PART FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Jackson was suddenly famous. In spite of his heroics at Manassas, he had until late May 1862 been little more than a catchy nickname operating in the back alleys of Virginia. His troubled winter march on Romney was not much of a credential, nor was his defeat at Kernstown, in spite of its grand political and military repercussions.1 McDowell was a small-scale dustup on a mountain in a part of the country few had ever heard of. Jackson’s victory at Winchester changed all that. His back-to-back victories over two Union armies two weeks later confirmed—if anyone needed more proof—that he hadn’t just been lucky. Now, a little more than a month after his first win at McDowell, his name was pulsing through the nation’s arteries as the great new military genius of the South. The agents of this transformation were largely the Virginia newspapers, whose stories were circulated and reprinted all over the Confederacy and who, desperate for good tidings in that hopeless spring, loudly trumpeted the news: with less than 17,000 troops (and sometimes far less), Jackson had taken on and routed 52,000 troops in three Union armies. He had inflicted 4,600 casualties (killed, wounded, or captured), seized 9,000 small arms and a vast trove of Union supplies, and had kept more than 40,000 Federal troops from joining McClellan in front of Richmond. In five battles and many smaller engagements from March 23 to June 9, he had marched his men 646 miles, knocked the entire Union war plan in the eastern theater off balance, and had done it all at a cost of 2,750 men. In the late spring of that year he was very likely the most famous soldier in the world.
The Southern press spared no adjectives in relating Jackson’s victories. The Richmond Dispatch insisted that in “striking blow after blow . . . in stunning succession” Jackson’s victories in the valley rivaled Napoléon’s legendary Italian campaign.2 In the flush of victory after Cross Keys and Port Republic, the Richmond Whig exulted:
These two battles are among the most brilliant, if not the most brilliant, of the war. They are the crowning glory of Jackson and his associates. . . . Jackson and his army, in one month, have routed Milroy—annihilated Banks—discomfited Frémont, and overthrown Shields! Was there ever such a series of victories won by an inferior force by dauntless courage and consummate generalship?3
While the Confederate press strutted and crowed, Northern newspapers were feasting as usual on spoon-fed misinformation about supposed Union victories over the upstart rebel general. After Cross Keys, a Washington abolitionist paper bragged, ridiculously, that “a battle between Jackson and McDowell” had resulted in “the loss of Gen. Jackson’s entire command. . . . Nine thousand prisoners fell into Gen. McDowell’s hands.”4 But even in these deeply biased accounts there was a sense that Jackson was something different, a new nemesis to worry about and pay attention to. In the days after the humiliating Union defeat at Winchester, the New York Times had persistently painted Nathaniel Banks as “one of the ablest and most useful of our chieftains” because he had kept Stonewall Jackson from crossing the Maryland border.5 Those papers began covering their tracks soon enough, unable to avoid the stark truths of Jackson’s victories. Either way, the odd, provocative name “Stonewall Jackson” was finding its way into the culture of the North. Several months later a Northern magazine—the American Phrenological Journal and Life Illustrated—even featured an advertisement for Pyles O.K. Soap claiming that Jackson himself used their product and liked it. “Stonewall Jackson nabs it, and sighs for more,” read the copy.6
His fame spread just as quickly through soldiers’ letters, both Union and Confederate, that were often read aloud on family hearths. In the South, these were overwhelmingly adulatory. “I wish we had a whole army filled with Jacksons, and the Yankees would soon be shipped from our soil,” wrote a soldier of the 11th Virginia regiment. Wrote another from the 6th Louisiana, “Jackson is perfectly idolized by this army.” Northern soldiers sent home their own praise, too, calling him “a man of decided genius,” and “thisgreat leader” who had “outgeneralled all our commanders.” One Union quartermaster was even court-martialed for pointing out that “Stonewall Jackson had whipped the US in every battle.”7 Porter Alexander, at the time Johnston’s chief of ordnance, wrote that Jackson’s valley exploits were “unsurpassed in all military history for brilliancy and daring.”8
Exactly who this new celebrity was, was harder to say. Though his men cheered him loudly when he rode by and boasted of his genius in letters home, they were also painfully aware of how hard they had been used, and how many of their comrades—nearly a third of his force—had simply fallen away, unable or unwilling to follow.9 And yet this seemingly pitiless man with so little apparent sympathy for human suffering was also a devout Christian. He prayed in his tent and in the woods at 3:00 a.m. He prayed on his horse and prayed in the midst of battle. He encouraged his men to attend religious services, distributed Christian pamphlets, and arranged for preachers to give sermons in the regimental camps. Christians especially took note that he insisted on giving God credit for his victories and even refused to read newspapers that proclaimed his own renown. This was not mere convention or pro forma humility. He genuinely feared that pride and excessive ambition would anger God and destroy the Confederacy. “The manner in which the press, the army, and the people seem to lean upon certain persons is positively frightful,” he told his brother-in-law D. H. Hill, referring to himself. “They are forgetting God in the instruments He has chosen. It fills me with alarm.”10 He wrote his Lexington pastor, the Reverend William S. White, asking him to warn his congregation that “if we fail to trust in God & give him all the glory, our cause is ruined.”11 In all this, he seemed to many to be the epitome of the selfless leader, a commodity in short supply in both armies. “No thought of personal advancement, of ambition or applause,” wrote Robert Lewis Dabney, his chief of staff at the time, “ever for one instant divided the homage of his heart with his great cause.”12
