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

by S. C. Gwynne

  “When I had finished,” said Smith, “he rose from the ground on which he had been seated, shook my hand warmly, and said, ‘I am very, very sorry.’ Without another word he went slowly out to his horse . . . mounted very deliberately, and rode sadly away.”10 Friends later said that Jackson found the South’s indolence in the days after Manassas to be “the darkest period of our struggle.”11

  Meanwhile, in Jackson’s and other Confederate camps near Manassas, autumn slid by, with little to mark the days. Drills were conducted four or five times a day. The men lived mostly in huge, conical Sibley tents, eighteen feet wide and twelve feet tall, supported by a center pole and open at the top to allow smoke to escape. Designed to fit twelve men, they often held twenty, and they were afflicted with the usual run of camp pests. Their canvas roofs and walls were often covered with black flies and mosquitoes—“gallinippers,” as some soldiers called them. There were blood-sucking buffalo gnats that dived into ears and nose, blowflies, chiggers, fleas and, worst of all, lice (“gray backs”) that roamed freely over the body and took up residence in its more hirsute areas.12 As always, there was disease. Diarrhea and dysentery were universal. Men who had never seen combat and never would see combat were already dying at a steady rate. If Jackson himself suffered from these afflictions, which he almost certainly did, he never mentioned it.

  The highlight of Jackson’s time in camp was a mid-September visit from Anna—one of the perquisites of his new rank. The journey from her parents’ home in North Carolina, where she now lived, was difficult. Because her escort did not have a military “passport” to the front, she was forced to travel alone by rail from Richmond to Manassas—something Southern ladies in antebellum times did not often do—and because of a missed connection was compelled to spend the night in the train car at Fairfax station. She spent a few hours at a house that was being used as a hospital—a “place of horrors,” as she called it—where she saw soldiers building coffins.13

  Jackson was thrilled to have her with him. In just a few months, their lives had changed dramatically. Their home in Lexington was abandoned and closed up, their slaves placed with other families. Their happy domestic routines—Jackson’s job, the church, the black Sunday school, the Franklin debating society, their visits to the local springs—had all vanished from their lives. Jackson’s garden, and his little farm outside of town, lay untilled and untended. Their beloved Amy had died that fall, and both had grieved for her. For the moment they had only each other, and they made the most of their time together. Jackson secured them a room near his camp. They attended church in a small farmhouse, and ate together at a mess table under the trees, which Anna enjoyed immensely. She met General Johnston, was impressed by his “polished manners,” and watched a Grand Review of his entire command, finding it “the most imposing military display I have ever witnessed.” She received many social calls from officers and enlisted men of the Stonewall Brigade, all intensely curious to see what their general’s wife was like. The highlight of the visit was a tour of the Manassas battlefield, conducted by Jackson and his artillery chief, W. N. Pendleton, the minister from Lexington. She found the geography itself surprisingly ordinary, writing that Bull Run was “a small, insignificant stream,” and that there was “nothing remarkable” about the terrain of the battlefield. But she was fascinated to hear Jackson and Pendleton describe the movements of the two armies. They toured Henry House, now famous, half destroyed with shot and shell; they saw human bones and the carcasses of horses.14

  And then Anna had to leave. If the machinery of war was moving slowly or not at all in the larger army, Jackson’s own situation was much more fluid. On October 7 he was promoted to major general, thus completing a dizzying ascent from a disregarded major of engineers to high command in six months. He was in rarefied company, now one of four division commanders in Johnston’s army (the others were James Longstreet, Earl Van Dorn, and G. W. Smith), and earning three and a half times his salary at VMI—$4,812 annually compared with $1,300.15 The promotion was perhaps the final measure of how his performance on Henry Hill was seen in the Confederate army’s high command. Jackson’s skill and courage as a field commander were undeniable.

