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

by S. C. Gwynne

  Late on the chilly, rain-lashed afternoon of March 21, 1862, an elderly former militia officer named Jonah Tavener was traveling on horseback from his home in Loudoun County, Virginia, to the Shenandoah Valley. He had just come through Snicker’s Gap, one of the main passes through the Blue Ridge Mountains, when he saw something that, in that month and year of the war, was still extraordinary: a large body of blue-clad troops—two thousand to three thousand of them—winding their way eastward. Eastward. Tavener may have been too old for the army, but he was not too old to understand an important enemy troop movement when he saw it. Undetected by Union scouts, he swung south of the marching column, where he soon encountered Confederate riders under the command of Colonel Turner Ashby, who happened to be an old acquaintance. He was taken to Ashby, to whom he told his story. Ashby immediately grasped its importance. He dispatched Tavener, along with a special courier, to Jackson himself, where his story detonated like an eighteen-pound percussion shell.1

  The news changed everything. It altered Jackson’s strategy and set in motion events that changed the war in the Shenandoah Valley and the war in Virginia. It even changed the fate of the Union troops Tavener had seen. Though he did not understand it at the time, Tavener had spotted a piece of McClellan’s master plan to destroy the Confederacy, a plan as yet unknown to the brain trust in the Confederate War Department in Richmond. Tavener’s little discovery had another effect, too: it prompted the opening move in what would become known to history as Stonewall Jackson’s valley campaign.

  To understand what Tavener saw, we have to back up five days, to a somewhat simpler moment when it seemed that fortune was smiling on the Union and all its works and there was no possibility that a minor irritant like Thomas J. Jackson could ever cause any real trouble in Virginia. McClellan was preparing for his unprecedented gambit: the movement of his army from Washington to the York-James Peninsula. He was also bound, by previous agreement with President Lincoln, to leave enough men to keep Washington, DC, “entirely secure.” Fearful, as usual, that the enemy had more soldiers than he did, McClellan was scrambling to bring in every able-bodied man he could find. Thus on March 16, four days after Jackson’s retreat, McClellan sent an order to Major General Nathaniel Banks in Winchester, summoning his two divisions to the Washington area, where their presence would free up soldiers for the great expedition. “Post your command in the vicinity of Manassas,” he told Banks, “intrench yourself strongly and throw cavalry pickets well out to the front.” He also instructed Banks to leave “something like two regiments of cavalry . . . to occupy Winchester and thoroughly scour the country south of the railway and up the Shenandoah Valley.”2 For once Little Mac was not exaggerating Confederate troop strength. That was because it was manifestly against his self-interest to do so. It would have deprived him of men he desperately needed. The valley could be dealt with briefly and dismissively; it was a strategic afterthought, a sideshow.

  Thus Banks began preparations for departure. He sent a division (more than nine thousand soldiers), under the command of Brigadier General James Shields, to chase Jackson. Shields was to destroy him if possible, but, in any case, to make sure he was indeed far away from Winchester when the Federal troops marched out. Shields was one of the more arresting personalities of the early war. Like his immediate superior, Nathaniel Banks, he was wealthy, politically powerful, and entirely self-made. Born and raised in Ireland, he sailed for America at age sixteen but was shipwrecked off the coast of Scotland. He stayed in that country, working as a tutor to a wealthy family. Four years later he finally made it to New York, where he discovered that a wealthy uncle who had promised to help him had died. He briefly went to sea with a merchantman and eventually fetched up in Illinois, where he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1832. He was elected to the Illinois legislature as a Democrat in 1836, thus beginning a rapid political ascent that was marred only by a smear campaign conducted against him by his fellow Illinois politician Abraham Lincoln. The campaign led Shields to challenge Lincoln to a duel; Lincoln apologized, and the two men somehow ended up friends. Shields became a justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, commissioner of the General Land Office in Washington, and a US senator from Illinois. He was a brigadier general in the Mexican-American War, where he was wounded twice, and led the decisive charge in the Battle of Churubusco. He became wealthy in various businesses that included a silver mine in Mexico. Shields was slender, five feet eight inches tall, and immaculately dressed. He was urbane, sophisticated, confident, charming, funny, and courtly.3 He was also, in the words of one of his artillery officers, “vainglorious to the last degree.”4 This unfortunate latter trait would destroy his Civil War career.

