CHAPTER FOUR
The chaos Jackson found at Harpers Ferry was very like the chaos he had found at Richmond, with one important distinction. He was now in command of it. Here was the same motley assortment of volunteers and militiamen, the same rawboned recruits with the same naive, self-fulfilling notions of what the war was going to be like; the same lack of order; the same wild exuberance. Some 2,500 men, mostly from the Shenandoah Valley, had assembled in the warming Appalachian spring in the tiny, picturesque mountain town on a tongue of land at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. It was lovely, outsized country: broad-shouldered mountains falling abruptly into sparkling, muscular rivers. If this notch in the mountains seemed to the recruits a perfect place to have a sort of extended social picnic, punctuated with parades, they could hardly be blamed. There had been no one, in the two weeks since secession, to tell them otherwise. “Society was plentiful,” wrote a young recruit who was there, “for the ranks were filled with the best blood of Virginia; all its classes were there. Mothers and sisters and other dear girls came constantly to Harper’s Ferry and there was little difficulty in seeing them. Nothing was serious yet; everything much like a joke.”1
In charge of all this were four generals of the militias, a colorful set of men even by the standards of the early war. They dressed the way they believed generals ought to dress: cocked hats and feathers, epaulets and ceremonial sashes, gleaming sabers and pistols. They looked quite grand, the more so since they went about like pashas, with entourages that included aides-de-camp, adjutants, inspectors general, personal servants, and various supernumeraries. They served whiskey liberally to friends and colleagues. They liked ceremony and spectacle, and provided plenty of both. They owed their positions to their prominence in their hometowns and counties; the ranking officer, for example, sixty-year-old Major General Kenton Harper, was the mayor of Staunton, Virginia, and the editor of the town’s newspaper. He presided over what, by military standards, was an organizational disaster: there was no medical facility, no commissary or quartermaster, no chief of ordnance. The limit of military organization was the hundred-man company. There was little equipment or ammunition, and many of the men had no rifles.2 But no one in command seemed terribly exercised about the shortages. Life rolled on, reviews were held, speeches made, and everyone seemed quite happy in anticipation of the excitement that was surely to come.
Amid such pomp and visions of martial glory, the new commanding colonel who arrived on the evening of April 27 was a sorry disappointment. He was, in fact, the opposite of anyone’s idea of what a leader was supposed to look like, and his somber, uncourtly, and undashing manner did nothing to change that impression. He had only two assistants: Assistant Adjutant General John Preston, a personal friend, founder of VMI, and a leading businessman in Lexington; and Inspector General James Massie, a VMI faculty member. The new commander had no prancing steeds and not a thread of gold trim on his uniform. Bearded, solemn, and unexceptional, he walked with long awkward strides through the camps, wearing his faded blue VMI uniform and a beaten-up cadet cap that he pulled down so far over his nose that it obscured the upper part of his face. “The Old Dominion must be sadly deficient in military men, if this is the best she can do,” wrote one newspaper correspondent who spent some time with him. “He is nothing like a commanding officer.”3
Jackson, meanwhile, felt exactly like a commanding officer. This was what he had wanted, and he believed without any doubt that he was equal to the task. He took a modest room at a little wayside hotel near the railroad bridge, where he sat with Preston at a small pine table—often under a tree in the yard—reviewing the rolls of troops.4 His self-assurance was immediately tested. On the day he arrived, Virginia governor Letcher had informed state militias in Harpers Ferry and elsewhere that officers above the rank of captain would be relieved of duty the moment a state-designated commanding officer arrived. Jackson’s first job was to enforce this order, which meant dismantling most of the military command structure in Harpers Ferry. Predictably, the idea that the imperial generals were being ousted in favor of this shabbily dressed, socially inept professor seemed disgraceful, both to the officers and to the men who served under them. “The deposed officers . . . left for home or for Richmond in a high state of indignation,” wrote a member of a Staunton regiment. “The men were deeply attached to their field officers, and regarded the ordinance of the convention as an outrage on freemen and volunteers.”5 Jackson thus began his tenure in an atmosphere of outright hostility and insubordination. Many of the militia officers had stormed off to Richmond to plead their cases, unable to believe that it could possibly be in the interest of the state or the Confederacy to replace them. Some militiamen simply left in disgust.
