by S. C. Gwynne
Conditions would get worse, much worse. The next day the temperature dropped to 18 degrees. Still, Jackson pushed them, upbraiding Stonewall Brigade commander Richard B. Garnett when he allowed his men, who had not eaten in thirty hours, to stop and cook rations for the day. (He had never liked Garnett anyway and had worked to block Garnett’s appointment to command his beloved brigade.) At sunset on the third day, as the column approached Bath, one of Loring’s brigades, under Jackson’s VMI colleague Colonel William Gilham, clashed with Union skirmishers. As darkness fell, Gilham ordered the men to bivouac in the snow-covered field. Jackson immediately overruled him, sending John Preston with orders for him to advance into Bath. Loring, again astounded by Jackson’s orders, immediately countermanded them. Jackson arrived, just as angry, and the two exchanged heated words. Jackson gave up the advance.
The next day Gilham committed what was, for Jackson, an unforgivable sin. Though he had been given direct orders to advance into the town of Bath, he had failed to do so. His skirmishers had been fired on again by the rear guard of the retreating Union forces, and, out of fear or caution, he had simply stopped. Then he had compounded his error by neglecting to tell Jackson what he had done. Gilham’s mistakes would mean the end of his brief war career. Jackson brought charges against him, specifying that he had neglected his duty by failing “to attack the federal forces after overtaking them near Sir John’s Run Depot on Jan. 4, 1862,” and that he “did fail to report either directly or indirectly . . . the cause of his having failed to attack.”11 (Gilham later wrote critically of Jackson, saying that it was Jackson’s fault—choosing poor roads and ordering militia to do regular army work—that they had not captured the Federals at Bath.12) There would be no court-martial for Gilham. Instead, Jackson would place him on indefinite furlough, and send him back to VMI to resume his duties there.
It is worth noting exactly who Jackson had just pushed so abruptly out of the army. During the years Jackson had taught at VMI, William Henry Gilham had been the institute’s highly respected commandant. He was the academic star of the institution, its most brilliant professor, the man responsible for much of its curriculum. A graduate of West Point and a veteran of the Mexican-American War, he was smart, elegant, self-possessed, and enormously popular with cadets. He was considered a brilliant drillmaster. He was, in short, everything that Jackson was not. In 1859 he had commanded the VMI expedition, in which Jackson had taken part, to Charlestown to provide security for John Brown’s execution. But Gilham was more than just Jackson’s colleague. He was also Jackson’s friend and business partner in several ventures. There are no records of what happened between the two men, or how Jackson told Gilham what was going to happen to him, or how Gilham reacted to the news, or whether he was grateful, on some level, that Jackson did not drag him through a court-martial. It was probably no consolation to Gilham, who came so far short of expectations, that Jackson would be much less kind with other officers who got in his way.
The misery continued, unabated. January 7 was, for many of the men, the most horrific noncombat experience of the war. In a fierce north wind, with temperatures hovering in the 10-to-20-degree range, the men, wagons, and horses moved across icy roads frozen hard as a rock and covered with six inches of snow. “It was a desperate time,” wrote acting chief quartermaster Michael Harman. “Sleet, snow, horses falling and braking [sic] their legs; wagons stalled and overturned, soldiers shrieking from painful, frozen wounds.”13 Other accounts described the same horrors. “Men were frozen to death,” wrote John Worsham of the 21st Virginia (Gilham’s regiment). “Others were frozen so badly they never recovered, and rheumatism contracted by many was never gotten rid of. Large numbers were barefooted, having burned their shoes while trying to warm their feet at fires.”14 Sometimes men waited, shivering in the storm, up to ten hours while the army’s 160-wagon supply train labored past. Men, horses, wagons—everything was slipping, falling. “Limbs were broken as well as guns and swords when a dozen soldiers went down at the same time,” wrote Henry Kyd Douglas. “Horses fell and were killed.”15 To add to such appalling misery, the men also became infested with lice.16 The final march was brutal, too, as the ice thawed to a muddy slush and the men plodded forward in a sleeting rain. Many of them were encased in icicles. On January 14, Jackson and his soldiers marched into Romney after two harrowing weeks. They discovered that the seven thousand Union troops and artillery who had occupied the town, alerted to Jackson’s advance, had evacuated and fled north.
