CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The days after the Kernstown fight felt disconcertingly familiar: Jackson, mounted on Little Sorrel, chin thrown forward and cap settled on the bridge of his nose, was once again riding south at the head of his tiny, brigade-size army through the tentative Shenandoah spring with a much larger Union force in hot pursuit. He had faced an almost identical situation less than a week before, with no apparent options other than headlong retreat. Yet there he was. He was not only palpably there, marching up the valley pike with his men in columns of four, songs on the wind (“Listen to the Mockingbird”), and bullet-strafed regimental flags flying proudly, but also, in a few days, he had changed the war itself. With his ferocious little jab at Shields in Kernstown, he had single-handedly knocked McClellan’s offensive off balance. By doing that, of course—and by bringing the attention of the world to the Shenandoah Valley—he had also had the effect of doubling the furies on his heels. Before, he had been chased by a single division—some nine thousand under James Shields—whose purpose was akin to swatting away an insect. Now came nineteen thousand men, under Nathaniel Banks himself, with a more resolute set of orders.1 In the eyes of the War Department in Washington, Jackson had made himself a worthy foe. Now he would pay for his audacity.
Even a casual observer could have told you that Jackson was remarkably alone in the immense theater of transmountain Virginia. There were no Confederate armies standing by to rescue him; no such orders had been given. What that observer could not have told you was that the same description applied to Jackson’s own life. Much of the world Jackson had known at the war’s opening had either been wholly transfigured or had vanished altogether. That change had begun with exile from his homeland. The western part of Virginia where he had grown up—soon to be West Virginia—had since the early days of the war been in the curious process of seceding from a seceded state. It was already a Federal stronghold, crawling with bluecoats, and would formally join the Union within a year. The meaning must have been painfully clear to Jackson. If he tried to return to his native land—Clarksburg, Jackson’s Mill, Beverly, or any of the old haunts where he still had deep family roots—he would be arrested and locked up. He was the enemy. In a very real sense, he could not go home.
Nor would he ever again embrace the love and friendship of his sister, Laura. The war famously divided brother from brother. Here it parted brother from sister. We don’t know exactly how the break happened, but it happened precipitously, sometime after the beginning of the war in mid-April 1861. It was very likely the result of Laura’s wartime politics.2 She was as strong-willed as her brother, and she turned out to be an ardent, outspoken Unionist. Curiously, as late as April 6 there is no hint of friction between the two, who had been so close that they usually spent a full month together every summer. His letter to her of that date, a little more than a week before the outbreak of the war, is lengthy, thoughtful, and concerned, as he often was, with her relationship with God. He refers to her own “very kind letter” and tells her that if necessary he will pay the “whole salary” of a minister in her hometown of Beverly rather than see him leave. He goes on:
You speak of your temptations. God withdraws His sensible presence from us to try our faith. When a cloud comes between you and the sun, do you fear that the sun will never appear again? I am well satisfied that you are a child of God, and that you will be saved in heaven, there forever to dwell with the ransomed of the Lord. So you must not doubt. . . . Jesus says: “My yoke is easy and My burden light,” and this is true, if we but follow Him in the prompt discharge of every duty . . . we should always seek by prayer to be taught our duty. If temptations are presented, you must not think that you are committing sin in consequence of having a sinful thought. Even the Saviour was presented with the thought of worshipping Satan. . . . Don’t doubt His eternal love for you.3
Comforting words, yet there the relationship ends, forever. Though Laura’s husband, Jonathan Arnold, was a Confederate sympathizer—he would be arrested for it in 1863—and Beverly contained many people who agreed with him, she held fast to her convictions.4 She nursed sick and wounded Federal soldiers in her own home. She even became something of an embarrassment to Jackson, accusing him publicly on several occasions of cheating on his West Point entrance exam, a charge for which no evidence has ever been found. Though Jackson sometimes queried travelers from western Virginia for news of her, he rarely spoke of her, and people around him avoided the subject.5
Much of Jackson’s comfortable, familiar old world in Lexington had disappeared, too. Anna and his slaves were gone, the house vacant. She was in North Carolina with family members now. It would be nearly a year before he saw her again. VMI still functioned, but enlistments in the army had gutted its upper ranks. Most of his former students were already in the war. Many would serve with him, and many would die. His great friend John Lyle, the bookstore owner and debate society founder, was dead. Ellie and Maggie’s father, Dr. George Junkin, whom he loved and revered as a surrogate father, pastor, mentor, and counselor, had left Lexington abruptly after Fort Sumter, dragging his heretical Unionist convictions back to Pennsylvania with him. He would never return. It was another crushing loss for Jackson. Maggie and her husband, John Preston, were Jackson’s strongest surviving links to the town, but they, too, were enduring hardship. At the Battle of Kernstown Maggie’s cousin and Jackson staffer Lieutenant George G. Junkin was taken prisoner. Junkin, who had lived with Jackson and Maggie at his uncle Dr. Junkin’s house in Lexington for two years, and was close to Jackson, would spend the rest of the war in a Union prison camp. As the tide of war washed his past away, Jackson clung ever more resolutely to the twin pillars of his life: God and duty.
