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

by S. C. Gwynne

  In his debilitated state, he had been writing to Anna less than usual, too, and perhaps this had increased her sense of alarm. Shortly after his arrival in Gordonsville, he wrote,

  My darling wife, I am just overburdened with work, and I hope you will not think hard at receiving only very short letters from your loving husband. A number of officers are with me, but people keep coming to my tent—though let me say no more. A Christian should never complain. The apostle Paul said, “I glory in tribulations!” What a bright example for others! 16

  Though McClellan had not yet begun his withdrawal, by July 27 Lee felt confident enough in his opponent’s essential timidity to send Jackson reinforcements in the form of Ambrose Powell Hill’s “Light Division” and a brigade of Louisianans. Lee, keenly aware that he was sending this hot-tempered general to work with the secretive, hypercritical Jackson, sent the latter a little admonitory note. “A. P. Hill you will find I think a good officer with whom you can consult,” Lee wrote, “and by advising with your division commanders as to movements much trouble will be saved you.” What Lee did not know was that enmity between his two generals dated to their West Point days, and that Hill was still seething with anger at what he considered (unfairly) Jackson’s failure to fight at Mechanicsville and Savage’s Station and his lateness at Gaines’s Mill.17

  But A. P. Hill’s arrival changed everything. With twenty-two thousand men, Jackson now had the means to attack. He dispatched scouts and cavalry, looking for some weakness in Pope’s position that would allow him to advance. On August 7, he found it. Pope, in apparent ignorance of the habits and predilections of his adversary, had permitted a piece of his army, specifically its 2nd Corps, to dangle tantalizingly out beyond the rest of the force near the town of Culpeper. It was pure coincidence that the man who commanded this vulnerable, detached Union force was none other than Nathaniel Prentiss Banks. Jackson prepared to move immediately against him. When Jackson’s men heard that “Commissary Banks” was in their front, they cheered and capered about. “Get your requisitions ready, boys! . . . Old Stonewall’s quartermaster has come with a full supply for issue.”18

  But Banks was nothing if not an ambitious, enterprising man. And now he saw an opportunity to win back some lost grace. Though there is considerable dispute about what Pope’s orders said—Banks later insisted that he was directed to attack the enemy if the enemy approached, and Pope’s defenders insisted that Banks was supposed to avoid bringing on a general engagement until the rest of the army came up—there was enough wiggle room for Banks to conclude that he could advance against Jackson.19 He thus moved south of Culpeper, where, on August 9, he encountered his old adversary at a place called Cedar Mountain. Though Banks hardly needed encouragement, Pope’s inspector general Brigadier General Benjamin S. Roberts took care that morning to remind him of what was expected of him. As Banks recalled later: “General Roberts, when he indicated the position [of the Union troops], said to me, in a tone which it was hardly proper for one officer to use to another, ‘There must be no backing out this day.’ He said this to me from six to twelve times. I made no reply to him at all, but felt it keenly because I knew my command did not want to back out; we had backed out enough.”20

  Whether he was goaded into it or shamed into it, or whether he simply thought he was following Pope’s orders, Banks should never have offered battle. He was up against a superior force commanded by a superior general, who would that day bring fifteen thousand men into battle against Banks’s nine thousand.21 Pope insisted to the end of his life that he had never intended Banks to take on Jackson’s entire force alone. All logic would have been with him; against a commander like Jackson, notorious for beating large armies with small ones, it seemed a suicidal move. But Banks picked a fight anyway.

  The battlefield at Cedar Mountain was simply laid out: Union and Confederate troops faced each other in battle lines that ran roughly north to south for about two miles. The opposing lines were on average about half a mile apart. Most of the terrain was open: cornfields, wheatfields, and pastureland. On the south a large, conical green hill loomed up over the open, gently swelling landscape. The northern extremities of both lines disappeared in patches of thick woods. At about 3:00 p.m. the now customary artillery fight started. For two hours the two sides pounded each other. Though the Union had superior weapons, Jackson the artillerist and former artillery instructor got the better of his adversary, carefully choosing his gun positions on the mountain itself and behind his lines to create a devastating converging fire.