Jackson, unfazed by any of this public contempt—one of his great strengths, and weaknesses, was that he cared little about the opinions of others—now moved quickly to reorganize the troops. He began by asking some of the militia officers to stay and help him, thus buying goodwill with a number of companies. Working late into the night and sometimes through until morning—his one complaint to his wife in otherwise happy letters was his lack of sleep—he slowly but firmly stripped the militia companies of their independence and hammered them together into regiments, recruiting many VMI graduates into command positions. He got rid of the whiskey and instituted a rigorous and unforgiving program of drill and instruction, which began at 5:00 a.m. and continued for the next seventeen hours and included up to seven hours of marching. Sometimes the days did not end even there: on May 2 Jackson ordered his troops to sleep on their weapons, and scheduled a full inspection for 1:30 a.m.
Drilling came in different forms. There were marching drills, which taught the men how to walk together in formation and how to transform themselves from a marching column, two or four abreast, into a two-man-deep battle line—and then how to reverse that action. The idea was to be able to move a five-hundred-to-one-thousand-man regiment in an orderly way to, from, and around a battlefield; how to advance, how to retreat, how fast to march, how to dress ranks, how not to shoot at friendly troops. Weapons drills involved instruction in the nine separate actions required to fire a musket. There was instruction on all sorts of other skills, too, from military protocol to making camp to the handling and cooking of rations. To help him with this, Jackson had procured the services of ten cadets from VMI. Since there was virtually no training for officers in the South—who often sat up late at night in their tents reading printed manuals—the cadets’ expertise was crucial to the early war preparations of the Confederacy.6
Within a week Jackson had, to the amazement of local observers, quietly rebuilt the entire military operation at Harpers Ferry. Though the troops were still alarmingly green in many cases, “The presence of a mastermind was visible in the changed conditions of the camp,” wrote John D. Imboden, an artillerist from Staunton. “Perfect order reigned everywhere. Instruction in the details of military duty occupied Jackson’s whole time.”
Many of the militia officers who had left in a huff had thought better of it and had quietly returned, taking their places in the new volunteer army, now squarely under the command of the peculiar professor. What had emerged from the anarchy and disarray of that week was, in fact, a distinct and unusual style of command. It began with rigid discipline and adherence to the strictest military code. Jackson would not tolerate disobedience, insubordination, tardiness, or neglect of duty. “Once or twice some willful young officer made experiment of resisting his authority,” wrote Dabney, “[but] his penalties were so prompt and inexorable that no one desired to adventure another act of disobedience.”7 Punishments were doled out fairly and evenhandedly, without passion or prejudice. Duty was duty. You shirked it at your own peril, and there was nothing personal about what happened to you—arrest and the guardhouse—if you did. Jackson—the new Jackson, anyway—was all about scrupulous honesty, meticulous accountability, and cool professionalism. Soldiers quickly learned that quiet and unconversational did not mean irresolute.
