CHAPTER SIX
The real war was coming. There was no doubt about it now. It would be here with the summer’s heats and would be fought somewhere in the state of Virginia by large numbers of men, and the resolution would be Armageddon-like in its clarity. There was very little disagreement about that. “Everyone seemed to think one battle would settle it,” wrote Confederate officer William Blackford, “and those in authority, who had brought on all the trouble, who ought to have known better, thought so too.”1 The world would be sorted out, and there would be glory in the sorting.
Above all, nobody wanted to miss the show.
Witness, then, the 1st Virginia Brigade, 2,300 men in four regiments under the command of newly minted brigadier general Thomas J. Jackson, restive in its camps in early July in the heretofore peaceful and prosperous town of Winchester, at the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley, sixty miles east of Washington, DC. (This is also known, counterintuitively, as the Lower Valley because it is farther downstream on the Shenandoah River.) The past month had not exactly been glorious. The men had been ordered, much against their will and that of their commander, to retire from their base at Harpers Ferry in mid-June. They had been warned, in late June, not to engage the enemy if the enemy was in force, had engaged him anyway at Falling Waters, and had retreated under orders to the hamlet of Darkesville, just south of Martinsburg. They had waited there for a battle that never materialized, and then on July 7, to their anger and disbelief, they had retreated yet again under orders, this time into the safety of Winchester.
There was a clear theme here. Flight. Joe Johnston’s Army of the Shenandoah Valley was moving inexorably west and south. The action and glory, meanwhile, as everyone knew, almost certainly lay to the north and east. It seemed to be a war of maneuver, and they were losing it. Union commander Robert Patterson, inching down upon them from the north with eighteen thousand men, was certainly of that opinion. Crowing about his occupation of Harpers Ferry and Martinsburg, on the Virginia side of the Potomac, he observed that “we will thus force the enemy to retire and recover, without a struggle, a conquered country.”2
Even more unsettling, word had arrived that a Confederate force in western Virginia had been soundly beaten and its commanding general killed by a thirty-four-year-old military genius and foursquare Union hero named George Brinton McClellan. The men of Jackson’s 1st Virginia Brigade had been told they were already greatly outnumbered by the Union forces in Maryland. Now, with a victorious Union army apparently running roughshod over the northwestern part of Virginia, it seemed likely that Patterson would be coming with even more men, which would mean more caution, more retreat. It all seemed quite dispiriting. Jackson, irritated and restless, chafing at this enforced passivity, could do nothing about it. “I want my brigade to feel that it can itself whip Patterson’s whole army,” he wrote in a letter, “and I believe we can do it.”3 That was about the last thing Joe Johnston or Jeff Davis or anyone else was going to let him do.
So Jackson’s men settled, somewhat sullenly, into camp life, where they were relentlessly drilled by their stern commander and awaited whatever sort of war might descend upon them. They also discovered the first of war’s horrors, the sort that affected both armies equally and would eventually claim two soldiers’ lives for every one lost on the battlefield: disease. Epidemics of mumps, measles, and smallpox swept through the valley army in the late spring and early summer, adding to the misery already caused by the inevitable, intractable camp illnesses: diarrhea, dysentery, malaria, and typhoid. Jackson’s brigade was especially hard hit by measles and typhoid. Men who had never seen a battlefield were already dying painful deaths, and the number of soldiers on the sick list in Johnston’s army rose to a remarkable 1,700 as of mid-July, nearly 20 percent of his force. Much of the sickness came from the galling sanitary conditions in the camps. The mid-nineteenth century had seen many technological advances, but they did not yet include an understanding of bacteria or microbes. One of the key causes of disease in camp was the contamination of the water supply from what passed for latrines, which were nothing more than patches of ground, usually next to a watercourse, that were covered with fresh earth once a week.4 But men with severe dysentery and explosive diarrhea often did not make it to the appointed area, and so the soldiers were literally eating, sleeping, and drilling in a murk of infectious germs. Diarrhea, especially (which was also a symptom of typhoid and dysentery), was one of the major killers of the war. Even in the relatively controlled conditions of Richmond hospitals, more than 10 percent of all diarrhea cases resulted in death, usually from severe depletion of bodily fluids.5
Jackson, meanwhile, was getting used to the idea of command. His new rank had changed the fundamental nature of his relationship with the world around him. VMI cadets who had been his students, including those who had mocked and teased him, and former colleagues who now served under him could feel it. Behind every word, order, or request now rested the full weight of a brigadier general in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States. His obsessions with duty and detail now, in the perilous life of a large army, took on a different cast. Jackson, taking it all in stride, ignored the heat and the dust, which were plentiful, and the epidemics that were engulfing his tents (which included fleas), and ordered six drill sessions per day, punctuated by camp duties, roll calls, and meals. He did not limit himself to daytime work. The men marched at night, too. Often for half the night. “Jackson is considered rigid to the borders of tyranny by the men here,” wrote one captain in his brigade. But that same captain also said he believed that Jackson “enjoyed the entire confidence of his command.”6 Jackson, in turn, was immensely proud of them.
