They Called Him Stonewall

by Davis, Burke;

  Stuart’s cavalry passed at dawn, reporting a quiet enemy in the rear. When the infantry reached Piedmont, at the foot of the mountains, trains were waiting to carry them to Manassas. By midafternoon they were on the field of Bull Run. Few Federals came in sight of Jackson’s men, but there was far cannon fire, and the stories were fearful: General McDowell was across the stream, everywhere, with thirty-five thousand men; no one had ever seen such an army. Already the country was filled with stragglers. The lines of wagons and big guns were endless, and there were carriages, too, with Congressmen and their ladies and society people out to see the sport.

  A Union private, Warren Lee Goss, remembered the experience of the naïve soldiers coming down into Rebel territory: “They gave us rations of salt junk, hard-tack, sugar and coffee. Each man carried his rubber and woolen blanket, 40 rounds of cartridges, a canteen, his gun and equipments, and most of us a patent drinking tube. I hadn’t been on the march an hour before I realized that it might not be such fun, after all.… The weather was scorching hot, but the most trying thing was the jerky way they marched us. Sometimes they’d double-quick us, and again they’d keep us standing in the road waiting in the hot sun … we saw carriages and barouches which contained civilians who had driven out from Washington.… We thought it wasn’t a bad idea to have the great men … come out and see us thrash the Rebs. Every one of us expected to have our names in the papers when we got home.”

  William T. Sherman was there with the Federals, too, and wrote: “The march demonstrated the general laxity of discipline; for with all my personal efforts I could not prevent the men from straggling for water, blackberries or anything on the way that they fancied. Our men had been told often at home that all they had to do was to make a bold appearance, and the Rebels would run.”

  There was anxiety on the Confederate side. Lee paced in Richmond, waiting, while the sickly Jefferson Davis hung about field headquarters at Manassas, looking from the soulful hound’s eyes of Beauregard to the prim little face of Joe Johnston, seeking reassurance. Lee had chosen the ground for defense, and it was good; he had labored to get troops to the site, too. Unfortunately for the Rebels, not all of Johnston’s troops had yet arrived from the west. A pair of Yankee engineers had deliberately crashed their trains to block the rails.

  Through the early morning hours of Sunday, July twenty-first, General McDowell was pushing up thirty thousand men toward a waiting force of some twenty-six thousand Confederates. At the same hour, Johnston was attempting to launch a plan of attack conceived by Beauregard—a slash from his right flank.

  With morning, the largest American armies ever assembled made ready for the first great bloodletting of the war. The day was ideal for the purpose, clear and warm. The Confederates began by bungling, for General Ewell, who was to lead the attack, did not get his orders and did not move as he should. Soon the Yankees advanced, and the two raw armies, little more than mobs, fell upon each other.

  It did not begin as a day of significance for Jackson. He lay back in reserve on a hot hillside as the opening scenes rolled before him. In the distance, through heat waves, rose a dust cloud, and the young Confederate gunners used the cloud as a target, firing steadily.

  At nine forty-five, bluecoats emerged from dust opposite the stream, and the first of the Federal charges came. The enemy crossed at a place called Sudley Ford and soon struck the Louisiana Tigers, the spirited men of Major Rob Wheat. The enemy was at first driven off, but Wheat was wounded, and a South Carolina regiment was roughly handled. The Federals finally drove off the Tigers and South Carolinians. Up and down Bull Run a string of terrible little battles exploded, as if they had no relation one to the other; in each, green troops fought as if for the lives of all.

  As noon approached, General Johnston, who had left the assault to Beauregard, finally became restless and rode into the field. Johnston told Beauregard to throw his reserves into action, and shouted, “The battle is there. I am going.” Beauregard followed him.

  Johnston, guided by an accurate ear, came to the key terrain of the day, a place called the Henry House Hill, owned by a widow, Judith Henry. Near by was the home of a free Negro, one Robinson. The Generals studied the field.

