CHAPTER FIVE
Jackson’s one-man show in Harpers Ferry was not destined to last. Upper Virginia was too important, and Jackson was a mere colonel, a largely unknown quantity. On May 23, the twenty-sixth day of his command, Brigadier General Joseph E. Johnston arrived to replace him. The transition was perfectly characteristic of the scrupulous, by-the-book Jackson. Since he had not been informed by either Lee or Letcher of the change of command, Jackson politely but firmly refused to relinquish it until Johnston—whose staff was dumbfounded by Jackson’s stubbornness—could produce proof of his appointment. Johnston was not just any officer. When the war started, he was quartermaster general of the US Army and the highest-ranking officer to join the Confederacy. He was considered by several high-ranking officers on both sides—notably Longstreet and Sherman—to be the equal of Robert E. Lee. When warned by Johnston’s staff officer Chase Whiting, Jackson’s supercilious upper-class tutor at West Point, that he might be arrested for his behavior, Jackson stated calmly, “I consider my duty clear.” He was never impolite. He even took Johnston on a tour of the camps. But he was insensitive to peer pressure, and he did not waver. Johnston, who managed to maintain his soldierly bearing and understood the military rule that officers should not relinquish command on verbal assurance alone, soon located a telegram with Lee’s endorsement. Jackson immediately gave way, with no hard feelings. For anyone who was paying attention, it was another signal that Jackson was not like other officers in the Confederacy. Though he was clearly ambitious, he would not extend even this small, rule-bending courtesy to one of the Confederate army’s most important officers and the man who would be in a position to promote him.
Johnston, meanwhile, brought a radically different approach to the defense of Harpers Ferry. Where Jackson had preached the spirit of Thermopylae and as good as invaded Maryland to set his defenses, Johnston’s first thought was to fall back. “This place cannot be held against an enemy who would venture to attack it,” he wrote to Lee. He offered a lengthy list of reasons why this was so, including lack of men, lack of ammunition, the presence of a hostile populace, and an inability to guard river fords. Lee, who regarded Harpers Ferry as a critical part of his strategy in northern Virginia, protested strongly in a letter to Johnston, writing, “The abandonment of Harpers Ferry will be depressing to the cause of the South.” Johnston immediately fired back, “Would not the loss of five or six thousand men be more so?”1
On June 14, with reluctant approval from the Davis administration—and against Jackson’s wishes, too, though he did not air his objections—Johnston evacuated Harpers Ferry. His pretext was the presence of a large Union force in the town of Romney, sixty miles to the east. It would later turn out that no such force existed. Johnston ordered Jackson to arrange the evacuation, which meant taking with them whatever equipment and matériel they could, burning what they could not, and looking after sick men and military records. This included setting fire to much of the town, and blasting to bits the magnificent nine-hundred-foot B & O Railroad bridge over the Potomac. Three days later, Jackson systematically destroyed the sprawling B & O Railroad shop complex. He hated doing it. All he could see was the destruction of key wartime assets.
In spite of the awkward transfer of power, Johnston and his duty-obsessed subordinate managed to get along. Johnston appreciated Jackson’s talents immediately, retaining him as commander of the Virginia regiments and thus making him his top lieutenant. Though he had insisted on retiring from Harpers Ferry, Johnston was anything but a coward. He had graduated from West Point in the Class of 1829, ranking thirteenth out of forty-six cadets, had fought with distinction in the Mexican-American War (where he was twice wounded) and in the Seminole wars, and had attained a higher rank in the regular army than his West Point classmate Robert E. Lee. Confederate general and war historian Richard Taylor pronounced him the “beau ideal of a soldier,” an officer who “gained and held the affection and confidence of his men.”2
It was under Johnston that Jackson—known to his men by the name he had been called at West Point and the name he would be called for the rest of the war, Old Jack—saw his first combat experience as a commanding officer. On July 2, he was encamped with 2,300 men and four cannons north of Martinsburg, a town about fifteen miles northwest of Harpers Ferry in what is now West Virginia, when he received word that Union troops had crossed the Potomac River and were coming toward him. Jackson, whose standing orders from Johnston were to retire if the enemy approached him “in force,” could not tell exactly how many soldiers he was facing, though he knew that a large Union force under Major General Robert Patterson had been camped on the Maryland side. So he decided to find out in the most aggressive way possible, conducting what was known in military jargon as a “reconnaissance in force”—an attack whose purpose is to make the enemy reveal himself.
