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

by S. C. Gwynne

  I cannot tell you . . . how much I wish I could be with you and see my two darlings. But while this pleasure is denied me, I am thankful it is accorded to you to have the little pet, and I hope it may be a great deal of company and comfort to its mother. Now don’t exert yourself to write to me, for to know that you were taxing yourself to write would give me more pain than the letter would pleasure, so you must not do it. But you must love your esposo in the meantime.32

  Jackson told no one about the birth of his daughter, and even forbade Anna to put the news on the telegraph. He was experiencing “a joy with which a stranger could not intermeddle.” Later, more in control of his emotions, he implored his wife not to “set your affections upon her, except as a gift from God. If she absorbs too much of our hearts, God may remove her from us.”33 He named the child for his cherished mother and his beloved but estranged sister: Julia Laura Jackson.

  Jackson had no time to share these feelings with anyone anyway. Battle loomed. For reasons that would soon be painfully clear to the Union army, Lee had decided to stand and fight behind the Rappahannock. He actually could not believe that Burnside wanted to fight there. As one Confederate officer put it, “If the world had been searched by Burnside for a location in which his army could be best defeated and where an attack should not have been made he should have selected this very spot.”34 Fredericksburg was a charming, prosperous river town of five thousand souls where George Washington spent his boyhood and later bought a home for his mother. James Monroe once practiced law there.

  More important militarily were its immediate surroundings. West of the Rappahannock was a broad plain that climbed in a gentle upward sweep to a long, slightly elevated range of wooded hills that ran behind the town, roughly parallel to the river. Though the slopes were not steep, the natural defensive positions on the ridge were superb. Union troops would have to advance across half a mile to a mile of open ground, where they would be at the mercy of Confederate artillery. As they closed on the ridgeline, they would then be faced with some seventy thousand Confederates and their artillery firing downhill at them from behind sturdy entrenchments that included a stone wall, a sunken road, and considerable wooded cover. The one Federal advantage beyond sheer numbers was a high ridge that rose on the left bank of the river known as Stafford Heights. Artillery posted there had complete command of the town and plains below. This meant that the Confederates could not stop the Union army from crossing the river, nor could they mount an effective counterattack. But those big guns would offer little or no help to the blue-clad men as they assaulted the heights west of the river.35

  Lee took full advantage of the local geography, installing his army along the crest of the ridge, which offered both elevation and, in some places, superb natural fortifications. The most striking characteristic of his line was its unusual length: seven miles. He had neither attacked, nor defended, anything close to that scale thus far in the war. On the left was James Longstreet’s 1st Corps, dug in mainly along Marye’s Heights, which were fronted by a six-hundred-yard-long stone wall and sunken road. On the right, occupying a front of more than two miles, was Jackson’s 2nd Corps, tucked into the woods in a deep formation reminiscent of Second Manassas. The main difference was that he and his guns now commanded the high ground.

  The Battle of Fredericksburg began on December 11, when Burnside ordered his men to build pontoon bridges across the Rappahannock in preparation for crossing. As the engineers attempted to anchor the wooden pontoon boats in place across from the town and lay four-inch-wide planks across them, Brigadier General William Barksdale’s brigade of 1,800 Mississippians opened fire on them from the buildings across the river, driving them back each time they emerged onto the boats. Frustrated and impatient with the delay, Burnside ordered his artillery chief to “bring all your guns to bear on the city and batter it down.”36 Soon soldiers on both sides were watching what Colonel Edward Porter Alexander, recently appointed Longstreet’s chief of artillery, called “perhaps the most impressive exhibition of military force . . . I have ever witnessed.”37 For two hours the guns boomed; cannonballs whizzed, hummed, whistled, screeched, or whirred, depending on who was hearing them; buildings collapsed; trees were uprooted; fires raged all over town; and entire blocks lay in smoldering ruins. The barrage damaged almost every structure in the town.