As many of his soldiers noted, then and later, as hard as Jackson could be, he was also solicitous of his troops’ welfare, sometimes almost motherly in his concern for their well-being. He was, as any of his friends from Lexington who knew him well could tell you, a strange mixture of sternness, severity, and deep kindness. What his wife—who saw him clearly most of the time—called “this mingling of tenderness and strength” was on display in a remarkable letter he wrote to one of his officers who had requested an extension of a furlough to visit gravely ill and dying family members:
My Dear Major—I have received your sad letter, and wish I could relieve your sorrowing heart; but human aid cannot heal the wound. From me you have a friend’s sympathy, and I wish the suffering condition of our country permitted me to show it. But we must think of the living and of those who are to come after us, and see that, with God’s blessing, we transmit to them the freedom we have enjoyed. What is life without honor? Degradation is worse than death. It is necessary that you should be at your post immediately. Join me tomorrow morning.
Your sympathizing friend, T. J. Jackson.7
His tenderness was very real, but it was also merely a sentiment; he would not allow it to interfere with what he considered to be his duty, and he would not budge in his insistence that the officer leave his stricken family.
The men were getting used to his idiosyncratic ways, too. Jackson was no less eccentric than he had been at VMI, though his behavior was now on display in a much larger arena, before thousands of men. He had his peculiar way of walking; his peculiar, ungraceful way of riding Little Sorrel, who seemed to be an extension of his personality; his dirty uniform and odd way of wearing his hat so that you could barely see his eyes; and his tendency to walk away abruptly in the middle of a conversation. He dined on cornbread and water, slept on “the floor of a good room” in a house with little or no furniture in Winchester, though he also found that he liked sleeping outside and spent several weeks sleeping outdoors on the ground, saying that it “agreed with me well, except when it rained, and even then it was but slightly objectionable.”8 And, of course, he prayed and read his Bible and consecrated every act of his life, every thought he had, to God. He did this consciously, every day. The blessings of his life—and in the month of July in the year 1861, Jackson believed he was in a high state of grace—all came from the hand of God. At least part of his devotion involved reminding himself constantly of just that.
• • •
Some 60 miles away, across the valley, through the towering ramparts of the Blue Ridge and the river-crossed lands of the Piedmont, the enemy was busy preparing for the war that the Northern newspapers, with rising shrillness, were demanding. The central—and somewhat bizarre—characteristic of the war was that the capital cities of the two enormous nations—the Confederacy alone encompassed 750,000 square miles and 3,000 miles of coastline—were just 90 miles away from each other. And so while recruits since mid-April had been swarming into large towns and cities across the country, in places such as St. Louis and Columbus and Atlanta and New Orleans, organizing themselves into regiments and brigades to fight the war across a broad front, the inescapable reality was that the first big fight was going to be—had to be—close to the power centers of the two nations, if only because losing one capital or the other would likely end the war almost before it started. “On to Richmond!” was the battle cry in the Northern newspapers. It was a catchy slogan and communicated a simple idea: Richmond, an easy and close target, would fall, and the South would lose whatever credibility it had as a military power, both at home and with such potential allies as France and England. Peace, on Union terms, would follow.
Thus by mid-July, a mere three months after the surrender of Fort Sumter, three Union armies confronted three Confederate armies in the Virginia theater, along the most likely routes of invasion. Across the Potomac River from Washington camped a Union army of 35,000 men, commanded by Irvin McDowell. Facing it, some thirty miles to the west, at a strategic railroad junction called Manassas, was a Southern army of 20,000, commanded by Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard. To the west, in the Shenandoah Valley, Joe Johnston’s 11,000 at Winchester faced Robert Patterson’s 18,000, and on the Chesapeake Bay coast at Fortress Monroe, John B. Magruder’s 5,000 Confederates squared off against Benjamin Butler’s 15,000. Thus the underdog Confederacy began the war outnumbered and outgunned at every point in Virginia: 64,000 to 36,000.
