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

by S. C. Gwynne

  On that same ride, Jackson and Douglas had discovered, to Jackson’s great delight, a field that was full of blackberries, one of the general’s most coveted fruits. The problem was that the field was in a sort of no-man’s-land between Federal and rebel picket lines, and that day, wrote Douglas, “there was a deal of spiteful firing between them.” Jackson went happily into the field anyway, calmly picking and eating the ripe fruit even though, as Douglas observed, “the bullets seemed to be as plentiful as blackberries.” At one point he turned to his increasingly anxious aide and, with a large, juicy berry between his thumb and finger, asked Douglas casually “in what part of the body I preferred being shot.” Douglas, nervously handing the general berries while minié balls whistled overhead and buried themselves in the trees around them, replied that while his first choice was to be hit in his clothing, he preferred anyplace other than his face or joints. Jackson said he had “the old-fashioned horror of being shot in the back and so great was his prejudice on the subject that he often found himself turning his face in the direction from which the bullets came.” Just then a bullet thudded into a sapling near their heads, and Jackson, with a “vague remark about getting his horse killed,” reluctantly left the feast.18

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  The strange, almost recreational mood of the blackberry field persisted after the Confederate army moved its camps to Richmond on July 8. Jackson’s divisions were near Mechanicsville, about three miles from the city. The weather improved, food became better and more plentiful, and there was time to relax and write letters home. Best of all were the accolades: if Lee and Jackson were famous, so were the men who fought for them. They were aware that, however it had happened—in fact they had won one battle, lost two, and fought three draws—they had done a marvelous thing.19 They were cheered by their compatriots. “These were the halcyon days of Jackson’s troops,” remembered a gunner with the Rockbridge Artillery. “Well-earned rest, good rations, abundant supplies from their valley homes, proximity to the capital with its varied attractions, the praises and admiration of its people for Stonewall and his followers all combined to make it most pleasantly remembered ever afterwards.”20 One infantryman remembered that Jackson gave his company permission to spend the day in Richmond. “That was a great day,” he recalled. “We left Richmond a year ago in new uniforms, with the fair complexion of city men. . . . Now we returned as veterans ruddy and brown, with the health and hardness that outdoor living creates. Our welcome was an ovation, and it made us feel our standing in public esteem. The only thing we regretted as our time closed was that the day did not last forever.”21

  Jackson himself mostly stayed out of Richmond, attending to the mountain of administrative detail involved in running his divisions. He was a thorough and highly capable administrator but gets little credit for it. In one of his dispatches to Ewell, you can see his thoroughness: he wants to know the condition of all his batteries, the number and kinds of guns that still worked, the number of men and serviceable horses, which of their guns and caissons had been captured, which they had taken from the Yankees, which they had exchanged with the Yankees after the battle, and so on.22

  But there was another reason why Jackson did not want to go to Richmond, and it was made manifest on his only visit to the city. On Sunday he decided to attend services in a real church for a change, and so he rode into the city with staff members McGuire, Pendleton, and Douglas. At first they went unnoticed, mainly because few people knew what Jackson looked like, and with his wrinkled uniform and general absence of pomp there was nothing to catch anyone’s eye. They entered the Presbyterian church and were escorted to a pew. Jackson, as was his habit, fell asleep and slept through most of the service, which included the fiery preaching of the Reverend Moses Hoge. The service proceeded as usual until, just as the benediction was being given, “a gentle excitement and rising confusion indicated that [Jackson] had been discovered.”23 Though the church doors opened, most of the attendees rushed for Jackson’s pew instead, some of them climbing over the backs of other pews to get to him.24 He tried to escape but, as Douglas told it,

  For awhile [Jackson] was cut off and surrounded and could not cut his way out; there was no relief in sight. The staff were run over and squeezed into a corner and otherwise disregarded, and were very little stars on the solar splendor of our Chief. But in the end we came to his rescue and got him out. Pretty girls tried to be polite to us, but it was too late; we would have none of it!25

  While he was in Richmond Jackson also paid a few calls. He went to the governor’s mansion and met with Lee and his old friend Governor John Letcher. The two generals then continued on to the Confederate “White House,” a splendid gray neoclassical mansion, where they met with Davis and other Confederate generals. After a while the other generals departed, leaving Lee, Davis, and Jackson to meet together in private. When the three came out, Davis and Lee, according to an observer, lingered for a moment on the front steps, then “bade Jackson farewell in a manner that indicated they would not see him again.”26 Whatever ill will there had been between Jackson and Davis was no longer apparent, and would not resurface during the war.