Both were in play as never before. Kernstown had been both intimate and brutal, a stark and bloody lesson in what it meant to fight an enemy who was as violent and determined as you were. There could be few illusions anymore about what war really meant, or about how much Jackson and his men risked. Back in war-shocked, Union-occupied Winchester, the courthouse was jammed with groaning, bleeding, disfigured men from both sides. One observer wrote, “A Confederate captain, Yancey Jones, was lying there with both eyes scooped out and the bridge of his nose carried away by a bullet. He was sometimes delirious and roared about forming his company and charging. An Ohio volunteer lay on his back, the brains oozing from a shot in the head, uttering at breathing intervals a sharp stertorous cry. He had been lying thus for 36 hours.”6
With the Union occupation of Winchester and the valley’s first real battle at Kernstown came bitterness and new contempt on both sides. “The inhabitants believed that the army was a horde of Cossacks and Vandals,” wrote David Hunter Strother, the Virginia-born writer who fought under Banks,
whose mission was to subjugate the land, to burn, pillage, and destroy. Hence they are received with distrust and terror, and their slightest disorders magnified by the imagination into monsters and menacing crimes. The [Union] soldiery, on the other hand, thought they were entering a country so embittered and infuriated that every man they met was a concealed enemy and an assassin, and every woman a spitfire.7
Strother was himself full of unalloyed contempt for these Virginians, a feeling shared in one form or another by many people in the North. He wrote:
I have myself considered the Old Virginia people as a decadent race. They have certainly gone down in manners, morals, and mental capacity. There seems to be nothing left of their traditional greatness but a senseless pride and a certain mixture of dignity and suavity of manner, the intelligence of a once great and magnanimous people. It was high time that war had come to wipe out this effete race. . . . That will be the final result of the war, I do not doubt.8
It was inevitable, too, that a Union army marching conspicuously through the valley would clash head-on with the institution of slavery. For many slaves the opportunity for escape was just too obvious, and many took that chance, crossing through army lines, seeking refuge and asylum. In normal times—which these emphatically were not—the escaped slaves would have been considered property and returned under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Some Union commanders in the opening months of the war did precisely that. But then an opportunistic Union general named Ben Butler, who happened to be a lawyer, came up with a new way of thinking about the problem. Confronted in 1861 with a demand for the return of three escaped slaves in coastal Virginia, he decided that if he took seriously Virginia’s claim to being a foreign power, and if it was making war upon the United States, then he was under no obligation to return any sort of property. Instead, he would hold the slaves as “contrabands of war.” The concept, which Lincoln did not like, first because he thought it might destabilize border states, and second because he would not then or later accept the Confederacy’s claim to sovereignty, quickly caught on anyway. (Congress would support Butler by passing the Confiscation Acts in 1861 and 1862, which allowed for the emancipation of slaves owned by masters in seceded states.) There was, in fact, little else the Union could do. Returning escaped slaves on a grand scale to the enemy was, in the long run, an absurd proposition. The “contrabands” were accepted, put to work, and paid for their services. Soon enough they would fight, too.
By the standards of the Deep South, the Shenandoah Valley had relatively few slaves, and almost nothing that resembled the brutal, impersonal culture that often existed on the giant plantations of South Carolina. Only one valley property owner had more than one hundred slaves. Most had far fewer than that. But because many of the slaves were rented out to nonslaveholding families for agricultural labor or housework, the institution was more pervasive than the numbers showed.9 This phenomenon also provided at least one answer to a common question from Union troops: Why, if you do not own slaves, are you fighting for slavery? The answer was that ownership per se was only part of it; the institution pervaded the South on less apparent economic levels.
As Banks moved south, growing numbers of slaves began to enter Union lines. At Harpers Ferry, Federal troops faced what one soldier called “a flood” of escapees; in nearby Charlestown, a reporter wrote that “hundreds of contrabands are hourly seeking refuge within our lines.”10 They had different reasons for leaving. Some said they were tired of abuse and overwork. Many were treated well but just wanted freedom, or what they imagined it to be. A slave named George Washington, who had worked as a farmer and hotel waiter, said that his owner had never harmed him but that he simply preferred “freedom to slavery.”11
Such defections produced a range of effects—all of them deeply unsettling—on valley residents. One farmer lost seven slaves within a few months—one-third of his workforce. Some escapees took what Virginians considered to be brazen advantage of the new Federal power. A slave named Shipley, accompanied by a Union escort of twenty-five soldiers, marched boldly to a farm in Newtown to reclaim his wife, Mary.12 Even more unseemly to Southern sensibilities—hypocritically, in some cases—some of the Yankee soldiers enjoyed close relations, sexual and otherwise, with black women. One Confederate officer reported that three Union soldiers married black women while they were camped at Winchester.13 Yet another sign of cultural transfiguration was the sight of a Union colonel lecturing a white slave owner for striking a female slave. Though most slaves stayed home, and many were not so unhappy with their lot that they would risk blind flight, it soon became apparent that, as Banks marched through the valley, he was not only pursuing Jackson. He was also tearing at the social and economic fabric of the Confederacy.
• • •
If one was forced to run for one’s life, with a future that might be measured in days or hours instead of months or years, the Shenandoah Valley was a breathtakingly beautiful place in which to do so. Eleven months into the war, the place was still mostly unscarred, a graceful, mountain-walled land of clapboard farmhouses and steepled churches, rolling wheat and barley farms, valleys hidden within valleys, and land that rose and fell like gentle swells on the ocean. To outsiders the valley seemed, as it does today, a sort of idealized, postcard-perfect, Currier and Ives version of rural America. In the rain-drenched spring of 1862 it was a thoroughly sodden paradise, too. There was water everywhere, in cataracts that thundered out of the Alleghenies, in the swollen streams that ran along every road and path, and in the deep pools of the winding North Fork of the Shenandoah and its tributaries. Everywhere, too, were the valley’s trademark fog and mist, thick and smoke-blue, swirling through valleys and gorges, making mountaintops vanish and the high ridges seem to float on the air like sleeping giants. Jackson loved the place. “This country is one of the loveliest I have ever seen,” he wrote Anna, a sentiment he would express over and over again.14
It was also, at that moment, one of the most perilous. Though Jackson was directly engaged with two Union divisions, he had many more Union troops in the region to worry about. All threatened him. To his west, just over the Alleghenies in a parallel river valley, now camped Union general John Frémont, the old Pathfinder, disgraced in Missouri but somehow, through the magic of Republican politics, back in the field. He had 23,000 widely scattered men. Across the Blue Ridge Mountains in Fredericksburg, General Irvin McDowell of Manassas fame had 34,000 men. With Banks’s 19,000, the Federals thus had some 76,000 troops in the area. (This did not include the Union troops at Harpers Ferry, which by May would number more than 7,000.)
Opposing them—in the broadest sense—were three small rebel forces. In the Alleghenies just west of Staunton were 3,000 troops under General Edward Johnson. Just across the Blue Ridge, near Gordonsville, Major General Richard S. Ewell had 8,000.15Jackson himself would soon, with the new Confederate draft and the return of stragglers and men on furlough, have about 6,000 men. Together the Confederate forces totaled some 17,000.16 Though the 76,000 would never face the 17,000 in a stand-up fight—Jackson would make dead certain of that—that was roughly the size of the troop disparity. They would all, Union and Confederate, figure in what happened in the valley theater in the coming months.
