CHAPTER NINETEEN
In the Confederate eastern theater, this strange war that seemed to roll on, month after month, with no actual fighting, was about to end. Everyone could feel it, and in the Southern diaries and letters of the era there is a strong sense of gloom descending. The writers could not know that the year 1862 would see a chain of battles in the East—Seven Days, Second Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg—whose previously unimaginable numbers of killed and wounded would make the first Manassas seem like a small fight. But they seemed to understand, in some part of their brains, that the war was about to take a brutal turn. It was amazing, in fact, how quickly the peaceful, warm, hopeful days of autumn had given way to the hard, bitter disillusion of midwinter. There would be no more languorous breaks, when men could ponder the gigantic illogic of what they were doing and hope that more level heads in Britain and France might intervene to settle the matter peacefully.
The participants in the Bath/Romney expedition in January had felt the lash of the wind and had shivered in subzero weather. But its sequel was, in its own way, worse. February and March brought unrelenting sleet, snow, and freezing rain to Jackson’s army in its camps around Winchester, turning the earth to a deep, glutinous mud that engulfed horses and wagons and found its way into tents, clothing, and food and made it difficult even walking to the “sink,” as men called the latrine. As always, the camps wreaked destruction on nature: forests were cut down for firewood and breastworks, once-clear streams became clogged with filth, and the air was filled with the smell of woodsmoke and offal and feces and unwashed men—the pervading stink of armies. The dense gray clouds meant that there was no starlight or moonlight; nights were cloaked in an eerie, opaque darkness.1 Desertions—a new and unsettling problem that challenged the most basic Confederate assumptions about why the war was being fought—were becoming more and more frequent. Many of these men were walking north toward enemy lines, carrying with them not only their betrayal but troves of military intelligence as well.2 In an even more unsettling development, slaves, too, were starting to cross through enemy lines in ever-larger numbers.
Thus the hard, unhappy winter unfolded. When Loring’s men returned to Winchester from Romney in February, they arrived cold and wet and miserable and fully loaded with bitterness and grudges held. They were openly critical of Jackson and often ended up in fistfights with the members of the Stonewall Brigade, many of whom were equally unhappy about the Romney expedition but reserved to themselves the right to criticize Old Jack. Then there were the sick, so many that Winchester itself had been turned into an enormous hospital: churches became medical wards, pews became beds. In January and early February there were some 3,200 sick in a town whose normal population was less than 5,000, with illnesses that ranged from dysentery and pneumonia to scarlet and typhoid fevers.3
The war was closing in on them in very specific ways, too. Since the beginning of the year the Union’s bad luck had turned decisively in a string of victories. At Roanoke Island on the North Carolina coast, Union troops had landed, won a quick victory, and captured 2,500 prisoners. Confederates had been routed at Mill Springs, Kentucky. In Tennessee, Grant had won battles at Forts Henry and Donelson. At the latter he had swallowed an entire Confederate army whole. Nashville itself, the state capital, had surrendered. These defeats had immediate political consequences: President Jefferson Davis, hailed as a genius in the wake of Manassas, was now the target of sharp censure, as though in a matter of months he had somehow gone from being clever and adroit to being lamentably stupid. He had “lost the confidence of the country,” said the Richmond Whig.4 One congressman bemoaned his “incredible incompetency,” while George Bagby, editor of the influential Southern Literary Messenger, stated flatly, “We have reached a very dark hour. . . . Cold, haughty, peevish, narrow-minded, pig-headed, malignant, he [Davis] is the cause. While he lives, there is no hope.”5
And though McClellan’s army remained in its camps around Washington, it had swelled to an enormous size: 155,000. Jackson’s fear was now fully realized. The once-raw Union recruits were well trained, highly disciplined, and superbly equipped, and now constituted a far more lethal threat than the one the Confederate army had faced the previous summer. There was no missing these signs. “Darkness seems gathering over the Southern land,” wrote a disconsolate Maggie Preston in her diary in March. “Disaster follows disaster; where is it all to end?”6 Jackson’s quartermaster, John Harman, wrote his brother in a similar mood after news of Henry and Donelson and the evacuation of Nashville. He wrote, “This is the severest blow of all. . . . I have no hope that England and France will interfere, so we will be reduced to great straights [sic].”7
