CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Major General Richard S. Ewell, the man they called Old Bald Head, was in a blazing rage. He was so angry, stalking back and forth in his quarters with his spurs on and his cap drawn low on his hairless pate, that his staff, at whom he had blown up several times that day, was studiously avoiding him. The date was May 13, 1862, five days after the Battle of McDowell. The object of his fury was none other than his fellow general Thomas J. Jackson, who had abandoned him precipitously at this muddy camp in the Elk Run Valley near Swift Run Gap ten days before. Jackson had told him almost nothing of his plans, and had left him to languish in what Ewell considered a godforsaken hole ever since. Ewell had learned of the victory at McDowell, only to be informed that Jackson was embarking on what Ewell considered the deeply misguided pursuit of Schenck and Milroy up the mountain-walled South Branch of the Potomac River. Ewell, meanwhile, had been left to stew in his own sour air, to fend off constant, annoying wires from Richmond asking him questions he could not answer, and to rage at Jackson.
“Did it ever occur to you that General Jackson is crazy?” he asked the unfortunate Colonel James A. Walker, who had tried to avoid such an interrogation. This was the same James A. Walker who, as a cadet at VMI, had challenged Jackson in his classroom, threatened him, and later been expelled.
“I don’t know, General,” Walker replied. “We used to call him Tom Fool Jackson at the Institute, but I don’t suppose he is really crazy.”
“I tell you, sir, he is as crazy as a March hare!” stormed Ewell. “He has left me here with some instructions to stay until he returns, but Banks’s whole army is advancing on me and I haven’t the remotest idea where to communicate with General Jackson. I tell you, sir, he is crazy.”1
The source of Ewell’s anger was news that Union general James Shields had detached his force from Banks and was marching with a full division through New Market Gap, across the Massanutten Mountain, northward up the Luray Valley, and over the Blue Ridge on his way to join McDowell at Fredericksburg. Shields, in other words, was passing directly under Ewell’s nose, and there was nothing Ewell could do about it, and he simply couldn’t stand it. Powerless to attack, he did the only thing he could: he dispatched part of the 6th Virginia Cavalry and several pieces of horse artillery under VMI graduate Tom Munford “to impede Shields’s movement in every possible way.”2
When Munford stopped by Ewell’s quarters at midnight to check in before leaving, the latter was still so agitated that he leaped out of bed and, wearing only his nightshirt, went down on his knees on the raw floor and spread out a map under the light of a lard-burning lamp. “His bones fairly rattled,” Munford recalled. “His bald head and long beard made him look more like a witch than a Major General. He became much excited, pointed out Jackson’s position, General Shields’s and General Banks’s. . . . Then, with an ugly oath, he said: ‘This great wagon hunter is after a Dutchman, an old fool!’ ” He was referring to General Robert Schenck’s Dutch ancestry and to Jackson’s keen interest in capturing Federal supplies. “Why, I could crush Shields before night if I could move from here,” he went on. “This man Jackson is certainly a crazy fool, an idiot.” And with that, Ewell showed Munford the brief, tersely worded wire he had received from Jackson: “Your dispatch received. Hold your position—don’t move. I have driven General Milroy from McDowell; through God’s assistance, have captured most of his wagon train.”3 Ewell jumped to his feet, utterly exasperated, and asked incredulously, “What has Providence to do with Milroy’s wagon train?!”4
While Ewell fumed in his quarters, Jackson was already pushing his army hard, southward, back down the road they had taken from Staunton to Franklin. He was headed back to the valley, as fast as he could go. He would not keep Ewell in the dark long. Ewell was the key to everything. Without his eight thousand men Jackson could not even think about attacking Banks. That same day—May 13—Jackson sent Ewell a wire telling him he was coming back, and ordering him to follow Banks if he moved farther north. (Ewell would not get this until the next day, hence his rage at being neglected.) On May 15, six days after the battle, Jackson’s troops had passed over the last high ridges of the Alleghenies and descended back into the valley, which in their absence had finally burst into glorious spring. “The old valley looked like paradise,” recalled an artillerist. “Cherry and peach trees were loaded with blooms, the fields covered with rank clover.”5
Two days later Jackson turned off the McDowell–Staunton road. His army wheeled and headed north toward Harrisonburg and Banks’s camps in the heart of the valley. Jackson was now fully aware of Shields’s departure, which meant that Banks was suddenly, and unquestionably, vulnerable. Jackson had been more than willing to move against Banks’s two divisions with his own two smaller divisions. Now the numbers had swung wildly in his favor. The effect was like placing raw meat in front of a wolf. Two days before, Jackson had received a wire from Lee’s adjutant, advising him of Lee’s steadfast belief that “if you can form a junction with General Ewell with your combined forces you would be able to drive Banks from the Valley.”6 The phrase had a nice feel to it. It meant that the hated invaders would be thrown back clear across the Potomac. With Lee’s blessing, Jackson now thought only of striking Banks. For the moment, nothing else mattered.
