by S. C. Gwynne
I saw it flying in its graceful curve through the air, coming directly toward the spot where I was standing. I watched it until it struck the ground about fifteen feet in front of me. I was so interested in the skyball, in its harmless appearance, and surprised that a shell could be so plainly seen during its flight, that I forgot for a moment that danger lurked in the black speck that was descending to earth before me like a schoolboy’s innocent plaything. It proved to have been a percussion shell, and when it struck the ground it exploded and scattered itself in every direction around me.1
Nathan Kimball, meanwhile, believing that he was still not seeing the rebels’ full strength, and ignoring orders from his convalescent commander to attack, had made a wonderful discovery. Just north of Kernstown and west of the valley pike was an elevated promontory known as Pritchard’s Hill, the sort of defensive position army commanders dream about. “The position commanded the plain or valley, and village in front,” he later wrote. “No better position could be found to cover the approaches to Winchester with the forces I had.” He proceeded to load the top of the hill with men and cannons until the place fairly bristled with firepower. By early afternoon Pritchard’s Hill held 16 guns, 300 artillerists, and 6 full regiments—the better part of 3,500 men.
Banks and Shields continued to be certain, in spite of Ashby’s peculiar behavior, that Jackson could not possibly be crazy or brave enough to, as Shields later put it, “hazard himself so far away from his main support.”2 To march on Winchester with such a small force would be suicidal, and it did not take a genius to see that. So secure was the Union command in this conviction that Banks left that afternoon by train for Harpers Ferry, en route to his new assignment in Manassas. He was quite pleased with it; he was trading an obscure sideshow for the main event. Shields, supremely confident and full of his usual bravado, told his subordinate Colonel Sullivan, in Sullivan’s words, “that there was no danger of Jackson’s fighting again; that he knew him, and Jackson was afraid of him.”3
If that was true, Jackson had an odd way of showing it. At 7:00 a.m. he had put his men on the road again: 3 brigades, and 5 batteries of 24 cannons. All told, he had 3,500 infantry and artillerymen. “With the blessing of an ever-kind Providence,” he wrote General Johnston before leaving, “I hope to be in the vicinity of Winchester this evening.”4 Out on the arrow-straight, macadamized valley pike, he drove his men brutally hard: fifty minutes of march; ten minutes of rest, sometimes less. After the grueling march of the day before, many fell out of the ranks. The phenomenon was known as straggling. It was the bane of Civil War armies, and it could embrace everything from nearly outright desertion to the inability of a soldier with a toe infection to keep up with the rest of his company. A man with severe diarrhea, for example—and there were many—would be forced to leave his marching column repeatedly. He would fall behind. Over many miles he would fall very far behind and would be literally hours behind his regiment, unattached and uncommanded. Some men straggled to pick blueberries or to drink from streams. Some were drunk, or suffering from hangovers. Many straggled because they did not want to fight. The practice was often so widespread that it was virtually impossible for commanders to court-martial all offenders even if they wanted to. Thus the disciplining of stragglers—arrest, court-martial, fines, confinement, and sometimes even the threat of the firing squad—was inconsistent at best, and depended on the mood of the commanding general. It was an enormous problem for both sides throughout the Civil War, and no commander ever solved it. Jackson, who drove his men harder and faster than any other commander in the war, inevitably faced the problem. On this march, which covered some thirty-seven miles in less than thirty hours, he lost several hundred that way.5
At noon on March 23, the vanguard of Jackson’s army arrived five miles south of Winchester, and the rest of the men soon caught up. In the military terms of that era, this was blazing, unprecedented speed; seen from Washington, DC, it was a virtual blink of the eye. With Ashby’s fleet and highly contentious cavalry in front as a screen, moreover, the army’s march north had been completely undetected. Jackson immediately moved all of his troops off the exposed valley pike and into the woods just to the west. The day had brightened; the clouds had burned off, and the deep chill had gone out of the air. With two of his aides, Sandie Pendleton and George Junkin, Jackson rode out to reconnoiter. What they saw was a surprise: Kimball’s artillery on Pritchard’s Hill looked to be several times stronger than what Ashby had led them to expect. Though this seemed odd to them, they still had no reason to challenge their fundamental assumptions. Jackson now had a choice. He could rest his hungry, aching, foot-weary men and attack the next morning. That was the sensible thing to do. Staring up at the heights of Pritchard’s Hill, however, Jackson realized how visible he was. If the Federals saw his full force, they might have time to bring up reinforcements, and Jackson would lose what he believed, incorrectly, was his advantage.