Jackson, meanwhile, laboring at his desk in his Winchester headquarters, was in an exceedingly dangerous position. There was peril all around him, it was fast closing in upon him, and he faced it virtually completely alone, with little hope of reinforcement. He was greatly outnumbered. Though on paper the valley army had ten thousand to thirteen thousand men, his ranks had been badly depleted by sickness, absenteeism, and desertion. He had also lost men to “recruitment furloughs,” the result of a December 1861 law that granted leaves and paid bounties to men who agreed to enlist for the rest of the war. (Original enlistment terms expired in April.) A number of officers were absent on trips to their hometowns to drum up new recruits.8 The effect was to reduce Jackson’s effective troops to fewer than four thousand men. Harman, who had to supply them, thought the number was more like three thousand.9
Against him were ranged three Union forces, all under the command of Major General Nathaniel Banks, that totaled thirty thousand men—a ten-to-one advantage if they were all brought to bear on Winchester, which was not just a theoretical possibility. By the end of February, two of these forces had already crossed the Potomac River and entered Virginia; another was camped at Harpers Ferry. Banks’s main force, a day’s march away in Charlestown, had twenty-three thousand men, enough to envelop Winchester and crush Jackson where he stood.10 The Union advantage extended to weaponry, too. Many of Jackson’s men were carrying “percussion smoothbores,” outdated muskets with a range of maybe a hundred yards against a Union army that had mostly rifled weapons accurate at three times that distance.11 But many others had no weapons at all. In a remarkable letter to Governor John Letcher in early March, Jackson made what Union commanders would have considered an astonishing request. “As you say we must, under Divine blessing, rely upon the bayonet when firearms cannot be furnished,” he wrote, “let me have a substitute, so as to make the arm six inches longer than the musket with the bayonet on.” In the event that it was unclear what he was requesting, Letcher appended a note at the bottom of the letter before forwarding it to the War Department: “Respectfully referred to General Lee for information, with the hope that 1,000 pikes may be furnished to Genl. Jackson.”12 Pikes. Jackson was planning to go into battle, outnumbered seven to one, with medieval weapons against rifled muskets. Not only that but Lee, who saw pikes as a way to solve a larger weaponry shortage, actually approved the request. Long, sharp sticks were better than nothing. (The governor of Georgia, equally desperate, ordered ten thousand of them,13 but they were never used in battle in the Civil War.)
Neither side was under any illusion about the other’s strength. Unlike in McClellan’s Washington camps, where overestimation of enemy numbers was becoming a way of life, Banks’s troop estimates, made with the help of deserters, escaped slaves, and a spy network of Union sympathizers in the Lower Shenandoah Valley, were extremely accurate. Both commanders were fully aware of the absurd mismatch.14
Jackson was only in trouble, of course, if he could not be reinforced. To remedy this he sent Davis an urgent request in late February, along with the warning that large numbers of Federal troops would soon be moving against Winchester and thus threatening the valley itself. “It is unnecessary to say that I have not the force to send,” came Davis’s gently chiding response to Jackson’s superior Joseph Johnston, suggesting the utter futility, if not outright preposterousness, of Jackson’s plea, “and have no other hope of his reinforcement than by the militia of the Valley.” Recruit your own soldiers, in other words, even though we have no weapons to give them. Davis’s only advice, considerably less than helpful, was to “avoid the sacrifice of the army.”15
Jackson was thus quite alone: sixty miles from the nearest of Joe Johnston’s forces across the Blue Ridge at Culpeper, thirty-five miles from his brother-in-law D. H. Hill’s four regiments in Leesburg, which in any case were spoken for, and many days’ march from Brigadier General Edward Johnson’s small command between Staunton and Franklin in the southwestern mountains. (They were there to guard the mountainous back door into the Shenandoah Valley.) The math was irrefutable: Jackson was going to have to fall back, a process that his quartermaster, John Harman, had already started by the end of February, moving clothing and supplies twenty-one miles south to the town of Strasburg. But even the sturdy, usually optimistic Harman knew that Strasburg would not be far enough away to offer safety. “I do not think they will stop there if we have to leave Winchester,” he wrote his brother on February 26. “Nobody is coming to reinforce us.”16 That meant flight—continuous, perilous flight—or destruction.