Jackson showed no sympathy at all for his troops’ suffering. Though he had shared every bit of this misery with his men—often walking beside them, sometimes dismounting to “put his shoulder to the wheel of a wagon to keep it from sliding back”—he kept on driving forward, stopping for a few days only when he had no choice but to put winter shoes on his horses, whose falls had created mayhem in the ranks.17 He seemed to feel only frustration at the failure of his column to move faster. For that he held his officers responsible. Before he had even returned to Winchester, Jackson was writing to Secretary of War Judah Benjamin to request that Richard B. Garnett, the brigadier general commanding the Stonewall Brigade and a soldier with an excellent reputation in the army, be relieved of command. “General G. is not qualified to command a brigade . . . he is not able to meet emergencies even in the proper management of his brigade in camp and on the march.” It did not matter to Jackson that Garnett was an experienced soldier and a popular Virginia aristocrat with deep connections in the political and military community. Those were the very reasons his request was denied. As the coming months would prove, Jackson was not finished dealing with Garnett.
Nor was he finished, having seized Romney at such enormous cost to his men, with his plan to push deeper into northwestern Virginia. He now proposed to add reinforcements and march west into even more mountainous country, to capture the Federal supply depot at Cumberland, which was garrisoned with eleven thousand Union soldiers. When Benjamin denied him the troops, he came up with yet another idea—to destroy railroad bridges seventeen miles west of Romney. But it could not be done. Morale had been shattered, especially in Loring’s brigades. Officers were despondent, defeated. As Jackson informed Benjamin in a January 20 letter, “General Loring’s leading brigade, commanded by Col. Taliaferro, was not in a condition to move, the enterprise had to be abandoned. Since leaving Winchester, the 1st instant, the troops have suffered greatly, and Gen. Loring has not a single brigade in a condition for active operations.”18
The hard march had also reduced the size of his army. Even the Stonewall Brigade had less than two-thirds of what it started with. There were many desertions, and much sympathy for the deserters. Men cursed Jackson openly, even members of the Stonewall Brigade. “That Jackson was not popular with his officers and men, even of his old brigade, at that time, is undeniable,” Taliaferro wrote later. “For the true secret of the power of the American soldier is his individuality—the natural result of American citizenship; and Jackson’s men thought, and, thinking, did not think that the ends accomplished by the Romney campaign justified the sacrifices which were made.”19 Jackson might have helped his cause with men and officers if he had given them even the most rudimentary idea of what they were doing, or where they were going. He had told no one anything of his plans, not even his second in command.
