “denounced the Romney expedition in the severest terms,” while Davis “did not hesitate to say at once that Jackson had made a mistake.” In the same “Private and Confidential” note to Loring, Taliaferro wrote, “When I told him of Jackson’s having left us at Romney and having withdrawn his forces to Winchester, I never saw anyone so surprised. . . . I think from all I can find out that the Presid’t is disposed to do us justice. . . . Jackson’s prestige is gone, public sentiment is against him. The leading men of the N.W. have asked me if he was not deficient in mind.”²⁶

Whether the latter was true or not no longer mattered. Davis, upset by what he had heard, and willing, perhaps because of his personal feelings about Jackson, to bypass the entire army command structure, proceeded to instruct Judah Benjamin to recall Loring’s brigades from Romney. The Confederate secretary of war was a talented, complex, flawed political operative. The son of English Jews, he was raised in Louisiana and attended Yale. He became one of his home state’s leading lawyers at a young age. At forty-two he was elected to the US Senate. He was short, rotund, well groomed, and socially adept. “He always looked as if he had just risen at the end of an enjoyed dinner to greet a friend with pleasant news,” wrote historian Douglas Southall Freeman.²⁷ He was ambitious, opportunistic, persuasive, and self-confident to a fault, and so blindly loyal to Davis that he would never side with generals in the field against him.²⁸ He was also, for all his lack of army experience, meddlesome, which meant, as Joe Johnston wrote irritably in his memoirs, bypassing army command on a regular basis by “granting leaves of absence, furloughs, and discharges, accepting resignations . . . upon applications made directly to himself, without the knowledge of officers whose duty it was to look to the interests of the Government in such cases.”²⁹ If it didn’t bother Davis to ignore military protocol in overriding Jackson’s orders, it certainly would not bother Benjamin.

Thus did Jackson receive, on the morning of January 31, a short, abruptly worded telegram from Richmond:

General T. J. Jackson, Winchester, VA:

Our news indicates that a movement is being made to cut off General Loring’s command. Order him back to Winchester immediately.

J. P. Benjamin, Secretary of War

By his own description, Jackson was astonished by what he read. He had just cleared, with considerable pain and suffering, all Union armies from three large Virginia counties, destroyed a hundred miles of railroad track, and had suffered only thirty-five casualties doing it.³⁰ The tone of the message must have struck him as strange, too—as though addressing an underling who did not need to understand the order’s ramifications, instead of a full major general commanding six thousand square miles of Virginia. Within the hour, he had decided what to do, probably with the help of prayer. He would comply with the order as given. And then he would resign. His reply to Benjamin was as follows:

Hon. J. P. Benjamin, Secretary of War

Sir:

Your order requiring me to direct General Loring to return to his command to Winchester immediately has been received and promptly complied with.

With such interference in my command I cannot expect to be of much service in the field; and accordingly respectfully request to be ordered to report for duty to the Superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute at Lexington; as has been done in the case of other Professors. Should this application not be granted, I respectfully request that the President will accept my resignation from the Army.

I am, sir, very respectfully, your obedient servant, T. J. Jackson.

Unlike Benjamin, Jackson was sticking to military rules and running his correspondence through proper channels. He sent the letter by courier to his immediate superior, Joe Johnston, in Centreville. Jackson also wrote letters to his friends Governor John Letcher and Congressman Alexander Boteler explaining his action. Their substance was, as he told Letcher, that “a sense of duty brought me into the field and has, thus far, kept me here. It now appears to be my duty to return to the institute. . . . I desire to say nothing against the Secretary of War. I take it for granted that he has done what he believes to be best, but I regard such a policy as ruinous.”³¹

Because Johnston held Jackson’s letter while he tried to persuade him to change his mind, Boteler ended up receiving his letter in Richmond before Benjamin had received Jackson’s reply. Astounded, the bespectacled, bearded Boteler hurried to Benjamin’s office.

“In consequence of your order, Jackson has sent in his resignation,” he told Benjamin.

“What!” the secretary of war exclaimed, wheeling around in his chair. “Jackson resigned! Are you sure of your information?”

“As sure as I can be of anything,” Boteler replied, “as I have it here directly from himself, under his own hand and seal.”