  His vanity must have been enormously flattered by his troops’ triumphant march up the valley pike, strutting like an army of occupation and opposed only by Turner Ashby’s small cavalry unit that served as Jackson’s rear guard. Shields was now deep into the mysterious, lethal, alien world of the Confederacy. Redbuds were in early bloom. The sullen, hostile citizenry stared balefully at the Union soldiers as they passed. One of his soldiers thought, uncharitably, that some of them had a “cowed and stupid look.”5 Though Ashby’s cavaliers could not match Shields’s numbers or his firepower, they could make trouble, and that is what they did, burning bridges, sniping at pickets, and lobbing shells from their three-gun horse artillery. As equestrians, the Union cavalry was simply no match for them; indeed, they were awestruck by the seemingly deerlike ability of Ashby’s troopers to jump fences and cross rough terrain at high speed, and generally ride circles around them. At one point Shields concocted a plan to circle and entrap the Southern cavalry, which failed laughably. “A gull would stand as good a chance to catch a fox, as our force to catch Ashby,” wrote one of Shields’s staff.6

  Thus did Ashby’s gallant seven hundred harass and annoy Shields as he drove south in the shadow of the hulking Massanutten Mountain. They certainly slowed him down. But they changed no Union minds. Shields’s division entered the valley town of Strasburg unopposed, then pursued Ashby another five miles south. At that point Ashby’s guns opened again, but at such a “ridiculous distance,” according to one Union officer, that the Irish general concluded that his work was done.7 Jackson, by Shields’s reckoning, was now at least forty miles south of Winchester. He was no longer a threat. Shields’s infantry turned and marched back to Strasburg. The next day, March 20, they returned to Winchester—a hard march in wind, rain, and bone-chilling cold. They were in a hurry. The war was going to be over soon, the action was all going to be to the east, and no one, not least Banks and Shields, wanted to miss it.

  Ashby, trailing Shields northward through the valley, soon concluded that the Union general had given up his pursuit. That was the first stunning piece of news Ashby gave Jackson on March 21. Until the moment he heard it, Jackson had been facing both the destruction of his army and the loss of the valley. Ashby’s scouts and spies had reported that Shields would likely pursue him to Staunton, a large, prosperous town that was the southern valley’s counterpart to Winchester in the north. Staunton was Jackson’s supply base. It was also a strategic gem: whoever held it held the Upper Valley, and the Upper Valley was the back door to Richmond. If Union troops could move, unobstructed, east through Rockfish Gap in the Blue Ridge and aboard the Virginia Central Railroad, they could virtually guarantee the city’s fall. Jackson, outnumbered three to one, could either fight it out where he stood—in the vicinity of Mount Jackson—or fight it out farther south. Either way the outlook, in the absence of reinforcements, was grim if not hopeless. Jackson, with little real choice, had been planning to turn and fight even before he heard Ashby’s news, even though there was almost no way he could have won.8

  The second piece of news, even more electrifying to Jackson, came in the person of Jonah Tavener. Shields’s abandonment of his pursuit had suggested to Jackson that Banks was leaving the valley to reinforce McClellan. Tavener’s story offered striking confirmation. It also su
ggested a course of action. Two days before, on March 19, Jackson had received a letter from Joe Johnston, now camped safely behind the Rappahannock, fifty miles south of Washington. Johnston had a very specific agenda. He wanted Jackson to do everything he could to keep Banks from reinforcing the Union army at Richmond. “It is important to keep that army in the Valley,” he wrote, “and that it should not reinforce McClellan. Do try to prevent it by getting and keeping as near as prudence will permit.” This was easy enough for Johnston to say. He was not alone in the valley, facing a much larger Union force. Jackson was clearly not supposed to give battle. At that moment, no one in Richmond was in the mood for another humiliating Confederate defeat. In Johnston’s fantasy world, Jackson would be able to dance so tantalizingly near that the Federals would have no choice but to keep Banks’s divisions in the valley.