This looming danger seemed to have little or no effect on Jackson himself. Unlike another rising general, William T. Sherman, who as Union commander in Kentucky in the fall of 1861 had driven himself to distraction with paranoid overestimates of enemy troop strength and the fear of defeat—which led him to request that he be relieved of command—Jackson seemed not to mind his isolation.17 As always, he shared scant information with his staff, and worked hard and mostly alone to keep his army supplied with food, clothing, munitions, and such minutiae as regimental flags. He dispensed furloughs and dealt with the ever-stingy War Department in Richmond. The horrors of the Romney expedition had not touched him. Hardship, or the prospect of hardship, or fear of what was to come, had absolutely no effect on his thinking and never would. Nor had he changed in another important way: while he still showed the world the face of the stiff, somber, inflexible, and duty-bound officer, behind closed doors with his wife and close friends he was, as in Winchester, an entirely different person. When Anna had arrived just before Christmas, he had stalked her, pounced on her at the landing of their quarters, swung her around in his arms, and, with “the captive’s head thrown back,” recalled Anna, kissed her “again and again” while a group of officers standing on the sidewalk watched in mute amazement.18
In their snug quarters with the Reverend James Graham; his wife, Fanny; and their three children, Jackson was once again the warm, affectionate, expansive polymath he had been in Lexington with Ellie, Maggie, and Anna. Graham, six months older than Jackson and an intelligent, reliable reporter, wrote the following description of his guest that men in Loring’s command, who had just been driven mercilessly through the ice and snow, would scarcely have believed:
For about two months he slept every night under my roof and sat every day at my table, and bowed with us every morning and evening at our family altar. . . . Those nearest to him could not fail to see underneath his grave earnestness the brighter and more attractive elements of his nature, which even his habitual gravity could not always restrain from breaking forth—sometimes, which the world would hardly suspect, in a keen sense of humor; but often in expressions of warm affection. . . . Instead of that reticence or bluntness with which he is charged, he had a pleasant word for every acquaintance. He met at my table and fireside a great many people of different conditions and rank and of both sexes, and to all of them he was uniformly cordial, even exerting himself for their entertainment if circumstances seemed to require it.19
Anna’s own descriptions of life inside the Graham house seem to recall those happy, unguarded moments in their house in Lexington, but this time with an expanded cast of characters. One dinner party seemed to typify the social atmosphere of the Graham house that winter. A young officer and Fanny Graham’s mother—with whom Jackson had struck up a warm, admiring friendship—began an improvised artillery battle in the Grahams’ living room. The matron, wielding a chair for a cannon, fired at the officer, and the officer, wielding his own chair, fired back. Soon all the guests were playing, firing at one another, yelling and laughing. The Reverend Graham and his mother-in-law were firing side by side. They were so loud that Jackson, who had been in his room upstairs, came down to see what the fuss was all about. The room became very still while he surveyed the scene. Then he pronounced, with affected solemnity, “Captain Marye, when the engagement is over, you will send in an official report,” whereupon the room exploded in laughter so loud that it was heard “far out into the street.”20
Jackson’s good mood and high spirits were at least partly the result of his excellent health. Since June 1861, two months into the war, all of those old ailments—the uveitis, the stomach troubles, the nagging sinus infections and aches, and various organ complaints—had mysteriously vanished. This had happened, in Jackson’s words, “since leaving home.”21 Thus one of Jackson’s oldest, strongest, and most visible obsessions had vanished altogether—and would not reappear during his life in the war. It is hard, from a distance of 153 years, to fully make sense of this. Jackson had, as we know, some very real ailments. The pain in his eyes and the floaters he saw before him were not figments of his imagination, nor was his burning dyspepsia. But the sudden and complete absence of these afflictions suggests, at the very least, that his state of mind had something to do with them. A man who was, at the very core of his existence, a warrior, had been forced throughout his life into other pursuits and occupations. Even in his army years, he spent only a few weeks in actual combat. Now, finally, it seemed that he was fulfilling some old destiny. And he felt, for one of the few times in his adult life, perfectly fine. There was something else, too, that made him happy. In February Anna became pregnant.
