CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Any Union officer who was surprised by the idea that Jackson was not slipping quietly away in darkness would have been shocked to learn of his actual plans. He had been thinking about what he would do as he paced the high ground around Port Republic and listened to the thud of artillery from Cross Keys. He had concluded that, as he put it later, “as no movement was made by General Shields to renew the action that day, I determined to take the initiative and attack him the following morning.”1 And that was only the first phase of an extraordinary plan—some might have called it purely crazy—to destroy both Federal armies. It may or may not have been the scheme of a man who was in the middle of a physical breakdown. It was certainly, as Douglas had observed, a lot of risk even for Jackson to take, which was saying something. The idea was to move the main body of his army, including Ewell, by night to Port Republic, cross the South River, and attack and defeat Shields’s two brigades in the early morning. Then—having left a reinforced brigade under Brigadier General Isaac Trimble to hold off Frémont—Jackson would recross both the South River and the North River, march to Cross Keys, and defeat that Union army as well, this time once and for all. All before early afternoon.2 If anything went wrong, the cavalry was to hold the road to Brown’s Gap open for escape.
The plan was Beauregard-like in its wild optimism. Indeed, Jackson’s staff officers were all amazed at their commander’s lack of anxiety. The combative Ewell, who bridled at the timetable for marching from Cross Keys to Port Republic with his tired infantry, was nonetheless by now a full believer in his eccentric commander. Late that night he was sitting in front of his tent in conversation with new cavalry chief Tom Munford—the ranking cadet at VMI when Jackson first arrived and one of Jackson’s first acquaintances there—when the bald-pated Ewell said, in his fidgety, nervous way, “Look here, Munford, do you remember my conversation with you at Conrad’s Store when I called this old man an old woman? Well, I take it all back! I will never prejudge another man. Jackson’s no fool; he knows how to keep his own counsel and does curious things, but he has a method to his madness.”3
That method was sorely tested on the morning of June 9. What was supposed to be a relatively simple task—getting the army across the South River—turned out to be a logistical nightmare. Engineers had worked through the night to build a makeshift bridge by placing wagons in the riverbed and then laying wooden planks on top of them. But the bridge was made poorly; there were gaps in the planks, and the wagons were of different heights. Soldiers began crossing in single file, and many fell off into the fast-moving, chest-high water. Many more had to wade the river in thick fog, stumbling and floating off downstream in the process. Jackson had lost his advantage almost before he started.
But he was so fatigued and impatient that instead of waiting for his five full brigades—some eight thousand men in total—he marched boldly up the small river valley with only four of the Stonewall Brigade’s five regiments (the Stonewall) and two batteries under the command of Charles S. Winder. Facing him were two Federal brigades under Brigadier General Erastus B. Tyler, a wealthy Ohio fur merchant and one of the tougher Union fighters in the valley, and Colonel Samuel Carroll, who had made the daring raid that almost netted Jackson. Shields, who should have been with them, was stuck in Luray, forty miles north, preparing to fight yet another ghostly apparition of General James Longstreet. Though he repeatedly assured Tyler and Carroll that “I will be with you soon,” he would never show up.
But his subordinates’ defensive position was superb. Their right flank was anchored on the rampaging South Fork. Their left, a mile away across open wheatfields, was anchored on a lovely, elevated, mountain-laurel-covered shoulder that jutted out from the foothills of the Blue Ridge. On that shoulder was a flat piece of ground where charcoal had been made, known as the Coaling. The cannons that Tyler had placed there commanded the entire river plain below.
By attacking with such a small force, Jackson had made a mistake. Perhaps he was still bone-weary and not thinking clearly. He had risen at 3:00 a.m. that day after another cruelly short night. But by failing to wait for his main force—including most of Ewell’s army—he was feeding his troops into slaughter. It was not long in coming. The worst of it was at the hands of the Federal gunners on the Coaling, spraying canister at rebel troops in the shelterless fields and at the base of the shoulder. The Confederates had their hands full with the Union infantry, too, which outnumbered them. Winder’s men fought hard, but the replacements they desperately needed were mired for the moment in a thick tangle of wagons, men, and horses back at the South River. At about 8:30 a.m. Winder and three regiments mounted a heroic charge against twice their number, surging forward through the flat farmlands. They were soon under murderous fire. One of those regiments, the 7th Louisiana (the lead unit of Brigadier General Richard Taylor’s brigade), would lose half its men.
While the battle raged and the Confederate line shuddered along its length, Jackson, who now understood that just about everything was going wrong, made two critical moves. He sent orders to Isaac Trimble to abandon Cross Keys as quickly as possible, cross the North River bridge, burn it down, and join the rest of the army east of Port Republic. Frémont, stuck on the other side of the river, would be unable to follow. Jackson, his light eyes blazing with the glow of battle—the men were beginning to call him “Old Blue Light”—also grabbed his mapmaker, Jed Hotchkiss, and ordered him to gather the rest of Taylor’s 1,700 Louisianans, who had just appeared on the field, and, in his words, “take that battery.”4 By that he meant those Federal guns on the Coaling that were tearing his men apart.