His reconnaissance had discovered something else, too. Roughly a mile to the west of Pritchard’s Hill was a four-mile-long-by-three-quarter-mile-wide, elevated, intermittently wooded table of land the locals called Sandy Ridge. It was not only high ground; it was also higher than Pritchard’s Hill and therefore ideal for artillery placement. In spite of the weariness of his men, Jackson decided he would attack immediately. He was worried only about doing so on the Sabbath, which he rigorously kept free of all secular activity. There could be nothing more secular than killing human beings with shells and bullets. “I was greatly concerned, too,” he wrote Anna later, after she had told him she worried about fighting on Sunday. He had found it “very distasteful to my feelings . . . but I felt it my duty to do it, in consideration of the ruinous effects that might result from postponing the battle. . . . Necessity and mercy both called for battle.”6 He would move west through the small valley, scale Sandy Ridge, turn the Federal flank, then strike the valley pike in the Federal rear. There was nothing exceptional about the plan: it was standard West Point flanking tactics. But Jackson had seen in an instant something that Kimball had not: the critical tactical importance of Sandy Ridge. His assumptions of enemy troop strength, of course, were still those provided by Ashby the day before. He still believed he had more men and guns than the enemy had.
Back in Winchester, Shields, in pain from his shrapnel wounds, still refused to believe that he had anything to fear. At one thirty he ordered Kimball to “concentrate forces and fight the enemy on the plain.” Kimball ignored him. Whatever happened at Kernstown was his problem now. He knew how well situated his troops were, suspected that the enemy was more numerous than he looked, and believed that Ashby’s purpose was “to draw me from the strong position I held.”7 Determined to stay on the defensive, he could see Jackson’s lead regiments under Colonel Samuel Fulkerson moving west through the woods below him. He opened fire, raining down shell (hollow iron spheres with timed fuses that exploded into fragments) and canister on the men below. Alarmed by the intensity of the fire, Jackson ordered Fulkerson to turn and try to flank the artillery on Pritchard’s Hill. Fulkerson took one thousand men to within five hundred yards of the guns and was cut to pieces. Of the eighty-four men killed that day in his regiments, almost all died under Kimball’s artillery fire.
Fulkerson’s men fell back from the approaches to Pritchard’s Hill—it was about two o’clock now—and with the main body of Jackson’s troops continued hauling themselves west toward Sandy Ridge under the constant pounding of Kimball’s guns. Fulkerson’s ill-fated lunge had had the effect of a feint, and it was effective in screening the movement of the Confederate cannons. Jackson also had Ashby demonstrate beyond the valley pike, a true feint that also worked, convincing Kimball that there was still danger on the Union left, and causing him to draw off two regiments to deal with it.