• • •
Nathaniel Prentiss Banks was a splendid-looking man. Everyone said so. Trim, compact, and athletic, with luxuriant, artfully tousled brown hair and a splendid military-style mustache, in his sharply tailored uniform, yellow dress gloves, and gleaming saber, he looked the very model of the Civil War general. He looked, indeed, in body type and facial structure, a good deal like his immediate superior, George McClellan, and he had something of McClellan’s erect, confident, dignified, patrician bearing. Banks had what a contemporary called “a genius for being looked at.”22 This was curious, because there was absolutely nothing of the aristocrat in him. He had grown up in the working-class neighborhoods of Waltham, Massachusetts, the son of the cotton-mill foreman, had himself gone to work in the mill at age fourteen for two dollars a week, and had married a Waltham factory girl.23
But he was bright, engaging, and intensely ambitious. He taught himself law, was admitted to the bar at twenty-three, and by sheer force of will dragged himself up and out of the drudgery and dead-end world of the textile mills.24 He started out as a “bobbin boy,” replacing full bobbins of thread with empty ones. He acquired the nickname Bobbin Boy Banks, which he carried for the rest of his life. His entry into politics in 1830 began a stunning rise to power and influence. He was elected to the US Congress in 1853, and became Speaker of the US House of Representatives in 1856. As a nationally prominent antislavery Republican, he played a key role in getting John Frémont that party’s nomination for president in 1856. He was elected governor of Massachusetts in 1858, and ran for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination against Lincoln, whom he later supported and who seriously considered him for a cabinet post. Just prior to the war, Banks had succeeded George McClellan as director of the Illinois Central Railroad, whose principal attorney, before his 1860 election to the presidency, had been Abraham Lincoln. With his sparkling connections and his booming oratorical voice, Nathaniel Banks was a potent force in the North, and Lincoln owed him many political debts. It was partly for that reason that he appointed Banks, with no military experience, one of the first Union major generals of the war, an exalted rank that left many West Pointers and regular army men over whom he had been promoted seething with anger and jealousy. He was the fourth-ranking general in the Union, and its most prominent “political” general.
And now it had fallen to him to make the first Union thrust into Virginia. This was no idle task. The very idea of probing into the Confederacy itself was frightening. The terrain was unknown, exotic; most of it was unmapped or inaccurately mapped. There were hostile civilians, ubiquitous spies, constant threats to supply lines, who-knows-what rebel armies or guerrilla units lurking behind every mountain, and the ultimate horror of being encircled or cut off in enemy territory.
But even with so much uncertainty it must be said that Banks, in the first week of March, camped in the Virginia towns of Charlestown and Martinsburg, had almost everything going for him. That began with nearly perfect intelligence of his enemy’s strength, position, and defensive works. He knew with rare precision exactly how many regiments Jackson had and even the names of his regimental commanders. He knew Jackson’s overall strength and the strength of the average company—thirty, well down from the one hundred it should have been. He knew where trenches had been dug and where earthworks had been built. He knew, from a deserter from the 2nd Virginia Regiment, that many of Jackson’s men were carrying smoothbore muskets with percussion caps.25His staff officer David Hunter Strother, a northern Virginian who before the war had written humorous travelogues for Harper’s Monthly under the pseudonym Porte Crayon, knew the countryside intimately.