Benjamin read the letter, his keen political instincts undoubtedly suggesting to him the magnitude of the mistake he and Davis had made. “You had better show that letter to the president,” he said. Boteler then walked over to Jefferson Davis’s office and told him of Jackson’s resignation, to which Davis responded, “I’ll not accept it, sir!”

“I’m very glad to hear you say so, sir,” answered the courtly Boteler, “for I’m sure we cannot afford to lose him from the service. But you don’t know General Jackson. When he takes a stand in accordance with his own ideas of duty, he’s as firm as a rock.”³²

Boteler hustled down to tell Governor John Letcher, who was just as furious about it as he was. He soon went off to vent his anger at Benjamin and Davis and anyone else he could find in the War Department. Suddenly, indignant letters and telegrams were flying across the state, and within a few days, everyone from Lexington to Richmond seemed to know about Jackson’s resignation. Many people wrote to him directly to express their outrage. Typical of these was a note from the Reverend Francis McFarland of Mint Spring, Virginia, to Jackson. “I declare to you sincerely, General, no single fact has come to my knowledge during the war that has so grieved me, as the news of your resignation, & all speak of it with deep regret,” he wrote. “When one in high position in our army,who fears God (of whom we have, alas, so few), should feel compelled to leave it, I would regard it as evidence of the frown of God upon us.”³³ Even a member of Davis’s own staff wrote, “No heavier blow has befallen us or is likely to befall us.”³⁴

Jackson himself seemed strangely unperturbed by all the commotion. “He was the only calm and unexcited man among us,” wrote his host, James Graham, in Winchester, who was, like many of the town’s residents, indignant at the affront. “There was no severity of temper, no acrimony of language, no suspicion of anger.” He seemed unusually happy, relaxed, and talkative, and told Anna how much he was looking forward to getting back to their old lives in Lexington. As he explained it to them, “The department has indeed made a serious mistake, but, no doubt, they made it with the best intentions. They have to consider the interests of the whole Confederacy.”³⁵

Which was exactly what politicians in Richmond were now frantically doing. The general sentiment in the capital was overwhelmingly pro-Jackson, and Davis and Benjamin and their allies had been made acutely aware of that. In Romney, according to Jackson’s quartermaster, “Loring is like a scared turkey, and so is his command.” There was no question that Jackson must not be allowed to resign, and now a campaign was mounted to get him back, one that specifically did not include the perpetrators. Johnston had already pleaded with him not to resign, pointing out correctly that the breach of protocol was as much an affront to him as it was to Jackson. Letcher wrote him a long, supplicatory letter, which was hand-carried to Winchester by Boteler, who made the case personally. Jackson was perfectly calm during most of it, except when Boteler made the indelicate suggestion that Jackson might not want to be “an exception” in a world where others were dedicating themselves to the cause and making sacrifices. Jackson, as Boteler later recalled, answered in an agitated voice, louder than usual:

Sacrifices! Have I not made them? What is my life here but a daily sacrifice? War has no charms for me; I’ve seen too many of its horrors. . . . The hope of being serviceable as a soldier brought me here. I gave up the peaceful pursuits of a congenial occupation for the cares, discomforts, and responsibilities of the camp. I left a very happy home, Colonel, at the call of duty, and duty now not only permits but commands me to return to it.³⁶

But as the evening wore on, Jackson’s resistance weakened. When Boteler was leaving, he said, “Well, what message can I take back to our good friend, the Governor?” Jackson paused for a moment, then replied slowly, “Tell him that he’ll have to do what he thinks is best for the state.” Two days later, Jackson requested that Letcher withdraw his resignation.

It was typical of the man that, reinstated in full power, and now free from the interference of Davis and Benjamin, Jackson immediately preferred charges against Loring. There would be no forgiveness, no accounts that would go unsettled. Under the rubric of “neglect of duty” Jackson detailed Loring’s sins, from failure to attack at Bath to permitting long delays in his column’s march, allowing his command “to become so demoralized . . . that it was necessary to abandon an important expedition against the enemy.” He did not leave out the petition, which he said violated military rules, or even Loring’s harsh words—“This is the damnedest outrage . . .”—spoken about Jackson to Loring’s own troops.³⁷ Johnston agreed with Jackson that Loring should be court-martialed for allowing his regiments to lapse into “a state of discontent little removed from insubordination.” (With the political storm raging, Loring in fact withdrew from Romney on February 3.)