While all this was happening, Jackson was pursuing his true purpose: a flank march up Sandy Ridge that would extend his line against a weaker force. In the words of John Lyle of the 4th Virginia, Jacks
on moved about on horseback with a pale countenance and a set jaw, furiously “stripping his front almost bare of troops to hurl the bulk of his small force on the right flank of the enemy.”8 What he really wanted to do, and what all his training as an artillerist told him to do, was to get his batteries up on top of Sandy Ridge as quickly as possible. They rolled on, unseen, while Jackson’s infantry pushed forward over the marshy low ground, crossing that same no-man’s-land of shot and shell, toward the heights of the ridge. “Their bravery was heroic and commanded the admiration and respect of all who witnessed it,” wrote an Ohio infantryman who was looking down on the action from Pritchard’s Hill.9
At 3:00 p.m.—ironically, almost the exact moment the dapper and placidly confident Nathaniel Banks was boarding a train for Harpers Ferry—Jackson’s batteries thundered to life atop Sandy Ridge. It was also the moment Nathan Kimball realized the severity of his mistake in failing to secure his right flank. Jackson’s guns were now 100 feet or more higher than his own, which were almost exactly a mile to the east. And now they began to find the range of Union infantry and batteries, while Kimball’s guns were forced into an artillerist’s nightmare: shooting uphill at the enemy. Kimball’s infantry were for the moment useless, motionless, flat on their bellies, and praying that the next shell fragment was not going to embed itself in their skulls. Though ranges of Civil War artillery varied, the most common gun of the war, the 12-pounder Napoleon smoothbore, could shoot 1,619 yards or just under 1 mile; rifled guns were accurate over larger distances: the 10-pounder Parrott had a range of 1,900 yards (1.08 miles), and the 3-inch rifles were fairly accurate at 2,000 yards (1.14 miles). Cannon shooting spherical case, or shrapnel, tended to operate at 500 to 1,500 yards, while the effectiveness of anything loaded with canister was limited to about 350 yards.10
Jackson, in his first real fight with an independent command, was quickly learning his trade. The last time any Americans had fought a war was fifteen years earlier, in a different country, with different weapons, and most of the men who were running this war had little or no experience of traditional battlefield command. (Indians had generally refused to fight pitched battles; fighting mounted Cheyennes or Comanches on the open plains or Seminoles in Florida swamps required an entirely different set of skills.) Civil War tactics were invented on the fly by men trying desperately to see through the sulfurous smoke and fog of battle, to understand terrain, troop movement, supply trains, the effects of artillery bombardment on infantry, and a hundred other things that were not covered in West Point’s dry texts or in Napoléon’s maxims. Jackson had made some very good moves—some calculated, some purely reactive. He had surprised the enemy with a fast and unexpected march so successfully cloaked that, to the dumbfounded Shields, who did not learn that Jackson himself was present on the battlefield until 3:30 p.m., he had appeared as if from nowhere. Such materializations from the ether would become a Jackson hallmark. He had grasped the tactical significance of Sandy Ridge before his opponent had. He had screened the movement of his artillery, had gotten it to the high ground first, and had used his advantage in elevation to devastating effect. He had, moreover, already understood and put into practice something that both Confederate and Union armies would be relatively slow to learn. Though it was common practice in military theory to attach batteries to brigades and have them support those brigades on the battlefield, Jackson had detached and massed his artillery on the hilltop, creating far more concentrated firepower.11 He had, moreover, by the strength and surprise of his attack, forced Kimball—who had been led by Jackson’s audacity to believe that the two sides had equal numbers of men—to play his tactical game.12 With his numerical advantage, all Kimball had to do to win the battle was bring a large force against Jackson’s right flank. He would have turned it quickly, and would just as quickly have captured the supply trains in the Confederate rear. If he had done so, he would have won a stunning victory. He would have been a hero. Instead, befuddled by the speed of Jackson’s movement and the telling effect of his big guns, he swung heavily to his right, trading finesse for brute force.
But Jackson had made mistakes, too, and would make more this day. As in the Romney campaign, he had told none of his subordinates anything of his battle plan—not even Brigadier General Richard Garnett, a veteran soldier and the commander of the Stonewall Brigade as well as his second in command. This was shocking on its face—illogic from a supremely logical man. It had already resulted in confusion over whether one of Garnett’s regiments was supposed to support Fulkerson’s attempt to turn Kimball’s artillery. That attempt itself had been a mistake; Jackson had allowed himself to be distracted by Kimball’s guns from his main goal of gaining the ridge. The effect was to slow the movement westward of his regiments, which would now be fed into the battle in fragmentary fashion. Piecemeal attack—which ceded the advantage of massed firepower—was one of the cardinal sins committed by generals in the Civil War, even the best ones. Jackson was learning about that, too. But he would never learn to share information freely with subordinates; it was a glaring weakness, and it would haunt him here and throughout the war.