  Witnesses on both sides were stunned by the barbarity of this attack on a civilian target, even though it had been evacuated. Later in the war men would get used to seeing cities and towns destroyed. But not yet. One New York gunner wrote later that he felt guilty about what he had done to the helpless town. Lee, watching from the heights, was disgusted by the spectacle, made worse by the frenetic Federal looting that followed. “These people delight to destroy the weak and those who can make no defense,” he said. “It just suits them.”38 In spite of all this apocalyptic thunder, the Federals still did not manage to dislodge Barksdale’s Mississippians, who began firing again as soon as the engineers emerged on the pontoons. Burnside, now furious, ordered volunteers to paddle the pontoon boats across the river and establish a bridgehead. This was soon done, though Barksdale’s men would put up a spirited street-to-street fight—the war’s first urban combat—for the next twelve hours. Behind it all, above the left bank lay the enormous Federal war machine, fully packed, provisioned, and waiting to cross. As Confederate artillerist Porter Alexander described the scene,

  Over 100,000 infantry were visible, standing apparently in great solid squares upon the hilltops, for a space of three miles. Scattered all over the slopes were endless parks of ambulances, ordnance, commissary, quartermaster & regimental white-topped wagons. . . . Still more impressive to military eyes . . . were the dark-colored parks of batteries of artillery scattered here and there among them. . . . Over the whole scene there hung, high in the air, above the rear of the Federal lines, two immense black, captive [observation] balloons, like two great spirits of the air attendant on the coming struggle.39

  By December 12, Burnside had managed to get his army across the Rappahannock. The next morning he launched his attack. His plan to assault Lee’s long line had two components. The main attack was to be made by William B. Franklin’s “Left Grand Division” against the Confederate right, roughly sixty-five thousand Federals against Jackson’s thirty-seven thousand. The secondary strike was to be made by the “Right Grand Division” under Edwin Sumner against the entrenched Confederates on Marye’s Heights. Sumner’s assault would fix Longstreet in place while Franklin rolled up Jackson’s line on the Federal right. Then the two grand divisions, together, would crush what was left of Lee’s army. In effect two battles would be fought that day, separated by three miles. Though Burnside’s plan was somewhat simple and crude, relying on brute force for its effects, there was no reason—on paper, anyway—why it could not work. As Burnside would soon discover, the reality on the ground was quite different.

  Jackson, waiting on Prospect Hill, was visibly happy that morning. In the words of an aide, he was “in his most serene and cheerful mood.”40 He was pleased with fatherhood, pleased with the high spirits of the men and guns he had carefully deployed. That morning he wore the new coat Stuart had given him along with a new blue-gray lieutenant general’s hat with a band of gold lace that Anna had sent him, to the general bewilderment of his men, many of whom did not recognize him. He was unusually talkative, too. When Longstreet asked him if he was not “scared by that file of Yankees you have before you down there,” he fired back, “Wait until they come a little nearer, and they shall either scare me or I’ll scare them!” When Von Borcke asked him a version of the same question—Could he hold against such numbers?—he replied, “Major, my men sometimes fail to take a position, but to defend one, never! I am glad the Yankees are coming.”41

  Most of all, he knew that he had built a prodigiously strong defensive position, stronger even than at Second Manassas. His lines were stacked a mile deep, with so many reserves—three-fourths of his entire 2nd Corps—t
hat he had roughly eleven men per yard of defensive ground. His first and second lines consisted of A. P. Hill’s battle-tested veterans of the “Light Division,” heroes at Cedar Mountain, Second Manassas, and Antietam. The two generals were still feuding but did not allow personal issues to interfere on the battlefield. Behind them were Taliaferro’s division on the left and Early’s division on the right. These were some of the best and most seasoned fighters in the Confederate army. Stuart’s brigades with horse artillery were posted on the far southern end of his line.

