They Called Him Stonewall

by Davis, Burke;

  One of Jackson’s colonels, James A. Walker of the Thirteenth Virginia, rode to Ewell’s headquarters, at Conrad’s Store, on a visit. He found General Ewell in such a state that he could not transact his business, and he was on the point of leaving when Ewell caught him.

  “Colonel Walker, did it ever occur to you that General Jackson is crazy?”

  “I don’t know, General. We used to call him Tom Fool at the Institute, but I don’t suppose he is really crazy.”

  “I tell you, sir, he is as crazy as a March hare. He has gone away, I don’t know where, and left me here with some instructions to stay until he returns, but Banks’ whole army is advancing on me and I haven’t the most remote idea where to communicate with General Jackson. I tell you, sir, he is crazy and I will just march my division away from here. I do not mean to have it cut to pieces at the behest of a crazy man.”

  Ewell’s cavalry chief, Colonel T. T. Munford, brought in a Federal prisoner, and Ewell questioned him almost savagely. He found that General Shields, with some eight thousand troops, was on the march east to join General McDowell at Fredericksburg, and would pass so near that he could be struck. Ewell was beside himself with the desire to attack Shields but could not do so until he had permission from Jackson. In growing excitement, he directed Munford to take his troopers and a couple of guns and impede the march of Shields by burning bridges, laying ambuscades, hitting at his wagon train—anything. He ordered Munford to report to him before leaving, at midnight.

  Munford left a record of it: “He asked me to hand him a map and with the aid of a miserable lard lamp he attempted to show me where General Jackson was. Before I knew what he was after he sprang out of bed, with only a night shirt on—no carpet on the floor—and down on his knees he went; his bones fairly rattled. His bald head and long beard made him look more like a witch than a general. He became much excited, pointed out Jackson’s position, General Shields’ and General McDowell’s …

  “Then with an ugly oath, he said, ‘This great wagon-hunter is after a Dutchman, the old fool. General Lee at Richmond will have little use for wagons if all these people close in around him; we are left out here in the cold. Why I could crush Shields before night if I could move from here. This man Jackson is certainly a crazy fool, an idiot. Now look at this.’

  “Handing me a small piece of paper upon which was written, ‘Headquarters, Valley District, May 1862, General R. S. Ewell: Your dispatch received. Hold your position. Don’t move. I have driven Gen. Milroy from McDowell. Through God’s assistance have captured most of his wagon train … Respectfully, T. J. Jackson, Major General’

  “Ewell jumped to his feet, ran all over the room and said, ‘What has Providence to do with Milroy’s wagon train? Mark my words, if this old fool keeps this thing up and Shields joins McDowell we will go up at Richmond! I’ll stay here but you do all you can to keep these people from getting together.’”

  This explosion was scarcely over when Ewell was once more roused from his bed, this time by a courier in search of his colonel. He came up the steps, his saber banging at his side, and rapped on the door, calling for his officer.

  “Come in and light the lamp,” Ewell yelled. “Look under the bed. Do you see him there? Do you know how many steps you came up?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, I do, by God. By every lick you gave them with that thing you have hanging about your feet—which you’ll hook up when you come to my quarters. Do you know how many ears you have? You’ll leave here with one less and maybe two, if you ever wake me again this time of night, looking for your damned colonel.”

  Ewell descended at last from his rage when Colonel Ashby arrived.

  “I’ve been in hell for three days, Ashby. Hell. What’s the news from General Jackson?”

  Ashby could report details of the victory, which cheered Ewell, and he warmed with the prospect of action in some rational campaign. He was to have another day or so of confusion. He had orders from Jackson to stay where he was—but these were superseded by surprising dispatches from Richmond. General Joseph E. Johnston, their commander, ordered Ewell to move back to the east, to face the threat to Richmond.

  Thus Ewell, in a dilemma, taking with him his beloved Friday and a handful of officers, went forth to find Jackson. He rode from Swift Run Gap, across the Valley, and met his new chief. The commander was more than sane.