Issuing precise orders in a soft voice that carried an accent from the western mountains of Virginia, Jackson ordered one of his four regiments—the 5th Virginia—to advance accompanied by a single piece of artillery. The 2nd and 4th Virginia Regiments were to act as reserves, in a state of full readiness; the 27th Virginia loaded the brigade’s baggage and equipment onto wagons. Less than half an hour after he had gotten the news from Stuart’s courier, Jackson’s men were on the move. The Federals were moving, too. When Jackson’s force of 380 advanced on them at 9:15 a.m., at a place called Falling Waters, Union troops were about 3,000 strong. Jackson swung his men immediately into action, sending one of his companies on a flanking movement to the right. “The enemy soon advanced, also deployed, and opened their fire,” wrote Jackson in his battle report. His skirmishers returned fire, driving the enemy back.3 The Federals came on a second time, and were again repulsed. But that was the end of whatever tactical advantage Jackson enjoyed. He was clearly outnumbered, and now he could see just how bad the mismatch was. Federal guns began to rake his position, while enemy soldiers appeared in a battle line that was two regiments wide—enough to flank and even envelop Jackson’s small group. Jackson gave the order to fall back. Before he did, his battery chief, William Pendleton—who less than three months before had been the Episcopal rector of Grace Church in Lexington—fired a cruelly efficient volley of solid shot that, in Jackson’s words, “entirely cleared the road in front.”4
Jackson handled the retreat masterfully. It was the first real sign of his talent as a field commander. He held his command together as it executed the difficult and nerve-racking task—even for veterans—of falling back three miles under fire before an enemy that held an eight-to-one numerical advantage. Under Jackson’s calm, self-possessed guidance—he was on horseback, in the middle of the fight—the regiment withdrew slowly and deliberately, constantly checking the Federal troops, who, Jackson wrote, “were advancing through the fields in line and through the woods as skirmishers, endeavoring to outflank me.”5 It was, in other words, a fight all the way. Throughout it, as bullets and shells buzzed about them, Jackson, seated on his horse and moving constantly in front of his troops, had seemed fearless. In midfight he stopped by the side of the road to write a note to Johnston. While he was writing, according to an artillery corporal who witnessed it, “A shot from a Federal battery struck centrally, ten feet from the ground, a large white oak that stood in the fence corner close to Jackson and knocked a mass of bark, splinters and trash all over him and the paper on which he was writing. He brushed it all away with the back of his hand, finished the dispatch without a sign that he knew anything unusual was going on, folded it, handed it to the courier and dismissed him courteously: ‘Carry this to General Johnston with my compliments, and see that you lose no time on the way.’ ”6
In his first test Jackson had performed well. By the tactical standards of the early war, he had done exceptionally well. He had conducted an aggressive reconnaissance in force, had inflicted damage on the enemy, and then, obeying the letter of Johnston’s orders, had conducted a disciplined retreat, contesting ground all the way. He was so effective that Union general Patterson estimated Jackson’s total strength at 3,500 men, ten times what he actually had on the field. Most gratifying of all to Jackson was the performance of his men, all of whom he had trained personally and almost none of whom had seen combat before. “My officers and men behaved beautifully,” Jackson wrote Anna. Then, lest it seem that he was giving them too much credit, he added, “I am very thankful that an ever-kind Providence made me an instrument in carrying out General Johnston’s orders so successfully.”7 This was no figure of speech, no trope of the era: Jackson believed that he was merely God’s instrument, a crude tool in God’s hands. All credit for victory belonged to God, and to no one else.
He had also benefited from the brilliant debut of Jeb Stuart, whose Virginia cavalry had been instrumental in making the retreat an orderly one. At one point Stuart and his men daringly swept around the Federal right flank and captured an entire company of Union soldiers—a neat trick considering how badly Stuart and Jackson together were outnumbered. “Col. Stuart and his command merit high praise,” Jackson reported, “and I may here remark that he has exhibited those qualities which are calculated to make him eminent in his arm of the service.”8 Though estimates of the numbers of killed, wounded, and captured at the Battle of Falling Waters vary widely, it is likely that each side suffered several dozen killed and wounded, in addition to the forty-nine Union prisoners taken by Stuart and the ten rebels captured by the Union.
Johnston was quick to realize what Jackson had accomplished. He was a combat veteran and knew a talented field commander when he saw one. On July Fourth, he wrote the War Department in Richmond to recommend that Jackson “be promoted without delay to the grade of brigadier-general.”9 But General Lee had already come to that conclusion himself, in spite of whatever reservations his associates in Richmond had about Jackson’s rash behavior. In a letter to Jackson dated July 3, Lee wrote, “My dear general, I have the pleasure of sending you a commission of brigadier-general in the Provisional Army, and to feel that you merit it. May your advancement increase your usefulness to the State.”
Jackson was elated. “My promotion was beyond what I anticipated, as I expected it to be in the volunteer forces of the state,” he wrote Anna, proudly enclosing the letters from Lee and Johnston.10 What he meant was that his commission no longer came from the state of Virginia. His appointment as brigadier general was to something entirely new: the Provisional Army of the Confederate States of America. He would be a general in the Confederacy, an organization that was slowly but steadily assuming authority over the states. Still, not everyone in Richmond was convinced that his promotion was a good idea. When President Jefferson Davis announced it, according to one Richmond insider, “it provided laughter among those who thought they knew him well.”11
Jackson knew nothing about what well-dressed men in Richmond salons and offices were thinking. He knew only that he had come very far in a very short time, and he had no doubt that God had made it happen, or that he deserved it. Though he did not say so, it must have thrilled him to realize that only two and a half months had passed since he had arrived, unheralded, unappreciated, and without a commission, in the teeming streets of Richmond.