  Still, there were doubters. Many—if not most—of the officers in the army, while they acknowledged his performance at Manassas, questioned his aptitude for higher command.16 “I fear the Government is exchanging our best Brigade Commander for a second or third class Major General,” said one of them.17 In late October, in response to lobbying from Congressman Alexander Boteler and others, Jackson was given command of what was to be called the Valley District—the area between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Mountains that consisted mainly of the Shenandoah Valley. On the chilly afternoon of November 4, Jackson arrived in the northern valley town of Winchester to take command. It was, among other things, a heartbreakingly beautiful place to make war.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A SEASON OF STORMS

  Compared with the Washington-to-Richmond corridor, the Shenandoah Valley was a military backwater. It wasn’t in the far northwestern part of the state Jackson had told Davis he wanted, and Winchester’s gently rolling, open geography would be hard to defend. But Jackson was pleased anyway. Winchester, a pretty town of foursquare brick homes Jackson had fallen in love with during his brief time there with Johnston, had enormous strategic importance as the northernmost defensive post of the Confederacy. With a population of 4,400, it was a bustling commercial center, a crossroads where nine turnpikes and railroads converged. The town was also the northern gateway and military key to the fertile Shenandoah Valley—that slanting, 150-mile-long, 25-mile-wide alley between two muscular, smoke-blue mountain ranges whose agricultural yields in wheat, rye, hay, barley, oats, corn, and potatoes were unrivaled in the South. There was little doubt, moreover, that a Union occupation of the valley would be an outright disaster for the Confederacy, shutting off a critical food source and opening a tailor-made corridor of invasion to Richmond complete with its own railroad line and supply base.1 When Jackson wrote Alexander Boteler that “if the Valley is lost, Virginia is lost,” he was simply stating what anyone with any knowledge of local geography would have known. His mission, at the extreme left of the Confederate line, 80 miles west of Joe Johnston’s headquarters in Centreville, was to prevent that from happening. He would have his hands full: in October a Union army of 5,000 had swept local militia aside and seized nearby Romney, Virginia, in a parallel river valley only 35 miles west of Winchester; that force had since swelled to 7,000 men. Fifty miles to the north, across the Potomac River in Frederick, Maryland, waited 16,000 troops under General Nathaniel Banks. And scattered along the Potomac and into the western mountains were some 22,000 troops reporting to General William S. Rosecrans.2

  Against 43,000 Union troops Jackson had only a meager force. By December he had about 5,000 men: 2,000-plus in the battle-tested Stonewall Brigade, another 2,500 militia he had inherited or recruited, and some 500 cavalry under the brilliant but erratic Colonel Turner Ashby. The recruits did not daunt him; he had learned from his experience at Harpers Ferry how to deal with them. Officers would be summarily broken of their militia ranks; the men would be drilled five times a day until they learned real army discipline. The guardhouse waited for those who clung to their old freedoms. The difference now was that Jackson, as major general, was already a much harder man than the novice colonel, less forgiving of error, less tolerant of anything like a challenge to his authority. He was never angry or emotional and, indeed, as he laid out his camps around Winchester he was all business: rules were rules, violations were violations; consequences must follow.

  This new order was on display in mid-November, when bad weather prompted enlisted men in the Stonewall Brigade to seek shelter inside the town of Winchester in spite of Jackson’s strict orders to stay in their camps. There had been incidents: men were drinking and making trouble. His solution was to expand the original restrictions to include officers, who reacted ang
rily at what they saw as an assault on their personal privileges. Nine colonels and majors, including the brigade’s temporary commander, sent a joint communiqué to Jackson huffily asserting that his order was “an unwarranted assumption of authority” and “an improper inquiry into their private matters” and freedoms “accorded in every other department of the army.” Jackson replied immediately, and sternly, that these officers were “in violation of Army regulations” and that, either out of “incompetency” or “neglect of duty,” they had been responsible for the arrests of several of their enlisted men in town. The carefully chosen term “neglect of duty” carried its own threat of court-martial. He then laid down the law in flat, uninflected language: “If officers desire to have control over their commands,” Jackson wrote, “they must remain habitually with them, and industriously attend to their instructions and comfort, and in battle lead them well, and in such manner as to command their admiration.”3 In case anyone wondered how serious he was, he moved immediately to replace the brigade’s commander. Business was business.

