Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson

by S. C. Gwynne

  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 we
re 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.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ALL GREEN ALIKE

  How astonishing, at first glance, that this unprepossessing little patch of ground in the middle of nowhere was something that large numbers of men would fight and die for. Jackson and his brigade arrived at their destination in the early evening of July 19, 1861, having first been packed into freight and cattle cars like so many “pins and needles,” as one man put it, then carried on a rattling, bumping, and excruciatingly slow journey into a nondescript northern Virginia cou
ntry of wheat- and cornfields and pastures broken by pine woods and farmhouses that suggested prosperity but not wealth.1 The land was, in all ways, unexceptional. So was the little knot of frame buildings—a tallow factory, telegraph office, hotel, and a few railroad workshops—scattered around the depot where the soldiers of the 1st Virginia Brigade detrained and stood awaiting orders, gazing about as though to gather in the significance of the place, or its relationship to the glorious battle they were going to fight. They were a motley group, as unimpressive to look at as their brigadier. Some wore gray uniforms, some wore blue, some wore what looked to be civilian dress with a bit of military trim.2 They sported a bewildering variety of hats, and carried mostly outmoded smoothbore muskets. They were Jackson men all, some of them former students from VMI or neighbors from Rockbridge County, drilled to the limits of their patience in camps from Harpers Ferry to Winchester, bent to the will of their surprising new master, and tested exactly once, in the brief fight at Falling Waters. Though they did not look like much, in a young war full of puffed-up amateurs they passed for a well-trained fighting unit, and Jackson was extremely proud of them. The hot, flat crossroads where they now found themselves, thirty miles west of Washington, DC, would, within two days, become one of the most famous places in the Western world. It was called Manassas Junction.

  There were exactly two reasons why anyone cared about the little junction that summer. First, it marked the point where the 148-mile-long Orange and Alexandria Railroad, the principal north–south line in Virginia, crossed the Manassas Gap Railroad, a 77-mile-long line that linked the fertile lower Shenandoah Valley with the rest of northern Virginia. This made Manassas Junction the most important strategic site north of Richmond and the inevitable target of a Union advance. Second, the Confederacy had decided, at all costs, to defend it. This meant placing its largest army between Manassas Junction and McDowell’s Union army, which had moved west from its camps near the Potomac to the tiny town of Centreville, a small cluster of buildings that included several taverns, tanyards, and a squat stone church seven miles to the northeast. It had also meant fortifying the land around the junction itself: trenches had been dug and stockades erected. Amazingly, in the middle of those works was a giant, three-ton naval cannon that had somehow been dragged into place and would hurl thirty-two-pound balls, though it was difficult to imagine, just then, at what or at whom such a massive projectile was going to be thrown.3