But there was plenty of reason for hope. Though the war had barely begun, the South had already found in Beauregard a hero for the ages, a five-foot-seven-inch bantam with an erect military carriage, piercing eyes, and a magnificent Van Dyke. He was a Creole from an important family in Louisiana. Like many other highborn sons of the South, the army had seemed a natural vocation. He had attended West Point and performed splendidly there, graduating second in the Class of 1838. In the Mexican-American War he had served as an engineer on General Winfield Scott’s staff, alongside Robert E. Lee and George McClellan. At the battle for Mexico City, he was wounded three times on the same day, and finished the war with the brevet rank of major. For the next thirteen years he mostly rebuilt and repaired forts in the South. In January 1861 he assumed the superintendency of West Point, only to be asked to resign soon afterward because of his pro-secessionist sentiments.
All that gave him a record as accomplished as most officers in either army. But what made the dapper little man with the hair-trigger sense of dignity famous—indeed, an instant legend—was the Battle of Fort Sumter. It was Beauregard, as commanding officer in Charleston, South Carolina, who had demanded the surrender of Union troops. And it was Beauregard who had ordered and supervised the thirty-four-hour artillery attack on the fort. It had not been his idea to shell the fort, and in the “battle” that followed the only casualty was a Confederate soldier who bled to death from a misfired cannon. And, indeed, the fort he was pounding into submission was, for all practical purposes, defenseless, and was about to run out of food anyway. Virtually any officer could have given the same orders.
None of that made any difference, nor did the fact that Beauregard was not an especially engaging personality. The war was commenced, and Beauregard, the brave and audacious soldier who had ordered the first shot, was an instant hero.9 The Southern press portrayed him as a Napoleonic figure—that part was hard to miss in a compact, French-speaking soldier with grand ambitions—and when he traveled north in late May to assume command of the Confederate Army of the Potomac in front of Washington, throngs turned out to meet his train, cheering rapturously. When he arrived, Carolina troops who had served under him roared, “Old Bory’s Come!”10
The North, as yet, had only McClellan to pit against Beauregard, and he was off in the mountains of western Virginia, still largely unknown. Beauregard’s opposite number, commanding the Union forces in front of the capital, was Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, an army lifer who had never actually commanded troops in combat. A large, plain-looking man with a doughy countenance, a large, square head, a square jaw, and a squarish beard to go with it, he had, like so many general officers in the war, attended West Point, where he graduated in 1838, eight years before Jackson. His subsequent career had been spent on various military staffs, starting as an aide-de-camp in the Mexican-American War and ending in the War Department in Washington, where he served under Winfield Scott and Joseph E. Johnston, among others. Though he had pursued a solid, unspectacular career, he was earnest, intelligent, self-confident, and politically well connected, most notably to Lincoln’s Treasury secretary, Salmon P. Chase. On May 14, 1861, McDowell, still a brevet major, was vaulted over many officers who were superior in rank and length of service and made brigadier general. Soon he was given the most important command in the Union army.
He was in many ways a hard man to like. Stiff, formal, and aloof, a poor listener who often drifted while others were speaking—unless the subject was fishing—he had a singular inability to remember names and faces. Even his friend Salmon Chase thought him a bit distant. “He is too indifferent in manner,” Chase wrote. “His officers are sometimes alienated by it. . . . There is an apparent hauteur—no, that is not the word—rough indifference expresses better the idea, in his way towards them, that makes it hard for them to feel any warm personal sentiment towards him.”11 He was a strict and unforgiving disciplinarian, which made him unpopular with the volunteers. He was also a massive eater, so much so that, while in the midst of a meal, he often paid little attention to the people around him. “At dinner he was such a Gargantuan feeder and so absorbed in the dishes before him that he had but little time for conversation,” wrote a Union officer who attended formal dinners with him. “While he drank neither wine nor spirits, he fairly gobbled the larger part of every dish within reach.”12 Nevertheless, he would be the one to fight the big, definitive battle that would decide the fate of the nation.
If McDowell seemed to be a minor sort of man—in talent and career achievements—his immediate supervisor, Winfield Scott, was in most ways larger than life. Scott was the nation’s preeminent soldier. He was, as it happened, actually older than the United States itself. Virginia-born in 1786, he had been a hero as a young man in the War of 1812, became general in chief of the US Army in 1841, and was the chief architect of its stunning victory in the war with Mexico. He ran as the Whig Party candidate, and lost, in the presidential election of 1852. He was everyone’s idea of what a general ought to look like. A massive six feet five inches tall, with splendid side-whiskers and hair swept back from a noble brow, and dapper in his blue uniform, he was, as his subalterns said in Mexico, a magnificent man.