  The meeting had been called to discuss a new threat. While the two armies had been locked in combat east of Richmond, a new Union army had been formed in the western part of the state under the command of Major General John Pope, and it was on the move. On July 12, the day before the meeting, Lee had learned that advance elements of that army were already near Culpeper, a town only twenty-seven miles northeast of the key strategic town of Gordonsville, the junction of the Orange and Alexandria and Virginia Central Railroads. They seemed to be closing fast. Lee’s response was to formally divide his army into two commands, under Jackson and Longstreet. In case anyone wondered what Lee thought of his generals after the Seven Days, this was clear evidence of his continued high opinion of Jackson. The generals who had not performed well in his view, John Magruder and Benjamin Huger, were quickly shipped off—Huger to duty as inspector of artillery and ordnance; Magruder, eventually, to command of the Confederate Trans-Mississippi, which included Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.27 Lee would now leave Longstreet between McClellan and Richmond, and dispatch Jackson to meet Pope. Jackson would march the next day. Because he did not know what McClellan might do, Lee could spare Jackson no more than fourteen thousand troops (two divisions) to face fifty thousand bluecoats in the Piedmont. The confrontation was another absurd mismatch. But it had a curiously familiar ring.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  NO BACKING OUT THIS DAY

  The new Union threat Jackson faced in Virginia was really an old Union threat, but one that had been renamed and placed under new management. The Army of Virginia, as it would be known—a Yankee army with a Confederate name—had been stitched together from the three armies Jackson had beaten up in his valley campaign. Its 1st Corps was John C. Frémont’s old unit, now under the command of the angular, Teutonic Franz Sigel, a general of modest abilities who had fought in mostly losing campaigns in the western theater and whose main credential was that he had commanded revolutionary troops in Germany in 1848.1 The army’s 2nd Corps was commanded by Nathaniel Banks, the former Massachusetts governor and Speaker of the House who was still licking his wounds from his defeat at Winchester. The 3rd Corps was under the ponderous gourmand Irvin McDowell, the goat of Manassas, who had recently been left to guard Washington while McClellan waged war in the peninsula. Together they directed more than fifty thousand soldiers. Even as an assemblage of failed, early-war Union generals, they were an odd grouping.

  But they were no odder than the man who had been appointed to command them. John Pope was a swaggering narcissist who had distinguished himself at West Point (Class of 1842, top third) and in the Mexican-American War and who had spent time before the war as an army surveyor and topographical engineer mapping southern routes for the transcontinental railroad. (The routes were never used.) In March 1862 he had won considerable fame for his capture of the
town of New Madrid, Missouri, and the neighboring rebel-held Island No. 10 in the Mississippi River along with 3,500 prisoners. Like McClellan a year before, the confident, distinguished-looking Pope was very much the man of the hour, very much the Great New Hope of the Union.

  But as Lincoln’s new appointee he was in all other ways designed to be as unlike McClellan as possible. He was a staunch Republican, outspoken against slavery. He was in favor of causing suffering and disruption to the civilians of the South. His objective, as he told the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, was “to defend Washington, not by keeping on the defensive, nor by fortifying in front of the enemy, but by placing myself on his flanks and attacking him day and night.”2 In the view of his many supporters in Washington, he was an aggressive fighter, an image he cultivated in one of his first orders to his troops, which became quickly infamous. Addressed to the “Officers and Soldiers of the Army of Virginia,” it said:

  Let us understand each other. I have come to you from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies; from an army whose business it has been to seek the adversary and beat him when he was found; whose policy has been attack and not defense. . . . I desire you to dismiss from your minds certain phrases, which I am sorry to find so much in vogue amongst you. I hear constantly of “taking strong positions” and holding them, of “lines of retreat,” and of “bases of supply.” Let us discard such ideas. . . . Success and glory are in the advance, disaster and shame lurk in the rear.3

  The speech was quite obviously aimed at McClellan. But it also infuriated a large segment of the military. Pope might as well have called the Army of the Potomac cowards. Then, too, there was the indisputable fact that few people who knew him seemed to like him much. Confederate general Richard Taylor wrote memorably that Pope’s character was marked by “effrontery while danger was remote equaled by helplessness while it was present and mendacity after it had passed.”4 Union major general Fitz John Porter, McClellan’s most devoted subordinate, had a similarly low opinion of Pope. “I regret to see that General Pope has not improved since his youth,” he wrote a friend, “and has now written himself down as what the military world has long known, as ass.”5 John Frémont, who disliked Pope, had resigned rather than serve under him. (Pope was also of a lesser rank.) A correspondent for a British magazine captured the confident general in the summer of 1862: “Tall, corpulent, and athletic, with keen dark eyes, and beard and hair black as midnight, Gen. Pope had the air of a commander. Vain, imprudent, and not proverbially truthful; but shrewd, active, and skilled in the rules of warfare. . . . He spoke much and rapidly, chiefly of himself.”6

  But Pope was just getting started. A few days later he issued a series of harsh new orders that were unprecedented in their hostility toward Southern civilians who were seen—correctly—as a major impediment to Union operations. Indeed, Pope was responding to the anger much of the army felt at what they took to be McClellan’s “pussyfooting.” “We are the most timid and scrupulous invaders in history,” a Massachusetts colonel wrote at the time. “It must be delicious to the finer feelings of some people to watch our velvet-footed advance.”7 Thus Pope announced that in the future his troops “will subsist upon the country,” which meant that they now had full license to take anything and everything from Southern farms, from corn in the fields to cattle, pigs, chickens, tobacco, ice, smokehouse meats, and fruit preserves. The order was seen immediately for what it was: permission to pillage. There was more. Houses where gunshots originated would be burned. When damage was done to Union property, all citizens within five miles would be rounded up to repair the damage and even pay for it. Suspected guerrillas would be arrested and made to take loyalty oaths. Those who violated the oaths could be shot; others would be sent south through the Confederate lines—in effect, deported from Yankee-controlled to rebel-held territory. News of Union depredations inspired by these orders roared through the South, along with wild rumors about the wholesale rape of the Virginia Piedmont.

  Lee himself took deep, personal offense. Though normally reserved in his judgments of others, including his enemies, he was outspoken on the subject of Pope, whom he said was “a miscreant” who must be “suppressed.” He even wrote a letter on behalf of President Davis to new Union army chief Henry Halleck, protesting that Pope and his men had taken on the roles of “robbers and murderers,” and that if they were captured they would not be granted the normal privileges of prisoners. If any unarmed citizens were shot by Pope’s men, Lee warned, he would execute an equivalent number of Union officers.8 Halleck did not bother to respond, and Lee never made good on his threat. Jackson considered Pope’s orders “cruel and utterly barbarous,” according to his brother-in-law Rufus Barringer. This from a man who had once advocated a “black flag” war in the North.9

  Most soldiers and civilians, North and South, held Pope solely responsible for his brash words. Indeed, many historians have suggested that he was acting alone. But whether he was seen as a bold new commander, an ass, or, as Lee believed, an evil to be eradicated, Pope was in reality the carefully chosen spearhead of Lincoln’s new campaign to toughen the war. The new Republican strategy was to stop playing nice, stop pretending that noncombatants in the South were somehow innocent, stop trying to preserve or defend enemy property—or, as one Union soldier had it, stop being “compelled to mount guard over rebel commissary stores, while Jackson’s crew were refreshing themselves with sleep.”10 Congress had been hardening its stance for months. Now the army would, too, in direct contravention of the lofty Democratic theory of war McClellan had put forward to Lincoln in his July 7 letter. The truth was that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had personally vetted Pope’s troop address, and Abraham Lincoln had approved it. Lincoln had also approved, in advance, Pope’s equally notorious general orders. Lincoln was in effect using Pope as a mouthpiece, speaking through him to McClellan, Southern civilians, the Union army, and the nation at large.11 Unfortunately for Pope—the blustery, overconfident front man—many of the things he said would come to haunt him for the rest of his life.