Everyone who had known him before noted the change. “It occurred to us at the time that Jackson was much more in his element here as an army officer than when in the professor’s chair at Lexington,” wrote John Gittings, a former student who saw him in Harpers Ferry. “His manner had become brusque and imperative; his face was bronzed from exposure, his beard was now of no formal style, but was worn unshorn.”8 He was already a very different creature from the professor he had been just a few weeks before. He had discovered a new competence, something he had never done before on this scale but was exceptionally good at. The men could feel it, and perceptions changed. The martinet’s obsession with petty detail now came to be seen as evidence of an iron will. “The only moments of relaxation we enjoyed were those we spent at meal times, but here we were met by the grave, solemn countenance of our Commanding Colonel,” wrote recruit Charles Grattan. “All were afraid of him, for none knew how kindly and genial a heart beat in his bosom. . . . We ate silent as mutes, ever and anon casting a healthy eye upon the Colonel to see if he ate like other men, or bolted raw meat and gnawed bloody bones.”9
Men who performed their duty to Jackson’s specifications quickly discovered the other side of their commander. “He was a rigid disciplinarian, yet as gentle and kind as a woman,” wrote Imboden. “He was the easiest man in the army to get along with pleasantly so long as one did his duty. He was as courteous to the humblest private who sought an interview for any purpose as to the highest officer in his command.”10 As an instructor, he was patient, forbearing, and tolerant of mistakes, provided his students were trying diligently to learn.
Jackson proved to be good at pure logistics as well. After his arrival in Harpers Ferry he had been tasked by Lee with the removal of the rifled-musket fabricating machinery from the former Federal armory to Richmond. Within a week, Jackson had informed an amazed Lee that two-thirds of it had already been moved—a remarkable feat, considering that the complicated machines and their water-powered gearing had to be carefully dismantled before shipment.11 When he discovered that a wagon shortage had occurred because local merchants were paying twice the government rate, he seized the rolling stock. Local businessmen screamed in protest. Jackson ignored them.12 Unwilling to wait for Richmond to ship him the ammunition cars he wanted, he put blacksmiths and carpenters to work converting commercial wagons to caissons. Impatient with the military bureaucracy on his requisition of horses, he dispatched his quartermaster to horsey Loudon County to impress or purchase them. Realizing that Confederate railways were low on rolling stock, he conceived and carried out an ingenious plan that siphoned off locomotives and cars from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, an important Union lifeline to Washington and points east, and took them south into Virginia.13
By May 11, Jackson had seen his command grow to 4,500 soldiers, and his transformation of the large, disorderly encampment into the rudiments of an effective military force had not gone unnoticed. Lee was certainly aware of it.14 “[I] am gratified at the progress you have made in the organization of your command,” he noted in a letter to Jackson on May 9.15 By May 21 Jackson would have fully 8,000 men—7,000 of them armed—a number that included infantry and cavalry from Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, and Maryland.16 They were still woefully underequipped. “Words cannot express to you our deplorable condition here,” wrote Major Kirby Smith on May 29 in a blast directed at his inept state government. “[We are] unprovided, unequipped, unsupplied with ammunition and provisions.”17 In Harpers Ferry, as in the rest of the South, soldiers drilled in whatever they could muster: frock coats, swallowtails, jackets, and shirtsleeves. They carried their own carbines and fowling pieces until someone put an official weapon—likely a smoothbore musket—into their hands. (Indeed, Jefferson Davis was still complaining to Brigadier General Joseph Johnston more than a month later: “I have not arms to supply you.”18) In spite of that, Jackson’s sheer organizational prowess inspired plenty of optimism. A report from an inspector general of the army in late May was surprisingly upbeat. He pointed out shortages of clothing and equipment, inadequate ground for drilling, and the rawness and inexperience of the soldiery. But the inspector also noted that “a fierce spirit animates these rough-looking men,” and credited Jackson with assembling “force enough here to hold this place against any attack.”19