But by the time the war began, those days were over. He was seventy-four years old now. In addition to his towering height, he was now massively, almost comically fat. He lurched about, had trouble standing for long periods of time, and could no longer ride a horse. He was vain, and prone to fits of temper, as he had always been.13 Still, after Robert E. Lee turned Lincoln down for the job, there was no one else in the North with quite Scott’s military stature.
And it was Scott who, quite sanely and reasonably, as a military man who knew what war was all about, had come up with a grand scheme for a relatively bloodless victory. Derided in Northern newspapers as the “Anaconda plan,” the metaphor was nonetheless apt. The idea was to envelop the Confederacy from without, blockade its Gulf and Atlantic ports, and send a force of sixty thousand men down the Mississippi to choke off its commerce and in effect split the South in two, bottling it up in what would then be a useless, and valueless, sea of cotton. The idea was to squeeze the South to death. It had merit—and indeed would be revisited by the Union later in the war. But Scott’s plan would take time—time to build or acquire ships, time to train troops for the Mississippi expedition—and time was something no one seemed to have. Passive, slow-burning solutions were not what the times—or the bellicose press of both sides—called for. Public opinion in the North was overwhelmingly in favor of crushing the rebellion now. Lincoln himself favored an immediate invasion. There was even a timetable of sorts, if one believed what one read in the papers. On June 26, Horace Greeley’s influential New York Tribune began running an editorial page slogan that read, “The Nation’s War Cry! Forward to Richmond! Forward to Richmond! The Rebel Congress Must Not Be Allowed To Meet There On The 20th Of July! By That Date The Place Must Be Held By The National Army.”
So the armies were gathered up and sorted into their camps, where they waited in the rising summer heat for politicians and generals to decide exactly who would strike first and when the blow would fall. There was a strange, dreamlike quality to these weeks of waiting that many soldiers commented on. Except for the diseases that seemed inevitable when soldiers were crammed twenty-men-deep into white canvas Sibley tents, life for the Southern soldiery on the Alexandria line was not so bad. It could even seem languorous. “The country people are all staying at their farms and are now cutting wheat and the darkeys and the old red hills look as natural as can be,” wrote young officer Edward Porter Alexander to his wife on July 5, 1861. “The country girls come around here every morning to see the parades and it looks a good deal like West Point.” The war still seemed distant. “I candidly do not believe that any attack will be made on us for at least a long time,” Alexander wrote, “nor that Beauregard intends to advance on Washington within a month at least.”14
Thirty miles away, across the Potomac, their Union counterparts, many seeing a big city for the first time, had become earnest and enthusiastic tourists. They tromped through all the public and government buildings, including the Smithsonian, the Post Office, and even the White House. The most popular place of all was the Patent Office, which displayed a large array of the latest gadgets and inventions.15 Those were the more tame diversions, anyway. The streets, badly cut and rutted by army wagons, now teemed afternoon and night with drunken, quarrelsome troops. Hotels and boardinghouses were filled to overflowing. Soldiers jammed the saloons, slugged down juleps and gin slings and whiskey skins and brandy smashes, and brawled in the streets, often brandishing revolvers and bayonets. Sanitary conditions were nightmarish. The Washington Canal, running through the middle of the city, became an open toilet, a receptacle for all the city’s sewage—human, equine, and otherwise. It all found its way to the Potomac and, according to a government report, “spread out in thinner proportions over several hundred acres of [tidal] flats immediately in front of the city, the surface of which is exposed to the action of the sun at intervals during the day, and the miasma from which contaminates every breath of air which passes.”16 The stench was everywhere, inescapable. Thus the men waited for their unimaginable war. They would not wait much longer.
• • •
Johnston’s army, meanwhile, was rapidly becoming the key strategic pawn in the looming battle that, at its core—as with all Civil War battles—was a numbers game, one played with both real and imaginary figures. McDowell knew that he had about 35,000 men in four roughly equal divisions. He estimated Beauregard’s strength at 35,000. This was grossly inaccurate, as many early war assessments were, particularly by Union generals. Beauregard had barely 20,000. But McDowell’s number nevertheless dictated strategy and, in particular, one excruciatingly obvious piece of that strategy: if the numbers in Manassas were going to be roughly equal, then, at all costs, Johnston must be prevented from joining Beauregard. And it was equally true that in Confederate war councils, where they were absolutely aware of their strength along the “Alexandria line” in front of Washington, and their likely disadvantage in number of troops, number of regular army soldiers, and ordnance, there was a growing conviction that Beauregard could not win without Johnston.