Perhaps no commander in the war was quite as isolated from common humanity as Jackson was. Command is lonely anyway; Jackson’s policy of sharing little or no important information with his officer corps made it doubly so. He held no councils of war, consulted no one about strategy or tactics. Unlike most generals in the war, he did not even ask for casual advice from peers or subordinates. This isolation was almost certainly made worse by the absence of any emotional leavening in his life: there was no Laura, Ellie, Maggie, or Anna to whom he could spill out his heart behind the safety of closed doors. The loving, affectionate, domestic side of his dual personality had temporarily disappeared. Though he never admitted it—even in letters to Anna—he must have been terribly lonely.
The most human part of him—and the most surprising to his men—was his exceptional kindness, something that everyone who knew him well, from West Point forward, inevitably commented on. It was perhaps the least understandable of all of his unusual personality traits. It did not seem to fit with the rest of him. In spite of the crushing demands of his job, he sat for hours with his surgeon Hunter McGuire to comfort him after a family tragedy, which prompted McGuire to write later of “his great kindness, his tenderness to those in trouble or affliction.”13 Brigadier General William B. Taliaferro, one of the leaders of the revolt against Jackson after Romney, and a man Jackson disliked, who was recuperating from an illness in the valley, wrote that Jackson “insisted that I should rest myself upon his bed; and as he assured me that he had no immediate expectation of collision with the enemy, I consented, and he carefully, with his own hands, threw his blanket over me. I mention this incident to show the genuine kindness of his nature.”14 All of this was part of his growing notoriety, too—a notoriety that, as it lodged itself in the thinking of the Union command, would have everything to do with what happened next in the Virginia theater of the Civil War.
While people in the North and South sought to calibrate the man, and to discover what he was made of, the fundamental truth of him was still his string of stunning victories in the valley campaign. It was so transformative that it naturally inspired jealousy—both then and later—the gist of which was, as Longstreet was the first to say publicly after the war, that Jackson’s accomplishment had come against less than excellent Union generals. No one would argue the central point: Banks, Shields, and Frémont were in many ways typical of the early war generals on both sides who did not fight especially well and were soon weeded out. Jackson took what they gave him and ruthlessly exploited their weaknesses. The same could be said for the wartime career of Ulysses S. Grant, who in the first two years of the war operated in a similarly chaotic environment against inferior opponents. At Fort Donelson, where he insisted on “unconditional surrender,” which made him famous, he was up against Gideon J. Pillow, one of the worst generals in the war. Lesser generals were the rule, not the exception, in the early part of the war, and the great generals made their names against inferior opposition because that was the only opposition that existed. Such arguments, moreover, miss the fact that Jackson and Grant were both among the great early innovators of the war, for whom the quality of the opposing commanders was merely one of many problems they faced and solved. Both were doing things without precedent in military history, executing marches and military maneuvers and transporting troops and building supply lines in ways that were quite new.
• • •
While Jackson was leading his army through the last phase of the valley campaign, an event of singular and momentous importance had taken place in Richmond. That event was not, as one might have expected, the wounding on June 1 of Major General Joseph E. Johnston at the Battle of Seven Pines, a bloody eleven-thousand-casualty stalemate fought after Johnston had attacked McClellan’s left wing east of Richmond. Though that might have been a crippling blow to a Confederacy already short of competent generals, it turned out to be a wonderful piece of good fortune. The transformative event was an order, issued by Confederate president Jefferson Davis at 1:30 p.m. on June 1, appointing Robert E. Lee to replace Johnston as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. This was by no means an obvious move. Lee, while widely respected, had not performed well in his only prior field command in western Virginia in 1861, and had spent the war in a desk job as Davis’s military adviser. Many generals in that army did not believe he was equal to the work. A bit too fussy, was the feeling. Now Davis was entrusting him with the fate of Richmond and, by extension, the South. Though no one suspected it at the time, Davis had made what was probably the single most important decision of the war, on either side.