And now he would pay for that neglect. When Jackson put his army to winter quarters, he ordered Loring and his three brigades to stay in Romney to make sure Union forces did not reoccupy it. The Stonewall Brigade would return to Winchester, while various militias were posted in other towns. Once the orders were given, Jackson rode forty-three miles on the astoundingly resilient Little Sorrel through the mountains to Winchester, changed out of his mud-covered uniform, and hastened to the Graham house, where, according to Anna, “he came bounding into the sitting-room as joyous and fresh as a schoolboy” and took her in his arms. It would have been obvious to anyone who saw him that he had no regrets about what he had j
ust done. He was, in fact, very pleased with the results of the expedition.20
He was naive. Back in the muddy, icebound “hog pen” that was the tiny town of Romney, with snow, sleet, and rain falling, raw sewage running in the streets, and a courthouse full of rotten meat, Loring and his officers were ready to explode. They felt deeply wronged, not only because of the brutality of the march and Jackson’s strange penchant for secrecy but also because he had left them perilously exposed, with fewer than five thousand soldiers in close proximity to vastly larger numbers of Federals. (They were not, as it turned out, completely wrong. Jackson’s own engineer had pronounced Romney indefensible with the forces Loring had, and Union records would later show that Union general Frederick Lander was preparing to attack Romney on February 3, until his health prevented it.21 Jackson, on the other hand, had accepted his huge numerical disadvantage as the premise of the entire campaign, and it had not changed. He had tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to secure more troops.) They even accused Jackson of favoritism—allowing his “pet” Stonewall Brigade to return home to the relative comforts of Winchester. They pointed to the large numbers of sick men in their ranks, all presumably the result of Jackson’s shocking neglect. In fact, according to Jackson’s surgeon Hunter McGuire, many of the claims of sickness were false: “I organized a guard and guard-house, arrested hundreds of Loring’s men who claimed to be sick, had them examined by the surgeons and returned to duty unless they were sick enough to stay in the hospital. In this way in a very few days I sent back to Loring’s camp fully 1,000 men.”22
Once they realized that Jackson was not going to change his mind, two of Loring’s officers—Colonel Samuel Fulkerson and Colonel William Taliaferro—now opened a campaign against him, appealing directly to the political establishment in Richmond. Fulkerson was old-line Virginia and a district judge. Like Taliaferro, he was a veteran of the Mexican-American War and knew Jackson from having served on the governing board of VMI in the 1850s. (It was more than a little ironic that the two men behind this campaign were both subordinate to Jackson and both his former overseers at VMI. Perhaps they could not quite accept the idea of the eccentric science teacher’s transformation.) Fulkerson, who was well connected in Richmond, wrote a letter bearing a note of endorsement from Taliaferro to Virginia congressmen Walter Preston and Walter R. Staples. He told them that he wanted their help in persuading Secretary of War Benjamin and President Davis to free Loring and his brigades from Jackson’s command. Mostly, they were just desperate to get out of the frozen mud of Romney. Fulkerson said that Jackson had subjected his soldiers to great hardship in an unnecessary and fruitless winter campaign and that the exposure to the cold had “emaciated the force almost to a skeleton” and would discourage reenlistment. In his long postscript to Staples, Taliaferro wrote:
My Dear Staples: I take the liberty with an old friend, which I know you will pardon, to state that every word and every idea conveyed by Colonel F. in his letter to you is strictly and most unfortunately true. The best army I ever saw of its strength has been destroyed by bad marches and bad management. . . . It will be suicidal in the Government to keep this command here.23
After these chummy appeals, next came a formal petition to Loring, drafted by Taliaferro and signed by Fulkerson, six regimental commanders, and Colonel Jesse Burks, who had replaced William Gilham, running through the same complaints and asking Loring to take the matter up with the War Department. Loring added a note to the petition saying he agreed completely with its charges, then sent one copy to Jackson, as military protocol required, and gave the other to Taliaferro, who used his furlough to hand-carry the note to Richmond. Once there, he called on old friends and associates in the capital and the legislature, and lobbied hard to have Loring’s command recalled. Fulkerson and several other officers from Loring’s brigades were in Richmond, on furlough, doing the same thing. According to Jackson ally Alexander Boteler, “several prominent officers of Loring’s command took every opportunity while there to deprecate Jackson and manufacture public opinion against him. They said he was rash, foolhardy, and fanatical; that he had no common sense; was, unquestionably, crazy and entirely unfit to be at the head of an army.”24 Not everyone believed this Loring-sponsored campaign. When Representative Walter Preston was approached by one of the officers, he replied, so that others could hear, “It’s a great pity, sir, that General Jackson has not bitten some of his subordinates on furlough and affected them with the same sort of craziness that he has himself.”25
