by S. C. Gwynne
Thus did 200 Confederates, outnumbered 10 to 1, and aided by Tyler’s tactical blunder, hold their own smartly against the oncoming brigade. Tyler’s force had been virtually stopped in its tracks. But the battle was only five minutes old. From his position with the artillery on high ground, a quarter mile in the rear, Jackson saw that he needed more soldiers, and began to feed the fight. Under his orders, Lieutenant Colonel John Patton and the 21st Virginia, 270 men strong, advanced to the stone wall, where they poured a hot fire into the Union ranks. Still, the entire fight at this point was only two regiments against five. Tyler’s first, unsuccessful assault had been on the eastern end of the stone wall. Now he noticed that the western end was undefended, and ordered an attack there. Colonel Sam Fulkerson, bringing his 23rd and 37th Virginia Regiments forward after being cannonaded for the better part of two hours, saw the same weakness, the same opening. What happened next was a deadly footrace. The 1st West Virginia rushed forward from the north, while the Virginia boys lunged from the south. The Confederates won, by seconds. They set up quickly behind the wall, 500 of them, opening up with their smoothbores loaded with “buck and ball” (a bullet attached to three pieces of buckshot that combined the characteristics of a musket and a shotgun) on the West Virginians, who were only fifty yards away. At point-blank range, the effect on the bluecoats was deadly.
Only ten minutes had elapsed since Tyler’s first charge. He had been repulsed twice. Now the Confederates, realizing the size of the Federal force, began to bring additional regiments to the wall. Brigadier General Richard Garnett finally arrived, after his long march across the low ground with the rest of his Stonewall Brigade, and inserted the 33rd Virginia just to the right of the 21st Virginia. It is noteworthy that he not only had no knowledge of any battle plan; also, neither he nor his commander knew where the other was. By Jackson’s orders, the 2nd Virginia came up, too, as did the Irish Battalion, to fill another gap in the wall. The Federals, meanwhile, had managed to untangle themselves into disorganized clots of men at the edge of the woods, 150 to 200 yards from the stone wall. They paid the price for their confusion, as many of their men in the front lines were dropped by their own friendly fire. At one point, the 1st West Virginia had unloaded several volleys into the backs of the 7th Indiana and the 7th Ohio. The Federals were nonetheless able, from behind trees and rocks and declivities, to deliver a constant stream of fire. Along the wall, the Confederate soldiers who fell almost invariably did so with horrible head wounds, many of them lethal, caused by huge .59-caliber minié balls that hummed like tuning forks in the sulfurous air and entered through the throat, mouth, eyes, forehead, and nose, blowing the men’s brains out the sides and backs of their heads. Many soldiers later commented on the enormous sound of war: it was more of a giant, rolling roar than a succession of shots.
By 4:30 p.m., a little more than half an hour into the fight, Jackson’s 1,200 men behind the wall had created a stalemate with the larger force, which was disorganized and strung out along a four-hundred-yard front that was fifty to five hundred yards from the stone wall. The fight went furiously on. There was little or no finesse here. It was a brutal, bloody, hard-nosed affair, rarely equaled in closeness of range and intensity of firing in the larger war that was to come, and no one, except the 110th Pennsylvania, was running away from it. Jackson himself told a friend five days later, “I do not recall ever having heard such a roar of musketry.”14 Wrote a soldier in the 7th Indiana, “The battle was on in all of its fury. The woods were soon enveloped in smoke. . . . The crashing of shells and shot and canister through the trees has left an impression on my mind that can never be effaced. . . . The regiments [were] mixed up through and through each other, but [we] never ceased to get rid of our sixty rounds of cartridges as fast as we could load and shoot.”15
Jackson had thus far done remarkably well in spite of enormous disadvantages. He had less than half the troops his enemy had on the battlefield. His men were armed with smoothbores, while all but three Federal regiments had far more accurate rifled muskets.16 He had only three rifled cannons against the Union’s fourteen.17 And his men had held the wall. He knew he could not hope to win. But he still had three regiments in reserve and less than two hours of daylight, and the odds had gone up considerably for a drawn battle—one that would accomplish everything he had been ordered by Johnston to do, and more. “I became satisfied that we could not expect to defeat the enemy,” he later wrote, “and that our safety consisted in holding our position until night and drawing off under the cover of darkness.”18
At almost the very same moment—around 4:30 p.m.—it occurred to Colonel Nathan Kimball, on his own high ridge a mile to the east, that he could lose. He had fully 3,600 men he had not used. Just as Jackson had earlier stripped his right of troops to seize Sandy Ridge, Kimball gathered up regiments on his unthreatened left and sent them double-quicking across the little meadowed valley between the two heights and into the fight at the eastern end of his battle line. Now came the final slugfest at the wall, the last hour of the fight. Most of the action had shifted east, where Kimball’s fresh troops were shouldering into Jackson’s bone-tired, battle-weary force. For Jackson it was a race to darkness. The fighting at the wall, brutal and constant for a full hour, now turned desperate. A measure of its intensity was the astounding tale of the regimental flag of the 2nd Virginia Regiment. The bearers of regimental colors were often targets of the enemy, both because they stood out as easy targets and because the flags were important in telling soldiers where the rest of their regiment was, and in which direction it was heading. The carnage began when the first standard-bearer, Sergeant Ephraim Crist, was shot in the head and killed instantly. Lieutenant J. B. Davis, who picked it up, was knocked out of action by a spent ball. Lieutenant Richard Lee then took up the flag and, with reckless bravery, jumped over the wall and brandished it at members of the 67th Ohio, who refused out of respect to shoot him, saying, “Don’t shoot that man, he is too brave to die.” They ordered him back over his wall, where he was soon wounded severely in the leg. A fourth, unknown man who grabbed the flag fell mortally wounded. Finally a full colonel, James W. Allen, leaned down from his horse, picked up the colors, and rode them to the wall, where his 250 surviving troops rallied around him. By the time the colors got there, they bore the marks of fourteen bullet holes, and the banner’s flagstaff had been shot in two. The 5th Ohio had a similar experience. Five different standard-bearers were killed or wounded within a few minutes.19
Then something happened that no one, including Jackson, had counted on. At about five thirty, as the sun was setting over the battlements of the Alleghenies, and Jackson’s goal of a drawn battle was in sight, the Confederate soldiers at the wall began to run out of ammunition. It began, predictably, with the courageous 27th Virginia, the men who had started the fight at the stone wall. They had carried only forty to sixty rounds in their cartridge boxes to begin with, and whatever ammunition the valley army had was sitting several miles away, back on the valley pike. Amazingly, in spite of this the Confederates, exhorted by Brigadier General Garnett, who stormed up and down the ranks, had managed to repulse three Ohio regiments that had assaulted the eastern wall. But the Federal numbers were beginning to tell. Fresh, well-armed Federal regiments were coming up to replace regiments that were themselves running out of bullets. And Kimball was beginning, at last, to use his numerical advantage to extend his line. Now, in the smoky blue twilight, came the hammer blow: two fresh Indiana regiments, the 13th and 14th, hit the eastern part of the wall, whose defenders had virtually no ammunition left. Fearing envelopment, Garnett, at about 6:00 p.m., called retreat. A few minutes later, Jackson, who had ordered up reserves from the valley pike, was astonished to see his men streaming to the rear. He found Garnett and furiously dressed him down for ordering the withdrawal. “He did not manifest any concern,” Jackson later wrote of Garnett, “and was not using any efforts to rally his men. I rode up to him and asked him why he did not rally his men, or try
to do so. He told me he had done so, till he was hoarse.” Jackson, incredulous, then rode back and forth, as bullets whickered about him, loudly exhorting the men back into battle. He could not believe what was happening. He grabbed a young drummer next to him, and with his hand on the boy’s shoulder, yelled, “Beat the rally! Beat the rally.”
But he was too late, as were the reserve 5th and 42nd Virginia Regiments he had summoned, who arrived at about six thirty but could do no more than help cover the retreat. The rest was messy. Men fell back in disorder; regiments fell apart in the oncoming darkness; the army became formless. The Union cavalry for once showed some aggressiveness, riding around the disintegrating Confederate left flank and rounding up several hundred prisoners, who were later paraded through the streets of Winchester. “We all scattered, every fellow for himself, building fires out of fence rails and making ourselves as comfortable as possible after the fatigues of the day,” wrote John Casler of the 5th Virginia.20 Jackson ordered the bloodied army into bivouac about five miles south of the battlefield. He rode silently with them, and at one point stopped by a campfire. “General,” said one of the men, “it looks like you cut off more tobacco today than you could chew.” Jackson replied simply, “Oh, I think we did very well.”21 He had a small dinner of bread and meat—his first food of the day, gave thanks to God, and went to sleep on a bed of fence rails, without a blanket, next to his chief commissary, Wells Hawks. The next day Jackson’s army headed south once again, pursued by the same army that had chased them less than a week before.
• • •
Jackson’s men, battered, parched, and exhausted, agreed with his assessment of the battle. They knew that they had been badly outnumbered. They were equally aware that they had faced a Union foe that was just as brave and tough and resourceful as they were. (This was news to many of them.) They had marched twelve to fifteen miles in the morning, had been subjected to galling artillery fire, then had stood with astounding bravery at a stone wall for two hours under a barrage of Union lead. They had fought to their last bullet and were deeply proud of what they had done. “It was a terrific fight and all our men behaved like heroes,” wrote Alexander Boteler Jr. of the Rockbridge Artillery, son of the congressman. “No one left his post unless ordered off the ground. . . . Our canister scattered them like scared sheep, and made them all run.”22 The almost universal feeling was that with ammunition they would have held. “The . . . little army had been heavily engaged, and although confronted by large odds, held its own, and only retired after shooting all its ammunition away,” wrote John Worsham of the 21st Virginia Regiment. “It seems to me that the 21st Virginia would have held its line indefinitely if it had been supplied with ammunition. It was a regular stand-up fight with us, and as stated the men . . . fought as I never saw any fighting during the war.”23 Even Loring’s old regiments seemed to find a new respect for their commander. And Confederate prisoners, to a man, expressed pride at what they had done.
Southern newspapers echoed the same sentiment. If their facts were slightly skewed, they fully understood that a very small force had stood toe to toe with a much larger one. “No battle has been fought during the war against such odds,” said the Richmond Dispatch. “With a force not exceeding 3,500 men—men who had been on forced marches for weeks—we attack 20,000 fresh troops, repulse them again and again, until overpowered by numbers.” The paper gave Jackson full credit: “A braver man God never made.”24 Amid all the recent bad news from the scattered Confederate armies, here, at least, was an example of pluck and courage. Here was hope. Jackson himself did not believe he had lost the fight. According to his mapmaker, Jed Hotchkiss, he “never considered that he was beaten at Kerns-town.”25 To Anna he wrote, five days after the battle, “My little army is in excellent spirits. It feels that it inflicted a severe blow upon the enemy.”26
The gruesome scene they left behind was witness to it—a pocked and devastated landscape full of pooled blood and bodies and pieces of limbs, clothing, hats, weapons, and a bewildering variety of personal items. Across the top of the wall, running its entire length, was a jagged line of blood, the residue of hundreds of Union minié balls hitting Confederate skulls.27 A bloody, severed foot hung from a tree, testimony to the brute violence that had put it there. “The small bushes were cut to pieces, and every tree was filled with balls,” wrote John C. Marsh of the 29th Ohio. “The dead lay thickly in those woods and behind the stone wall, some all torn to pieces with shell, some badly mangled with canister, but by far the larger portion were killed with rifle balls. It was curious to note the different expressions on the faces of the dead. Some seem to have died in the greatest agony; others wore a smile even in death.”28 Sandie Pendleton thought that, though smaller in scale, the Battle of Kernstown was “a harder fight than Manassas.” In the end Union casualties exceeded Confederate casualties, perhaps predictably, considering that much of the battle amounted to an assault on a fortified position. The totals were: 118 Federals killed, 450 wounded, and 22 captured or missing; 80 Confederates killed, 375 wounded, and 263 captured.
Though he had expressed satisfaction with his performance, Jackson was frustrated that he had come, as he saw it, so agonizingly close to a draw against a superior foe. His unhappiness quickly manifested itself in his anger toward the unfortunate Garnett. Jackson believed that if Garnett had held on only a few minutes more, reserve troops would have arrived, there would have been no retreat, and darkness would have ended the fighting. Garnett, of course, had never been informed of that battle plan. Acting alone at the wall, he had behaved bravely and had ordered retreat only when, outnumbered and out of ammunition, and facing a possible envelopment by a much larger force, he had no other choice, a decision that all of Jackson’s regimental commanders later supported.
Jackson himself bore at least some of the responsibility for his defeat. This was his first fight as commanding general. He was learning. He was expanding his understanding of battle, which he had seen before only in pieces. He had done certain things very well. But seen from the front lines, the Battle of Kernstown was lost because Confederate soldiers ran out of ammunition, and that was Jackson’s direct responsibility.29 (Kimball made a similar though less costly mistake: he had failed to bring forward enough ordnance for his cannons.) Jackson had not anticipated an extended firefight and had not brought up reserve cartridges from his supply wagons. (Urging his men, as he did at the end, to charge with bayonets against rifles, was patently absurd, albeit a pure expression of Jackson’s own combativeness.) He had also—somewhat mysteriously, considering his intimate control of his brigade’s fight at Manassas—remained a quarter mile or so from the stone wall. Though there were good reasons for this—he could see the entire battlefield and the Union position more clearly from there—he was not available to redeploy his regiments where they were needed. (Kimball suffered from the same problem; he was even farther away from the action.) As twilight descended, Fulkerson’s six hundred men at the western part of the wall were relatively unengaged. They could have been ordered to the eastern wall to great effect. They were fresher; they had ammunition to spare. Finally, Jackson had hampered Garnett’s effectiveness by not telling him his battle plan; Garnett did not even know where Jackson was.
Perhaps the biggest lesson to be learned from Kernstown, however, involved not fighting but politics. Jackson’s tactical defeat turned out to be one of the great strategic victories of the early war. It began with the sheer fierceness of his troops’ resistance, suggesting to the Union command that he was stronger than he actually was. This impression was enhanced by Union-held prisoners, who crowed loudly that Jackson would soon be reinforced by thirty thousand troops. Banks, correctly suspicious of such tales, still could not quite bring himself to fully disbelieve them. This revised, more potent version of Jackson was further enhanced by James Shields. Puffing up his own accomplishment, Shields described for the Union War Department the desperate eight-hour battle he had fought against eleven thousand Confederate t
roops, five times what Jackson put on the field.30 He told of how—far from being surprised by Jackson’s attack—he had feigned weakness to deliberately lure and trap Jackson. Piling lies on top of lies, he claimed that he had closely managed the battle and even ordered Tyler’s brigade to attack. “The havoc which has been made in the rank of the Rebels has struck a blow such as they have nowhere else endured since the commencement of the war,” Shields told the War Department. “Jackson and his Stonewall Brigade and all the other brigades accompanying him will never meet this division again in battle.”
But McClellan and the War Department in Washington drew the opposite conclusion. To them the battle meant that Jackson was far more dangerous than they had thought. The valley was not a sideshow; it was a full-blown theater of war. Thus McClellan, still in command of the valley and alerted to this new danger, made an uncharacteristically decisive move. The sensible thing might have been to leave Shields in the valley to fight Jackson. Instead, he canceled orders for both of Banks’s divisions to leave the valley. He ordered the brigades that had already departed back to Winchester. And then he ordered a full-out pursuit of the small rebel army. “As soon as you are strong enough, push Jackson hard and drive him well beyond Strasburg,” he wrote Banks. He still wanted Banks in Manassas, but now the terms were “the very moment the thorough defeat of Jackson will permit it.” Thus were 19,000 sent out to destroy 3,500, and thus did two full divisions become useless to the Union army east of the Blue Ridge.31