But Davis and Benjamin wanted no such thing. Jackson and Loring would be separated forever and life would go on. Loring was actually promoted, but also banished to southeastern Virginia, and his command was dispersed. He spent the rest of the war butting heads with his superiors, including Confederate general John C. Pemberton, who blamed him for the disastrous Southern defeat at Vicksburg in 1863. Jackson himself retained the lion’s share of Loring’s troops, including all of his Virginia regiments. As Jackson had predicted, Union troops reoccupied Romney after Loring had abandoned it. The damage to the tracks and to the C & O dam were repaired. On balance, Jackson’s winter campaign was hardly a success, and certainly did not endear him to his bosses, though it did make them painfully aware of the consequences of interfering with him.

But in a very different sense, Romney was enormously telling. It was not about conquest as much as it was about command, and the exercise of it by a new general in a new war that was being invented minute by minute. The Romney Expedition witnessed the emergence of an extreme style of leadership that posed for the first time a question central to the outcome of the war: Just how far could you push both officers and common soldiers in pursuit of military goals? What the Confederates had done was no ordinary march. Jackson had forced his men to walk more than one hundred miles through a succession of brutal winter storms, high winds, ice, mud, and temperatures that stayed well below freezing. In spite of repeated protests from his officers, conditions that worsened as they marched, and troops with frozen, bleeding, bare feet, he held fast to his objective. He had imposed his will on an army of highly individualistic American volunteers and militiamen, who had freely given their allegiance to their country. They did not see themselves—indeed, could not imagine themselves—as blunt, unthinking instruments of death. The war they had enlisted in had begun as an exercise in glory and freedom. Under Jackson, it began to look more like grim servitude. Many of the men and officers in Loring’s command thought Jackson was literally crazy. He was, in fact, just slightly ahead of the soldiers’—and the nation’s—perception of what this pitiless war was all about, and just exactly how much raw suffering and death lay in the path of victory.

Jackson had also demonstrated that pure gall and audacity counted for something. Romney had been evacuated because Jackson’s advance had scared George McClellan, who, a hundred miles away in Washington, was in no mood to engage with an aggressive rebel army of unknown size in midwinter.³⁸ Though Generals Nathaniel Banks and Frederick Lander had wanted to move against Jackson, McClellan would not allow it.³⁹

After the Romney campaign Jackson wrote a note to one of his colonels, who had reported at one point that it was impossible for him to execute an order. “If your cavalry will not obey your orders,” Jackson wrote, “you must make them do it, and if necessary go out with them yourself. . . . Arrest any man who leaves his post, and prefer charges and specifications against him, that he may be court-martialed. It will not do to say that your men cannot be induced to perform their duty—they must be made to do it.” That was pure army, of course, but somehow, from Jackson’s hand, it had an entirely new ring.

It is noteworthy that two weeks after the close of the Romney campaign, another unorthodox but fast-rising West Point graduate who was greatly underestimated by his peers also submitted his resignation. On February 16, 1862, in the western theater, Union commander Ulysses S. Grant had won a stunning victory at Fort Donelson in Tennessee, capturing twelve thousand Confederate soldiers. When asked by the opposing commander for terms, he had replied, “No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender.” Thus did the moniker Unconditional Surrender Grant become famous, just as Stonewall had attached itself to Jackson after Manassas. Like Jackson, too, Grant’s success had led to his promotion to major general. But following his victory at Donelson, Grant immediately ran afoul of his superior, Major General Henry Wager Halleck. Halleck, who thought him rash, overly aggressive, and far too independent, in effect stripped him of his army. On March 7, 1862, Grant wrote to Halleck:

I have done my very best to obey orders, and to carry out the interests of the service. If my course is not satisfactory, remove me at once. I do not wish to impede in any way the success of our arms. . . . I respectfully ask to be relieved from further duty in the Department.⁴⁰

Halleck realized immediately that he had greatly overplayed his hand, and refused to accept the resignation. Grant was reinstated and given back his army. It was yet another sign that the war was changing, and that it was favoring certain individuals who did not play the game by conventional rules.