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

by S. C. Gwynne

  Jackson struggled. He stayed up late at night, piling anthracite coal on his metal grate while “boning” his lessons for the next day. As he would do later at VMI, he spent hours staring at a blank wall while rehearsing his homework in his mind. “No one I have ever known,” said one of his barracks mates, “could so perfectly withdraw his mind from surrounding objects or influence, and so thoroughly involve his whole being in the subject under consideration.”12 And though he developed a few friends, he remained for the most part a social misfit. He walked around campus with his head down, looking neither right nor left.13 He was modest and shy to a fault. He blushed when spoken to. When he did speak, according to schoolmate John C. Tidball, “his voice was thin and feminine—almost squeaky—while his utterances were quick, jerky, and sententious,” and did not encourage further conversation.14 He did not participate in extracurricular activities such as group swims in the Hudson, summer dances, or bull sessions. He was always too busy studying.15 Then, too, he had a stomach ailment—presumably dyspepsia—that caused him to stand or sit in a bizarrely stiff posture. According to one of his classmates, he was afraid that he might otherwise compress some of his internal organs and make the condition worse.16 All of this foreshadowed his health obsessions as an adult. Other cadets found such practices bizarre, to say the least.17

  One of the better-known anecdotes of Jacksonian behavior came from the same cadet, Dabney Maury, who had tried unsuccessfully to befriend him on the first day. During summer, when they lived in tents, Maury and two of his Virginia friends, A. P. Hill and Birkett Fry (also a future Confederate general), were “lolling upon our camp bedding” when Jackson happened by on evening “police duty,” which involved cleaning up trash. In Maury’s account, he “lifted the tent wall, and addressed [Jackson] with an air of authority and mock sternness, ordering him to be more attentive to his duty, to remove those cigar stumps, and otherwise mind his business.” Jackson responded with such a “stern and angry” look that Maury later went to his tent to apologize. “Mr. Jackson,” he said, “I find I made a mistake just now in speaking to you in a playful manner not justified by our slight acquaintance. I regret that I did so.” Jackson leveled a stony gaze at him and said, “That is perfectly satisfactory, sir.” Maury then returned to his friends, telling them flatly, “Cadet Jackson, from Virginia, is an ass.”18 That was the last meaningful social interaction the three aristocratic Virginians had with him at West Point.

  On one occasion—and only one—Jackson provided a glimpse of the unbending moral absolutism that was to characterize his later dealings with William French in Florida. During one inspection, a cadet had stolen Jackson’s scrupulously clean musket and replaced it with his own dirty one. Jackson reported the loss. The cadet was soon found with Jackson’s weapon and then lied about how he had gotten it. For once Jackson’s shyness left him: he was furious. He demanded that the cadet be court-martialed and expelled. It was only after much persuasion by his peers and officers that he was convinced not to press charges.19

  McClellan had none of these problems. His main worry was whether he would lead his class, or have to settle for second or third place. He was so smart that he could coast through courses others found difficult. He wrote his brother that he was doing “not much, I confess” in the way of studying. In French he did hardly anything at all, and still ranked eighth in the class.20 McClellan was not only obviously brilliant, but he had a sparkling, gregarious personality that made him one of the most popular cadets in his class. Even his academic rival Charles Stewart found him to be a generous and honorable man who had “not a mean thought in him.” Nor was McClellan a narrow or prudish conformist. On New Year’s Eve during his first year he and several friends risked punishment to procure a late-night feast of oyster pies from a well-known, off-limits local tavern.21 Teachers liked him, too. Erasmus Keyes, his artillery instructor—who would later command the 4th Corps of the Army of the Potomac under McClellan in the peninsula campaign—wrote that “a pleasanter pupil was never called to the blackboard.”22 McClellan made many close friends, including his roommate A. P. Hill. Those friends tended to be from the South, and from the upper echelons of society. McClellan would always carry a deep, abiding sympathy for that part of the country. (That feeling would become more and more apparent as the war progressed.) It is not known how much interaction he and his classmate Jackson had, though in such a small group of young men they certainly came into frequent contact with each other. (After the Mexican-American War, Jackson made a point of visiting McClellan and Dabney Maury when he was on court-martial duty at West Point, where both were on the faculty.23) In any case, there would seem to have been an uncrossable social and academic gulf separating the two cadets, one that very little could possibly change.