Jackson’s immediate need, in the wake of Kernstown, was to forestall his own destruction. He moved south, quickly at first, marching twenty-five miles the first day straight down the valley pike to the town of Woodstock. Then, realizing that Banks was not exactly in hot pursuit, he slowed down, making a leisurely thirteen-mile march the next day to Mount Jackson. Jackson was in no hurry, “running” as slowly as he possibly could, using Ashby’s rear guard to jab insolently at his pursuers. Banks followed, ever more sluggishly, then stopped altogether. Jackson, staying just out of reach behind Ashby’s cavalry screen, stopped, too, seeing no point in running from someone who was not chasing him. Amazingly, considering the order McClellan had given Banks, Jackson and his army were able to remain in the immediate area of Mount Jackson for the next twenty-three days, unmolested and unpursued. It was a stall worthy of McClellan himself. Jackson moved only once during that time, shifting a few miles south to a more defensible piece of high ground east of the pike and just south of Mount Jackson called Rude’s Hill.
With nowhere near enough men to attack Banks, but with free time suddenly on his hands, Jackson turned his attention to other things, such as reorganizing his army, which was still woefully short of supplies, weapons, and other equipment. While there he was confronted with a revolt of two hundred militiamen in Rockingham County, who had fortified themselves in the mountains and vowed to fight the new draft. Jackson put the mutiny down with characteristic grim efficiency. He sent seven regiments of infantry accompanied by cavalry and artillery—more than three thousand men—who shelled the mutineers into submission. They were all arrested, briefly jailed, then placed back in the ranks.17 Jackson’s dispassionate, businesslike approach to such problems made him even more formidable as a disciplinarian. The men knew that it would make little or no difference to him if he had to shoot them. Duty was duty.
Meanwhile, what was holding back this twenty-thousand-man Union army, fresh from its inspiring victory at Kernstown? The answer was, primarily, Nathaniel Prentiss Banks. Like McClellan, he was a deeply cautious man, and like McClellan he had to have his men and matériel precisely right before engaging the enemy. And everything was emphatically not right in the valley. There was, to begin with, the atrocious weather, constant driving rain, freezing winds, sleet, snow, and storms that encrusted men, horses, tents, and equipment in ice and caused tall trees to topple. Supply and artillery wagons churned the meadows into a deep, slippery ooze that mired horses and men and cannons and anything that fell into it. Sometimes the mud was so deep the men could not even drill, abiding in their frozen, muck-filled tents and trying vainly in the wind and rain to keep campfires alive.18 There was the problem of supplies, too, or lack of them, Banks told the War Department. The Harpers Ferry-to-Winchester railroad was out of service; his men were on half rations. Some of them had no shoes. Banks complained bitterly, too, about the incompetence of his cavalry. Here he really did have an insurmountable problem. His men could not ride or shoot with Ashby’s troopers, who bedeviled them at every turn. The Southern horsemen destroyed bridges and culverts, waited in ambush, and fired their light artillery at the invading Yankees from around blind corners.19
But Banks could not remain in place forever. On April 17, with clearing weather, his two divisions finally lumbered forward. At 7:00 a.m. his advance regiments triumphantly entered Mount Jackson, where they found nothing but the burning supplies and equipment the rebel army had left behind. Jackson had seen them coming. By midday the Union troops were pounding, under a hot sun, uphill through the muck toward Jackson’s camp at Rude’s Hill. Banks believed that if Jackson was going to stand and fight he would do it there, on this easily defended piece of high ground a mile to the east of the valley pike with a commanding view of the plain below. At last, Banks was ready to fight. With this in mind, he drew up his full corps in the wide river bottom just south of Mount Jackson, in what soldiers on both sides remember as one of the more striking military displays of the day.20 His infantry formed battle lines, as though preparing for a frontal assault. By late afternoon, Banks’s skirmishers were moving forward toward the crest of the hill.
But Jackson had anticipated this, too. Instead of an entrenched army, what the exhausted Federals found was an abandoned camp with the ashes of campfires. The only evidence of Confederates were the few stray shells tossed at them by Ashby’s vanishing rear guard. Jackson had never had any intention of fighting at Rude’s Hill. Indeed, he was happy to let Banks have Mount Jackson, and a lot more of the valley as well. An hour or two before, anticipating the Federal advance, he had put his army back on the turnpike heading south, once again staying just out of Banks’s range. Jackson, who knew he could move faster than his enemy, did not seem especially worried. He sent everything he did not need on to Staunton, then bivouacked for the night about twelve miles north of Harrisonburg. The next day he moved off the valley pike and headed east under the shadow of the southern end of Massanutten Mountain, through the tiny towns of McGaheysville and Conrad’s Store (now Elkton) and onward through the persistent mud to a smaller declivity within the Luray Valley known as Elk Run Valley.21
There, on April 19, his army made camp. None of his officers had even a vague idea of what he had in mind. Most of the men thought he was simply running away and that they would soon be driven ignominiously from the valley, where many of them lived. Such, they might have reasoned, were the mathematics of war. But somehow, in this bizarre, unwinnable endgame, Jackson had managed to find a superb little sanctuary. Elk Run Valley butted up against the towering Blue Ridge, which meant that Jackson’s flanks were anchored in dense, steep, pathless forests. In his front was the swollen-to-bursting South Fork of the Shenandoah, a far more formidable river than the lazier North Fork.22 And behind him he had a reliable escape hatch: a well-maintained road that led up and over the Blue Ridge and out of the valley at Swift Run Gap. Not only was Banks unlikely to attack him there with the force he had, but Jackson was poised, if Banks made a run at Staunton, to hit him from behind.
Now, again, something remarkable happened. Banks, his rickety supply lines lengthening, his worries mounting over the inadequacy of his cavalry, stopped pursuing Jackson. He remained at New Market for five days, then inched cautiously southward to the town of Harrisonburg, where he came to a full stop. This time he had a far more plausible reason for cutting off pursuit. On April 19 he had presented the War Department with the remarkable news that Jackson had left the valley. The Confederate general had disappeared, as though with a blinding flash of light, into the mist-shrouded ranges of the Blue Ridge. On April 20 Banks certified it. “The flight of Jackson from this valley, by way of the mountains, from Harrisonburg toward Stanardsville and Orange Court-house, on Gordonsville, is confirmed this morning by our scouts and prisoners.” This was wholly untrue. Jackson was sitting in his pocket valley in the far eastern part of the larger Shenandoah Valley, less than twenty miles from the desk in Harrisonburg where Banks was writing his dispatches.
