CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Banks decided to run, as fast as he could, back to Winchester, eighteen miles north of his Strasburg camps. As he saw it, there was nothing else he could do. If he fled with his army over the mountains to the west, he would have to abandon his enormous cache of food, medicine, and equipment. To stand and fight, with rebel armies in his front and rear (as he thought), was suicidal. If he marched north, he at least had a chance of beating Jackson in a footrace, which was exactly how he saw it. “It was therefore determined,” Banks wrote later in his official report, “to enter the lists with the enemy in a race or a battle, as he should choose, for the possession of Winchester, the key of the Valley, and for us the position of safety.”1 He did not need to add that the ultimate safety was Winchester’s proximity to the Potomac and the North. (Union-occupied Harpers Ferry was thirty miles northeast.) The day ahead was thus all about maneuver, pitting Banks against Jackson in the very thing Jackson was best at.
At about nine o’clock on the cool, drizzly morning of May 24, Banks’s troops moved out. They were not quite aware yet that they were running for their lives, though this was exactly what they were doing. Ahead of them, already strung out for more than fifteen miles along the valley pike, was their enormous train of five hundred army wagons plus another two hundred civilian wagons of one sort or another. Some of the wagons that had left before dawn were already rolling into Winchester as Banks’s infantry started marching. With them, too, were large numbers of escaped slaves they had collected in their travels. Banks no longer commanded just an army but a vast assemblage of refugees and whatever assets they had managed to drag along with them. Many believed that Stonewall Jackson would kill them outright. All were terrified of being sent back to their masters. As one Connecticut soldier saw it, there were “half as many negroes as soldiers.”2 They, too, traveled with wagons, some of them almost comically overloaded with human cargo. All were headed to Winchester by a single road: the hard macadam of the valley pike. It was a curious exodus, a sort of dark, fearful version of the same army’s confident, triumphal march south in March and April.
Banks himself was deeply pessimistic. The way north was crossed in two places by main roads where his army and train could be intercepted. He had received reports that a Confederate army was already on its way to Winchester. His army could be sliced in half. Or he could arrive in Winchester only to find the town occupied by rebels. Either way, all or part of his army would be cut off. And of course he still believed that the main body of the Confederate army—the strange, aggressive Jackson himself—was very likely closing in on him from behind. Though he did not betray his emotions to his officers, Banks believed that he might not survive the day. An hour before he departed, filled with longing for his family and fearful that he might never see them again, he wrote his wife the sort of letter many Civil War soldiers wrote before going into battle. He told her about Colonel Kenly’s defeat at Front Royal, complaining bitterly that “our govt. separates its forces into little powerless squads without power to crush the foe—anywhere.” In his anger at his bosses he had forgotten that his predicament was largely his own fault. Or maybe that explains his excessive bitterness. Then he as good as bid her farewell:
Kiss the dear children for me. I love them and their mother greatly. Dear Birney—how I should love to hug her once more. And Fremont and Maud. Darling children. How I love them . . . I want our dear children to be just, to be truthful. That embraces everything . . . I have been very fortunate in having so good a friend in my wife and I can never say how dear she is to me. Take care of our dear children. They are very fine creatures. It would be a pleasure to live if only to watch them; but life is not worth much. Remember me affectionately to my mother, my brothers and sisters. I need not write any more. I am in good health and good spirits—the best. Have perfect confidence in getting through our difficulties. Good-bye.3
His wife may not have believed his feeble assurances at the letter’s end, particularly since they were followed by the resoundingly final sign-off of a man who, apparently, fully expected to die.
Whether he lived or died, Banks’s path, at least, was clear to him. Jackson, his larger force bristling on the Union flank, had no such advantage. Ahead of Jackson that day was a chess-like game of contingencies, multiplying options, and psychological puzzles. In spite of advances in weapons and mechanization, communications in the Civil War sometimes seemed to exist on the same medieval level as sanitation and personal hygiene. Just as it seemed incredible that it had taken Banks eight or more hours to figure out what had been happening twelve miles from him, it would seem to defy logic that Jackson, a man with an uncanny sense of terrain and troop movement, could not get a fix on the location of a 6,500-man army with a fifteen-mile-long wagon train. Yet that, strangely, is what happened on the day after the Battle of Front Royal.