  Jackson relieved Ewell’s distress with an appeal to Lee, who agreed to leave Ewell in the Valley, and also proposed once more an attack on Banks. And Jackson wrote out, at Ewell’s insistence, an order to protect his lieutenant from possible censure of the high command. Ewell, in fact, wrote the order, and Jackson copied and signed it:

  … As you are in the Valley District, you constitute a part of my command. Should you receive orders different than those sent from these headquarters please advise me.…

  You will please move your command so as to encamp between New Market and Mount Jackson on next Wednesday night unless you receive orders from a superior officer.…

  Telegrams to Lee explained the details, and Ewell went back to his command, to bring the men forward. With confusion ended for the moment, the army was to prepare for action. Ewell and Jackson had studied each other with care and had parted friends; they found themselves more alike than seemed possible. Jackson frowned, shaking his head, at each outbreak of Ewell’s profanity, which dwindled away during the interview. But he was attracted by the little man’s impatient prodding; he was spoiling for a fight, and he would ask no quarter, Jackson judged.

  Ewell revealed the kinship of spirit in orders to one of his brigadiers, General L. O’B. Branch: “You can’t bring tents; tent flies without poles, if you must, or tents cut down to that size, and only as few as are indispensable. No mess-chests or trunks. It is better to leave these things where you are than to throw them away after starting. We can get along without anything but food and ammunition. The road to glory cannot be followed with much baggage.”

  Ewell was ready to bring all of his troops to Jackson, and though the dratted war plans were secret, he had a fair idea of what lay ahead. He gave the impression that he was to enjoy it.

  General Jackson’s body servant was a large, handsome mulatto of about the General’s own age, by the name of Jim. When Jackson was in headquarters, Jim was constantly about. Tonight, as the camp darkened at New Market, Jim had work. He prepared a full supper for the men of the staff and carried to Jackson only a crust of cornbread and a pitcher of milk. The General would not eat until he had been given the nightly treatment of cold towels placed across his naked chest and abdomen, which he found helpful. He then took his simple food and remained standing where he had eaten. Jim understood his painfully erect position: The General believed that his organs functioned properly only when he stood, that their normal position was possible only when he held himself bolt upright. He did not waste these moments. Jim could hear Jackson’s muttering and knew that he was at work.

  The General was committing to memory a chart of the Valley geography, and he knew in an instant the road mileage separating any two towns of the area. He called them off now in the same way he had, last summer, memorized an artillery chart, charges, size of shot and range. These grew out of long-established mental habits, by now inflexible.

  When the General finished his strange work, and had knelt in prayer for a time, Jim disappeared. He was a man of high spirits, a favorite of Jackson’s staff, and one who lived dangerously.

  “My General is one hard man on this temperance business,” he had told the officers. “But you know it don’t carry over to me. No, sir, it don’t apply on old Jim. Somebody’s got to do the General’s drinkin’ for him, and most of his laughin’, too.”

  Jim had expanded visibly in the General’s service during the war, and lorded it over his friends among the servants and the occasional women he met on the route. He became a companion hero in the legends of the General which he spread continually.

  Jackson str
ayed into the camp. He made his way to General Taylor and sat quietly beside him, staring at the Louisiana troops as if he could not make them out. He asked a few questions about them, admired their orderly ways, sucked a couple of lemons, accepted a piece of hardtack from an officer, drank a bit of water and wandered off. He left an order with Taylor: The Louisiana troops were to lead the army. Before dawn. He would not tell him which road to take. That would be revealed in the morning. Taylor grumbled curses as the commander went away in the darkness.

  One of Taylor’s men had gaped at Stonewall from his fireside, in wonder, committing his image to memory. He was to write his impression: “He was dressed in a suit of gray homespun with a brimmed cap. He looked like a good driving overseer or manager with plenty of hard horse sense, but no accomplishments or other talents, nothing but plain direct sense. It was because his manners had so little of the man of the world or because he repressed all expression that he had the appearance of being a man of not above average ability. The remark was made by one of us after staring at him a long time, that there must be some mistake about him, if he was an able man, he showed it less than any man any of us had ever seen.”