  Numbers of Confederate troops were at hand. On the face of the hill was a shrunken, but stubborn, South Carolina brigade. Behind the crest of the hill, just out of the fire and superbly placed, were troops in good order, most of them lying at ease. A six-gun battery in their center joined fire on the enemy. Officers were trying to rally broken regiments on the hill and to stop a stream of frightened men through the woodlands. No orders were needed for the resting brigade. It was found to be Jackson’s, waiting as calmly as if it had been through a thousand such searing battles. Two South Carolina brigades, under General Bee and Colonel N. G. Evans, were now falling back to the slope, lashed by blue waves of infantry. The surge of battle came nearer Jackson’s men.

  Captain Imboden, who was near Jackson, had already been upbraided by the General for cursing in battle. Old Jack was slightly wounded. Imboden recorded it:

  “The contest that ensued was terrific. Jackson ordered me to go from battery to battery and see that the guns were properly aimed and the fuses cut the right length. This was the work of but a few minutes.… I stopped to ask Jackson’s permission to rejoin my battery. The fight was just then hot enough to make him feel well. His eyes fairly blazed. He had a way of throwing up his left hand with the open palm toward the person he was addressing. And, as he told me to go, he made this gesture. The air was full of flying missiles, and as he spoke he jerked down his hand, and I saw that blood was streaming from it. I exclaimed, ‘General, you are wounded.’ ‘Only a scratch, a mere scratch,’ he replied, and binding it hastily with a handkerchief, he galloped away along his line.”

  Shells were falling about the Henry House, where the eighty-year-old widow lay with her two sons, all of them invalids. The sons, one of them recalled, were “shocked when we saw the Union troops coming from Sudley Ford,” and they tried to move their mother, who refused adamantly, until shells had plunged into the house. The hobbling men took her on a mattress toward the home of a neighbor, but soon Mrs. Henry, frightened, “begged so hard to be taken back that we returned to the house, and had just replaced her in bed when she was instantly killed by a shell.” The house began to flame almost in the center of Jackson’s line.

  The enemy appeared on the crest of the hill, infantrymen in blue outlined clearly against the sky in the sights of Jackson’s prone marksmen. When his brigade fired, the Yankees were literally blown into oblivion; artillery drove survivors of that attack down the hill. The fight pressed in once more, into an ever smaller space.

  The Federal commanders, Heintzelman, Hunter and Tyler, threw their regiments against the position—all told, twenty-five thousand Union troops. The hill was being defended for the moment with ninety-eight hundred men, in the brigades of Jackson, Bee, Bartow and Wade Hampton. The affair could not last long. More dark files advanced in the distance, bound for this hill.

  The Federals pushed over a rise called Matthews Hill, and now passed the Henry House. Into this melee Stuart came at the head of his reckless riders. They emerged on the smoky flank near men in red uniforms; Stuart thought these were Alabama troops he had seen earlier. He shouted, “Don’t run boys. We’re here!” It was an error. The men were the Zouaves of Heintzelman; and Stuart, with no other course left to him, rode into their midst at top speed. He lost a few men, but the New York troops scattered and were no longer in the battle.

  Then came one of those unfathomable moments of battle which turn the tide. It swept the Federals from a field won, thus far, at great sacrifice. Almost as Stuart spread panic among the Zouaves, one of Jackson’s infantry regiments, the Thirty-third Virginia, stormed from its pine brush cover. It charged a battery of Union guns, but these guns, strangely, did not fire on the Southern attack. Officers evidently were uncertain as to whether the Virginians were friends or foes. The delay w
as fatal. At seventy yards the graycoats fired, wiping out the gunners. Jackson had to fight for the guns even longer, for a band of Maine men seized them, and waves of battle plunged back and forth in the full heat of the afternoon.

  Near three o’clock, the combined weight of Stuart’s charge and Jackson’s move began to tell. More Confederates rallied about the guns, and from Manassas Junction the last of Johnston’s reinforcements came up. The Federal troops moved back under the weight of numbers, and a few companies, already having fought beyond their limits of endurance, gave way. Regiments turned to the rear, taking others with them. From the Confederate front rose the first Rebel Yell of the war, and Colonel Arnold Elzey, at the head of his Marylanders, led pursuit of the Federals.