With the fate of the nation apparently hanging on the whereabouts of Joseph E. Johnston, what followed in the Shenandoah Valley in the second and third weeks of July was one of the great military blunders of the Civil War. It very likely altered the course of the war and, in any case, profoundly changed the lives of Thomas J. Jackson and his Virginia brigade. It starred Major General Robert Patterson, a sixty-nine-year-old Pennsylvanian who had fought in the War of 1812, had been a major general of volunteers in the Mexican-American War, and later became quite wealthy as the owner of cotton mills and a sugar plantation. Though he was brilliant at business, and prominent in the politics of Pennsylvania, what he experienced at the head of an army in unfamiliar country with massive supply requirements and an enemy of unknown strength was more like paralysis. It was Patterson who had moved timidly with his army from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, to occupy an abandoned Harpers Ferry on June 16, and Patterson whose forces had crossed the Potomac River from the Maryland side on July 1 and then engaged Jackson at Falling Waters. The Confederate force had then fallen back again, while Patterson marched unopposed into the town of Martinsburg, announcing by wire to Winfield Scott that he was “in hot pursuit” of Johnston. But instead of driving south to meet the enemy, Patterson now paused to wait for supplies. He would not attack before he was certain that he had absolutely everything he needed. “As soon as provisions arrive,” he told Scott, “I shall advance to Winchester to drive the enemy from that place, if any remain.”
He would do no such thing. Patterson, as would soon be apparent, was scared. He was in enemy territory in Virginia and surrounded by a hostile populace. His supply lines were, implicitly, threatened. He worried, above all, that he did not have enough men, and this worry took the form of an uncritical willingness to believe the mostly wildly exaggerated reports about the size of the enemy’s force. How, he wondered, could he be expected to bring his eighteen thousand men against twenty-six thousand men in enemy territory? At Martinsburg he waited, and urgently requested more troops, which Scott sent to him: five regiments.
Still, Patterson dithered and worried. He complained about lack of transportation, about the ninety-day enlistments that were soon to expire, making the men unwilling to fight, and, again, of being in an exposed position in enemy country. He worried that the reason Johnston did not attack him was that Johnston was luring him into a trap. Had Scott himself not warned him a month before that “a check or drawn battle would be a victory to the enemy” and that he should “attempt nothing without a clear prospect of success”?17 Patterson, an old warhorse, was not necessarily afraid of violence; like so many inept generals early in the war, he was afraid of the responsibility, and of the shame and embarrassment that would follow any defeat or disaster that had resulted from his orders. His attitude is worth noting because it would become so common among general officers on both sides. It is visible in Patterson’s hedged response to Scott, who was trying, in late June, to coax Patterson to cross the Potomac into Virginia. “I would not, on my own responsibility, cross the river and attack without artillery a force so much superior in every respect to my own,” Patterson wrote, “but would do so cheerfully and promptly if the general-in-chief would give me explicit orders to that effect.”18 In other words, he would happily sacrifice his army if only Scott shouldered the responsibility. It was all about blame.
On July 16, Patterson, goaded by Scott, finally ordered a reconnaissance in force of Johnston’s army, which had by now fallen back to the town of Winchester. Patterson had been told that McDowell was marching that day on Manassas, and so the purpose of this demonstration was to make sure Johnston and his Confederate force did not go anywhere. That was the main idea: prevent the two Confederate armies from uniting. So a small body of Union infantry and cavalry went forward and briefly engaged Colonel Jeb Stuart’s cavalry. But Patterson, now only a few miles in front of Johnston’s smaller force, suddenly became frightened by reports that Johnston had thirty thousand to forty thousand or even more troops in front of him, with sixty pieces of artillery. Patterson and his officers reasoned that, since Johnston had already been prevented from joining Beauregard, why risk fighting? So instead of advancing, they retreated. On July 17, eighteen thousand Union troops marched seven miles back to Charlestown, near Harpers Ferry, the Potomac River, and the soil of Maryland.