  But in fact Johnston’s message was exactly what Jackson wanted to hear. He wasted no time and consulted no one. He would never again repeat the fiasco of his Winchester council of war. Armed with both Ashby’s and Tavener’s intelligence, he put his army on the road the next morning, March 22, heading straight back up the valley pike for Winchester. That day he conducted the first of many forced marches in the valley—twenty-three miles through mud and rain (twenty-seven miles for the rearmost units)—at a pace that caused scores of men to drop from exhaustion and wagons and supplies to fall miles behind the infantry. Men were hungry, footsore, and miserable, but they covered a large amount of ground quickly. They would soon be famous for it and earn another nickname for themselves: “Jackson’s foot cavalry.” Jackson’s operating principles in combat were speed and deception. March 22, 1862, saw the first full-scale exercise of the former. Fast or not, though, it was an astoundingly risky move. The march placed Jackson ninety-five miles from his supply base, in a countryside abounding with Federal soldiers who were eager to destroy him. There were at least ten thousand Union troops at Winchester, perhaps far more. At that point Jackson had no way of knowing. Tavener had seen only a single brigade heading east. But from Jackson’s point of view his mission was clear: keep Banks in the valley. He was accomplishing that the only way he knew. In his mind, too, was his beloved Winchester, whose residents he had abandoned without a fight eleven days before.

  • • •

  While Jackson was pushing his men furiously north, Ashby, well in advance, had plans of his own. At 2:00 p.m. he and a small force of riders hit Shields’s supply train about four miles south of Winchester near the tiny hamlet of Kernstown, which consisted of a handful of businesses—butcher, wheelwright, blacksmith, cooperage, and tavern—and a stone church. He had unloaded enough shell and canister to get their attention, and nearly captured part of the supply train, when Shields summoned cavalry, artillery, and infantry and counterattacked. Ashby, greatly outnumbered, fell back six miles, to Newtown. Though he had done little damage to men or matériel, one of his shell fragments had managed to strike Brigadier General Shields in the chest and shoulder. He fainted several times and was carried from the field.

  Turner Ashby embodied the immense cavalry advantages the South held early in the war. There were a number of reasons for this. The South had more people who used the horse as an integral part of their lives, and the landed Southern gentry was full of accomplished riders.9 Northerners, meanwhile, were more likely to see horses as beasts of burden. Confederate cavalries also had superior animals, mainly because of the Southern fondness for racing, and because Southern cavalrymen supplied their own mounts. Most Southern towns had their own horse tracks. In the North, slow-moving draft horses were the preferred breeds.10 Cavalry in the Civil War was rarely used to charge infantry; more often, it functioned as the army’s eyes, tracking enemy movements, screening their own army’s movements, using their high mobility to strike enemy communications and supply lines. To be effective required serious expertise, which necessitated far more training than the infantry received.11 Even the greenest infantry could be more or less shoved into battle. Not so cavalrymen. In the North it was thought that it took fully two years to produce a seasoned trooper.

  The dark-eyed, dark-skinned, heavily bearded thirty-three-year-old Ashby was, by all accounts, as brilliant a pure rider as anyone in Virginia had ever seen. In the remaining two months of his life his dashing, reckless, romantic bravery, riding in the service of Stonewall Jackson, would captivate the South. He came, in fact, to represent for many Southerners everything that was noble—and superior—about the Southern cause, in a world where Northerners tended to see shades of Simon Legree: he was said to be honorable, charitable, Christian, gentle except when in a fight, of pure character, and of course he could and did ride with reckless abandon through the ranks of his Yankee counterparts.12 “Riding his black stallion, he looked like a knight of the olden time,” wrote Henry Kyd Douglas, a member of Jackson’s staff. “Galloping over the field on his favorite war horse, his white one, eager, watchful, he was fascinating, inspiring. Altogether he was the most picturesque horseman ever seen in the Shenandoah Valley.”13

  His background was less spectacular. He grew up on a modest family farm in Fauquier County that suffered considerable economic hardship. He never attended college, and instead went into the mercantile business, operating out of a shop near a railroad depot, at which he was not very successful. Nor was he exactly the beau ideal he seemed in articles such as the one in Southern Illustrated News that pictured him on a white charger and wearing a long coat and plumed hat, the very model of equestrian gallantry. He was in fact a fierce, driven, border-state partisan who specialized in a brutal and highly irregular form of warfare far from the eye of the public or the press. One example: In October 1861, after a fight with Union cavalry, Ashby and his troopers stripped four of the Union dead naked and spread one out in the form of the crucifixion, with holes cut through his palms.14 It is hard to see the chivalry in such an act, which horrified Union soldiers. In 1861, too, he had avenged the wounding of some of his men in a skirmish by killing what he estimated in a letter to his sister was “twenty or thirty of them.”15