  Jackson had already won the sobriquet which was to become more famous than he and to obscure for history most other events of his life.

  In the heaviest of the fighting, when the Southerners were being driven from the hill, General Bee yelled to his South Carolinians, pointing to Jackson’s men, who steadily awaited the next attack:

  “Look, there stands Jackson like a stone wall. Rally behind the Virginians, men!”

  Bee was soon fatally wounded, but his shout had helped to hold his men from flight, and a number of them remembered his words. The name spread: Stonewall. And the silent officer who had commanded on Henry House Hill became overnight a legend in the army.

  Jackson came down the hill as the Federal tide ebbed, while bullets still flew. As he galloped toward a bridge below him, he held aloft one hand and looked upward. Some thought he was praying, others that he beckoned his men, or favored the wounded hand; and some, like Maury, thought he might be about the curious business of balancing his weight.

  McDowell had lost three thousand men, nearly half of them as prisoners; the Confederate loss was just under two thousand—only a dozen prisoners—and when the Federal retreat became flight, it seemed that each man fled from certain death.

  Warren Lee Goss saw Jackson’s men snatch the Federal guns in the turning point of the day, and the first moments of panic:

  “The batteries were in an open field next to us. We were watching to see what they’d do next, when a terrible volley was poured into them. It was like a pack of Fourth of July firecrackers under a barrel, magnified a thousand times. The Rebels had crept upon them unawares, and the men at the batteries were about all killed or wounded.

  “The dead cannoneers lay with the rammers of their guns and sponges and lanyards still in their hands.… Those who could get away didn’t wait.… It must have been four o’clock in the afternoon, at a time when our fire had become scattered and feeble, that the rumor passed from one to another that the Rebels had got reinforcements. Where are ours? we asked. There was no confusion or panic then, but discouragement … Our men began to feel it was no use to fight, cursing their generals because no reinforcements were sent to them. The men had now … been marching and fighting thirteen hours. The enemy were pressing up, and we fell back. We didn’t run.”

  Confederates saw it, however, as “one dense mass of fugitives … the whole of the Federal army … rushing madly in the direction of Washington.”

  President Davis came up through chaos at the rear of his army, among skulkers and wounded, thinking that the day had brought defeat. But when he and Johnston and Beauregard met in sight of the enemy retreat, Davis almost lost control of himself. He rushed to Colonel Elzey, who had now halted the chase, and cried, “General Elzey, you are the Blücher of the day!”

  Davis wrote Lee: “We have won a glorious though dear-bought victory. Night closed on the enemy in full flight and closely pursued.”

  Lee replied in a message to Johnston: “I almost wept for joy at the glorious victory achieved by our brave troops.”

  While Confederates celebrated, the Federals tore on as if the devil were at their heels. William Howard Russell wrote for his readers in the London Times:

  “On the hill beside me there was a crowd of civilians … in all sorts of vehicles, with a few of the fairer sex … a lady with an opera glass … was quite beside herself when an unusually heavy discharge roused the current of her blood—‘That is splendid. Oh, my! Is that not first-rate? I guess we will be in Richmond tomorrow.’

  “An officer … galloped along the front, waving his cap and shouting … ‘We’ve whipped them on all points.… We have taken all their batteries. They are retreating as fast as they can, and we are after them.’ The Congressmen shook hands with each other and cried out: ‘Bully for us! Bravo! Didn’t I tell you so?’…

  “I had ridden three or four miles … every moment the crowd increased; drivers and men cried out … ‘Turn back! Turn back! We are whipped!’ They seized the heads of the horses and swore at opposing drivers.…

  “The uproar and the dust were beyond description … some cavalry soldiers, flourishing their sabers, and preceded by an officer, who cried out, ‘Make way there—make way for the General,’ attempted to force a covered wagon, in which there was seated a man with a bloody handkerchief round his head, through the press.…

  “The scene on the road had now assumed an aspect which had not a parallel in any description I have ever read. Infantry soldiers on mules and draft horses with the harness clinging to their heels … ambulances crowded … wagons swarming with men who threw out the contents in the road to make room, grinding through a shouting, screaming mass of men on foot who were … yelling with rage at every halt and shrieking out: ‘Here are the cavalry! Will you get on?’