It was all very odd, informal if not underhanded, unmilitary, and in gross violation of army protocols. As such, the Confederate high command should never have tolerated it. Instead, it was in the presence of Vice President Alexander Stephens and President Jefferson Davis that Taliaferro found his most receptive audiences. Stephens, Taliaferro told Loring, “denounced the Romney expedition in the severest terms,” while Davis “did not hesitate to say at once that Jackson had made a mistake.” In the same “Private and Confidential” note to Loring, Taliaferro wrote, “When I told him of Jackson’s having left us at Romney and having withdrawn his forces to Winchester, I never saw anyone so surprised. . . . I think from all I can find out that the Presid’t is disposed to do us justice. . . . Jackson’s prestige is gone, public sentiment is against him. The leading men of the N.W. have asked me if he was not deficient in mind.”26
Whether the latter was true or not no longer mattered. Davis, upset by what he had heard, and willing, perhaps because of his personal feelings about Jackson, to bypass the entire army command structure, proceeded to instruct Judah Benjamin to recall Loring’s brigades from Romney. The Confederate secretary of war was a talented, complex, flawed political operative. The son of English Jews, he was raised in Louisiana and attended Yale. He became one of his home state’s leading lawyers at a young age. At forty-two he was elected to the US Senate. He was short, rotund, well groomed, and socially adept. “He always looked as if he had just risen at the end of an enjoyed dinner to greet a friend with pleasant news,” wrote historian Douglas Southall Freeman.27 He was ambitious, opportunistic, persuasive, and self-confident to a fault, and so blindly loyal to Davis that he would never side with generals in the field against him.28 He was also, for all his lack of army experience, meddlesome, which meant, as Joe Johnston wrote irritably in his memoirs, bypassing army command on a regular basis by “granting leaves of absence, furloughs, and discharges, accepting resignations . . . upon applications made directly to himself, without the knowledge of officers whose duty it was to look to the interests of the Government in such cases.”29 If it didn’t bother Davis to ignore military protocol in overriding Jackson’s orders, it certainly would not bother Benjamin.
Thus did Jackson receive, on the morning of January 31, a short, abruptly worded telegram from Richmond:
General T. J. Jackson, Winchester, VA:
Our news indicates that a movement is being made to cut off General Loring’s command. Order him back to Winchester immediately.
J. P. Benjamin, Secretary of War
By his own description, Jackson was astonished by what he read. He had just cleared, with considerable pain and suffering, all Union armies from three large Virginia counties, destroyed a hundred miles of railroad track, and had suffered only thirty-five casualties doing it.30 The tone of the message must have struck him as strange, too—as though addressing an underling who did not need to understand the order’s ramifications, instead of a full major general commanding six thousand square miles of Virginia. Within the hour, he had decided what to do, probably with the help of prayer. He would comply with the order as given. And then he would resign. His reply to Benjamin was as follows:
Hon. J. P. Benjamin, Secretary of War
Sir:
Your order requiring me to direct General Loring to return to his command to Winchester immediately has been received and promptly complied with.
With such interference in my command I cannot expect to be of much service in
the field; and accordingly respectfully request to be ordered to report for duty to the Superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute at Lexington; as has been done in the case of other Professors. Should this application not be granted, I respectfully request that the President will accept my resignation from the Army.
I am, sir, very respectfully, your obedient servant, T. J. Jackson.
Unlike Benjamin, Jackson was sticking to military rules and running his correspondence through proper channels. He sent the letter by courier to his immediate superior, Joe Johnston, in Centreville. Jackson also wrote letters to his friends Governor John Letcher and Congressman Alexander Boteler explaining his action. Their substance was, as he told Letcher, that “a sense of duty brought me into the field and has, thus far, kept me here. It now appears to be my duty to return to the institute. . . . I desire to say nothing against the Secretary of War. I take it for granted that he has done what he believes to be best, but I regard such a policy as ruinous.”31
Because Johnston held Jackson’s letter while he tried to persuade him to change his mind, Boteler ended up receiving his letter in Richmond before Benjamin had received Jackson’s reply. Astounded, the bespectacled, bearded Boteler hurried to Benjamin’s office.
“In consequence of your order, Jackson has sent in his resignation,” he told Benjamin.
“What!” the secretary of war exclaimed, wheeling around in his chair. “Jackson resigned! Are you sure of your information?”