What he had in mind was not going to be easy. His main problem lay not in the valley proper but in the eastern suburbs of Richmond. McClellan’s enormous army, advance units of which now camped six miles from the city, was the Confederacy’s main concern. Shields’s reinforcement of McDowell would give the latter some forty thousand troops, who Jefferson Davis and his War Department brain trust assumed were headed toward Richmond. (They were right. Unbeknownst to them, the order to “move upon Richmond” had been received by Irvin McDowell on May 17.7) The valley, in other words, looked again like the minor sideshow it was. Ewell was more urgently needed east of the Blue Ridge. So, probably, was Jackson. In spite of Lee’s standing orders, Jackson might be pulled from the valley at any moment.
While Jackson was on the road north, approaching Harrisonburg, Ewell received orders, written several days earlier, from Joe Johnston that seemed to defeat all of Jackson’s plans. “Should [Banks] cross the Blue Ridge to join General McDowell at Fredericksburg,” Johnston wrote, “General Jackson and yourself should move eastward rapidly to join either the army at Fredericksburg, commanded by Brigadier General J. R. Anderson, or this one.”8 Half of Banks’s army had already crossed the Blue Ridge.
Johnston’s wire put Ewell, who wanted as much as Jackson to attack Banks, in a mild panic. Seeing no other way to solve his dilemma, and impatient with couriers, Ewell mounted his horse and rode fifty miles, crossing the Luray Valley, the swollen South Fork of the Shenandoah, and the Massanutten Mountain at New Market Gap. He rode all night, reaching Jackson’s camp near Harrisonburg at daybreak on May 18. When he arrived, he refused breakfast and sat down in an old clapboard mill to discuss business with Jackson, a man whose sanity he had recently wondered about. The two men found much common ground and soon came upon an elegantly deceptive solution, one that used Joe Johnston’s somewhat paranoid insistence on using couriers alone—instead of couriers plus telegraph—against him.
Ewell, again, was the key. In spite of his quick temper, he was ordinarily the model of a good soldier, following orders and rarely challenging authority. But in this case he asserted himself. He would stay with Jackson in the valley and continue the campaign against Banks. As long as Jackson took responsibility for what happened, he would agree to join their forces. He would, in effect, defy Johnston’s orders. But the two conspirators needed some sort of official cover. So they decided to make up their own. The day before, Jackson had sent a message to Johnston asking for new orders—based on Banks’s shift to Strasburg and Shields’s transit eastward—that would allow him to attack Banks. Because of Johnston’s insistence on using couriers, Jackson would not get his answer for three days. In the meantime, he and Ewell needed a reason for not obeying Johnston’s order.9 Sitting in the old mill, Ewell wrote a note to Jackson bearing a false dateline from Columbia Bridge in the Luray Valley—as though he had never made his midnight ride. He blandly described his predicament, told of the news of Shields’s departure, and updated Jackson on the status of his army. Jackson then wrote out an equally flat response purporting to remind Ewell that “as you are in the Valley District you constitute part of my command” and requesting that “should you receive orders different from those sent from these headquarters, please advise me of the same at as early a period as practicable.”10 They were covered, at least for a while.