  As his artillery took its toll on men, horses, and enemy guns and caissons, Jackson roved over the field on horseback, his eyes wide and luminous with the light of battle, like a man who had been born to do this and only this. He cared nothing for his own safety. At one point he and a group of his staffers on horseback were numerous enough to attract the attention of Union batteries. Suddenly the air was full of projectiles that either exploded above or plowed up the soil around them. Jackson was unperturbed. “General Jackson had been sitting with his right leg thrown across the pommel of his saddle,” wrote cavalryman John Blue, “as immovable apparently as a statue, with his field glasses watching the artillery duel.” With the evident peril closing in on them he turned to his nervous companions and said, with a faint smile, that the Confederate guns “were making it pretty warm” for the Yankees. A moment later, a shell exploded very close to the group, wounding three horses. Jackson immediately led the group to the rear and told them they would be better off out of sight. “They will hardly aim at a single horseman,” he assured them. His order was obeyed happily and without question, while Jackson returned to his observation point.22 A moment later a rider arrived to tell Jackson that one of his key generals and a division commander, Charles S. Winder, had been mortally wounded by a shell fragment. Jackson raised his hand in silent prayer.

  At 5:45 p.m. Banks’s infantry attacked. Two brigades under Brigadier General Christopher Augur advanced two-deep through the cornrows and thickening heat toward the waiting Confederates. Soon long rolls of musket fire exploded along most of the line. Sheets of yellow flame pierced billowing clouds of white smoke, while volleys of sizzing minié balls filled the air like angry insects. It was a stand-up fight, with little cover. On the Confederate right, Brigadier General Jubal Early, a hard fighter who would make a name for himself at this battle, repulsed advance after advance. By some estimates there were nine of them.23 From the base of Cedar Mountain, General Richard Ewell’s batteries continued to fire, as Jackson, close to the front, watched contentedly through his field glasses. He was clearly transported by the sights and sounds of the battle, wrote Blue. He was “a different person altogether,” who only by great exertion managed to stop himself from riding into combat.

  But Blue noticed something else, too. Jackson was not only watching the action on the field, he was also looking “anxiously to the rear.” Why? Because Jackson had once again gone into battle with only two of his three divisions. D. H. Hill’s division—representing most of Jackson’s numerical superiority—was due to arrive at any moment. But where was it? Jackson ordered a member of his staff to ride to General Early and “say to him, stand firm, Gen. Hill will be with him in a few moments.”24 Early was indeed holding his own as the battle raged on.

  The real and immediate peril, however, lurked not in the open field but on Jackson’s left, in the deep woods behind the wheatfield, where he could not see it. He had received a report from Jubal Early of Federal bayonets moving in and around those woods, and had sent word to brigade commander Thomas S. Garnett to “look well” to his left. (He had no relation to Richard B. Garnett.) Unfortunately, no one did; or if someone did, he did not look very hard. Garnett’s superior, the mortally wounded Charles Winder, had been replaced by William B. Taliaferro, who was far more concerned with the battle in the center and right. The result was that Jackson’s left wing was in considerable disarray: its soldiers were not where they should be. His old Stonewall Brigade,
on the far Confederate left, which had been hanging back from the front, was supposed to be marching to a position even with the rest of the Confederate line, and closing up the gaps on the far left. The 10th Virginia Regiment, which had been ordered to help reinforce Garnett’s left, had not yet arrived.

  At this moment of unexpected vulnerability, less than twenty minutes into the battle and just a few minutes after Jackson had told Early to hold on, Nathaniel Banks decided to order an attack on the Confederate left. It seems to have been more a product of his annoyance with the Confederate artillery than a deliberate or calculated plan.25 In any case, it shouldn’t have worked. Just ten minutes later, when the Stonewall Brigade had come up and the 10th Virginia was moving into place, it could not possibly have worked. But Banks, unknowingly—as far as we can tell—had hit an invisible, 1,400-foot-wide seam, the weakest point in Jackson’s line. Shortly after 6:00 p.m., three and a half regiments with 1,500 bluecoats under Brigadier General Samuel Crawford scrambled out of the woods and into the open field in a straight-ahead assault. In front of them, across the open wheatfield, stood Garnett’s four regiments plus a battalion (a collection of companies and smaller than a regiment). The numbers, and the terrain, would all seem to have been in favor of Garnett. A body of men smaller than his own was advancing, unprotected, through a quarter-mile-wide wheatfield, while his own men enjoyed the cover of woods and brush. Crawford’s men never should have reached the other side of the field. They should have been cut down.