  • • •

  Then something interesting happened. Into this rather predictable narrative of the casually successful Philadelphia blue blood and the struggling Appalachian orphan came a new story line entirely: Jackson, who had started his West Point career dead last in the weakest section, known as the Immortals, began a steady rise in the class ranks. It is hard to imagine the sort of pressure he was under that first semester as the worst student in a class that was undoubtedly going to shrink substantially, as West Point classes did. The fear of washing out, and returning home a failure, must have been harrowing. He barely made it through the January exams, which weeded out another 16 students. His 62nd in math saved him. After the June exams at the end of the first year, only 72 of the original 122 students remained. Someone paying close attention that spring might have noticed the remarkable progress of cadet Thomas J. Jackson, who suddenly ranked 51st in the class.

  Against all expectations he was rising fast, finally catching up to all that secondary education he had never had. In his second year he encountered the guts of the academy’s math program, much dreaded by cadets: analytical geometry and calculus. He was, as it happened, very good at both. In the January 1844 exams he rose to 21st—a stunning achievement, considering where he had started out. He did well in other subjects, too. Only in drawing was he still mired with the other Immortals. (Drawing was entirely related to military uses, sketching fortifications and so forth.) He was by now so confident that he wrote his sister, Laura, that “unless fortune frowns on me more than it has yet, I shall graduate in the upper half of my class.”24 By the end of junior year—when he roomed with future Union cavalry general George Stoneman, almost as taciturn as he—he had placed 11th in natural philosophy (the subject he later taught), one of the academy’s toughest courses, and 30th in general merit. By the time he graduated he ranked 17th in a class of 59, a feat driven partly by his number 4 ranking in logic, which many cadets considered “a bugbear”—a course even harder than natural philosophy. One cadet compared Jackson to “a meteor.”25

  There were other changes in Jackson’s life, too. Though he was still stiff, formal, and shy, he had found his place in the class. He had clearly earned his classmates’ respect. He actually loved the place. “It grieves me,” he wrote Laura in his last year, “that in a short time, I must be separated from amiable and meritorious friends whom an acquaintance of years has endeared to me by many ties.” In spite of his oddities, his schoolmates noticed that he did have a “sweet smile of recognition” for people he knew.26 Perhaps his best trait was his kindness, which was noted by more than one of his classmates. Future Confederate general William Gardner noticed it when Jackson, unsolicited, came to console him while he was under arrest and confined to quarters. Sickness and grief in his fellows seemed to always elicit sympathy from Jackson.27 One of Jackson’s roommates, Tennessean Parmenas Turnley, wrote later, “While there were many who seemed to surpass him in intellect, in geniality, and in good-fellowship, there was no one of our class who more absolutely possessed the respect and confidence of all.”28

  Except possibly George McClellan, of course, the nineteen-year-old undisputed star of the class. He finished second. As president of the Dialectic S
ociety—which held the intellectual elite of West Point’s senior class—he delivered the valedictory address at graduation. He was as much of a grand success walking out of the academy’s doors as he had been entering through them four years before. But if his classmates thought he was perfect, his correspondence showed that he was perhaps not quite. There were flashes, in his letters home, of the petulance, self-pity, and vainglory that would later damage his career. He bridled for much of his West Point life, for example, that he was not number one in the class, which he attributed to unfairness. “Toiling uphill is not what it is cracked up to be,” he complained to his mother. “I do not get marked as well for a good (or better) recitation, as the man above me.”29 When he found out he would graduate number two instead of number one, he wrote his family, “I must confess that I have enough malice in me to want to show them that if I did not graduate at the head of my class, I can nevertheless do something.” And always there was his almost melancholy sense of the burden of his own talent. “I know not what fate has in store for me,” he wrote his sister, “I only know that I must expect the hardest of trials a proud spirit can bear before I can effect anything.” He might have been writing in the spring of 1862, as his old classmate Tom Jackson was bearing down on his Army of the Potomac, unseen, from the high, rain-swept battlements of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  THE DEFENSE OF RICHMOND