  The morning of December 13 broke cold, still, and foggy. From the top of Prospect Hill, the core of the Confederate defense, soldiers could see nothing but the dense mist that lay wet and heavy in the river valley. At about ten o’clock, in one of the war’s most spectacular and theatrical moments, the fog suddenly lifted to reveal an open plain that was alive with moving dark lines of men, horses, and artillery. “On they came, in beautiful order,” wrote an eyewitness,

  as if on parade, their bayonets glistening in the bright sunlight; on they came, waving their hundreds of regimental flags, which relieved with warm bits of colouring the dull blue of the columns and the russet tinge of the wintry landscape, while their artillery beyond the river continued with unabated fury over their heads, and gave a background of white, fleecy smoke, like midsummer clouds, to the animated picture.42

  The entire battle, in fact, unfolded in what one observer termed “a giant panorama,” in which much of the fighting was visible to everyone on both sides.

  In the battle’s opening moments a young major named John Pelham, the commander of Jeb Stuart’s horse artillery, did something absolutely extraordinary: he hauled two pieces of artillery to a forward position on the Union left. One was quickly disabled, leaving him with a single twelve-pounder Napoléon. For nearly an hour, while he somehow dodged the heavy barrage aimed directly at him, he managed to hold up the advance of Franklin’s entire Grand Division. Only when he grudgingly withdrew under orders were the Federal batteries finally free to focus on Jackson’s position. For a solid hour, from 11:00 a.m. to noon, from both sides of the Rappahannock, Franklin’s guns pounded the Confederate lines. At noon the guns went silent, and then two infantry divisions, under Brigadier Generals John Gibbon on the right and the irascible, ambitious Major General George Gordon Meade on the left, marched forward up the gentle slope, dark antic lines moving against the frost-covered ground.

  Jackson had, in fact, not been softened up at all. He had deliberately held his fire, saving his precious ammunition for use against the oncoming infantry. When Meade and Gibbon closed to about half a mile—amazed at the rebels’ odd silence—Jackson’s fifty-plus guns exploded in the wintry air, throwing out clouds of smoke pierced by long sheets of red flame, raking the advancing lines with shell, spherical case, and double-shotted canister. His guns tore great bloody holes in Federal regiments. Beaten back, the Union men regrouped and came on again, and were again rocked by this storm of lead and iron, which included a deadly crossfire from Pelham’s guns. Still the Federals came forward, now into musket range, where they continued to be cut down by Confederate fire. Federal batteries in front of the river, meanwhile, began to find the range of those Confederate guns, knocking many of them out. In the noon hour the battle raged on.

  At about 1:00 p.m. Meade, undeterred, renewed his attack and again came under the same galling fire. As the division advanced, soldiers in the brigade of twenty-four-year-old Colonel William Sinclair, desperate for cover of any kind, found their way into a wide tongue of tangled, thickly wooded terrain that jutted forward from the same woods that held the rebel infantry. They expected to find rebels there, but they found no one at all. Earlier that day A. P. Hill, commanding that section of Jackson’s line, had apparently decided that the area was impenetrable and thus had left it unoccupied. He was wrong, almost disastrously so.43 Though the grove was tangled and swampy, it was navigable and far safer than standing in the open and at the mercy of Jackson’s canister, and the deeper the Federals penetrated, the more they understood that they had found a spectacular gap in their enemy’s defenses. They struggled upward through the thickets and then suddenly the lead group of Meade’s men—4,500 in total—were busting through a six-hundred-yard-wide gap in the Confederate line, rolling back the flanks of the two Confederate brigades under Brigadier Generals James H. Lane and James J. Archer that Hill had positioned on either side of this swampy gap. As the rebels fell back, the gap grew even wider. Meade’s soldiers drove straight on to the crest of Prospect Hill, where they caught Brigadier General Maxcy Gregg’s South Carolinians completely by surprise and routed them, too, mortally wounding Gregg in the process. By now they had penetrated so deeply that they were actually shooting at the rebels’ backs, causing even more panic and pandemonium in the collapsing center of the Confederate line. Suddenly—only a few minutes since Sinclair’s men first plunged into the woods—Meade’s division seemed on the verge of slicing Jackson’s carefully laid defenses in two.44 Gibbon’s division had moved forward and was engaged in a sharp firefight on the right side of the gap’s tangled thickets, while another Union brigade, under Brigadier General Conrad Feger Jackson, was fighting on the left.