What accounted for Banks’s blindness? It almost certainly had to do with the ineptness of his cavalry, which was not talented or brave enough to penetrate the brilliant Ashby’s screens. It also had to do with Banks’s desire to participate in the battle for Richmond, which was not going to happen if he was chasing Jackson’s broken and pathetic little force in the valley. Banks wanted to believe that Jackson had gone. On April 22, as though to persuade himself that it was absolutely, incontrovertibly true, he repeated that “Jackson has abandoned the Valley of Virginia permanently.” On April 24 he spoke of Jackson “at his present location near Stanardsville,” which was east of the Blue Ridge in the Piedmont country.23 Jackson, of course, hadn’t moved. Leaving the valley permanently, in fact, was the last thing on his mind. While Banks was assuring Stanton that Jackson was nothing to worry about, Jackson was quietly concocting a plan to drive Banks himself from the valley.
To Banks and his officers the meaning of Jackson’s departure was clear: their work was done. “There is nothing more to be done by us in the Valley,” he wrote Secretary of War Stanton on April 30, using words that he would come to regret. “Nothing this side of Strasburg requires our presence.” (North of Strasburg was the B & O Railroad, Washington’s main supply channel to the West, which would always be a matter of strategic concern.24) He added that “Jackson’s army is reduced, demoralized, on half rations.”25Banks’s cool, self-possessed tone convinced Washington that he was right. Lincoln and Stanton already believed that he had pushed perhaps a bit too deeply into Virginia, putting too much distance between him and other Union commands.26 The result was that on May 1, Secretary of War Stanton ordered Banks to “fall back with the force under your immediate command to Strasburg.”27 More important, he also ordered Banks to detach Shields’s division and send it to General McDowell in Fredericksburg. It seemed a curious finish to a curious campaign. Early in March, Banks had swaggered into Virginia with twenty thousand men and seized Winchester. One of his divisions had beaten Jackson at Kernstown, then driven him down the valley. But there had been no follow-through. In the thirty days after Kernstown his 5th Corps had covered a mere sixty-seven miles, during which time he had failed to catch, and then had lost altogether, a small Confederate army. And now, soon, he would be turning around, retracing his steps. The campaign was all strangely inconclusive.
• • •
At about this time something happened—quietly and without attracting notice—that would have a profound impact on the course of the war. Jackson, in his camp in Elk Run Valley, started to correspond for the first time in earnest with Robert E. Lee, and thus began an extraordinary partnership. Though Lee was officially President Davis’s military adviser, the former had begun, with Davis’s full approval, to function more like his chief of staff. And as more and more of Johnston’s, Davis’s, and the War Department’s time was consumed dealing with McClellan’s move up the peninsula, Lee began to exert more influence on the rest of Virginia. He was mostly trying to prevent McDowell, with his thirty-four thousand men at Fredericksburg, from advancing on Richmond and linking his forces with McClellan’s. Jackson had already proven his ability to tie up Union troops in Virginia. Quietly, informally, and with Davis’s approval, Lee had assumed de facto charge of the valley.
On April 21 Lee wrote a letter to Jackson that must have seemed a revelation to the younger man. Jackson’s orders since March had always been, in effect, to protect himself and his supply lines, to venture near the enemy but not too near, to engage the enemy without taking undue risks. Now he heard a new voice, using an entirely new vocabulary. Lee opened by telling Jackson that he was worried about the concentration of Union troops near Fredericksburg. He then wrote, “If you can use General Ewell’s division in an attack on General Banks, and to drive him back, it will prove a great relief to the pressure on Fredericksburg.”28 Attack. Drive him back. Lee had watched Jackson’s bold, if imperfect, moves in the campaigns leading to Romney and Kernstown. Reading Jackson’s correspondence from the valley, he was convinced that the two shared the same deeply aggressive instincts. It is worth noting that, at this moment, few in either the United States or the Confederate States yet had any idea of this rougher, more combative side of the courtly, soft-spoken Lee; Jackson was one of the first to see it and grasp it. Somehow, the two kindred spirits—whose personalities could not have been more different—had found each other.
And now Lee was offering Jackson precisely the opportunity he was looking for. On April 25 he went further. “I have hoped in the present divided condition of the enemy’s forces,” Lee wrote, “that a successful blow may be dealt them by a rapid combination of our troops. . . . The blow, wherever struck, must, to be successful, be sudden and heavy. . . . I cannot pretend at this distance to direct operations depending on circumstances unknown to me and requiring the exercise of discretion and judgment as to time and execution, but submit these suggestions for your consideration.”29 This was the music Jackson had been waiting to hear.
What Lee got back from Jackson on April 29 was exactly what he wanted—proposals for three different, equally daring offensive strikes at Union forces: one against Frémont’s vanguard west of Staunton; another against one of Banks’s detached forces near New Market; and still another against Front Royal and Winchester, in the northern part of the valley. Pleased, Lee left the choice to Jackson. That was just as well, because Jackson had already decided on the first—and probably the most audacious—of the three. By the time Jackson received Lee’s response, his men were already marching.30 Staunton, the prosperous commercial center of the southern valley, a critical base of food, clothing, arms, and other supplies, and the vital railhead of the Virginia Central Railroad, was the true key to military operations west of the Blue Ridge. Losing Staunton meant losing the valley and giving the Union the ideal staging ground for an eastward strike against Richmond. Staunton must be held. But the town was now threatened by two Union armies. On April 27 the vanguard of Frémont’s western Virginia force, 3,000 men under General Robert H. Milroy, had seized the tiny, mountain-ringed town of McDowell, twenty-eight miles west and north of Staunton. Still farther north, at Franklin, was General Robert C. Schenck with another 3,000. Behind him, in the long valley of the South Fork of the Potomac, was Frémont himself, with roughly 10,000 more. Banks, meanwhile, had 19,000 at Harrisonburg, twenty-eight miles north and east of Staunton. That gave the Union some 35,000 troops within striking range of Staunton.31 United, they would be able to seize the town and its critical railhead, thus completing the strategic conquest of the valley. That was the problem.