  The news of Stonewall Jackson’s arrival in front of Richmond ran through the Army of Northern Virginia like an electric current, and it spread from mouth to mouth until suddenly, according to one soldier, “a deafening shout burst from our men; thousands of throats took it up and rent the very air; it died away only to be repeated with greater emphasis and volume. . . . Stonewall Jackson here! The genius of our Southern cause—its very soul. What could he know of failure? Every soldier in the ranks felt safe; the magic of that name, the prestige of his corps, was such that the most doubting Thomas had no longer any fears.”1

  They had prayed that Jackson would come, and now, in their hour of greatest peril, he and his army had marched in, fresh from their brilliant valley campaign, ready to save the day, the city, the Confederacy. The moment was purely theatrical: one of the South’s few authentic heroes had arrived at the very time and place where he was needed most—the gloom-ridden, despondent city of Richmond, in whose eastern approaches stood McClellan’s restless Army of the Potomac—to redeem the Southern cause. Until his arrival, there had been little to hope for. The bloody stalemate at the Battle of Seven Pines on May 31–June 1 had accomplished nothing more than to fill the city’s hospitals with wounded men. And now came the very real prospect that the city might fall. Plenty of Northerners believed that it would; newspapers in New York and Boston were boasting of the inevitable victory. Expecting the worst, many Richmond residents had already fled. President Davis and other politicians had dispatched their families southward. Trains loaded with Confederate gold and government documents were ready to roll out of the city at a moment’s notice. Major General Joseph E. Johnston, recuperating from his recent wounds, was so certain that McClellan would capture Richmond that he arranged for a special train to take him out of the city.2 While Union soldiers drilled in their camps, gnawed on hard biscuits, and complained about the heat, Richmond prepared for battle, siege, and more death.

  How could one dusty, disheveled major general and 18,500 ragged troops possibly live up to such outlandish expectations? That is one of the most intriguing questions of the war. Because Jackson, against all odds, did. He fulfilled all of his countrymen’s most wildly optimistic and absurdly unrealistic expectations of him, and he did it before summer’s end. It is a matter of record that, mainly on the strength of Lee’s daring and Jackson’s astounding maneuvers, within two months the capital being threatened was no longer Richmond but Washington, DC, a city into which the defeated Union army beat a humiliating retreat—the greatest military disaster of the war to date.

  Just how that happened is one of the great stories of the war. It did not happen right away. First the rebel generals had to deal with the immense army in front of them.

  • • •

  The counteroffensive began as an idea in the mind of Robert E. Lee. In late June 1862 the problem he faced was obvious enough: how to force a very large Union army away from Richmond. Even though with Jackson’s troops and other reinforcements he would soon have eighty-five thousand to ninety thousand men at his disposal, he did not believe he could succeed in a frontal assault against the entrenched Federals. He was absolutely certain that he could not win a purely defensive battle.