  There were just two problems with this apparently stunning breakthrough. First, General Franklin, whose decision to send only two divisions forward was met with bitter protest by Meade, had no plans to follow up with additional troops. This was due both to his own innate timidity and to the bizarre and tentative orders he had received from Burnside that morning. If Burnside had wanted Prospect Hill carried at all costs, he had never said so. Second, and far more serious, what Meade had broken was merely the front ranks of the Confederate defense. The larger formation remained intact and dauntingly deep. Jackson, who learned of the breach from one of Gregg’s panicked men, showed no particular concern. He knew exactly how deep his lines were, and he knew that an entire division waited just behind Gregg’s broken brigade. His response was to tell a staffer, in a calm voice, to order Jubal Early forward.

  As they had at Antietam, Early’s men came on in a rush. With the sound of the rebel yell reverberating through the trees, his men scrambled forward and crashed into the wobbly Union lines, which had already suffered massive casualties. After more than an hour of fighting, the men were exhausted. No reinforcements were on the way. As Early came on, so did the Confederate brigades that had been surprised by Meade’s attack. They now regrouped and moved forward, too, both against Meade and against Gibbon on his right. Not only was the gap sealed, but the Confederates now closed on the Union forces along their entire front. What remained of the contest was violent, bloody, and brief. Meade’s men discovered, as they reeled in disorder from the woods, that when they emerged onto the open plain, momentarily safe from musket fire, they were now at the mercy of Jackson’s artillery. Adding to the horror, the tall broom sage across which they were retreating caught on fire. As the battle turned and the retreat became a rout, Jackson came forward to the edge of the woods, gazed out at the disorder and confusion before him, and raised his hand in prayer. Some of Early’s men, caught up in the sudden thrill of their success, chased the Union troops out onto the plain, only to be repulsed by stiff artillery fire and the fresh reserves Franklin should have sent up in support of Meade. The battle on the Confederate right was, for all intents and purposes, over. Meade’s breakthrough had offered the brief illusion that Jackson could be broken on Prospect Hill when, in fact, the Federals never had much of a chance—not attacking with single divisions, anyway.

  Franklin wired Burnside at two fifteen, via battlefield telegraph, to say that his men had been driven back. When Burnside later ordered him to advance his right, Franklin said it was impossible. Jackson spent the next hour shifting his lines, partly to bait Franklin into another attack. But to no avail. Jackson wanted to attack, and even had D. H. Hill’s division make preparations, but the orders miscarried. And he soon realized anyway that he did not stand a chance against the massed
Union artillery on Stafford Heights.45 He had suffered more than 3,400 casualties, most of those in A. P. Hill’s division. The Union had sustained nearly 5,000.

  The fight on the Confederate right paled in comparison to the bloody human destruction on the left. At about 11:00 a.m., with artillery from Jackson’s fight booming in the distance, Union forces advanced against Longstreet. William H. “Blinky” French was ordered to advance his division and take Marye’s Heights, a task that turned out to be impossible.46 Emerging from the town’s ravaged streets, French’s men had to advance across an open plain with almost no cover against a stacked and virtually impregnable defensive line. In front of them lay three thousand Confederates arrayed three deep in the Sunken Road behind the stone wall. Forty to fifty feet above them on the heights were more infantry. These two positions created, in effect, two front lines, which together brought six thousand rifles to bear simultaneously across a six-hundred-yard front. The Confederate artillery was stacked, too. Edward Porter Alexander, Longstreet’s chief of artillery and a man not prone to exaggeration, told his commander that “we cover that ground now so well that we will comb it as with a fine-tooth comb. A chicken could not live on that field when we open on it.”