Jackson had put the advance units of his army on the road at 6:00 a.m. Two hours later they had reached the tiny hamlet of Nineveh, about eight miles north of Front Royal. The assumption of such a march, of course, was that Banks was withdrawing along his supply lines to Winchester. But that was only a guess: Jackson had received no confirmation that Banks was actually doing that. What little intelligence he had gotten, in fact, from an engineer who had climbed the northern end of Massanutten Mountain to surveil the enemy, was dead wrong. His engineer had told him that Banks had two divisions totaling twelve thousand men, instead of the single division he actually had. At three to one—the real odds—a frontal assault would likely win the day. At three to two or one to one, Jackson’s approach had to be much more measured.
Jackson, meanwhile, was keenly aware that Banks had other options besides Winchester, a destination the former Massachusetts governor might avoid precisely because, with his men and trains strung out along the valley pike, he would be so completely vulnerable to attack. If Jackson and Ewell lunged toward Winchester, Banks could easily slip behind them, march east through Front Royal, out of the valley, and back to the safety of Washington. Banks could also just stay put at Strasburg, perhaps awaiting reinforcements from Frémont to the west—a logical and extremely plausible option—which created its own complex set of contingencies.
And so, at 8:00 a.m., Jackson brought his entire army to an abrupt halt. He waited more than two hours for some intelligence of Banks’s movements to emerge from the fog of war. Earlier that morning, he had dispatched his cavalry commander George H. Steuart with three hundred horsemen in the 2nd and 6th Virginia cavalry regiments north and west to the village of Newtown to see what, if anything, was moving down the pike. At 10:00 a.m. Steuart’s riders collided with Banks’s enormous line of wagons—the part carrying Federal sick and wounded—where they caused a great deal of havoc before being driven back by artillery. Black teamsters, especially, had panicked and fled at the sight of Confederate cavalry, leaving several dozen wagons in the ditch. At 11:15 Steuart’s courier caught up with Jackson with news of what they had seen. Banks was indeed marching north, wagon train and all. But just where was his main force? Determined to find out, Jackson split his army, leaving Ewell in place north of Nineveh—merely ten miles from Winchester—and backtracking with his own division through Cedarville and then onward to the valley pike at Middletown. Jackson’s patience, already wearing thin, was further tested by a feisty, stubborn force of Federal cavalry who, fighting to buy time for the main army, held him up for another two hours on the road to Middletown.
After a long and frustrating wait, the forward units of Jackson’s force soon discovered what they were looking for. At 3:30 p.m. at Middletown, they crashed with murderous ferocity into Banks’s army, which here consisted of massed groups of cavalry mixed with supply wagons. What followed, as Jackson’s troops opened from the Union flank with muskets and cannons, was a scene of such horror that even some of the Confederate participants had trouble watching it. Men and horses fell screaming. Solid shot from the artillery cut massive, bloody chunks out of Union formations. As one Union soldier put it, lying beside his dead horse, there was a “mass of living and dying men piled up in a heap on the road.”4 Jackson, rarely bothered by slaughter in battle, later wrote, “In a few moments the turnpike, which had just before teemed with life, presented a most appalling spectacle of carnage and destruction. The road was literally obstructed with the mingled and confused mass of struggling and dying horses and riders.”5 He had shown less sympathy on the battlefield itself. When Henry Kyd Douglas, standing next to him, told him that he thought their attack amounted to murder, Jackson replied simply, “Let them alone.” Meaning, let his soldiers do their awful work. Chief of Staff Robert Dabney saw the scene in biblical terms. “Behold the righteous judgment of God,” he wrote, surveying the bloody wreck of a once-proud Vermont cavalry regiment, “for these are the miscreants who have been most forward to plunder, insult, and oppress us!”6 Perhaps Jackson saw it that way, too. The clash was over in a few minutes. Jackson’s men took two hundred prisoners.
But the victory was short-lived. Though Jackson had severed Banks’s column and destroyed or run off several regiments of cavalry, this had not given him any clearer picture of the location of the main body of Banks’s infantry. Had he hit the head, midsection, or tail of the snake? Unknown to him, Banks, upon hearing about Steuart’s attack that morning, had ordered his infantry to leap-frog the long wagon train. Much of his army was thus well down the road to Winchester when Jackson arrived in Middletown. Banks himself arrived in Winchester at about 7:00 p.m., about two hours after his advance units. Jackson had in fact struck the rear guard—the snake’s tail.
