Now, after the brilliant march of fifty-four miles in two days—a feat now being hailed throughout the Confederacy—the time of peril had come for Jackson.
The Union command was moving to crush his force between two wings of its big army, and, with fifty thousand men to throw against Jackson’s worn twenty-three thousand, seemed in a position to do just that, before Lee could bring up reinforcements.
Jackson’s command was changed today. In the absence of Taliaferro, General William E. Starke, a newcomer, had taken over one division. In Ewell’s place was General A. R. Lawton. The position of the army seemed good, except that the enemy would have the cover of woods when attacking the left; and A. P. Hill, whose six brigades were on this end of the line, drew up his men in double files as a safeguard. Half of Ewell’s troops were in the center, the others far out to the right, guarding the flank beyond Starke and his men. For most of its length the line looked down a sloping pasture to a small stream called Young’s Brook, a perfect field of fire. Jackson could do no more.
Hundreds of Federal wounded lay before Jackson, many crying for attention. The Yankees, according to Captain Blackford, made no effort to help their wounded, “with their usual neglect”; and Blackford, with permission from Jackson, sent medical officers to the Union boys after Confederates had been cared for. The bluecoats were grateful to Stonewall, Blackford remembered, especially those who had suffered for want of water.
Near nine o’clock, when the dew was still on the undergrowth, Jackson called Stuart. The cavalryman was to take a regiment of troopers to the rear, back toward the blue bulk of the Bull Run Mountains, where the Warrenton road should contain the hurrying divisions of Longstreet—five of them. Jackson ordered Stuart to open communications with them and make way for their safe arrival on his flank, alongside the men of General Early on the far right.
The morning passed in quiet, for the most part. There were a few nervous rattles of musketry and rare growls of the big guns. The Confederates, becoming more anxious each hour, turned from watching the Federal lines to stare rearward, searching for a reassuring dust cloud along the Warrenton road. The men of the thinned ranks could only wait.
Stuart and his men soon saw signs of the approaching reinforcements as they went to the southwest, and they drove on until the red pillar in the sky over the Warrenton road was unmistakable. Longstreet was at hand.
The troopers found Lee and his staff in advance of the column. Stuart, Longstreet and Lee rode together as Stuart explained Jackson’s position and the threatening moves of the enemy. Within a mile or so, the generals dismounted and squatted at the roadside as Stuart pointed out the details on his map. While the trio conferred, Longstreet’s veterans padded in the road, Blackford said, “at a swinging step, covered with dust so thick that all looked as if they had been painted one color.” The men neared Jackson’s flank and turned off the highway, filing into position at a wide angle to the line of battle. The second march to Manassas was complete, as remarkable in its way as Jackson’s own, for Longstreet had been equally swift, though he had been forced to fight for a time at Thoroughfare Gap.
At about ten thirty, the approach of the relief column was plain to General Starke, who could not be sure whether the troops coming in so confidently were the men under Longstreet, or an assault force of the enemy. A courier was hurried to identify them. From the strong positions along the railroad cut, Jackson’s men rose to peer at the newcomers, violating orders to expose themselves, for they were already under fire from the Federals.
The first Yankee attacks were light. One small party came, inexplicably, at the Confederate center, lonely in the open when other Federal units had fallen back. This forlorn charge was led by a mounted major who was soon shot down. Jackson was to overhear an Alabama captain censure his men for killing the brave officer, and the commander could not refrain from snapping, as he had at Ewell at Port Republic, “No, Captain. The men are right. Kill the brave ones. They lead on the others.”
The enemy increased the attacks, and in waves the bluecoats came on over the open and into the woods as well. Fighting was hottest in the woods on A. P. Hill’s front. From his distance, Jackson could not see the cause of it. A gap of more than one hundred yards had been left in the line here. This was made serious by the presence of a deep embankment of the railroad in front of the gap, a spot offering cover to the enemy. The protected ditch was now filled with a mass of Federal troops, which ran out during the next assault and all but broke Hill’s line. Confederate reserves were called up and the storm became intense. It was bloody, close work, for in the thick cover Hill could not aid his troops with artillery. The attacks rose and waned, until the Federal generals seemed to weary of it. By noon there was a lull.