That night Patterson received a wire from an impatient and exasperated Scott in Washington, who did not yet know that the cautious Pennsylvanian had retreated. “Do not let the enemy amuse and delay you with a small force in front whilst he reinforces the junction [Manassas] with his main body,” said Scott, who evidently still expected Patterson to move against Winchester. Patterson was behaving badly, and he knew it. When he was advised by a staff member that if he did not move against Winchester he would be “a ruined man” and that “in the event of a misfortune in front of Washington the whole blame will be laid to your charge,” Patterson summoned up his courage and decided that he would advance the next day. Incredibly, he lost heart again. He never moved. He gave many reasons for this, chief among them that parts of his army, whose ninety-day enlistments were up, and who were weary of the promised advances that never happened, would not serve an hour past their time.
Unfortunately for Patterson, Johnston’s troops, under orders from Beauregard and with Jackson’s brigade in the vanguard, were already marching toward a pass in the Blue Ridge Mountains and to the train depot that lay beyond the mountains, on their way to fulfilling Winfield Scott’s worst nightmare. Patterson and his officers, in their secure camps in Charleston, saw none of this. That was because Jeb Stuart, executing one of the war’s first great cavalry screens, had rendered him blind. While Johnston and Jackson slipped away, Stuart’s dashing horsemen were thrown forward between the two armies to create dust and confusion and general mischief and to make sure no Union scouts got through.
Scott, increasingly suspicious, now demanded angrily of Patterson: “Has he [Johnston] not stolen a march and sent reinforcements toward Manassas Junction?” To which the hapless, doomed Patterson replied, even as Jackson was marching, undetected, east toward the mountains: “The enemy has stolen no march upon me. I have kept him actively employed, and by threats and reconnaissance caused him to be reinforced. I have accomplished in this respect more than the General-In-Chief asked or could well be expected, in face of an enemy far superior in numbers.”19
He soon discovered how disastrously wrong he was. He finally acknowledged this two days later in a telegram to Scott: “With a portion of his force Johnston left Winchester by the road to Millwood on the afternoon of the 18th,” he wrote. “His whole force was about thirty-five thousand two hundred.”20 Patterson could not resist a final lie, and one with phony filigree to boot: the “two hundred” made the false intelligence sound precise. (It was only a “portion,” moreover, because Johnston left 1,700 sick soldiers behind in Winchester.21) In any case, the war was over for Patterson. On July 22 Scott ordered him relieved of his command.22
• • •
Jackson had struck his tents and marched through Winchester and out the other side of town while a frightened and disheartened citizenry looked on. He hated to leave them. He had fallen in love with Winchester, and now believed that he was likely abandoning it to the enemy. For his 2,600 men, who had not been told where they were going, the orders to move out were the worst thing they had heard yet. After a full month of retreating and then languishing in their disease-ridden camps, they were skulking away from the enemy yet again. As they moved out along the long, dusty, winding pike, toward the looming blue haze of mountains, they chafed and grumbled. Then, an hour and a half out of Winchester, under orders from Johnston, regimental adjutants read them a communiqué:
General Beauregard is being attacked by overwhelming forces. He [Johnston] has been ordered by the government to his assistance. . . . General Patterson and his command have gone out of the way to Harper’s Ferry, and are not in reach. Every moment is precious, and the General hopes that his soldiers will step out and keep closed, for this march is a forced march to save the country.
The reaction was immediate and thunderous. “At this stirring appeal the soldiers rent the air with shouts of joy,” Jackson wrote to Anna, “and all was eagerness and animation where before there had been only lagging and uninterested obedience.”23 They waded across the waist-high Shenandoah, arrived at the small town of Paris, six miles from the Piedmont Station on the Manassas Gap Railroad, at about two o’clock in the morning. They would take the train to Manassas Junction the next day. The exhausted men slept. Jackson, meanwhile, joined the other sentinels and kept watch.
The next day was remembered later by many soldiers as one of those sweet, soft intervals that occurred in the early days of the war, before the fighting began to take its fearful toll. Because there were not enough trains and cars to transport the troops all at once, some of the regiments had simply to wait their turn, passing time in the pleasant countryside until midafternoon. “We had a regular picnic,” recalled John Casler, a member of Jackson’s brigade. “[There was] plenty to eat, lemonade to drink, and beautiful young ladies to chat with. We finally got aboard, bade the ladies a long farewell, and went flying down the road.”24 Actually, they labored down the road, behind a single, struggling locomotive; the thirty-four-mile trip took a full eight hours. But the rumbling, snail-like pace had at least some benefits. Along the way crowds gathered to wish them well, ladies waved handkerchiefs, and food was handed through the windows. The picnic was not quite over. As humble as the journey was, Jackson’s brigade was engaged in one of the first large-scale transfers of soldiers to battle by railroad in history.