  What he could do, however, was use the enormous size of the Union army against itself.3

  That army, camped deep inside enemy territory, was dependent on its lines of supply to deliver the six hundred tons of food, clothing, weaponry, ammunition, fodder, tents, and multitudinous other sundries it needed every day to survive. It was far too big to live off the land. Without those supplies it would turn very quickly from a fighting force into an assemblage of starving men and horses. The lines that fed it were long and sinuous: they had their origins in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other Northern cities. The matériel came by wagon, train, and eventually by boat down the Chesapeake Bay and then up the York and Pamunkey Rivers to a place called White House Landing, about twenty airline miles due east of Richmond. Lee knew it well. The White House plantation had been the home of his wife, Mary’s, great-grandmother Martha Custis at the time she married George Washington. It had later been inherited by Lee’s son Rooney. When Federal troops took possession of the mansion and converted it to Little Mac’s headquarters, it was Mary’s principal residence. McClellan, always attentive to proper protocol, saw to it that Mrs. R. E. Lee was escorted through the lines.4

  In the late spring of 1862, this pier on the Pamunkey had become the lifeline of McClellan’s epic move against Richmond. In the river were boats of every sort, steam-powered and sail-powered and man-powered, stacked and gammed in rows that spread out into the lazy current and that were tethered ultimately to a succession of floating wharves where goods were unloaded. There were floating hospitals, too, sutlers’ stores selling everything from toothbrushes to potted lobster, roads jammed with wagons, quartermaster officers, sailors, African-American laborers, and other contrabands, mules, and horses.5 Here, too, was the terminus of the telegraph wire from Washington, strung along a circuitous, two-hundred-mile path from the War Department to Wilmington, down the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and up the York-James Peninsula. With its electrical current, electromagnets, and pulses of Morse code, it was one of the technological wonders of the age. Through it ran all of Lincoln’s chiding and coaxing, as well as McClellan’s dilatory, self-protective replies. From White House Landing the supplies were loaded onto train cars on the Richmond and York River Railroad and hauled westward to the Union camps in front of the Confederate capital.

  Thus everything the Union army needed to survive—all that tonnage produced by McClellan’s vast logistical machine and transported from points hundreds of miles away—ultimately ran down a single, vulnerable railroad track. To threaten it was to threaten the army itself. Lee understood this. As he considered the scene in front of Richmond, he saw something else, too. The Chickahominy River, which ran parallel to the James and roughly bisected the peninsula, was swollen and unfordable: the bogs and marshes of its timbered bottomlands were up to a mile wide in places, making it impossible for cavalry or artillery to cross. At high water—which there was plenty of that spring—it was too swampy even for light infantry.6 Crossing was possible only by bridge, and there were only half a dozen of them spread along fifteen river miles in front of Richmond; some of them were washed out.

  To protect the railroad line on both sides of the Chickahominy, McClellan had been forced to split his army. Jeb Stuart’s swashbuckling ride had shown Lee precisely how he had done it. McClellan had deployed eighty thousand men in front of the city, south of t
he river. But north of the river, on his right flank, he had placed only a single army corps of thirty thousand men under General Fitz John Porter, an army lifer and McClellan crony who had graduated a year ahead of Jackson at West Point and had later been a cavalry and artillery instructor there.7 (The rest of the Union right was camped on the south side of the river.) Because of the difficulty of moving an army across the Chickahominy, Porter could not be easily or quickly reinforced. In this Lee saw a compounding of Union weaknesses. He saw opportunity. A successful attack north of the Chickahominy against the numerically inferior Porter would in turn threaten the Union’s railroad and supply depot, which would then compel McClellan’s main force to fall back from its advanced positions in front of the city.

  There were two problems with Lee’s idea. The first was that Porter occupied one of the war’s best defensive positions, one that Confederate engineers themselves had scouted earlier and determined would be almost impregnable.8 Lee’s answer to this, in the plan he outlined at the generals’ meeting on Nine Mile Road, was to avoid attacking Porter directly. Instead, he would send Jackson and his army to march around Porter’s flank and head straight for the railroad in his rear. With Jackson behind him—specifically Jackson, his name ablaze with its new celebrity—Porter would have no choice but to pull out of his breastworks and rifle pits and move rearward. He would then be out in the open, where Lee could unleash his wheeling attack. Of course, all this required precision in both timing and movement. The maneuvers were to be executed by an inexperienced staff under a novice commanding officer and subordinate officers who were unused to cooperating with each other.