Jackson’s solution was an extremely risky military operation. It would depend heavily on both speed and deception. He would move through the valley to Staunton, directly in front of Banks’s encamped army at Harrisonburg and in full view of Banks’s scouts and spies—there was no other way he could go—and join forces with General Edward Johnson. Together they would strike Milroy’s Union force at McDowell before he could be reinforced by Frémont. Jackson would then turn, head back into the valley, and link with General Richard Ewell, who was currently camped with his division just on the other side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Together they would attack Banks. If Lee had doubts—he must have, considering how many things could go wrong with such a plan, starting with the likelihood that Banks would attack Jackson at Staunton—he did not express them. Perhaps it was enough that, whatever Jackson did, he would cause headaches for the Union. Keeping to his Winchester vow to hold no war councils, Jackson told no one but Lee, and even Lee got only the barest of essentials. His generals, from Ewell to Johnson, were told only the parts of it that they absolutely had to know, which, of course, drove both of them to distraction.
Jackson’s first step was to summon Ewell, who promptly crossed Swift Run Gap and entered the easternmost part of the valley on April 30 with eight thousand men. The idea was for him to take Jackson’s place at Elk Run Valley while Jackson moved west, to Staunton. Ewell possibly understood that his purpose was to threaten Banks’s flank. But he did not know what Jackson planned to do, or who or when he might be planning to attack. Ewell’s men and officers, who were thrilled to be marching to the valley, were under the impression that they were going to join up with Jackson’s army, and were excited at the prospect. But when they arrived they found, to their astonishment, that Jackson’s army, whose distant campfires they had seen the previous evening, was nowhere in sight. “There was nothing, save the smoldering embers of the campfires of the night previous,” wrote one soldier later. “Jackson had disappeared; whither no one seemed to know. Quietly, in the dead of night, he had arisen from his blanket, and calling his troops around him, with them had disappeared.”32 Ewell, who understood that he was being kept in the dark, was angry and frustrated, a reaction that was fully in keeping with his character.
Dick Ewell was one of that impressive array of volatile, difficult, and highly idiosyncratic personalities who populated the Confederate army’s upper ranks. He was a slight five foot seven, with a broad, prominent dome of balding scalp above a fringe of brown hair, an angular nose, and a less than luxuriant beard and mustache. In the famous description of his fellow Confederate general Richard Taylor, Ewell, with his “bright, prominent eyes . . . and a nose like that of François of Valois,” bore “a striking resemblance to a woodcock; and this was increased by his bird-like habit of putting his head on one side to utter quaint speeches.”33 He was also, wrote Taylor, a person “of singular modesty.” Like Jackson, he suffered from dyspepsia. He would often dine only on a special preparation of wheat. He was an odd mixture of gentleness and brutal profanity. “He was a compound of anomalies,” wrote John B. Gordon, later a general, who served in Ewell’s brigade, “the oddest, most eccentric genius in the Confederate army. He was in truth as tender and sympathetic as a woman, but, even under slight provocation, he became externally as rough as a polar bear.”34 While what Lee later termed his “quick alternations from elation to despondency” and “his want of decision” made him ill suited for independent command, he was at bottom a smart, tough officer who liked to fight, could follow orders, and harbored no grand ambitions.35 He had graduated thirteenth of forty-two cadets in the West Point Class of 1840 and served with distinction in Mexico and later in the American West. He was liked and respected by his men, who affectionately called him Old Bald Head. Standing in the mud below Swift Run Gap, staring at the picturesque fields, woodlands, and quaint gristmills of the valley below, he could not help but wonder what Jackson, about whose sanity he was already beginning to question, had in mind.36 He stayed put, stewed about his predicament, kept his own counsel, and waited for orders.
Jackson, meanwhile, was on the move, pushing his force through a nightmare of mud and quicksand and moving water to Port Republic, heading for a pass through the Blue Ridge known as Brown’s Gap. The sixteen-mile march was agonizingly slow. According to staff member Henry Kyd Douglas, it was conducted “over soft and bottomless roads into which horses and wagons and artillery sank, at times almost out of sight, dragged along by main force of horses and men, the General himself on foot, lifting and pushing amid the struggling mass.”37 Jackson often dismounted to help gather fence rails and stones to give the wagons more traction. Once, while he was doing that, he found himself behind a common soldier who was doing the same thing, and cursing Jackson for putting him through such travails. “It is for your own good, sir,” came the voice, and the man turned and beheld the general himself.38 Dead horses and busted wagons littered the sides of the road.
Weather was not the only worry. The men were exhausted. They were also eating a shockingly deficient diet. The basic Confederate fare in the war consisted of two principal items: salt pork and cornmeal. The former, sometimes called “bacon” or “sow belly,” was what most Americans of the era would have considered nasty stuff: often blue-colored, cloyingly salty, fatty meat with hair, dirt, and skin left on. When the order was given to “cook three days’ rations,” soldiers would gather in small “messes” around a fire and a pot, and attempt to render their food into a form that could be carried in their grease-logged canvas haversacks. This process usually began by cooking the chunks of pork, then taking the grease and mixing it with the cornmeal. That mixture could be mixed with water, then fried to make easily transportable “corn dodgers” or other types of cooked cornbread patties. Either way, it was cornmeal and grease. Needless to say, such a diet was hard on the digestive tract. Sometimes their Commissary Departments did not even have sufficient supplies of salt pork, in which case soldiers would be given the dreaded, unpalatable “salt beef,” a nauseating horror made of the lesser parts of the cow—organs, neck, head—that the soldiers called “salt horse.” To dress it up, they would chop it, stew it in water, then crumble cornbread into it. The mixture was called “coosh,” and it was not much of an improvement. The coffee was rarely authentic—more likely a substitute made from such things as chicory, roasted acorns, okra seeds, or wheat.39
Though this was the basic diet, it was not all Confederate soldiers ate. If they were lucky—or if they had captured Union supplies—they might get molasses, sugar, peanuts, dried peas, and even fresh vegetables. Their picket guards often traded with their Union counterparts, exchanging Southern tobacco for authentic Northern coffee. If they had time, they foraged for everything from corn to apples, peaches, cherries, spring onions, potatoes, eggs, and turnips. Best of all were the packages from home. But most of this was a matter of serendipity. Jackson’s troops often subsisted on what might be considered starvation rations, which were virtually a guarantee of poor health.