This was short-lived, for a Federal thrust against Hill was launched from the troublesome railroad cut and had to be thrown back with a costly counterattack. The men who fought for Jackson here were chiefly Georgians, who were described by one of General Toombs’s officers: “I carried into the fight over 100 men who were barefoot, many of whom left bloody footprints among the thorns and briars through which they rushed with … really jubilant impetuosity, upon the serried ranks of the foe.”
With the Georgians fought North Carolinians under Maxcy Gregg, an officer who was almost defiant when General Hill asked if he could hold his ground. He would hold on through everything, Gregg replied. Ammunition was almost gone, to be sure. But there was still the bayonet.
Perhaps this spurred Hill to send his report to Jackson at this point. He saw Confederates dashing into the open under fire, stripping the enemy dead and wounded of their cartridge boxes, so that they might continue the fight.
Kyd Douglas came to Hill and took a doleful message for Jackson: The next attack would crumble Hill’s line, despite all he could do. This was grim news, for though Longstreet’s advance was filing into position, the divisions of reinforcements were by no means ready for fight. Jackson must hold off the enemy himself.
Jackson’s somber face depressed officers about him as he received Hill’s message, but his voice was quick and firm.
“Tell him if they attack he must beat them.”
Old Jack did not leave the chore to Douglas, but rode to Hill.
“General, your men have done nobly,” Jackson said. “If you are attacked again you will beat back the enemy.” Hill rode down his lines with Jackson shouting after him, “I’ll expect you to beat them.”
A rousing yell from the woods which drowned the sound of firing announced Hill’s success, and soon a courier found Jackson, bringing Hill’s compliments, and word of the repulse.
Jackson gave a curious smile. “Tell him I knew he would do it,” he said.
The line was not safe, however. In some quarters, men fought with stones against the enemy, which would not be driven away. On the left, Federal troops under General Phil Kearny pushed back the Rebels and held the ground under fierce counterattacks. The line had now retreated to the ridge, and General Gregg had drawn his sword, crying in hoarse dramatic tones, “Let us die here, my men, let us die here!” Reserves coming up passed this scene; and Gregg’s weary men, who had faced the enemy for seven hours, lay in the hot grass, with orders to thrust up their bayonets if the enemy drove back the front line and walked over them.
Jackson rode behind the hard-pressed lines. For a time he yelled to the men, “Can you stand it for just two hours? Two hours, men.”
At last, soldiers were to recall: “Just half an hour, men. We can bear it as long as that.”
The fierce fighting wavered up and down the field, except where General Fitz John Porter had halted on one flank, an act for which he would later face trial. It seemed to the Confederates an afternoon without end. “The sun went down so slowly!” wrote Ham Chamberlayne, a Virginia soldier. Douglas had the same feeling: “For the first time in my life I understood what was meant by ‘Joshua’s sun standing still on Gideon,’ for it would not go down.”
The red light shon
e on endless piles of Union dead along the railroad cut, particularly in Hill’s front. In this quarter, when the fighting was at its peak, Jackson seemed to invite death. One of Hill’s colonels watched fearfully: “The Federal sharpshooters at this time held possession of the wood, and kept up a deadly fire of single shots when any one of us was exposed. Every lieutenant who had to change position did so at the risk of his life. What was my horror, during an interval in the attack, to see General Jackson himself walking quickly down the railroad cut, examining our position, and calmly looking into the wood that concealed the enemy! Strange to say, he was not molested.”
The day ended on an ominous note. Jackson had to resist the enemy alone. From his post on a commanding hill, General Lee had been urging a reluctant Longstreet to send forward his divisions in an attack. Longstreet argued with the commander. The ground was too forbidding, he said, and he declined to obey Lee’s orders, at last: “I suggested that, the day being far spent, it might be well to advance before night on a forced reconnaissance, get our troops into the most favorable positions, and have all things ready for battle the next morning.”