Still, he did not know that. He wanted to destroy Banks’s entire army, not just a piece of it. And in the service of that idea he now made what would turn out to be an extremely costly mistake. Hearing the musket fire of a minor skirmish between stranded Union troops and the 9th Louisiana, he now guessed, incorrectly, that a significant portion of the Union army still remained cut off on the other side of Newtown. So he turned his army south. It took him another full hour and a half—until five forty-five—before he finally understood that he faced only a small and insignificant Union force. He immediately sent a rider to Ewell, who was stewing yet again about sitting and doing nothing all day, with a message saying, “Major-General Jackson requests that you will at once move with all your force on Winchester.” Nearly twelve hours after his first units started out toward Winchester, Jackson finally launched the all-out pursuit of Nathaniel Banks.
Little daylight remained. The distance between Middletown, where Jackson started his final push, and Winchester was about twelve miles. Some of Banks’s infantry and supply wagons were still on the valley pike, en route to Winchester. But they were no longer vulnerable to the sort of attack that would have destroyed them outright a few hours before. Darkness fell, and with it came a series of Union rearguard actions starting at Newtown—ambushes, really—that slowed Jackson’s march to a crawl. Nor could Ewell, leaving as late as he did, and arriving near Winchester sometime after 10:00 p.m., have hoped to catch many Union troops. In darkness they had had to pick their way up the valley pike, which was cluttered with abandoned wagons, blankets, guns, oil cloths, sutlers’ stores, and other equipment—while the 2nd Massachusetts Regiment and other pieces of Banks’s army laid ambushes for them and contested their advance, setting up behind stone walls and opening up with brilliant muzzle flashes that lit up the night. Near Newtown, Ashby’s troopers, who had been leading the way, fell out of rank altogether and abandoned themselves to the looting of the Union supply train, stealing anything they could get their hands on, including horses. They were lost to the army.7With all the stops and starts, and the stress of Federal bullets whirring by them in the darkness, it was another severe march by men who had already marched astounding distances since early March. Soldiers slept as they walked. Each time the army stopped, dozens simply collapsed.
Jackson’s objective had been a high ridge just southwest of Winchester. At 3:00 a.m. the army paused just north of Kernstown, the site of a battle that already seemed to have taken place a long time ago, in a very different world. Jackson fully intended to drive his army those last few miles. With his men dropping out by the hundreds—often facedown, asleep—Colonel Samuel Fulkerson summoned up his old authority as a Virginia state judge, approached Jackson, and told him that enough was enough. He had to stop and rest his army or he would not have an army to fight with in the morning. “My men are falling by the roadside,” he said. “Unless they are rested, I shall be able to present but a thin line tomorrow.” Jackson listened patiently, then said, “Colonel, I do not believe you can feel for your men more than I do. This is very hard on them, but by this night march I hope to save many valuable lives. I want to get possession of the hills of Winchester before daylight.” Jackson thought for a moment, then said, “Colonel, you may rest your command for two hours. I will go on with my own brigade.”8 But he soon relented. Though he hated giving up the high ground, and would not have ordered a halt on his own, he realized that he had pushed his army to the limits of its endurance. It had been a strange, unsatisfying day, with an inconclusive finish. What was undebatable was that, because of his own prudence and caution, however justifiable, Jackson had missed one of the great opportunities of the young war: to swallow an enemy army whole. Ulysses S. Grant had done it at Fort Donelson in Tennessee three months before, the only general to do so in the first year of the war.9 He was famous for it.
• • •
President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, pleased with the success of their military mission to Irvin McDowell’s army, arrived in Washington shortly after sunrise on May 24, having steamed through the night up the Potomac River. They bid a hearty good morning to their colleague Salmon P. Chase, secretary of the Treasury, who wrote in his diary that the two men were “highly gratified by the condition of the troops and anticipating an imposing and successful advance [against Richmond] on Monday the following.” The trip had, in fact, been one of the high points of Lincoln’s brief career as commander in chief.
His buoyant mood ended abruptly the moment he and Stanton walked into the War Department and saw the grim, crestfallen faces of their staff, who had just received word of Jackson’s rout of Kenly at Front Royal. Throughout the morning the news got worse as dispatches streamed in from the valley. Some were accurate, some wildly wrong. Banks was fleeing down the valley. Banks was cut off from Winchester. Six thousand to ten thousand rebels were on the road to Winchester. All this was made worse by the doomsday dispatches from the headquarters of Brigadier General John Geary, who commanded an infantry regiment and some cavalry on the eastern side of the Blue Ridge whose main purpose was to guard the Manassas Gap Railroad. Trusting unreliable sources, a nearly hysterical Geary reported that some twenty thousand rebel troops were closing in on him from the west and south, meaning that at least one of those armies was headed in the general direction of Washington, DC. None of these phantom rebel armies existed. But with the panic Jackson had created ricocheting around Washington, no one in the corridors of power could yet be sure of that. From Harpers Ferry came a deeply disturbing telegraph, saying, “The rebels have cut the wires between Strasburg and Winchester,” and that there was “fighting within 8 miles of Winchester.”