On May 3, a warm, sunny spring day at last, Jackson and his army finally crested the heights of Brown’s Gap, crossed through the Blue Ridge Mountains, and descended through the brilliantly green, rolling landscape of Albemarle County to a small depot on the Virginia Central Railroad known as Mechum’s River Station. Word of his departure, which ricocheted through the southern valley, was greeted with shock and sadness in Staunton and other cities. “Suddenly the appalling news spread through the Valley that [Jackson] had fled to the east side of the Blue Ridge,” wrote artillerist John Imboden. “Only Ashby remained behind with one thousand cavalry. Despair was fast settling on the minds of the people.”40 As it was among Jackson’s own men, convinced now that they really were leaving for good. At Mechum’s River Station, Jackson had—remarkably—managed to commandeer half a dozen trains with locomotives, which stood along the main tracks and sidings. His men boarded the cars sullenly. (A few regiments departed on foot.41) No one doubted, wrote Imboden, that the train “was to be taken to Richmond. . . . It was Sunday, and many of his sturdy soldiers were Valley men. With sad and gloomy hearts they boarded the trains. . . . When all were on, lo! They took a westward course!”42 Loud cheers rang through the cars. They weren’t running away after all. They were going back to the valley!
If Jackson’s men did not know whom they were going to fight, at least they knew where they were and in which direction they were going, facts that continued to elude the Union command. Jackson’s cat-and-mouse game in late April and early May was a work of considerable tactical brilliance, even if some of its effects were unintentional. Early Jackson historians gave him full credit for his deception; certain later chroniclers took some or all of that credit away. But a close reading of Union war dispatches shows that in a world full of spies, traitors, deserters, casual informants, and escaped slaves, where military secrets often migrated through enemy lines with amazing speed, Jackson managed to confuse almost everybody, and almost all of that confusion worked to his own advantage.
Banks was Jackson’s principal victim. Almost from the moment he had been ordered by Stanton to withdraw and divide his forces, he had begun to have second thoughts, alternating between confusion and worry about his own well-being. Judging from his dispatches, he began to be afraid for his soon-to-be-split army’s safety, a condition that would worsen in the coming weeks. On May 2, less than three days after reasserting the absolute truth of his claim that Jackson had left the valley, Banks wrote Frémont that Jackson “was seen today moving toward Port Republic. . . . His march is possibly a feint, possibly to join Johnson and attack Milroy near Staunton.” Thus Banks had completely reversed himself. Jackson was in the valley after all, he now asserted. Jackson was not only there but was also in motion and dangerous. Banks happened to be right, for a change, and he was miraculously right again in his May 3 wire to Stanton, saying that Jackson had been reinforced in the valley by Ewell.
Now Banks began to rethink those sweepingly dismissive dispatches of just a few days before. “I do not think it possible to divide our force at this time with safety,” he wrote Stanton that same day in a new, cautionary tone that must have mystified the secretary of war. (Shields was still with him and would not depart, with his ten thousand men, until May 12.) The next day, Banks, now reconciled to Jackson’s supposed presence in the valley, wired to say that “our officers are all confident that Jackson’s force is near Port Republic.” But, once again, he was completely wrong. This time the reason was, ironically, that Jackson had finally fulfilled Banks’s own earlier claims and actually left the valley. (Just how befuddled the Union command was, as a whole, was evident in Irvin McDowell’s note to James Shields on May 2, while Jackson was mired in the mud on the way to Brown’s Gap, saying that he was well east of the Blue Ridge and that he had “pushed through Gordonsville” on his way to Richmond.)
At this point—May 4–5—Banks, Frémont, Milroy, and the entire Union command lost Jackson entirely. Their dispatches reflect this. They had seen him moving toward Port Republic, and then, suddenly, they did not see him at all. Jackson’s railroad ploy was, in retrospect, brilliant. No one saw through it. By feinting east across the Blue Ridge, then making an about-face and moving his force by train from Mechum’s River Station to Staunton, he had effectively made his army disappear. Banks, unaware of this movement, which placed his own army squarely in Jackson’s rear—an enormous tactical advantage—asserted with placid confidence in a dispatch to Stanton on May 6 that Jackson’s force, which he still believed was near Port Republic, was “greatly demoralized and broken.” Union general Robert Milroy was just as badly deceived. On that same day he wrote his boss, John Frémont, saying that Jackson’s movement from Port Republic toward Staunton or Waynesboro—which was a complete fantasy in the first place—was merely a feint in the direction of Confederate general Edward Johnson in the western mountains. And Milroy knew why it could not be anything but a feint: “[Jackson] cannot move from Port Republic toward my advanced position without leaving Banks in his rear . . . which he will not do.”43 That, of course, was exactly what Jackson was doing.
By midday the first train had arrived at Staunton, creating an uproar in the streets as the electric news of Jackson’s arrival spread throughout Augusta County.44 Jackson, worried that such a celebration would draw attention, ordered Ashby’s men to seal off the town. No one was allowed in or out. Thus far his plan was working. Various Union commands did not know where he was; or, more accurately, Federal sources reported him at many locations, including Waynesboro, Port Republic, Gordonsville, Harrisonburg, Staunton, and en route to Richmond.45 Even Richard Ewell did not know where he was. The other news Jackson received, to his undoubtedly pleasant surprise, was that Banks had withdrawn from Harrisonburg on May 4 and was moving back north again.46Exactly why, Jackson did not yet know.