While Jackson was laboring to create a fighting force, making do with a scant few hours of sleep each night, he also managed to write a steady stream of affectionate letters to his wife, expressing his love, and advising her on such matters as closing up the house, finding places for the slaves, and moving to her parents’ house in North Carolina. “I just love my little business woman,” he wrote. “Let Mr. Tebbs have the horse and rockaway at his own price; and if he is not able to pay for them, you may give them to him, as he is a minister of the Gospel. . . . My habitual prayer is that our kind Heavenly Father will give unto my darling every needful blessing.”20 He wrote of his military progress, too: “I am strengthening my position, and if attacked shall, with the blessing of Providence, repel the enemy. I am in good health, considering the great amount of labor which devolves upon me, and the loss of sleep to which I am subjected. . . . Colonels Preston and Massie have been of great service to me. Humanly speaking, I don’t see how I could have accomplished the amount of work I have done without them. . . . Oh, how I would love to see your precious face!”21
Jackson enjoyed other, less visible successes as well. He had, as it turned out, an exceptional eye for talent, particularly when it was attached to sober, hardworking, Christian men. He had assembled the core of what would become one of the most talented staffs in either army: John A. Harman, a loud, profane stagecoach operator from Staunton, would become one of the most effective quartermasters in the Confederacy. Wells J. Hawks, a stagecoach builder from Charlestown who had been one of that community’s leading citizens, became chief commissary—the man in charge of the food; the brilliant Hunter McGuire, a doctor destined for national prominence after the war, who was so young-looking that Jackson checked his credentials, became medical director on his staff; finally there was the whip-smart Alexander S. “Sandie” Pendleton, not yet twenty-one, and the son of William Nelson Pendleton, the Episcopal rector in Lexington, who became Jackson’s chief of artillery. The highly competent Pendleton quickly became one of Jackson’s favorites, starting out as an ordnance officer and ending up as assistant adjutant general (the chief administrative officer), and doing a good deal of the critical military work on Jackson’s staff. Jackson would have some forty staff officers in his Civil War career. But these four would always remain at the heart of his operations.
Jackson was, moreover, blessed with not one but two exceptional cavalry officers. There was James Ewell Brown Stuart, known as Jeb, a loud, joyous, irrepressible twenty-eight-year-old West Pointer who had spent his previous military career with the mounted rifles and cavalry in the West. He was an odd combination of flamboyance and puritanically strict personal habits: he wore oversized gloves, a yellow sash, and a feathered hat, went about singing and reciting poetry, and practiced a devout form of Christianity. Implausibly, considering how utterly different they were, Stuart and Jackson became close and even affectionate friends; Stuart was the only man in the army who could make Jackson laugh, the only one who could kid him and get away with it. There was also the thirty-seven-year-old Turner Ashby, a born leader of men who was almost recklessly brave and already a legend in his home state of Virginia. He had courtly manners, a flowing beard, and, while sorely lacking in administrative skills, had astounding abilities as a rider and fighter. He was perhaps the purest example of the South’s early, overwhelming dominance in cavalry. Jackson’s earliest personnel crisis involved both men. It was brought about by his own appointment of Stuart as head of cavalry. Facing an incipient revolt by Ashby, Jackson settled the matter by splitting the cavalry command in two, and preserving the loyalty of both men. Stuart and Ashby would loom large in Jackson’s future campaigns.
So would a smallish, gaunt sorrel gelding that Jackson acquired for his wife during his Harpers Ferry posting and named Fancy. The horse turned out to have extraordinary endurance; a gentle, rocking gait that Jackson liked; and the ability, later on, to doze peacefully in the middle of the hottest fights. To everyone else in the war the horse was known as Little Sorrel. He became Jackson’s principal mount for the rest of his life.
The point of all this frenetic organization and reorganization was, of course, defense against the Northern invasion. Harpers Ferry was not only the South’s northernmost military post, a knob jutting into the sovereign lands of Maryland; it was also a gateway to the Shenandoah Valley, the long, mountain-walled corridor that sat on Washington’s western flank, and to the still-disputed lands of northwestern Virginia. But the town’s main strategic value was as a transportation hub. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the largest railroad network in the United States and a key lifeline to Washington, ran through it, and the 185-mile-long Chesapeake and Ohio Canal hugged the banks of the Potomac, just across the river.
Harpers Ferry was also one of the least defensible strategic sites in Virginia, if not the entire South. The problem was classically military: the town occupied conspicuously low ground. There were large mountains on three sides of it. Artillery placed on those heights could annihilate within hours whatever army was camped in the town. With troops and guns enough to occupy those heights, of course, Harpers Ferry could be held. But Jackson had nothing like that.