This limited forward move set off the day’s last firing, for the Federal commanders, quite by chance, gave their men the same order. The flashing guns were stilled only after midnight.
Night brought glum scenes to Confederate headquarters, for casualties had once more been heavy, and the loss of officers was appalling. Old Ike Trimble was wounded, Gregg had lost forty of his officers; Field and Forno, brigade commanders, were shot. General Dorsey Pender had narrowly escaped death from a bursting shell. All parts of Jackson’s force had suffered, but Gregg had lost six hundred men. One South Carolina regiment, the Thirteenth, had lost half its troops.
Hunter McGuire had a strange moment with Old Jack after the battle. Willy Preston, a boy from Lexington, and the son of Jackson’s friends and neighbors, had recently joined the army; he was a great favorite with the General. McGuire, calling the roll of the wounded as Jackson sat by a fire and Jim prepared coffee, said that Willy was mortally wounded. McGuire wrote:
“Jim … rolled on the ground groaning, in his agony of grief, but the General’s face was a study. The muscles in his face were twitching convulsively, and his eyes were all aglow. He gripped me by the shoulder until it hurt me, and in a savage, threatening manner asked why I had left the boy. In a few seconds he recovered himself and turned and walked into the woods alone.
“He soon came back.… We were still sitting by the fire, drinking coffee out of our tin cups, when I said, ‘We have won this battle by the hardest kind of fighting.’
“And he answered me very gently and softly, ‘No. No, we have won it by the blessing of Almighty God.’”
In the night, Longstreet’s men, still unidentified by Pope, settled in their position, the line running at a wide angle to that of Jackson on his right flank. By dawn all was quiet, and day broke in still heat, the plain of Manassas so dry that random shells set afire the grass, which sent boiling white flumes of smoke over the fields. The Confederates waited in supreme confidence despite the thinned ranks of Jackson; if Pope dared throw his attacks within the outspread arms of this force, he might be destroyed. The Rebel line had now spread enormously: some fifty-five thousand men, on a front of about four miles.
The morning passed with rare shots fired by skirmishers, and the far marching of Union troops, who raised dust in the background. At noon, planning to cut off what he imagined to be a Rebel retreat, Pope sent two columns along the Warrenton road. When these had come near the Confederate line, General Porter advised Pope’s headquarters that Longstreet had arrived. Pope disregarded this report, and in the memory of one of his privates, Warren Lee Goss, the Union commander thought the news “an invention of Porter’s.”
On the Warrenton road, Pope had installed General McDowell, an officer Goss heard freely discussed in the ranks: “Nothing was more common than to hear him denounced. ‘Sergeant,’ said a gray-haired officer, ‘how does the battle go?’ ‘We are holding our own,’ replied a noncommissioned officer, ‘but McDowell has charge of the left.’ ‘Then God save the left!’ growled the officer. ‘I’d rather shoot McDowell than Jackson.’ It was a common remark that Pope had his headquarters in the saddle, and McDowell his head in a basket.”
Jackson watched the limited Federal movements and spoke to a brigade commander in his line, Colonel W. H. S. Baylor:
“Well, it looks as if there will be no fight today, but keep your men in line and ready.”
The General then went rearward and talked with Lee, Longstreet and Stuart. Together they puzzled over the intentions of the enemy. Jackson soon went back to his own lines, sucking on one of the lemons from the treasure house of Manassas Junction. He soon disturbed the noon silence by sending a battery of the Rockbridge Artillery to break up a concentration of Union guns in the distance. This was so quickly done that Jackson was moved to praise of the gunners: “That was handsomely done, very handsomely done.”
The afternoon droned away, and the sound of the armies, some 128,000 men, was a faint, peaceful humming. At three o’clock, Jackson was in the rear of his line scratching off a note to Lee. There was the report of one gun as he wrote, a shot that throbbed in the still air. Jackson got to his feet and handed Douglas the unfinished and forgotten note. “That’s the signal for a general attack,” Jackson said. He mounted.