  Two weeks later, he again displayed what seemed to his men to be a new, strangely unyielding, unforgiving view of war. A soldier named James A. Miller, of Harpers Ferry, had gotten drunk and shot and wounded his captain. An army court-martial had found him guilty and sentenced him to death by firing squad. Because Jackson was in a position to commute the sentence, a number of pleas for leniency were made to him on Miller’s behalf, including an impassioned one from Jackson’s friend Reverend James Graham. Jackson refused. He upheld the court-martial, and Miller was shot to death by the 2nd Virginia in Winchester on November 6. (It was later learned that Jefferson Davis, more sympathetic than his major general, actually did commute Miller’s sentence, but a messenger bearing his order got drunk and never delivered it.4) The men were learning quickly that, in Jackson’s command, unlike most of the rest of the army, or the army they thought they knew, there would be no bending of the rules. Jackson may have had trouble enforcing discipline in his section room with mischievous, fresh-faced college boys, but he had no trouble doing so in a rough army camp.

  What Jackson mainly wanted was to attack a Union army. He had been made to wait passively for months in the camps around Manassas. Now, with something approximating an independent command, he was eager to advance. He was aware that with such a numerical disadvantage his only chance was to keep the enemy off balance. The way to do that, it seemed to him, was with tactical strikes. Two weeks after his arrival he wrote to Confederate secretary of war Judah Benjamin in Richmond with a plan, endorsed by Johnston, for a winter campaign “to capture the Federal forces at Romney.”5 He would need more men, and he proposed that three brigades in the Allegheny Mountains south and west of Winchester, under the command of Brigadier General William W. Loring, be ordered to join him. Thus reinforced—he would have more than ten thousand men—he would seize Romney.

  Once in possession of Romney, he proposed to cross a sizable chunk of the Allegheny Mountains in winter and strike deep into northwestern Virginia (now West Virginia). The latter proposal was interesting for two reasons. First, it reflected Jackson’s persistent, terrier-like refusal to give up on the idea of attacking and occupying his Union-leaning homeland. Second, it was, as Jackson modestly noted, “an arduous undertaking” that would involve “the sacrifice of much comfort.” This was a spectacular understatement. While his scheme did not quite come up to Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps with his army in the year 218 BC, the Alleghenies were steep, forbidding mountains. They were often covered with snow in December. They were subject to bitter cold and ice storms. Romney would be difficult enough. Probing, as Jackson suggested, into the country of the Little Kanawha and Monongahela Rivers could, in bad weather, prove disastrous. Still, Jackson was persuasive; Benjamin and Johnston approved the plan, pending the arrival of Loring’s brigades in Winchester. Without Loring’s men, Jackson could not even dream of attacking at Romney and beyond.

  On paper, the forty-three-year-old Loring was everything the Confederacy wanted in a brigadier general. At age fourteen he had enlisted in the Florida territorial militia to fight Seminole Indians. After a brief career as a lawyer and legislator, he enlisted in the US Army and fought with distinction in the Mexican-American War. He was breveted a colonel for bravery at the Battle of Chapultepec, then had his arm shattered by a bullet as he was running through one of the gates to Mexico City in the company of his fellow officer Ulysses S. Grant. Though Loring later had the arm amputated, he stayed on active duty, fighting Indians in the Northwest and on the Texas–New Mexico frontier. In 1857 he tracked and killed the notorious Apache war chief Cuchillo Negro. Loring’s weaknesses, which would soon be on display, were a belligerent, self-righteous streak that led him into confrontations with fellow officers, and a McClellan-like tendency to exaggerate the difficulties he faced.6

  Jackson had wanted Loring in Winchester in early December. But the last of Loring’s troops would not arrive until Christmas. Jackson, impatient for action, had occupied himself by doing minor mischief: he managed to break a dam on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, one of the main transportation routes between Washington and the Cumberland—part of his larger strategic plan to shut off Washington’s coal supply. (The Federals quickly repaired it.) Occasionally his frustration with Loring’s tardiness flashed into anger. When Colonel John M. Patton of the 21st Virginia in Loring’s command reported for duty, he complained to Jackson that his men had had a desperately hard march. “I feel it my duty to say to you that my men are so foot sore and weary that they could just crawl up barely,” he said. “Jackson snapped back, ‘Colonel, if that is the condition of your men, I will not send them on this expedition. Take them back and report to your brigadier.’ ” Patton quickly decided that his men were not quite as exhausted as he had suggested they were.