  Pope had assumed command just as McClellan was retreating from Lee’s army across the York-James Peninsula. His orders, as they evolved, were mainly to guard the approaches to Washington. He did that by deploying his army across the forty-mile-wide patch of rolling, river-cut Virginia foothills between the Potomac River and the Blue Ridge Mountains, roughly along the line of the Rappahannock River. Any rebel army marching north from Richmond would have to cross it. On his left flank, the Army of Virginia linked with Federal troops under Ambrose Burnside near Fredericksburg. The latter arrangement was crucial. In early August McClellan was ordered to abandon the peninsula and take his army north to join Pope. Much of that army would disembark at a landing on the Potomac River near Fredericksburg called Aquia Creek, where it would march west to fortify the existing Union line. (The rest would come ashore at Alexandria and march south.) McClellan protested the move bitterly, insisting that first, with an additional 20,000, then 50,000, then 55,000 troops—the number kept escalating—he could take Richmond from Lee’s mythical 200,000.12 But that moment had passed. A new savior had arrived. The strategy now was to unite the two forces. Together they would form a sort of superarmy, with more than 150,000 men, that would be able to move, north to south, upon Lee and his works at Richmond.

  Until then, Pope was to hold the line. In spite of this he was thinking bold, aggressive thoughts, appropriate to a man who had only seen the backs of fleeing rebels. Not far south of his army’s position was the Virginia Central Railroad, Richmond’s critical link to the Shenandoah Valley. If Pope could advance just twenty-five miles or so, he could take the towns of Gordonsville and Charlottesville, and he could cut that line. That was what he planned to do. Arriving on July 31 from Washington to assume field command, he wired his new boss, Henry Halleck, “Unless Jackson is heavily reinforced from Richmond, I shall be in possession of Gordonsville and Charlottesville within ten days.”13

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sp; • • •

  Jackson’s orders from Lee, of course, were to prevent that very thing from happening. He had arrived in Gordonsville on July 19 with a force of roughly fourteen thousand men. With no immediate threat in sight, and with too few men to attack Pope, he rested and drilled his army. Courts-martial for the cases of Richard Garnett (Kernstown) and Z. T. Conner (Front Royal) were convened. (The Garnett trial would be interrupted and never concluded.) He tried to fire his cavalry chief, Beverly Robertson, but Lee would not allow it. Jackson accommodated the request of his sickly and inept but well-meaning friend Robert Dabney to return to civilian life, and welcomed the brother of his wife, Anna, Joseph Morrison, as an aide. (Reverend Dabney resumed his career as one of Southern Presbyterianism’s most influential theologians.)

  Though Jackson seemed more like the Old Jack everyone was used to, the effects of sickness and fatigue from the valley campaign and the Seven Days were still quite apparent. Jed Hotchkiss thought he looked “weary,” and “the worse for his Chickahominy trip.”14 Anna’s cousin, a doctor, had seen Jackson in person, and had reported to her that her husband was “not looking well and very thin.” She was so concerned that she wrote to Hunter McGuire about it, to ask him to convince Jackson to take a short leave. “I have urged him,” she wrote, “to treat himself to a rest and cessation from labor for a few weeks. Sixteen months of uninterrupted mental & physical labor is enough to break down the strongest constitution, but he is so self-sacrificing, & is such a martyr to duty, that if he thinks he cannot be spared from the service, I’m afraid he would sacrifice his life before he would give up.”15 With large Union armies abroad in Virginia, Jackson, in fact, could never be spared.