But from the moment he took the job Lee was in an unsustainable position. He had quite possibly taken the worst job in the world. He was outnumbered by McClellan almost two to one. In a pitched battle in front of Richmond, he would stand little chance of surviving. In a siege—favored by Little Mac—he stood no chance at all. A Federal assault, meanwhile, could happen at any moment. This meant that he needed every soldier he could get his hands on, which meant that he needed Jackson, and he needed him now. One of Lee’s first moves was to send his valley subordinate three brigades of eight thousand troops so that he could crush whatever remained of Federal resistance in the valley and then join the army in front of Richmond. But Lee soon thought better of it and summoned his newly reinforced valley commander directly to Richmond. Jackson would have preferred to take forty thousand men and burn Philadelphia and Baltimore to the ground, thereby forcing McClellan from Richmond. While Lee would soon come around to his way of thinking, it was too late for that now.
Jackson threw out a wide cavalry screen to “block all awareness of Confederate preparations and movements,” then launched 18,500 men and their supply trains over and through the Blue Ridge Mountains. Since he could only lay hands on two hundred train cars, his wagons, cavalry, and artillery all went by roads, while the infantry marched and rode the rails by turns in a hopscotching system of Jackson’s own design. It was this large-scale, highly secret troop movement east to join Lee that Confederate congressman Alexander Boteler had observed on that railroad platform in Charlottesville on June 19. Jackson, with his fame ringing through the South and his legend in full ascent, was going east to join Lee and save Richmond. With that city’s fate hanging in the balance, Jackson’s turn from the valley was one of the most thrilling moments of the war. “We are on the eve of stirring times,” wrote Jackson’s quartermaster, John Harman, a feeling shared by many of the men in that army.
For Jackson an entirely new war began at an hour past midnight on June 23. That was when he left Fredericks Hall, near Charlottesville, on horseback, bound for a meeting of generals at Lee’s headquarters east of Richmond. Jackson traveled as an ordinary subaltern. He carried only a pass for “one officer” and was accompanied by two soldiers and a guide. Using relays of commandeered horses, he rode fifty-two miles in fourteen hours. When he arrived at a large, two-story mansion a few miles northeast of the Richmond city limits, he was told that Lee was working. Unwilling to disturb the senior officer, Jackson walked back into the yard to wait. A few minutes later, Major General D. H. Hill rode up and was startled to discover his brother-in-law Tom, dusty and tired-looking, leaning against a fence. In spite of his frail physique and sometimes sarcastic tongue, Hill was a first-class fighter. He was almost as religious as Jackson. The two men were greeting each other warmly when Lee’s aide beckoned them.
Inside the house they found Lee and two other major generals: James Longstreet and Ambrose Powell “A.P.” Hill. Longstreet was a strapping six foot two with broad shoulders, a broad face, and a heavy beard. Everything about him was broad and blunt. He had graduated from West Point three years before Jackson. He was bright, self-important, and opinionated. He was also fearless, imperturbable on the battlefield, a dependable if unspectacular fighter who had burnished his reputation at the Battle of Seven Pines. He favored defensive fighting, a position that put him considerably in advance of the thinking of most military men of the moment. Lee trusted him. He had been born in South Carolina but grew up mostly in Georgia. He had spent his military career in a string of dusty outposts, mostly as paymaster. The loss of three children in an epidemic was said to have robbed him of his humor. Jackson knew him from Manassas. “Little Powell” Hill had been in Jackson’s West Point class where, along with other members of the Virginia aristocracy, he had made fun of the orphan from the western mountains. He was proud, sensitive, and thin-skinned, and had a hair-trigger temper; he would prove to be one of the South’s best fighters. His graduation from West Point had been delayed because of the venereal disease he had contracted—a sickness that helped spoil his chances to marry the lovely Ellen Marcy, who instead chose Powell’s close friend George B. McClellan. All four Confederate generals had been at West Point at the same time.