They then made a simple plan. Ewell’s army would cross at New Market Gap three days later, and together they would drive north along the valley pike and assault Banks head-on at Strasburg. Their business concluded, Jackson and Ewell breakfasted amiably together, and the two attended Sunday services at the camp of the 12th Georgia Regiment, where the new chief of staff, the theologian and minister Robert L. Dabney, gave the sermon. Then Old Bald Head, who had not slept in twenty-four hours, mounted up and rode away. Jackson and Ewell both put their armies on the road early the next morning, heading for their rendezvous in New Market. Everything was going as planned.
Unfortunately, they were not yet free of interference. On May 20, just as Ewell and his eight thousand men were cresting the top of New Market Gap, heading down toward the valley pike, came the worst possible news. In a dispatch written three days earlier, Johnston had ordered Ewell outright, without any contingencies or allowance for discretion, to cross the Blue Ridge and join General Richard Anderson’s division. There was no wiggle room this time. “If Banks is fortifying near Strasburg,” wrote Johnston, “the attack would be too hazardous.” Ewell, shaken by the news, again rode to Jackson’s camp, a far shorter distance this time.
“General Ewell, I am glad to see you,” said Jackson warmly as Ewell rode up.
“You will not be so glad, when I tell you what has brought me.”
“What, are the Yankees after you?”
“Worse than that,” Ewell replied, “I am ordered to join General Johnston.”11
Considering what a stickler he was for regulations and army protocols, what Jackson did next was extraordinary. His clear duty was to release Ewell. But with Banks finally in his sights, he could not bring himself to do it. Bypassing Johnston and the normal chain of command, Jackson now appealed by telegraph directly to his new ally, Robert E. Lee. “I am of the opinion that an attack should be made to defeat Banks,” he wrote, “but under instructions just received from General Johnston I do not feel at liberty to make an attack. Please answer by telegraph.”12 He dispatched a courier, who galloped off to Staunton, forty miles away, from which point the telegram would be sent to Richmond. Now Jackson committed what amounted to an open act of insubordination.13 On Johnston’s order to Ewell he scribbled his own counterorder, directing Ewell to “suspend the execution of the order for returning to the east until I receive an answer to my telegram.” It was the sort of act for which Jackson would automatically have court-martialed one of his own officers. Ewell, who was still gamely playing along, had to wonder what might come of such a breach of the chain of command. But he stood firm.
Fortunately, the crisis resolved itself quickly. That evening a courier delivered a two-day-old message from Johnston, telling Ewell that he and Jackson were at liberty to attack Banks “supposing your strength sufficient.” Johnston was not taking a hard line after all. A subsequent message reminded them that their goal was “the prevention of the junction of General Banks’s troops with those of General McDowell.” Lee, too, soon added his approval. Though they left no record of it, the two major generals, who had flirted with insubordination and had suddenly become close collaborators, must have been thrilled. They immediately concocted a daring variation on their original plan. Instead of marching due north up the valley pike, Jackson would throw out a cavalry screen north of New Market, then turn eastward and, along with Ewell, pass through the Massanutten to the Luray Valley. Their armies would march north together, concealed by the looming mountain, seize the town of Front Royal with its small Union garrison, then fall on Banks’s flank, either destroying him or forcing him to withdraw toward the Potomac to protect his lines of supply and communication. Success depended once again on speed and deception, qualities that residents of the Shenandoah Valley were beginning to associate with Thomas Jackson.
• • •
In many ways Nathaniel Banks was not a bad general, certainly nowhere near the outright disaster that many of the purely political generals on both sides turned out to be. Though he had no army experience, the former Massachusetts governor and Speaker of the US House of Representatives had learned military ways quickly. He had paid attention. He had a marked talent for administration. He was good at handling the physical army, competent at supply and logistics, and did not lack nerve. His men liked and admired him. Where he fell woefully short was in strategic maneuver. Though he managed to get the details right, somehow, almost inevitably, he got the big picture wrong.