Knowing all this, Banks also knew, with nearly absolute certainty, just what a crushing advantage he held. And in early March he began to exercise it. Since there was an outside chance that Jackson might be reinforced by Johnston in Manassas, Banks moved slowly, but quite deliberately. On March 7, advance units of his army, conducting a reconnaissance in force, moved to within four miles of Winchester. There his cavalry encountered Jackson’s cavalry chief, Turner Ashby, and his own mounted troops in a wood. A sharp skirmish followed, which Union troops won handily. This confirmed what Banks and his commanders had heard elsewhere: that the feeble rebel force was no match for them. They had heard, moreover, that Jackson’s army was about to evacuate Winchester. By March 10, Banks had moved closer, spreading his army in a ninety-degree arc north of the town, and moving to control four roads leading into Winchester from the north and east.
Jackson, meanwhile, was indeed moving out. He had no choice. His supply wagons as well as his artillery were either already in Strasburg or on the road. On March 11, his men followed. (He had sent Anna away the first week in March.) Winchester residents, about to be abandoned to the clutches of an invading army and unaware of the hard logic that made it necessary, were dumbfounded. It did not seem possible that Jackson would retreat. As one of them, a Mrs. Cornelia McDonald, wrote, she spent the night “in violent fits of weeping at the thought of being left, and what might happen to that army before we should see it again.”26 By the evening of March 11, much of Jackson’s army was either on the road or camped four miles south, near the hamlet of Kernstown.
But Jackson, as it turned out, had never had any intention of abandoning Winchester without a fight. It was characteristic of him that he had told neither his senior officers nor his quartermaster about this. In the alarmingly transparent world of border-state Virginia, where Nathaniel Banks could learn everything about Stonewall Jackson and his army, down to gossip and small details, it was perhaps not surprising that Jackson was learning to value secrecy. But, as with the Romney expedition, he would pay a price for it. On the evening of March 11, Jackson convened a council of war, where he astonished his officers by proposing a daring and unconventional night attack on a federal position north of Winchester. He had always intended this, he said. His troops, now camped four miles south of town, would simply turn around, march to the north side of town, and attack. Jackson was under no illusion that he could win a pitched battle with a six- or seven-to-one disadvantage. But he could strike the Federals anyway, perhaps make them think that he was stronger than he was, perhaps help cover his retreat.
It is noteworthy that Jackson’s proposal came as other Confederate armies in Virginia were falling back. Johnston, anticipating a Federal offensive in the spring, had retired from Manassas on March 8, headed for camps below the Rappahannock. D. H. Hill, at Leesburg in northern Virginia, had also moved south. Jackson, moreover, had not been ordered to attack anyone. The deeply—and characteristically—hedged orders he had received from Johnston instructed him only “to endeavor to employ the invaders of the valley, but without exposing himself to the danger of defeat, by keeping so near the enemy as to prevent him from making any considerable detachment to reinforce McClellan, but not so near that he might be compelled to fight.”27 In other words, retreat, but do it as slowly as you can.
Jackson’s officers unanimously rejected his proposal. He explained it in earnest once again, in more detail, and they rejected it again, for several reasons. First, the supply wagons that Jackson thought were three miles south of town were actually seven miles away. Second, the men themselves were still strung out on the road for miles; a ten-mile forced march at night with tired men was simply not possible, he was told. He reluctantly gave the order to evacuate the town. By morning the last of the Confederate army was moving out, as the townspeople watched in sullen disbelief. The war would be very hard on them. Their marvelous but unfortunately situated town would be the scene of three major battles and a dozen skirmishes. It would change hands seventy-two times during the war, and thirteen times in a single day. It would eventually be depopulated and, for all practical purposes, destroyed.