  “A fresh outburst of artillery … in an instant the mass of vehicles and retreating soldiers, teamsters, and civilians, as if agonized by an electric shock, quivered throughout the tortuous line … drivers lashed their maddened horses and, leaping from the carts, left them to their fate, and ran.…”

  It went on through the night, and the next day, in a rainstorm, remnants of the undefeated, but terrified, Union army, streamed through the streets of Washington.

  It had not been Jackson’s fight; but in the night when burial parties were out, men everywhere about Manassas were remembering him. He had said things in battle which men now magnified.

  Once to an officer who had dashed up to him when things looked worst, shouting, “General, the day is going against us,” Jackson had replied calmly, “If you think so, sir, don’t say anything about it.” And he had held his troops so coolly, until the enemy was once within fifty yards, saying, “Hold your fire until they’re on you, then fire and give them the bayonet. And when you charge, yell like furies.”

  Jackson’s brigade had lost as heavily as any other: 488 of its 3,000 men were dead or wounded, and many of them were on the Henry House Hill tonight, where surgeons with their saws made huge piles of amputated limbs.

  Jackson went to a surgeon for treatment of his finger that night, and said, “Give me 10,000 men, and I would be in Washington tomorrow.” He would not be able to forget the lost opportunity for the chase. General Johnston was even now assembling reasons for his failure to press for victory, to show that his army was more disorganized in victory than McDowell’s in defeat; but Jackson was never to accept it. For weeks he growled about the dissipated chance to bring the North to its knees and end the war.

  The next morning he wrote Anna:

  My precious pet—Yesterday we fought a great battle and gained a glorious victory, for which all the glory is due to God alone. Although under heavy fire for several … hours, I received only one wound, the breaking of the longest finger of my left hand; but the doctor says the finger can be saved. It was broken about midway between the hand and the knuckle, the ball passing on the side next the forefinger.…

  Whilst great credit is due to other parts of our gallant army, God made my brigade more instrumental than any other in repulsing the main attack. This is for your information only—say nothing about it. Let others speak praise, not myself.

  A few days later he added:

  And so you think the papers ought to say more about
your husband! My brigade is not a brigade of newspaper correspondents. I know that the First Brigade was the first to meet and pass our retreating forces—to push on with no other aid than the smiles of God … to arrest the victorious foe in his onward progress—to hold him in check until reinforcements arrived—and finally to charge bayonets and thus advancing, pierce the enemy’s center. I am well satisfied with what it did, and so are my generals.…

  As you think the papers do not notice me enough, I send a specimen, which you will see from the upper part of the paper is a leader. My darling, you must never distrust our God.… In due time He will manifest His pleasure.

  You must not be concerned at seeing other parts of the army lauded, and my brigade not mentioned. “Truth is mighty, and will prevail.”

  Jackson caused a brief sensation back in Lexington with a letter to Dr. White, his pastor. A day or so after Bull Run, the minister anxiously opened an envelope with Jackson’s well-known scrawl over it, and a small crowd gathered, expecting news of the great battle. The letter read:

  My dear pastor—In my tent last night, after a fatiguing day’s service, I remembered that I had failed to send you my contribution for our colored Sunday school. Enclosed you will find my check …

  About this time he made a mortal enemy, an officer who got word that his wife was on her death bed. When the officer asked Jackson for leave, so that he could be with his wife in her last hours, Old Jack stared at him, saying only, “Man, man, do you love your wife more than your country?” The officer could not understand the emotion which had seized his commander; the wife died and the officer never forgave.

  Jackson was consistent, however. When Anna wrote, asking him to take a furlough and visit her in the Morrison home in North Carolina, he declined firmly, saying that he could not set a bad example for others.