  The campfires burned down in the groves, and it grew colder. Only the pickets could be heard. Fog rolled in as morning came. It was May twenty-first, gray and unpromising.

  Jackson had scarcely slept, but there was no trace of fatigue; instead, he was unusually animated. He trotted to the Louisiana headquarters and sent Taylor’s columns northward on the pike, in the vanguard of the army. After less than a mile, Jackson countermanded his order. He turned Taylor’s men to their right, heading east, and the men, who had assumed they were to assault the town of Strasburg, found themselves on the road which climbed the lone passable gap over the fifty-mile barrier of the Massanutton Mountains, that singular range which lies like a fortress between the forks of the Shenandoah.

  Within two hours the army had disappeared from the Valley people, who could not imagine its destination. Perhaps they were to be deserted to the enemy. It had happened before. The troops were driven from dawn to dusk, for two days in succession, passing over the mountain road Ewell’s men had used just a few days before. In the ranks they cursed and shook their heads. It was unanimous, almost. This commander was mad. He marched their legs off to get them to his side, and then, evading the enemy, he marched them back again.

  Jackson rode in the front of the column, not far behind Ashby’s cavalry screen, which cut them off from the world. He went along as always, on that shambling little sorrel horse, his huge feet thrust outward in the stirrups, suffering the gait of his mount, his expression wooden. General Taylor thought, charitably, that Jackson had a poet’s soul and was demonstrating the beauties of the Valley in spring with tours of its charms. The men wished they were down on the Peninsula, facing McClellan, where there was a war.

  The column poured down into the Luray Valley, just east of the Massanutton screen, and turned north once more. Far ahead lay the town of Front Royal, and there, by special edict of Lincoln’s Secretary of War, one Union regiment held the bridges of the Shenandoah.

  2

  FRONT ROYAL

  May twenty-third dawned in unseasonable warmth, and by midmorning the distances of the Valley country shimmered with heat. Jackson’s columns suffered despite the shade of the almost unbroken forests of Luray which swept upward on either side of the army, along the mountain spurs. The eastern Valley lay quiet, rich with bird song, and beginning to steam under the brilliant sky. There was nothing to signal the opening of a bold bid by the little army of Jackson, whose aim was no less than the expulsion of the Federal host from the Shenandoah.

  Jackson had divulged nothing, as usual. He had prayed, and sent his bidding to Ewell: “Let us, relying upon God, prepare for attacking Banks.…” The commander had spent the night in the open, and near-by troops had heard singing from his headquarters as he worshiped with some of his numerous preachers. One of the hymns was a favorite of the General’s: “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood.” The orders issued to the infantry seemed dull and routine: The column to continue to the north, Ewell’s division leading, just as before. Jackson was busy with the cavalry, however. He called Ashby back from Strasburg in the northwest, where he had been blinding General Banks for several days. Ashby was to cross the rough foothills of the Massanuttons and come into Jackson’s front, to cut the road and telegraph between Front Royal and Strasburg.

  Munford with the Second Virginia was cutting the railroad bridges to the east of Front Royal, and yet another cavalry patrol was cutting the wires linking the town with Washington. It was not long after the sun rose that Jackson, unknown even to all of his staff, had insured the isolation of Front Royal from the world, just as if he were a surgeon preparing to remove some malignant growth.

  The troops paced on through the morning. Since McDowell, they had been hurried 120 miles, but they now seemed fresh. They were also undetected by the enemy, whose latest information placed Jackson sixty miles to the southwest lying quietly in front of Banks.

  Some of the final orders of the night past were a bit disturbing, especially to the private soldiers, whose nose for bloodshed was infallible: Knapsacks to be left behind. Not a tent to be allowed. While the men were debating the seriousness of these orders, Jackson handled a complaint from a chaplain, a Catholic priest who declared that he could not hold services without the privacy of a tent. Jackson permitted this single exception to his order.