Then there was Lee himself, the soldier’s soldier with three decades of spotless military service. He had been born in 1807, the son of Henry “Lighthorse Harry” Lee, a hero of the Revolutionary War. He had graduated second in his class at West Point and distinguished himself in the Mexican-American War, where his daring exploits as a scout and engineer were crucial in enabling Winfield Scott to break enemy defenses in three major American victories. He was the quintessential Virginia aristocrat. He lived in a Greek Revival mansion that was one of the largest homes in antebellum Virginia, and was married to the daughter of George Washington’s step-grandson, whom George and Martha Washington had raised as a son. Tall, handsome, and a bit heavyset, with a full gray beard and a head of gray hair, Lee was so gentle and polite, calm and stately that it was difficult to see the fighter in him, though in fact he had a far more pure strain of military character than even Jackson himself. Jackson’s interests ranged to literature, poetry; Lee devoted no time to literature and did almost no general reading; his interests beyond his family and his religion were few, and even though he was quite devout, even here he lacked Jackson’s taste for more complex theology. The Bible was sufficient. Unlike Jackson, he had by hard study and a career in the service made himself highly proficient in tactics, logistics, and engineering; those military sciences he knew as well as anyone.15 Just at that moment, Jackson was by far the more famous of the two. Since Lee had not yet proven himself, there were many in the Confederate army, including Jeb Stuart and Gustavus Smith (to whom Jackson pleaded his case for an invasion of the North in August 1861), who did not feel he should have been given the job. His King of Spades nickname originated in his orders to dig fortifications around Richmond, which suggested to his soldiers that he was afraid to go out and fight.
At Lee’s field headquarters Stonewall Jackson, who refused food but accepted a glass of milk, now found himself the object of considerable interest.16 In his “rusty gray dress and still rustier gray forage cap” he stood out “from the spruce young officers under him,” according to one of Lee’s staff.17 Jackson was at that moment the most celebrated field commander in the war, and, in fact, in the Western Hemisphere. No one, North or South, had yet done anything like what he had done. Lee as a line general was a largely unknown quantity; he had only just taken command of an army. Though the Manassas victory had brought fame to Beauregard and Johnston, the former was in sharp decline, and Johnston, now wounded, had accomplished nothing since then. In the North there was only Grant in the western theater, though his performance at Shiloh had tarnished him. As Jackson stood there before his peers that afternoon, he was a bit of a wonder. He was also what he was to everyone else: a stubborn mystery.
Lee explained his plan, which had its origins in Jeb Stuart’s daring hundred-mile ride with 1,200 cavaliers around McClellan’s entire army between June 12 and June 15. Stuart had discovered, among other things, that McClellan’s right flank was vulnerable. Not only did it contain far fewer soldiers than the force south of the Chickahominy, but also the flank itself was “in the air”—not anchored by any natural formation or obstacle. And it was that flank that Lee proposed to turn. He described the Union army’s position astride the Chickahominy River, a sluggish, swampy creek that ran roughly northwest to southeast, on the east side of Richmond. It roughly bisected the peninsula that was defined by the York and Pamunkey Rivers on the north and the James River on the South. The problem Lee faced was that he did not believe he could carry a frontal assault against the 30,000 troops in the Federal 5th Corps under Major General Fitz John Porter who were dug in behind the Chickahominy.
His solution was to send Jackson’s army on a march to the north of Porter’s army. He would march clear around the Union right, flank, then turn and strike to the south, threatening the main Union supply line. If the plan worked, Porter, facing envelopment, would be forced to abandon his position. As that happened, the Confederate army would commence a gigantic wheeling motion, sending sixty thousand soldiers en echelon against the collapsing Federal right. Forced from its defensive redoubts and falling back to protect its supply base on the York River, McClellan’s army would have to come out into the open and fight, giving away all of its present defensive advantages. Just as important, the Union army would have to abandon its positions in front of Richmond.
The key, in any case, was Jackson. It had to be. His very name might be enough to turn the Union right. The generals agreed, with Lee’s endorsement, that Jackson’s army was to be in place on the night of June 25 and that he would begin his flank march in the early-morning hours of June 26. The four-hour conference broke up at about 7:00 p.m. on June 23. In the next forty-eight hours, Jackson had to ride back to his camp at night in the rain, and then march his army more than thirty miles into the brushy, swampy tangles of the York-James Peninsula and get it ready to fight. His legend said he had the fastest-moving army in history. That notion would now be severely tested.