  They weren’t. Whether it was the sheer audacity of the Federals, or the faintheartedness of the 21st Virginia, which quickly broke and ran, or the fact that the bluecoats crossed the field so quickly that the rebels had no time to reload—or some combination of these—within minutes Garnett’s men were “broken, thrown back in masses from front to rear, and intermingled with their assailants,” wrote Union brigadier general George H. Gordon.26 Some of the fighting was close and brutal. “Guns, bayonets, swords, pistols, fence rails, rocks, etc., were used all along the line,” recalled infantryman John Worsham. “I have heard of a ‘hell spot’ in some battles and this surely was one.”27

  Having shattered Garnett’s brigade, Crawford’s regiments, flush with victory, rolled on, swinging to the left, back out of the woods, and straight into the cornfield where the main battle was taking place. There they slammed into the flank of four regiments of Alabama and Virginia troops under Taliaferro, who had been battling Augur’s Union line. It was still only six fifteen or so. The entire duration of Crawford’s attack thus far was fifteen minutes. Since infantry will not stand flanking fire—seeing bullets coming at them from two sides—Taliaferro’s men fell back, too, and suddenly the entire Confederate left was collapsing. “Field and woods were filled with clamor and horrid rout . . .” wrote Gordon, “until the left of Jackson’s line was turned and its rear gained. . . . As Campbell [Garnett] had been overthrown, so next was Taliaferro; and then came the left of Early’s brigade . . . until on both sides of the road vast irruption had been made, which involved the whole of the enemy’s line.”28

  Jackson, meanwhile, had been observing Augur’s unsuccessful attacks against his center and right across the cornfield when a sudden, loud roar of musketry came up from his left. He cocked his right ear (he was almost deaf in the left), listened for a few moments, and concluded, “That firing is very heavy.” He wheeled, spurred his horse, and galloped off down the line, leaving his staff struggling to catch up. Suddenly the old professor was on fire. He galloped four hundred yards, leaped two fences, and plunged into the woods where Garnett’s men were in wild, chaotic retreat. Jackson reined in, sat there for a moment taking in the scene before him, “calm as a statue” as shells exploded and rebels streamed past him, then turned and cantered toward the rear.29 He needed A. P. Hill’s division now. He finally found Hill—who had grown up in Culpeper, eight miles away—putting his men into line and attempting to slow the retreat. Jackson curtly informed him that he was late and ordered him to bring his regiments immediately forward. Jackson approached one of Hill’s brigade commanders, Brigadier General Lawrence Branch, a famous orator in the antebellum House of Representatives, saying, “Push forward, General! Push forward!” As Branch’s men moved forward they chanted, “Stonewall Jackson! Stonewall Jackson!”30

  Jackson wheeled again, and galloped back into the murderous heart of the battle—the place in the woods where Garnett’s brigade had been driven back. Now, his blue eyes blazing and his face aglow as if possessed, the hatless major general rallied his troops. He reached for his saber but the scabbard was so rusted he could not draw it out. So he unsnapped the scabbard and, brandishing it, used the flat of it on the heads and shoulders of retreating troops, urging them to stop and turn around. A few moments later he took hold of a battle flag and raised it over his head, dropping the reins to do so, and continued his ride forward toward the front, holding both saber and flag aloft. As he did so he shouted to the men. There is some disagreement about exactly what he said, but it probably included “Rally, men! Forward! Jackson is with you! Your general will lead you! Follow me!”