Banks had dragged his army back, reluctantly and disconsolately, to Strasburg. He and his senior officers felt only bitterness that they had allowed Jackson to escape, only to defeat Milroy and Schenck, and that they were executing a retrograde march after such an inspiring entrée into the valley. Most of all, having been stripped of Shields’s division, and stuck in a lonely outpost in a theater of war that contained the mystically elusive Stonewall Jackson, they were suddenly, unaccountably vulnerable. “Here we are with a greatly reduced force, either used as a decoy for the Rebel forces or for some unaccountable purpose known only to the War Department,” Alpheus Williams, the commander of the only infantry division remaining to Banks, wrote on May 17. “The worst part is that we have put ourselves in a most critical position and exposed the whole of this important valley to be retaken and its immense property of railroads and stores to be destroyed.”14 Williams was right: with five thousand men at Strasburg and a thousand at Front Royal, Banks was in peril from any number of directions. As he put it, their orders from Stanton obliged him, unreasonably, “to hold the debauches of two valleys twelve miles apart.”15 On May 22, Banks issued what amounted to a cry for help. “The return of the rebel forces of General Jackson after his forced march against Generals Milroy and Schenck, increases my anxiety for the safety of the position I occupy,” he wrote Stanton. “I am compelled to believe that he meditates attack here.”16
In his bitterness Banks had somehow forgotten the reason for his predicament: his own multiple messages to the War Department trumpeting the departure of Jackson’s “pathetic and broken” forces from the valley, never to return. Banks had sold the idea too well. He had succeeded, now that he could finally see it clearly, only in isolating himself with an aggressive enemy in a theater of war that the enemy knew better than he did. All Banks could do was blame someone else, which is exactly what he did. His woes were the fault of General Irvin McDowell, he concluded, who in his greed, cowardice, and jealousy had managed to amass forty thousand men who did nothing more than sit idly about their camps in Fredericksburg, protecting Washington from phantom armies.17
It had taken Banks some time to see the big picture clearly. But now it was in sharp focus. He believed that Jackson and Ewell were going to attack him. He was absolutely right. But whatever Secretary of War Stanton may have thought of Banks’s urgent wire, it was too late to do anything about it. With full, enthusiastic approval from Richmond, Jackson now began his move against Banks. His men left in the early morning, having deposited “all unnecessary equipment,” which included knapsacks and tents, at the Rockingham County courthouse. At the same moment Banks was issuing his dire warning, Jackson and Ewell, who had crossed from the Shenandoah into the Luray Valley the day before, were fulfilling his worst nightmare.
He could not see them, of course. He had, in fact, no idea that Jackson was as close as he was, or that he was even in the valley at all. Though his information was hazy at best, Banks assumed Jackson was still in the vicinity of Franklin or McDowell and that Ewell had remained at Swift Run Gap, waiting for Jackson. Part of this was the sheer speed of Jackson’s march, which defied all of the Union command’s seemingly rational assumptions about what an army could do, or how fast and far it could move. From May 3, the day Jackson crossed the Blue Ridge on his detour to Staunton, to May 22, his army, with all its equipment and ponderous supply trains, had marched more than two hundred miles, through what were mostly abysmal conditions, often with short rations, inadequate supplies, and without such amenities as tents or shoes, crossing mountain ranges, roaring streams, and sodden valleys. One of Jackson’s artillerymen wrote his mother that he had “been marching twenty-three days straight, with only three days of rest.”18And now, exhausted and used up as they were, he was marching them again.
Part of Jackson’s invisibility was a result of Ashby’s devastatingly effective cavalry screen, which kept the entire Union command in the dark about Jackson’s movements. Jackson had thrown it out to help cover his move across Banks’s front at Staunton. When Banks retreated to Strasburg, Ashby followed, fanning out his troopers in a wide arc extending to Banks’s pickets, who were posted as far south as Woodstock. Jackson explained this in a later report: “To conceal my movements as far as possible from the enemy, Brig.-Gen. Ashby . . . who had remained in front of Banks during the march against Milroy, was directed to continue to hold that position until the following day [May 21], when he was to join the main body, leaving, however, a covering force sufficient to prevent information of our movements crossing our lines.”19 While Banks sat nervously in Strasburg, utterly blind and figuring that whatever was coming at him would be both visible and headed north along the valley pike, Jackson was actually marching up the Luray Valley, behind a screen that was a combination of Ashby’s hyperaggressive troopers and the impenetrable wall of the Massanutten, toward the Union garrison at Front Royal.