Sometime after 3:00 p.m., while Jackson was winning his artillery duel with Colonel Kimball, his young aide Sandie Pendleton climbed to one of the highest points on Sandy Ridge for a better view of Pritchard’s Hill and the countryside around it. He was astonished by what he saw: at least ten thousand Union troops, with artillery to match, positioned squarely in front of Winchester. This was not the skeleton force of four regiments Ashby had reported. This was a full division. Not only that, Pendleton counted fully five regimental flags floating down one of the roads that led to Sandy Ridge, coming directly toward him. One of Kimball’s brigade commanders, Colonel Erastus B. Tyler, a fur merchant from Ohio, was moving in force against the batteries that had been antagonizing him, and therefore toward the bulk of Jackson’s army, which was still shifting leftward through the wooded low ground. Pendleton galloped back to Jackson to report the news. We have no record of Jackson’s expression when he heard it, but we know what he told Pendleton. “Say nothing about it,” he said. “We are in for it!” So Garnett and other commanders, who knew nothing about the battle plan, would know nothing about enemy troop strength, either. It is safe to say that no other general, on either side, would have chosen to proceed this way. Jackson, who had been planning a general assault, abandoned that plan. He would have to shift from offense to defense. Outnumbered again, he was suddenly in a desperate battle for survival.
The Battle of Kernstown, as this fight would be known, entered its second phase when Colonel Nathan Kimball, weary of the dominance of Jackson’s cannons, sent Tyler’s 2,300-man brigade to silence them. That was what Pendleton had seen coming at him. Tyler, deploying west along the Cedar Creek Grade Road, and then south along Sandy Ridge, ran headlong into the lead regiment of the Stonewall Brigade—the 27th Virginia—which itself was swinging west and north to defend the artillery. Badly outnumbered, these 200 men, under their intrepid commander, six-foot-four-inch, 260-pound Colonel John Echols, fell back behind a half-mile-long, shoulder-high stone wall that ran east to west and rose and fell with the broken landscape. At about four o’clock on Sunday afternoon, March 23, with only a few hours of daylight remaining, the battle, which had up to that point really been an artillery duel, became a desperate fight for control of that stone wall on Sandy Ridge.
Erastus Tyler’s opening gambit, in this improvised war where commanding officers had to learn by trial and error, was a grievous mistake. To take his men more efficiently through the wood, he had formed them in what was known in military jargon as a close or massed “column by divisions.” That meant that instead of long, linear, two-man-deep battle lines—the typical Civil War battlefield deployment—his men were configured in a large rectangular box that measured some seventy-five yards across its front and four hundred yards deep. Two companies made up the front line; behind them stretched the other forty-eight companies in twenty-four lines, set up
front to back like dominoes. In that configuration they indeed moved easily through the woods on the northern part of Sandy Ridge. The weather had dramatically improved. On the second day of the Shenandoah spring, the sun was finally shining. “It was a beautiful day,” wrote an infantryman in the 7th Ohio. “Birds sang in the trees and the warm sun brought out all the aromatic odors of the forest.”13
Minutes later, the exhilaration of spring was gone. Tyler’s lead companies found themselves at the edge of the leafless wood, looking 150 yards across open ground to the stone wall, from which poured volley after volley of musket fire, red jets of yellow flame piercing the billowing rolls of smoke, while their rebel opponents shouted “Bull Run!” as loudly as they could. Jackson’s artillery opened up with canister on the Federal left, and Union soldiers, who were not trained to fight in a box formation, immediately found themselves in serious trouble. Once the firing started, it was almost impossible, because of the noise, smoke, and confusion, to shake themselves out into conventional battle lines by companies and regiments. The domino analogy is apt: the bluecoats offered a dense and easy target for Echols’s riflemen at the wall. At the same time, they had temporarily lost the ability to use their huge numerical advantage to extend their lines. The fire was so hot that the 110th Pennsylvania fled backward through the ranks of the 29th Ohio, just behind them. Or, as an officer from the disgusted 29th saw it, “they broke and scampered like sheep at the first fire.”