  The effect was immediate and electric. “Our men followed with a yell and drove everything before him,” wrote Charles Minor Blackford, who was with him. “It was a wonderful scene—one which men do not often see. Jackson is usually an indifferent, slouchy looking man. But then, with the ‘Light of Battle’ shedding its radiance over him, his whole person changed. . . . The men would have followed him into the jaws of death itself; nothing could have stopped them and nothing did.”31 The whole scene, he might have added, could not have been more out of character for the stern, reserved general. He had done something like this only once—in the road at the Battle of Chapultepec in Mexico, while he stood in a rain of bullets and shell and tried to rally his battery—but he had not done it since and would never do it again. His ride through the disintegrated Confederate left was also extremely dangerous. Considering that he was on horseback, and waving a sword and flag amid that “tornado” of bullets, officers near him marveled that he wasn’t hit. Taliaferro wrote later that his escape “from death was miraculous.” Taliaferro also understood that Jackson could not stay where he was. As he described it, “[Jackson] was in the very thickest of the combat, at short range. I rode up to him and insisted that he should retire, painfully and emphatically telling him that it was no place for the commander of an army.” Jackson looked surprised when his division commander said this, then said, “Good, good,” and rode to the rear.32 As he did, the rebel yell rose around him. He had certainly rallied the troops in his immediate vicinity—though his heroics would have had little effect on the other end of a two-mile battle line.

  Several Union prisoners, captured on the battlefield, were also impressed by Jackson’s performance. One young Federal soldier, in the custody of Captain Blackford, asked him, “What officer is that?” When Blackford told him, the young soldier “seemed carried away with admiration . . . he waved his broken sword and shouted ‘Hurrah for General Jackson! Follow your general, boys!’ ” Blackford, touched by his response, quietly let his prisoner return to his lines.33 Jed Hotchkiss, who was also with Jackson, recorded that other “Yankee prisoners cheered Gen. Jackson as he rode past them coming back after the fight.”34

  As Jackson was galloping heroically to the front, conditions were already changing in the Confederates’ favor. Though Crawford’s indomitable men had managed to rout Garnett’s brigade, Taliaferro’s brigade, and half of Early’s brigade, they had finally shattered themselves against the 13th Virginia Infantry, commanded by Colonel James A. Walker, the VMI cadet who had challenged Jackson and been expelled. Their flanking movement, which had, implausibly, nearly forced Jackson’s entire army to retreat, was spent. There were no reinforcements on the way, no attempt was being made to consolidate their gains; Banks had left them alone on the field to fend for themselves.

  And now Hill’s men came on, eight thousand of them, fresh and ready to fight, and s
oon it was the Union forces who were retreating. Jackson’s superior numbers began to take their toll. As Brigadier General Crawford described it, his retreat through Confederate fire was horrific: “The reserves of the enemy were at once brought up and thrown upon the broken ranks. The field officers had all been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, the support I looked for did not arrive, and my gallant men, decimated by that fearful fire . . . fell back again across that space leaving most of their number on the field.”35 Jackson’s center was once again stable. General Ewell, on the right, who had been unable to advance because of Confederate artillery across his field, now launched a full assault on the Union left. Banks understood what was happening to him. With his right shattered and his left in imminent danger, he ordered his full line to retreat, leaving the dead and wounded on the field. As the light in the sky began to fade, Jackson’s troops now swept forward as Confederate cheers and yells filled the air.

  It had been yet another hard, pitiless fight, and the battlefield bore witness to it. Though the infantry battle had lasted less than ninety minutes, more than 3,000 soldiers had fallen. Jackson’s troops had killed or wounded 1,786 Federals and taken 617 prisoner. Banks had killed or wounded 1,376 and taken only 42 prisoner.36 As always, Jackson wanted to pursue the enemy, and ordered A. P. Hill, with his fresh troops, to follow them. As always, pursuit after a battle was almost impossible to execute. Hill’s men got only half a mile before darkness came on. The army was worn out, used up. The temperature during the day had been in the 90s; by nightfall it was still 86 degrees. There would be no more pursuit that night.