  One of Loring’s three brigade commanders, William B. Taliaferro (pronounced “Tolliver”), offered a classic example of how quickly the war had changed men’s fortunes. Taliaferro was from an old-line, aristocratic Virginia family. He had attended Harvard and William and Mary, and had served in the Virginia legislature. He had also been president of VMI’s governing Board of Visitors during Jackson’s tenure there. That meant, of course, that he knew all about the eccentric professor and the complaints against him and had witnessed firsthand the attempt to get rid of him. Now Taliaferro was a mere colonel in Major General Jackson’s army. After the war he wrote about how this shifting perspective had changed his opinion of the man. “Jackson disclosed to me a trait which had not struck me before,” he wrote. “There is a real difference in looking at a brevet major and a full major general. At [VMI] he was more than ordinarily passive. The fire was there, but he was a soldier in grain, and he believed it to be his duty, in his subordinate place, to execute, not to suggest. I had not noticed the saliency of his character—I will not say restlessness, but the desire to do, to be moving, to make, to embrace opportunity.”7

  Jackson could do none of this until Loring arrived. So he waited impatiently, reported to Johnston by telegraph once a week, tried unsuccessfully to convince Virginia governor John Letcher to send him more troops, complained about Loring’s lateness, and attempted to sidestep the rising number of people who wanted to look at Stonewall Jackson, the hero of Manassas.

  But there were compensations. Anna arrived just before Christmas, and the couple found warm, welcoming quarters in the house of the Reverend James Graham. The man who could, in effect, order one of his own soldiers shot was as playful and affectionate as ever in private with his beloved esposa. The food was good, and Jackson’s messmates, most of them from Lexington and all with personal ties to him, were lively company. They included Jackson’s chief of staff, John T. L. Preston, who was not only Maggie’s husband but also Jackson’s business partner and VMI colleague; Ellie’s cousin George Junkin; Jackson’s own cousin Alfred Jackson; and Sandy Pendleton, the charming twenty-one-year-old son of Jackson’s friend the Lexington minister and Rock
bridge artillery chief W. N. Pendleton. Such nepotism was so obvious that when Jackson asked another cousin from western Virginia, Judge W. L. Jackson, to join his staff, he declined, saying that “to appoint another of your relatives will occasion dissatisfaction.”8 Jackson, as usual, was much less guarded among friends and family. “We have a merry table,” wrote Preston to Maggie, “I as much a boy as any of them, and Jackson grave as a signpost, til something chances to overcome him, and then he breaks out into a laugh so awkward that it is manifest that he never laughed enough to learn how. He is a most simple-hearted man.”9

  • • •

  Jackson’s Romney Expedition, as it would be known to history, began on New Year’s Day 1862 in unseasonably warm weather. His plan was to move north to seize the town of Bath, thereby covering his flank and rear, then swing west and south to attack Romney. The plan sounded simple enough. It turned out to be anything but. The temperature started dropping on the first day, falling below 32 degrees by evening. A biting wind made it feel even colder. Overcoats, blankets, tents, and food that had been left behind on supply wagons never made it to camp, which meant that most of the men spent the long, freezing night without cover of any kind. They resumed the march at dawn, still exposed and without food, but now in wind-driven snow. Temperatures fell into the 20s. When Loring ordered his brigades into bivouac short of Jackson’s destination for the day, Jackson, furious, ordered them all to pack up and move forward, without dinner, in the freezing darkness. Loring, who had been complaining bitterly about the mismanagement of the supply train, and about Jackson’s failure to tell him anything about his plans or military objectives, was appalled. “By God, sir,” he cried in the presence of his troops, “this is the damnedest outrage ever perpetrated in the annals of history, keeping my men out here in the cold without food!”10 The men themselves were nearly mutinous, blaming “Tom Fool” Jackson for their misery.