By May 5 the trains had carried Jackson’s entire army to Staunton, where they were joined by the command of General Edward “Allegheny” Johnson, a loud-voiced, bluff, popular old warhorse with a Mexican-American War eye injury that made one of his eyes wink continuously. He was a hard fighter, popular with his troops, and a man Jackson liked and admired. Jackson’s army was also joined by two hundred cadets from VMI, whom he had summoned north from Lexington. Their role would be, as Jackson explained to VMI superintendent Francis H. Smith, limited to “care of the prisoners and baggage trains,” which would allow “volunteers to go into battle who would otherwise be kept out.”47 Jackson met Johnson on May 6, wearing, for the first time, a full uniform of Confederate gray. Until then, he had worn only his old, mud-splattered blue major’s uniform from VMI. He had gotten a haircut, too. At dawn on May 7, the commands of Jackson and of General Edward Johnson, some ten thousand men, marched west and north into the mountains for the town of McDowell.
What of Banks, who merely a week before had greatly outnumbered Jackson and threatened him with annihilation? That same day—May 7—he wrote Secretary of War Edwin Stanton from his camp at New Market to say, “Nothing important has occurred today.” He noted blandly that Jackson’s army, which he had characterized the day before as “broken and demoralized,” had somehow occupied Harrisonburg. It had done no such thing. But something “important” was definitely occurring, more or less right under Banks’s nose. Jackson was moving against Milroy, in such force that Milroy that same day sent an urgent plea for help. “Enemy is pressing us. . . . Must have aid,” he wrote to his immediate superior, General Robert Schenck. “Cannot Blenker’s force make a forced march, relieve you and myself? Cannot you join me? Ask Frémont to have Banks press in on the rear of Jackson.”48
• • •
The Battle of McDowell, as it came to be known, was a small, fierce, bloody, four-hour firefight on a steep mountain slope that ended up being more equal—and far more lethal—than either side had expected it to be. It was fought because Jackson, moving invisibly and with remarkable speed, had succeeded in intercepting a smaller Union force under General Robert Milroy that had been preparing to advance against Staunton. Because Milroy’s army was well in advance of the rest of Frémont’s other divisions, which were scattered somewhere north of Franklin, Jackson, by arriving when he did, had achieved decisive numerical superiority. That was the idea—to strike at the enemy’s weak points, prevent him from concentrating his forces. A similar plan at Kernstown had failed because of faulty intelligence. This time Jackson had taken better care to find out what he was up against.
In the late morning of May 8, having crossed several high, rugged mountain ridges, the bulk of Jackson’s army, with General Johnson commanding the advance, ascended a long, flattened, ragged chunk of vertical land cut by steep hills and ravines known as Bull Pasture Mountain. From its crest the world seemed a simple place: below them to the west was a river, and behind the river was a small village, and spread out neatly on the valley floor, as in a giant amphitheater, were six regiments belonging to Milroy, and three to General Robert Schenck, a courtly four-term congressman from Ohio and former minister to Brazil who also happened to be one of the nation’s most accomplished poker players and would later be known as the “father of British poker.” He had just arrived that morning after a forced march triggered by Jackson’s sudden appearance in Staunton. If Jackson had harbored any doubts about Union troop strength, the sight of the Federal camps allayed them. Combined, the Union had about four thousand men.49Johnson took his force off the main road and laid them out in long defensive lines on a steep, mile-wide spur of Bull Pasture Mountain known as Sitlington’s Hill. Jackson’s plan, already in play, was to use his superiority in numbers to move a large force of infantry and artillery by night on a flanking march around the Federal left. His engineers had already found a route that would allow them to strike the main road five miles west of McDowell. In that way he would block the Union army’s retreat, envelop it, and destroy it.
But Milroy, as Jackson would soon learn, was no Nathaniel Banks. The gray-haired forty-six-year-old former lawyer and judge from Indiana was one of the more aggressive Union commanders in the East. He was fearless and even reckless. In the words of Robert Schenck, he was “undaunted and impetuous, though rather uncalculating.”50 He liked to fight, and wanted, more than anything else, to bring Old Testament–style retribution to the South for the sin of slavery. He wanted to attack Jackson with the full Union force but was overruled by Schenck, who nevertheless agreed to let him lead an attack that evening with a little over half their troops. They were not going for victory, just a temporary advantage. They would inflict a sharp, quick blow, and then, as Schenck put it, “retire from his front before he had recovered from the surprise of such a movement.”51 That was the idea, anyway.
The plan was daring in the extreme, bordering on foolhardy. Both Union commanders understood that Jackson and Johnson had joined forces. Both understood that they were outnumbered, camped in an indefensible valley, and facing an entrenched Confederate force on top of a high ridge. They knew that they would have to attack straight up the side of a mountain. The one advantage they had was surprise: an attack under those conditions, and with such a desperate disadvantage, was the last thing Generals Johnson and Jackson expected. While the troops under Johnson’s command dug in on top of Sitlington’s Hill, Jackson ordered his staff to his headquarters at a local hotel for a meal and some rest.52 They were all eating, about a half mile away, when the Union attacked. (An interesting parallel occurred a month before, when, at Shiloh in Tennessee, Ulysses Grant was surprised by an early-morning Confederate assault while he was eating breakfast nine miles downriver. Like Jackson, he had not believed the enemy would attack.)
At about 4:30 p.m. Milroy, having received an erroneous report that Jackson was moving artillery to the summit of Sitlington’s Hill—which would have been disastrous for the Union troops—gave the order to advance. Up the hill the Federals came, courageously and in good order, toward the waiting Confederates. What happened next, in textbook terms, should have been a disaster for the Union. But in the Switzerland-like topography around the small village of McDowell, there were good reasons why it was not. Mounting the hill, Milroy’s regiments, mostly Ohioans, engaged with Johnson’s battle line. At first the advantages seemed to be with the Confederates. They held the high ground, and could duck behind the crest of the hill to reload. The Federals, meanwhile, had to struggle upward over steep terrain that offered little cover. But these advantages soon vanished. Facing west, against a clear blue sky, the rebels presented neatly silhouetted targets, while the Union troops below were obscured in deepening shadow. Nor did the Confederates have artillery to take advantage of their high ground. As Jackson explained later, the terrain was too steep to drag the cannons up and, even if they managed to do that, the guns could not easily be removed and thus would be subject to capture. A final advantage was that the slope was so steep that the Confederate riflemen shot consistently high.