  Ashby was driven partly if not wholly by vengeance. In June 1861, he and his brother Richard had served in the 7th Virginia Cavalry, guarding the border counties of the lower (northernmost) Shenandoah Valley and hunting down Unionists. In one fight, Richard received a saber blow that took off part of his head and knocked him from his saddle. While he writhed on the ground, his attacker ran his sword through Richard’s abdomen, stole his spurs and horse, and rode off. Turner later found his brother, blood bubbling from his mouth, begging for water. He suffered for a week, then died. “From that hour Turner Ashby was a changed man,” wrote fellow Virginian Dabney Maury. “A stern sorrow his controlling motive, a deep purpose of vengeance possessed him, all his buoyancy and bright hopes of fame gave place to grief.”16 There is no doubt that Turner Ashby was a brilliant, dashing cavalier. He was almost unbelievably brave. He was also a stone-cold killer.

  In spite of Ashby’s strenuous efforts with his little force of 290 horsemen on the afternoon of March 22, neither Banks nor his division commander, Shields, had taken his presence seriously. They were convinced that Jackson was still forty or more miles away, and that Ashby, for whatever reason, was simply choosing to pester them, to no particular end. Jackson, meanwhile, rolling north at full speed, was now a half day’s march away from Winchester and planning a full-scale assault. He, too, was very much in the dark about his enemy, but in a far more dangerous way. That evening Ashby reported to Jackson that only four Union regiments and one or two batteries remained in Winchester—a force so small that even Jackson’s little army outnumbered it. But Ashby’s normally reliable intelligence was dead wrong. Only one Union division had left the valley. Jonah Tavener had seen the first third of it on the afternoon of March 21. The other two brigades, under Brigadier General Alpheus Williams, had followed the next morning. But that left a full division under Shields, which outnumbered Jackson at least two to one.17 Jackson was marching squarely,
and unknowingly, into what amounted to a trap. It was indeed such an apparently perfect, elegant trap that James Shields would later falsely claim credit for having deliberately designed it to draw Jackson in.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A JAGGED LINE OF BLOOD

  Generals Banks, Shields, and just about everyone else in command in the Union army in Winchester awoke on the overcast early morning of Sunday, March 23, with the same thought: that Turner Ashby, whatever odd mischief he had been up to the day before, was long gone. Two full Union divisions were going to march east across the mighty Blue Ridge Mountains to join McClellan in his grand enterprise and there was nothing to stop them. The war was going to be won, and soon, and they were going to be part of the army that would march triumphantly into Richmond before the summer’s heats. And so it caused considerable surprise and consternation when a Federal reconnaissance patrol, sometime around 9:00 a.m., ran smack into Ashby’s cavalry and horse artillery. He hadn’t gone anywhere. Not only that, he had somehow been reinforced with four infantry regiments, and apparently intended not merely to harass but also to move aggressively forward up the eastern side of the valley turnpike. Ashby, believing his own faulty intelligence, and as always recklessly brave, was determined to sweep straight into Winchester and retake the town before Jackson arrived.

  It was unfortunate for him that, while Banks and Shields, stationed in a house three miles north, in Winchester, persisted in believing that this small rebel force posed no threat, the wounded Shields’s battlefield replacement, Colonel Nathan Kimball, very definitely did not. Kimball, a smart, sensible Indiana doctor and Mexican-American War veteran who would go on to a distinguished war career as a Union general, wasted no time in countering Ashby’s attack. He threw troops forward and brought reinforcements up. Soon he had 3,000 men on the field facing Ashby’s 450 north of the small village of Kernstown and east of the valley pike. (Kimball was not aware that Ashby’s force was so small.) Ashby was repulsed just after 9:00 a.m., and then again at about 10:00 a.m. By 10:30 he had a pretty clear idea of what he was up against, and it was emphatically not the skeleton force he had told Jackson about, though he would compound his earlier mistake by mysteriously failing to tell Jackson of this potentially shattering development. Minié balls from Federal sharpshooters zipped through his ranks with their peculiar sibilant hiss, while the weirdly accurate, rifled Parrott guns of the Federal artillery began to find their range. One of Ashby’s artillerists recalled what it was like to watch, for the first time, incoming artillery: