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

by S. C. Gwynne

  Some of the fighting was desperate. At 5:30 a.m. Ewell sent the 21st North Carolina Regiment forward into what amounted to a perfect trap sprung by the 5th Connecticut. In less than two minutes, the rebels sustained seventy-five casualties; in twenty minutes they lost eighteen dead and seventy-eight wounded.3 As the barrage continued, Jackson seemed to be everywhere, roaming on horseback among his various batteries, urging the men on, barking specific orders at regimental commanders. At one point he approached Colonel John Neff of the 33rd Virginia. Gesturing toward an unoccupied spot on the high ground of Bower’s Hill, he shouted, “I expect the enemy to bring artillery to occupy that hill, and they must not do it! Do you understand me, sir? Keep a good lookout, and your men well in hand, and if they attempt to come, charge them with bayonet and seize their guns! Clamp them, sir, on the spot!”4

  At 7:30 a.m., after three hours of inconclusive fighting and while Banks’s supply wagons rolled quietly north toward safety, two important things happened. First, fog descended like a stage curtain east of the valley pike, silencing what had been a brisk fight between Ewell and his Union counterpart, Colonel Dudley Donnelly. Second, while church bells tolled from the nearby streets of Winchester, Banks’s brigade commander Colonel George H. Gordon decided to make a bold tactical move: he ordered the feisty, battle-tested 2nd Massachusetts—which had harassed Jackson’s vanguard the night before—to extend his battle line on the Union right, the logical prelude to an attempt to turn the Confederate flank. Confederate brigadier general Charles S. Winder, in command at the front, saw the movement and immediately countered it, throwing three regiments out to his left. Unfortunately for Gordon, a flanking game was not one he could win. He did not have the manpower. Winder saw that, too. Just then Jackson came forward to ask him for a report on the progress of the battle. Winder told him that he thought the Union right could be taken. Jackson surveyed the battlefield and replied simply, “Very well, I will send you Taylor’s brigade.”

  He meant thirty-six-year-old Brigadier General Richard Taylor, a Yale graduate and successful sugar planter but most conspicuously the son of Mexican-American War hero and US president Zachary Taylor. Though he was widely read in history and fluent in French, and a Southern gentleman from a long line of planters, Taylor also had the common touch and could swear like a stevedore. His men liked him. He was chosen because he was a hard fighter with a disciplined unit (the exceptions were the unruly Louisiana Tigers) and also because he happened to command the largest Confederate brigade on the field, with 2,500 officers and men. What happened next was a classic example of a successful Civil War flanking maneuver, using the advantage of numbers to extend a battle line farther than the enemy could extend his, then turning the enemy’s flank and making him face fire from two directions. When Taylor came up, Jackson pointed to the ridge and the right wing of the Union army and said, “You must take it.”

  Taylor and his brigade now moved forward. Jackson, who liked being in the bullet-shredded air of the front lines, rode with them. They soon emerged from the base of the hill that had screened them and into full view of the enemy on the higher ground. Taylor told Jackson sternly that “this was not the place for the commander of the army.” Jackson ignored him. A few minutes later, Federal muskets and Federal artillery loosed a howling volley. Many of Taylor’s men fell. Others, hearing the whistle of shot and shell about them, began ducking their heads. This angered Taylor, who saw much more difficult work ahead of them. “What the hell are you dodging for?” he shouted at them. “If there is any more of it, you will be halted under this fire for an hour.” Chastened, the men straightened up and moved forward. Taylor was struck, though, by the look of reproach on Jackson’s face. Jackson put a hand on Taylor’s shoulder and said, amid the storm of lead and steel, “I am afraid you are a wicked fellow.” Then he turned and rode away.5 Jackson was referring to Taylor’s choice of language, which certainly was not what he admitted to in his memoir. (Most of our current profanities were then in use.) Whatever he said, Jackson had believed it was worth a mild reproof, even in the heat of battle.

  As Taylor’s brigade shook itself out into battle formation—an immaculate gray line a thousand yards across—in full view of both armies, there was a strange pause. The fire slackened momentarily, as though in anticipation of what was quite obviously going to happen next. The Louisianans advanced. Up the hill they came, in perfect order, Taylor in front with sword in hand, closing about half the distance between them and the Union troops. From behind a stone wall came a crackling volley, slicing through Taylor’s ranks. But the Louisianans held their tight formation and continued to advance. On Taylor’s command they charged. As he later wrote, “with cadenced step and eyes on the foe, [the men] swept grandly over copse and ledge and fence, to crown the heights from which the enemy had melted away.”6 Within minutes they had routed the enemy without firing a shot. And now, in a cascading sequence of companies and regiments, the entire Union line broke. Watching them run, Taylor’s Confederates now opened fire. “The air seemed to be full of whizzing bullets,” recalled Union general Williams, “which stirred up currents of wind as if the atmosphere had suddenly been filled with some invisible cooling process.”7 East of the pike, where the fog had finally lifted, Union soldiers were also falling back into Winchester. Ewell, able to see the foe at last, unleashed a brigade under Brigadier General Isaac Trimble, which swept east of the town to cut Union colonel Dudley Donnelly on the Martinsburg road north of town.

  Jackson watched all of this, seated on Little Sorrel, his hand held high in what everyone by now believed was prayer. Then, according to cartographer Jedediah Hotchkiss, “as the enemy wavered & then broke & fled, he swung his old gray cap and shouted ‘Now let’s holler!’ ”8 His staff began to cheer, and then the whole advancing line took it up, and the rebel yell rose to what Henry Kyd Douglas remembered was a “deafening roar, which borne on the wind over Winchester told her imprisoned people that deliverance was at hand.”9 It was between eight thirty and nine in the morning. The battle had lasted four hours. Jackson’s soldiers were back on the streets of Winchester.

  The Union retreat was, at first, a relatively measured affair. Somehow, Banks’s infantry managed to stay with their companies and regiments. But such discipline could not last. The citizens of Winchester, particularly the women, shot at them with muskets and pistols from windows and doorways and shops as they passed through the streets. They threw glass bottles at the Federals, poured scalding water on them, and screamed insults. At least one woman shot a soldier dead with a pistol at point-blank range. Another woman, who fired on a colonel, was shot dead, a bright red spurt of blood erupting from her breast before she fell.10 Jackson’s troops were shooting at the flying Federals, too, many of whom laid down their arms and surrendered. “The enemy rose on the rise on the northern end of Winchester and poured a sharp fire of musketry into our confused rear,” remembered Banks’s aide David Hunter Strother. “Presently cannon boomed and shot whistled and shells hurtled over our heads. . . . At every report, the living mass started and quickened its motion as if by electricity. Overcoats and knapsacks strewed the fields.”11

  Soon the army was in full, chaotic flight north on the road to Martinsburg and the Potomac beyond. Union soldiers were running for their lives now, and they knew it; more than a thousand of them had already been taken prisoner in the streets of the town. For the rest, it was their excellent luck that Jackson’s army was in no position to pursue them. Many of the Confederates, having slept less than two hours the night before, were so exhausted that they simply sat or lay down. Then, too, there was the utter pandemonium inside the town, now cluttered with discarded equipment, discarded wagons, burning wagons, and burning buildings, plus large numbers of blacks—part of Banks’s enormous mule train—many of whom were escaped slaves, who had to be rounded up. All of this was complicated by a populace that was wildly ecstatic at its liberation. They rushed out of their houses, many dressed in their Sunday clothes, laughing, sc
reaming, embracing the rebel soldiers, and giving cheer after cheer for Stonewall Jackson and Jeff Davis. Some, wrote Robert Dabney, stood “on their doorsteps, with their solemn faces bathed in tears, and spreading forth their hands to heaven in adoration.”12 They welcomed the troops with hugs and kisses and pails of milk and water and baskets of food. Jackson was dumbfounded at the reception he received. He wrote Anna the next day that it was like nothing he had ever experienced:

  My precious darling, an ever kind Providence blest us with success at Front Royal on Friday, between Strasburg and Winchester on Saturday, and here with a successful engagement yesterday. I do not remember having ever seen such rejoicing as was manifested by the people of Winchester as our army yesterday passed through the town in pursuit of the enemy. The people seemed nearly frantic with joy; indeed, it would be almost impossible to describe their manifestations of rejoicing and gratitude. Our entry into Winchester was one of the most stirring scenes of my life. . . . Time forbids a longer letter, but it does not forbid my loving my esposita.13

  He got the same treatment from his own troops. “As he came the men pressed in shoals to the roadside and waved their hats enthusiastically,” wrote one of Ewell’s artillerymen. “It was deafening . . . I never saw a more thrilling scene. . . . General Jackson himself seemed much affected as he rode uncovered, bowing constantly.”14

  Luckiest of all for Banks’s hapless forces, Jackson’s cavalry support, inconsistent at best, now failed him completely. Because of their inherent speed, and the intimidating presence of horses, mounted troops could be devastating in pursuit of a fleeing enemy. But Ashby mysteriously disappeared the previous night. Brigadier General George Steuart, whose troopers were lounging several miles east of town while their horses grazed, refused to obey Jackson’s order as delivered by Sandie Pendleton, standing on protocol and saying that he would only obey an order from Ewell. Ewell was then found, with some difficulty, and the order given. By that time it was too late for Steuart to do much more than annoy the Union rearguard. Jackson halted the pursuit after five miles. Without cavalry, and with many of the soldiers in his command at the margins of consciousness, he had little choice. His troops then did the unthinkable: they bivouacked at noon. The day was over. Jackson himself, bone-weary and suffused with victory, rode back to Winchester, entered the Taylor Hotel, refused all offers of food, then threw himself on his bed, facedown, with his boots and spurs on, and fell asleep. He had not even bothered to wire Richmond about his victory. He had not communicated with his bosses since May 21. Another day would not matter.15 Later that night his wagons finally caught up with his army, and the men were issued their first rations in forty-eight hours.16

  Banks’s men got no such break. That day they lugged themselves thirty-five miles north toward the sanctuary of Maryland, after having marched eighteen miles from Strasburg to Winchester the day before, all under extreme duress and the threat of death or imprisonment. (Jackson’s legendary “foot calvary” never made such a march after fighting a battle.) In two days they had eaten a single meal. They were at the limits of their endurance, marching on fear and adrenaline. To their credit, they conducted a mostly orderly, if utterly demoralized, march. Banks, who had never conducted a retreat before, managed it surprisingly well. He was at his best, buoyant and undaunted, riding among the men and encouraging them, lending a hand with stuck wagons, forcing stragglers back into line. But they were a beaten army. All the way north they were acutely aware, as General Williams put it, “of the probabilities that we should be followed to the river and attacked . . . before a tithe of our men could be crossed and while all our immense train was parked ready to deepen the awful confusion that must follow.”17

  The sense of panic and dread increased on the southern bank of the Potomac that night, where a thousand campfires burned in the darkness. Teams and wagons, guns and caissons were jammed together and an exhausted army had to figure out how to cross a three-hundred-foot-wide river that was four to five feet deep and moving fast.18 They spent all night crossing. Men and horses drowned. But by the next morning the army was on the north side of the river. Though Banks’s report to Stanton was deeply inaccurate in many areas—from his estimate of rebel strength (25,000 to 30,000) to his assessment of Confederate killed and wounded (triple his own, he said, which was wildly inaccurate) and the number of wagons lost (55 instead of 106 or more)—he could say with reasonable honesty that “my command had not suffered an attack and rout, but had accomplished a premeditated march of near 60 miles in the face of the enemy, defeating his plans, and giving him battle wherever he was found.”19 In two long days of retreats, following a surprise attack by a superior force, Banks had managed to keep most of his army and wagon train intact. Most Confederates would have said that he was lucky to escape with his skin. That was true, too.

  But Jackson had won a staggering victory. It was striking on both tactical and strategic levels. He had marched his men 177 miles since his victory at McDowell 17 days before, and in less than 48 hours had driven Banks 53 miles, from Strasburg and literally into the Potomac River and across the Maryland state line. He had done this even though his artillery had failed him miserably at Front Royal, as his cavalry had at Newtown and Winchester. Jackson’s force had suffered fewer than 400 casualties. Banks had lost more than 3,500 men, 3,000 of whom were now prisoners of war. Jackson had already knocked the Union war in Virginia off balance; his victory at Winchester would soon shift the attention of the world from what seemed certain defeat in front of Richmond to the strange, shimmering new possibilities that were rising from the mists of the Shenandoah Valley.

  Even more important for the Confederate war effort, Jackson’s men had captured an enormous stockpile of matériel. It contained $125,185 of high-quality quartermaster supplies; 34,000 pounds of commissary supplies, including bacon, hardtack, salt pork, and sugar—so much of it that Jackson’s men began calling their opposing general by a new name, Commissary Banks; 500,000 rounds of ammunition; rifled cannons; 103 head of cattle; and 9,345 stands of small arms. (A “stand” consisted of a rifled musket, bayonet, cartridge belt, and ammunition box.) There was also an astonishing trove of medicine and medical supplies, which Jackson’s aide Sandie Pendleton thought was probably larger than those in the rest of the Confederacy combined. There were two well-stocked military hospitals with a capacity of 700 patients that came equipped with their own staff and Union doctors. Jackson, who could have sent those doctors off to a Confederate prison, instead set a Civil War precedent by giving them immunity to continue their work with wounded Federal soldiers, after which he allowed them to return to the Union army. In a world grown suddenly very hard and cold for Federal soldiers in the Shenandoah Valley, it was a small bit of Christian charity.

  Something else had taken place, too, at Winchester, something less tangible though quite as real as the battle itself. The moment of victory also marked the birth of the legend of Stonewall Jackson, of the idea of the man as warrior and hero that would soon loom much larger than the man himself. What the Confederacy had desperately needed, in a war it was obviously losing, was a myth of invincibility, proof that their notions of the glorious, godly, embattled, chivalric Southern character were not just romantic dreams. Proof that with inferior resources it could still win the war. Jackson, in his brilliant, underdog valley campaign, had finally given it to them. His personal eccentricities, his often brutal treatment of his own men and officers, his devout and zealous Christianity—all would from now on be seen as the attributes of genius. His dazzling stand at First Manassas would be seen in this new light. No one on either side of the Civil War would ever look at him the same way again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  LINCOLN’S PERFECT TRAP

  News of Jackson’s victory at Winchester rocked the political and military establishments in Washington. What he had done did not seem quite plausible. He had twice eluded Union forces that had been sent to destroy him. He had moved farther and faster and more secretly than
anyone in the Union high command had believed possible and had defeated Union forces more than one hundred miles apart. He had then pursued his helpless quarries for thirty and thirty-five miles, respectively. He had driven Banks clean out of the South. None of this could be explained by conventional notions of warfare, certainly not by warfare as it was being practiced by any Union commanders of the period. There was something lethal about this Confederate general, something grim and unyielding and inexplicable and alarmingly single-minded. Whatever dark magic Jackson possessed now made faint hearts in the nation’s capital uneasy. Where would he appear next? Rumors multiplied, abetted by Banks’s wildly inaccurate estimates of Jackson’s strength and the shrill bleats of alarm from General John Geary, just east of the valley, who reported that fully three Confederate armies were closing in on him, one of which was pointed at Leesburg, which meant that it was also pointed directly at Washington. This was pure hysteria. But the Federal War Department did not know that yet.

  In the midst of all this speculative frenzy, Edwin Stanton seemed to come completely unhinged. That afternoon the bearded, bespectacled secretary of war sent what amounted to an SOS to the governors of thirteen Northern states asking for their help in saving the nation’s capital from Jackson’s ravening army. “Intelligence from various quarters,” he wrote, “leaves no doubt that the enemy in great force are marching on Washington. You will please organize and forward immediately all the militia and volunteer forces in your state.” To the governors of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, he issued an even more urgent appeal: “Send all the troops forward that you can immediately. Banks is completely routed.” He also ordered the War Department to take immediate “military possession” of Northern railroads. Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase soon joined the paranoid chorus, saying that Jackson’s army had “endangered Harper’s Ferry & even Washington.”1 Even US senators were spreading the word that “Banks was flying—that Washington was menaced.”