Jackson, having put his idea to a vote, and having accepted defeat, was bitterly disappointed. As dawn lit up the skies over the smoky Blue Ridge Mountains, he and his medical officer, Hunter McGuire, rode to a promontory overlooking the town of Winchester and watched the long line of men snake southward. Both were overwhelmed by emotion—McGuire with sadness because he was leaving his hometown; Jackson with anger because he had lost an opportunity. “I was utterly overcome by the fact that I was leaving all that I held dear on earth,” said McGuire later, “but my emotion was arrested by one look at Jackson. His face was fairly blazing with the fire that was burning in him, and I felt awed before him. Presently he cried out with a manner almost savage: ‘That is the last council of war I will ever hold!’ And it was—his first and last.”28
Jackson could not know that on that same day, eighty miles to the east, events were taking place that would change both the course of the war and his own destiny. Lincoln, frustrated with McClellan’s refusal to advance in spite of considerable prodding, relieved McClellan of overall command of Union armies. While he was left in charge of the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln and Stanton would now assume authority over the other parts of that army. This included the newly constituted 5th Corps under Nathaniel Banks, who had previously reported directly to McClellan.
McClellan, meanwhile, had radically shifted his plan of attack. In response to an order from Lincoln—“Special War Order No. 1”—that he move against Manassas on or before February 22, which he refused to obey, he came up with a plan to move his huge army by boat to the mouth of the Rappahannock, about eighty miles southeast of Manassas. They would thus land behind Johnston and move against Richmond. Unfortunately, Johnston’s retreat to the Rappahannock had ruined that scheme. It had also done something far worse: it had exposed McClellan’s prodigiously inaccurate estimates of Confederate troop strength. McClellan had claimed, based on intelligence from Pinkerton, that he was facing a hundred thousand rebel troops. Newspaper correspondents, visiting abandoned camps, found evidence of no more than forty-five thousand. Not only that, but many of the big cannons supposedly aimed at Little Mac’s army turned out to be “Quaker guns,” logs painted black and made to look like weapons. The news was shocking, and the press made much of it. “Utterly dispirited, ashamed, and humiliated,” wrote Bayard Taylor of the New York Tribune,
I return from this visit to the Rebel stronghold. For seven months we have waited, organized a powerful army, until its drill and equipment should be so complete that we might safely advance against the “Gibraltar” of rebellion. And now . . . we see that our enemies, like the Chinese, have frightened us by the sound of gongs and the wearing of devil masks.29
Under intense pressure—Secretary of State William Seward, among others, was ranting about McClellan’s “imbecility”—McClellan on March 13 came up with a new plan. It would still involve putting 120,000 men on boats, but this time he would take them clear to Fortress Monroe at the end of the York-James Peninsula. They would then march one hundred miles up the peninsula and attack Richmond. Lincoln, who was convinced that attacking armies and not places was the way to win, did not like the idea. He wrote McClellan, in scolding tones, that his plan would amount to “only shifting, and not surmounting, a difficulty—that we would find the same enemy and the same, or equal intrenchments, at either place. The country will not fail to note—is now noting—that the present hesitation to move on the intrenched enemy, is but the story of Manassas repeated. . . . You must act.”30 McClellan, nonetheless, would have his way.
It is worth remembering this moment, in the middle part of the chilly, rainy month of March 1862, in the second year of the war. Joe Johnston and D. H. Hill are falling back to the Rappahannock; Confederate armies are being routed in the West; Confederate coastal defenses in North Carolina are crumbling; Jackson is on the run in the Shenandoah Valley; the once buoyant optimism of the South is giving way to fear and hopelessness. Jackson’s opponent Nathaniel Banks holds such a crushing numerical advantage that he is less worried about Jackson’s pathetic, slapdash army than about missing the real action east of the Blue Ridge. To Banks and his bosses in Washington, Jackson is merely an insignificant buzzing on the periphery of the real war, something to be swatted away. They would soon have occasion to change their minds.