But the main disadvantage was the disparity in firepower: Union regiments were mostly equipped with Springfield rifled muskets. The Confederates all had smoothbores. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the plight of the 540-man 12th Georgia Regiment, which had taken a forward position in the center of the Confederate line. Facing them was the 75th Ohio. Both sides quickly discovered the gap in firepower, which meant that, along most of the 12th Georgia’s line, soldiers had to hold their fire, while Ohio riflemen loaded and fired at will. “The Yankee scoundrels would not advance near enough,” wrote a Georgia soldier.53 The mismatch was so severe that the right side of the Confederate line had to stand fire, without returning it, for from one to two and a half hours. This problem of firepower, plus an unfortunate choice of position—a V-shaped formation dictated by a jutting piece of land that left them exposed to fire from two sides—meant that much of their regiment was simply shot to pieces. To their credit, they did not back down; some of them, having run out of ammunition, lay flat on the ground, ready to fight with bayonets. They suffered for such courage. Over the course of four hours, until darkness fell, the Georgians sustained 182 casualties—fully 40 percent of the Confederate total.54 “I felt quite small in that fight,” wrote Captain S. G. Pryor of the 12th in a letter to his wife after the battle,
when the musket balls and cannon balls was flying around me as thick as hail and my best friends falling on both sides dead and mortally wounded Oh dear it is impossible for me to express my feelings when the fight was over & I saw what was done the tears came then free oh that I never could behold such a sight again to think of it among civilized people killing one another like beasts one would think the supreme ruler would put a stop to it.55
Pushing their unique advantages, Milroy’s Federals struck Johnson’s brigade along the hill’s crest with unexpected fury. Suddenly it was a real fight, and it was General Johnson’s, because Jackson had, in his words, “intrusted” him with “the management of the troops engaged.”56 Jackson’s job was to command the reserves. While Johnson slugged it out with Milroy’s attacking regiments, Jackson ordered two Virginia regiments to block the road that gave access to Sitlington’s Hill from the main highway, and, seeing how hot the fight had become, he quickly summoned reinforcements. “The engagement had now not only become general along the entire line,” wrote Jackson later, “but so intense that I ordered General Taliaferro to the support of General Johnson.”57 As one of Taliaferro’s men observed, Jackson “was evidently in a bad humor.”58 Jackson also called up the Stonewall Brigade, camped several miles in the rear.
Thus did the Army of the Valley engage, as Taliaferro’s Virginia regiments now advanced to the center of the line. (After Johnson was wounded in the ankle, Taliaferro took over command of the battlefield.) Though the 12th Georgia continued to sustain disproportionate casualties, sheer Confederate numbers began to take a toll. As night began to fall, Milroy’s troops, exhausted and running out of ammunition, had no choice but to withdraw. Wrote Jackson, “Every attempt by front or flank movement to attain the crest of the hill, where our line was formed, was signally and effectually repulsed.”
At 10:00 p.m., Milroy took his men off the hill. At 12:30 a.m., fully understanding how much danger they were in from the now united Confederates, Union forces silently began their full retreat, north, into the mountainous country beyond. Jackson set off the following day, May 9, in pursuit, leaving his two hundred VMI cadets in charge of prisoners and supplies and under the command of Maggie’s husband, John T. L. Preston, and his former boss, Francis H. Smith. Jackson also took care to send a team of engineers to fell trees, roll boulders, burn bridges, and otherwise block the mountain passes in the Alleghenies that might have allowed Schenck to join with Banks. The Union forces, marching well into dark each day, managed to reach Franklin on May 11. Jackson arrived a day later, having been slowed down when Schenck’s forces set the forest on fire. There he found Schenck’s and Milroy’s forces drawn up in a dominating position on a large hill. Jackson, for whom Banks, not Frémont, was the principal target, convinced of the “impracticability of capturing the defeated enemy, owing to the mountainous character of the country being favorable for a retreating army to make its escape,” decided to withdraw.59 On May 13, after the army had attended a Jackson-sponsored “divine service” to thank God for their victory, Jackson put his army back on the road to the valley. The goals: unite with Ewell and destroy Banks.
In conventional military terms, the Battle of McDowell was a tactical victory for the Union, though Milroy and Schenck had fought with superior weaponry and with odd and unpredictable advantages provided by the battlefield itself. They had inflicted disproportionately large losses on the enemy, while accomplishing their purpose of saving themselves by delaying Jackson’s advance. Jackson lost 146 killed and 382 wounded, while the Federals lost 26 killed and 230 wounded. It was one of the rare examples in the war when the defending force suffered more than the attackers.
But in all other ways the field belonged to Jackson. He had won the battle, in fact, before it had ever been fought, by his valley-encompassing sleight of hand that had allowed him to evade a Union army and to place his own force in the field against a much smaller one. Jackson’s great brilliance was maneuver—the chess-like movement of an army to the right place at just the right time—and McDowell was the most prominent early example of this. Union forces could surprise him, yes, and hit him, but they could never have held the town for more than a few hours. Milroy and Schenck were not only forced into a headlong retreat but had to flee fully forty miles up the valley of the South Fork of the Potomac, putting enormous distance between Union forces and Staunton and thus fulfilling Jackson’s primary goal. Protecting Staunton had been his original idea. He had also put distance between the individual armies of Banks and Frémont. And by fooling Banks into thinking he had left the valley, he had gotten the additional benefit of Banks’s ordered withdrawal from Harrisonburg. On May 1, Staunton and the precious Virginia Central Railroad had been threatened by two Union armies. Now, a week later, those threats were gone.
But the real value of McDowell was inspirational. Jackson’s simple message on May 9, which he rewrote three times, shortening it from half a page to a single sentence—“God blessed our arms with victory at McDowell yesterday”—landed in Richmond with the force of a punch.60 Nobody had ever heard of McDowell, and nobody could tell how decisive a win it was, or exactly what was at stake, but here, at last, was a Confederate victory. In a season that had seen disaster after disaster—including Forts Henry and Donelson, Roanoke Island, Port Royal, Shiloh, and New Orleans—and when the South was watching with growing despondency as McClellan’s giant army began to crawl up the peninsula toward Richmond—this was worth something. The Southern press ran with it. “Who can doubt when Jackson speaks?” asked the Lynchburg Virginian. “Like a Christian hero, as he is, he ascribes the victory to the Lord of hosts. Long live Jackson!”