There was the thorny problem of political geography, too: Maryland was a slave state that had not seceded. But the belief persisted that it might yet secede—indeed, many Southerners believed that it would—meaning that any actions that might annoy Marylanders, such as military occupation of their lands, was thought to be a bad idea. The highest of the heights overlooking Harpers Ferry, as it happened, were on the Maryland shore of the Potomac.
On May 6, Jackson, who seemed unimpressed by such political considerations, wrote Lee that he had “occupied the Virginia and Maryland Heights” and was fortifying them.22 Lee, as President Jefferson Davis’s chief military adviser, responded immediately, and with some alarm: “In your preparation for the defense of your position it is considered advisable not to intrude upon the soil of Maryland unless compelled by the necessities of war.”23 As it happened, at that very moment Maryland was objecting strongly to the Union’s “invasion” of its sovereign land.24 Might not Maryland consider Jackson an invader as well?
But Jackson, an artillery officer who understood the tactical implications of his position, was pushing ahead on his own. He wrote Lee on May 7 that he had finished reconnoitering Maryland Heights and had “determined to fortify them at once, and hold them, as well as the Virginia Heights and the town, be the cost what it may.” Be the cost what it may. In case he had not made himself perfectly clear, later in the same letter he stated, “I am of the opinion that this place should be defended with the spirit which actuated the defenders of Thermopylae.”25 His reference was to the 480 BC battle in which 7,000 Greeks held off 100,000 or more invading Persians for seven days before succumbing. Jackson’s carefully chosen image is strikingly bloody, epic, and absolute in a war that had seen very little bloodshed. On May 9 Jackson wrote Lee again to report that he had placed five hundred troops on Maryland Heights, prompting this scolding retort from Lee: “I fear you have been premature,” he told Jackson. “The true policy is to act on the defensive and not invite attack. If not too late you might withdraw until the proper time.” Lee also pointed out the political repercussions of Jackson’s rash moves: “Your intention to fortify the heights of Maryland may interrupt our friendly arrangements with that state, and we have no right to intrude on her soul unless under pressing necessity for defense.”26
In any case, it was too late. The troops would stay. But Jackson, after proving his mettle as an administrator, had now begun to build a reputation as something less desirable—an officer who was overeager and required close watching by a superior officer, and who, above all, needed to be reined in. In his movement into Maryland he was completely at odds with the political climate in Richmond and with individual politicians such as Jefferson Davis, who were deeply suspicious of him.
This was in part Jackson’s own fault. He was motivated by the belief that, for the South to win against obvious industrial and numerical odds, it would have to win quickly. That meant hitting the enemy’s green troops hard and soon, and not paying attention to such political niceties as state boundaries. That meant burning Baltimore and Philadelphia and making Northerners understand on a visceral level what this war was going to cost them. As early as the week after secession, Jackson had proposed to Virginia governor John Letcher the idea he had mentioned in the letter to his nephew in January: a war of invasion in which the South would fly the “black flag”—meaning that all Union prisoners would be summarily executed. He even proposed to set the example himself.27
Though his plan sounded bloody, brutal, and un-Christian, as Jackson saw it there was clear and practical logic behind it. “He affirmed that this would in the end be the truest humanity,” wrote Robert Dabney, “because it would shorten the contest, and prove economical of the blood of both parties. . . . This startling opinion he calmly sustained in conversation, many months after, [saying that since] the Confederate Authorities had seen fit to pursue the other policy, he had cheerfully acquiesced.”28 But he still believed it. As for his then-radical idea for a war of invasion, he was simply ahead of his time. By the second year of the war, Robert E. Lee would come to the same conclusion. He would eventually invade the North twice. Jackson’s notion of total war, meanwhile, would soon define the entire conflict on both sides. The final campaigns of Union generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan in 1864 and 1865 were the fulfillment of Jackson’s ideas.29 For now, however, they were seen as wildly aggressive, if not outright crazy.