Douglas glanced at the note, which read: “Notwithstanding the threatening movements of the enemy, I am still of the opinion expressed this morning that he does not intend to attack us.” Douglas heard the rising crackle of musketry on the front. Before they reached the scene of action, the General had trouble with his horse; he was not riding Sorrel, but a small bay taken from the Federals yesterday. The horse stood stubbornly and refused to go forward, even under Jackson’s impatient spurring. The General dismounted and exchanged horses with Douglas, whom he sent to General Longstreet asking for reinforcements.
Federals ran forward in triple lines across the open, and they seemed much more dangerous than yesterday. The attacks were heavier on the right, but were threatening everywhere, for the Yankee infantry drove beyond its advance of the day before.
When Douglas gave Longstreet Jackson’s message, asking for help, Old Pete replied, “Certainly, but before the division can reach him, that attack will be broken by artillery.”
Viewed from Jackson’s position, the situation gave no such promise. A. P. Hill’s line had been pierced, and reinforcements were hurriedly mending it. A captain rode to Jackson with the report that Colonel Baylor had been shot. Jackson could not hear in the tumult.
“What brigade, sir?”
“The Stonewall Brigade.”
“Go back, give my compliments to them, and tell the Stonewall Brigade to maintain her reputation.”
The captain returned, with Jackson shouting after him to hold his position until help came.
At the moment when it appeared Jackson must give way, Longstreet opened a fearful artillery barrage from the ridge. His batteries stood on high ground, from which they fired almost straight down the flanks of the charging enemy lines; there had seldom been such targets. From the first rounds, Longstreet’s gunners began to tear apart Pope’s attack.
J. B. Polley, a private who went out with Jackson’s counterattack, wrote of what he saw from the ranks of Hood’s Texas Brigade: “A ghastly spectacle met our eyes. An acre of ground was literally covered with dead, dying and wounded Zouaves, the variegated colors of whose peculiar uniforms gave the scene the appearance of a Texas hillside in spring, painted with wild flowers of every hue and color. Not fifty of the Zouaves escaped whole.… Then, as General Hood said, the 5th Texas ‘slipped its bridle and went wild.’ Had not they been recalled, they would have gone right on to the Potomac.”
Jackson’s surge, timed perfectly with the murderous fire of Longstreet, rolled Pope’s army back. As this wing advanced, Longstreet hurled his own divisions upon the Union files, and there
was a vast, mad scramble over last year’s battleground of Bull Run. Much of the interior of the swirling storm was seen by Alexander Hunter, a private in a Virginia regiment:
“How the shells rained upon us … but the living wall kept on. It seemed as if we were walking on torpedoes. They crackled, split and exploded all around, throwing dirt and ejecting little spirts of smoke that for a moment dimmed the sky.…
“On came the Yankees in splendid style, and some of us forgot to fire our muskets while watching them.… It was high time to be leaving, we thought, when right behind us there came with a rush a fresh Rebel brigade.… A tremendous sheet of flame burst from our line … and with a wild yell the gray swept on toward the 6-gun battery that had been sending forth a stream of death.… We could see the sullen black mouths pointing at us, and behind them the gunners. It was for a second only, like the rising of a curtain for a moment on a hideous tableau … a noise as if an earthquake had riven the place.… The appalling sound of iron grapeshot was heard tearing its way through space and through bodies.… Mercifully for us … the guns were elevated too high.… Of course the execution was fearful … the ground was covered with victims, and the screams of the wounded rose high.…
“At last the enemy staggered, wavered, broke and fled.… It was unutterably grand. Jackson could be seen swinging his left on his right as a pivot, and Longstreet with his entire corps in the reverse method. The whole Yankee army was in retreat, and certainly nothing but darkness prevented it from becoming une affair flambee.”
Near the climax of the Confederate rush, Longstreet sent a message to Jackson, offering congratulations and more troops. Jackson could now grin. “Tell General Longstreet that I am obliged to him, but I don’t need them now; if he gets hard pressed I’ll send him reinforcements.” This seemed sheer bravado to listening officers, for the only troops under Jackson’s command were those in the front, caught up in the fiery duel with the Federals.
They Called Him Stonewall Page 32