  Ewell had spent the night just ten miles from Front Royal, and he now got orders from Jackson which enlightened him as to the commander’s intentions. The column was abruptly wheeled off the main road into town, which was exposed at the foot of river cliffs and under Union guns. The men went eastward over rough country to a ruder track called the Gooney Manor Road, which entered Front Royal from the south.

  The troops at last learned the identity of their intended victims—the Federal First Maryland, which held the town, the bridges and approaches. Ewell halted the column to call up his own First Maryland, under Colonel Bradley Johnson. The troops, who had lately joined complaints against harsh regulations as to enlistees, now stepped through at swagger step, and men resting by the roadside cheered them as they went to the front. Noon drew near.

  At Strasburg, General Banks, the Union commander, was oblivious to the gathering storm before his outpost. With the assistance of meddlers from Washington who blithely moved his troops by telegraph as if they were chess pieces, Banks had managed to spread himself thin, so that he lay in ideal condition for crippling attacks. He was himself lulled to sleep.

  In Washington, the rebellion was so nearly over, it seemed, that recruiting offices had been closed, and the capital abandoned itself to unofficial celebration. Banks complained, in fact, that there was little prospect of his seeing action, much as he relished the scent of burning powder.

  He had been stripped of the forces of General Shields, now out of the Valley. The troops he had left to him were placed in an almost perfect triangle, the base of which lay across the northern face of the Massanutton range.

  Banks himself held the western end of the triangle at Strasburg, with its southward-facing trenches and huge piles of stores. He had sixty-four hundred men posted in that town. The eastern end, at Front Royal, was manned by the one thousand troops of Colonel John R. Kenly, with a couple of cannon. The northern tip was Winchester, where 1,450 Federal troops held the position.

  Kenly had not been inactive at Front Royal, though he was severely limited. He had sent into the Luray Valley a patrol of horsemen and infantry, which had captured a single Confederate. From this prisoner, Kenly learned that Rebel columns were expected—a report which was lost on Banks, who disregarded it and even ordered to Strasburg the few horsemen of the little expedition. Front Royal was thus left blinded.

  Kenly had thrown his pickets a mile and a half south of the village, with two infantry companies in support. Another company guarded a railroad at some di
stance from the town, and the bulk of his force, six companies, lay in camp near the big wagon bridge. Two companies of the Twenty-ninth Pennsylvania lay between the forks of the Shenandoah to cover the railroad bridges. The only artillery on hand was good—a pair of Parrott ten-pounders, superior in range and accuracy to Confederate smooth-bores. Kenly, though more alert than his superiors, was not uninfected by their lassitude; it seemed incredible that he could be struck by any other than a tiny guerrilla force. Most of his men drowsed in a siesta.

  At 1 P.M. the Confederate advance appeared on heights south of Front Royal, and officers halted the leading troops, which spread in formation, still hidden from the Federals. They were the First Maryland of Johnson’s, and the Louisiana Tigers under Major Rob Wheat. They waited while General Ewell and his staff examined the country.

  The tents of the enemy were plain on the river bottom, and smoke went up from their fires. Immediately at hand was the outlying Federal picket. A couple of men slumped in the shade, but only one figure was in full view—a young sentry stretched beneath a rail shelter, who rose on an elbow and stared, at first in curiosity, as four horsemen appeared on the slope above him: Generals Ewell, Taylor, Steuart and Edward Johnson. Despite their impressive uniforms, he did not appear alarmed for several moments. He at last came to his feet, fired at the riders and turned to flee. Other blue-clad men ran behind him.

  The sentries fled in vain, for a group of Jackson’s horsemen cut them off at the rear and captured the entire post. The cavalry reached these men only seconds before the first companies of the Maryland regiment pounded past, on their way to charge the village. The muskets set Federal drums to throbbing, and bugle calls rang in the little valley.