By midafternoon, while Banks moved north and Jackson was still trying to figure out where his adversary was, Lincoln and Stanton, now in their own thick fog of war, had concluded that General Banks had likely been cut off at Middletown and was therefore stranded midway between Strasburg and Winchester without his supply lines. Wherever he was, the reports all indicated that he was in grave danger. If Banks was in trouble, of course, so potentially were the garrison at Harpers Ferry and the B & O Railroad, Washington’s lifeline to the West. No one had to remind the War Department that, in Confederate hands—specifically, Jackson’s hands—the Shenandoah Valley also constituted a loaded shotgun pointed directly at Washington. Most Union forces in Virginia were either at Fredericksburg or in front of Richmond. What, exactly, was there to stop Jackson from marching on Washington? He had a habit of popping up in inconvenient places, and there was no telling where he might appear next.
Lincoln acted calmly and resolutely, considering how badly he had just been whipsawed, and in spite of whatever regret he may have felt in having stripped away troops from the valley to feed McClellan’s ego. In response to this news he sent three telegrams: one to John Frémont, one to Irvin McDowell, and one to George McClellan. Frémont was immediately dispatched to save Banks. “The exposed condition of General Banks makes his immediate relief of paramount importance,” Lincoln said. “You are therefore directed by the president to move against Jackson at Harrisonburg and operate against the enemy in such a way as to relieve Banks.” To McDowell he delivered the harsh news that he was chopping his prodigious command in half and sending half of it to save Banks: “You are instructed to lay aside for the present the movement to Richmond and to put twenty thousand men in motion at once for the Shenandoah.” To McClellan, who still believed he was facing a rebel army well in excess of a hundred thousand men, he gave the worst news of all: McDowell’s entire force would now be withheld from him. It was McClellan’s oldest and worst nightmare: to be deprived of troops by cynical politicians and left to face a numerically superior enemy.
Judging from the reactions of Frémont and McDowell, one would have thought that traveling to the Shenandoah to fight Stonewall Jackson was a cruel fate indeed. “This is a crushing blow to us,” replied McDowell, whose main argument was that he could never get there in time to help Banks, needing at least ten days to get twenty thousand men into the valley. He later added, with undisguised bitterness, as though his job really did not consist of doing what his commander in chief asked him to do, “I shall gain nothing for you there, and shall lose much for you here. It is therefore not only on personal grounds that I have a heavy heart in the matter, but that I feel it throws us all back, and from Richmond north we shall have our large masses paralyzed and shall have to repeat what we have just accomplished.” He closed by asking Lincoln if he wanted McDowell to personally command such an expedition. The answer, to his chagrin, was yes.10 To make doubly certain that McDowell would comply, Lincoln immediately dispatched Salmon Chase to explain the orders to him in person.
Frémont, while nominally agreeing to obey the order, also tried mightily to beg off. The last thing he wanted was to be sent to rescue Banks. The enemy was everywhere around him, he told Stanton. He had few supplies. As usual, rain had bogged down the mountain roads. And so on. He found no sympathy. From Lincoln he received an irritated reminder that “this movement must be made immediately.” Of the three recipients of Lincoln’s missives, only McClellan, uncharacteristically, appeared to take the news well, replying stoically that “I will make my calculations accordingly.” (The next day, however, he was writing his wife with more indignation than usual, saying that the president “is terribly scared about Washington” and that “it is perfectly sickening to deal with such people. . . . I get more sick of them every day—for every day brings with it only additional proofs of their hypocrisy, knavery & folly.”11)
Thus did Jackson, who had not yet even engaged with the main body of Banks’s troops, rearrange, on a single afternoon, the carefully laid Union plans to join together two armies at Richmond and thus bring crushing numbers to bear against Joseph Johnston. By the night of May 24 more than thirty-five thousand troops were under orders, quite specifically, to stop Stonewall Jackson.