Thus began the final drama of Stonewall Jackson’s valley campaign. Could Winder and the bloodied Stonewall Brigade hold until Taylor took out the Federal guns on the Coaling? Could he take them out at all? The question was eventually settled by some of the bloodiest, most intimate fighting that these veteran soldiers had ever seen. Ewell, arriving on the main battlefield, was able to reinforce Winder enough to slow the Federal advance. But the carnage in the wheatfield was awful. The 31st Virginia lost 97 of its 226 officers and men.5 Now everything depended on Taylor’s Louisianans. For them the battle began when, upon their arrival on top of the Coaling—just as loud cheers went up from the battlefield below as the Union troops broke Winder’s line, forcing it backward—Federal guns unleashed a storm canister “full in the faces of the Louisiana infantry . . . tearing great gaps in their ranks, strewing the [slope] behind them with the wounded and dying.”6
The fighting soon centered on those Federal batteries and their cannons, limbers, caissons, horses, artillerists, and supporting infantry. Much of the combat was brutally personal, bayonet against bayonet, clubbed musket against clubbed musket, men killing men and being covered in the blood of their enemies. Artillerymen swung their rammers—normally used to load cannons—in the absence of anything better.7 Horses were bayoneted and shot to keep the Union from removing its guns, and their screams joined those of the men. “It was a sickening sight,” recalled one of the Louisianans, “men in gray and blue piled up in front of and around the guns and with the horses dying and the blood of men and beasts flowing almost in a stream.”8 Said Taylor, “I have never seen so many dead and wounded in the same limited space.”9 Three times the Federal batteries were seized and then lost, and soon the entire focus of the battle had shifted from the wheatfield to the Coaling. The great Federal counterstroke against Winder stalled.
At about 10:00 a.m., with a final, mighty surge, Taylor, reinforced now by two regiments under Ewell, finally took the last gun, while Winder, on the plain below him, with pieces of various regiments, swept forward. The Union line staggered, then broke, and the bluecoats turned and headed hastily back up the road they had come in on. Jackson took a moment to pray, with his head bowed and his right hand in the air, as was his custom. And then he unleashed his artillery—deadly, bone-and-sinew-shredding canister from the equivalent of giant shotguns—on the receding blue column. A four-mile chase netted 450 prisoners, 800 muskets, and a field gun. But the land soon became too thickly wooded for further pursuit. The battle was over.
Somehow it was perfectly in keeping with Frémont’s character that he should arrive, bayonets bristling, on the ground across the South Fork of the Shenandoah, where he could only watch helplessly as the Confederates marched their prisoners to the rear. It had escaped his notice, some hours before, that an entire Confederate division had left his front. At about ten o’clock he finally got up the courage to form his army in battle line and move forward, only to find that there was not a single enemy picket in sight. All he found was a church full of dead and dying men, with the now familiar pile of stacked arms and legs outside. Undaunted, Frémont marched crisply to the North River, where he discovered that the bridge had been burned. In the absence of any other obvious course of action, he mustered his impressive force on the riverbank opposite the battlefield. “In the afternoon he had advanced into the open ground near the river,” recalled Confederate chaplain J. William Jones, “and as I gazed on his long line of battle, his bright muskets gleaming in the rays of the sun, his battle-flags rippling in the breeze, I thought it the finest military display I had ever seen.”10
It was also entirely pointless. Frémont decided to open fire with his artillery anyway, which sent Jackson into a fury because many of the shells fell among the casualties. Frémont, he wrote later, “opened his artillery upon our ambulances and parties engaged in the humane labors of attending to our dead and wounded and the dead and wounded of the enemy.” Jackson wrote a personal note to Union major general Irvin McDowell to complain about it. In the battle he had suffered 800 casualties to Tyler’s 1,018—disproportionately high considering he had outnumbered his opponent. Even his staunchest supporters on his staff thought his tactics that day were too impetuous.
In any case, the Battle of Port Republic was over, and he had won it decisively. Usually, in the oddball logic of Stonewall Jackson’s valley campaign, victory meant that some form of hunt and chase would begin anew. Not this time. On June 8, ironically just as Ewell was being attacked by Frémont at Cross Keys, Lincoln and Stanton had finally decided that they had had enough of this rogue rebel general marching and countermarching in the valley and twisting their war policies into knots. Lincoln had concluded, possibly correctly, that with Jackson’s skills and daring he could probably distract Union authorities indefinitely from the real business at hand: the assault on Richmond, the end of the war. “It is the object of the enemy to create alarms every where else and thereby divert as much of our force from that point as possible,” wrote Lincoln to Stanton. “On the contrary, we should stand on the defensive every where else, and direct as much force as possible to Richmond.”11 And so that day new orders went out recalling both Frémont and Shields, though they were not received until the next day. Shields was to join McClellan as soon as possible. Frémont was to withdraw to Harrisonburg and assume a defensive position. He was so scared that Jackson might pursue him that he went an additional twenty-five miles, to Mount Jackson. He did not have much of a future. Less than a month later, when he was placed under the command of a former subordinate—John Pope—Frémont angrily resigned. Shields, who continued to try to blame his defeat at Port Republic on Samuel Carroll—to the increasing disgust of Shields’s peers—was put on the shelf and quickly disappeared from public view.
Jackson, meanwhile, was master of all he surveyed. Two Union forces were withdrawing from his front. There was a certain beautiful symmetry to it. The campaign, which started with a single enemy army pursuing Jackson southward through the valley, would end with two beaten Union armies withdrawing from him in a northerly direction. A week later, Jackson, in one of his most famous utterances, advised his mapmaker, Hotchkiss, to “never take counsel of your fears.”12 A person who followed such advice, of course, would be doomed to a short life. But at Port Republic Jackson had indeed disregarded the fears that any sane person would have had and produced a stunning victory in a manner that left military men in Richmond and Washington, as well as in the Shenandoah Valley, shaking their heads. His short, unadorned message to Richmond was all the more powerful for its brevity. “Through God’s blessing,” he wrote, “the Enemy near Port Republic was this day routed with the loss of six (6) pieces of his artillery.” Period. He was even briefer with Anna, someone he had been neglecting of late. “God greatly blessed our arms near Port Republic yesterday and today,” he wrote. Though he was aware that the Union had changed its mind about fighting in the valley, he did not yet know that Lee and Davis had come almost simultaneously to the same conclusion. The game was in Richmond now. Richmond must be saved.