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

by S. C. Gwynne

  What happened over the next six hours was something close to butchery, one of the war’s worst and bloodiest examples. French’s men were cut to pieces. Two of his brigades suffered 50 percent casualties within minutes. Whole regiments melted away before the unceasing rolling crash of guns and muskets and the flashes of white fire inside a wall of smoke. The Union boys never got to the wall. Most never got within a hundred yards of it. After French’s division came Hancock’s, attacking brigade by brigade just as French had, and then Howard’s, Wilcox’s, Sturgis’s, and Griffin’s, and so on, all fed by the stubborn Burnside into the killing machine at the top of the hill. The pattern of the attack would change hardly at all. There was no art to what was happening on either side: the men went up the hill, were cut down where they stood, and the survivors fell back while their comrades advanced over all that human wreckage—almost eight thousand casualties against less than a thousand for Longstreet’s men. There was no glory on Marye’s Heights either, just men killing men in a terrible and systematic way. Seven full Union divisions were sent in, one brigade at a time in fourteen different assaults against six thousand rebels. Porter Alexander, who spent the afternoon amusing himself with his spyglass by spotting men who had sought the almost nonexistent shelter, then blasting them from their cover, wrote later that “Fredericksburg was the easiest battle we ever fought.”47 Lee commented that “the attack on the 13th had been so easily repulsed, and by so small a part of our army, that it was not supposed that the enemy would limit his efforts to an attempt which . . . seemed so comparatively insignificant.”48

  Yet that is what happened. The last of the Federal assaults on the heights ended the Battle of Fredericksburg. The Union had suffered 12,653 killed and wounded, the Confederacy 5,309. Ambrose Burnside, stubborn till the end, wanted to personally lead an attack of his 9th Corps the next day, but was talked out of it by his generals. Though he has gone down in history as an incompetent field commander for his tactics at Fredericksburg, in fact there was often a fine line in the Civil War between tenacity and foolishness. At Gaines’s Mill, Lee spent more than five hours assaulting uphill against a phenomenally strong Federal position, and lost nearly 8,000 men in the process. Yet because his final charges, by Hood in particular, won the day, the battle is remembered as a glorious victory. Because Burnside sacrificed all those men in a losing cause, he is often seen as inept and mindlessly obstinate.49 Though Lee, Jackson, and Longstreet expected the attacks to resume, they never did. The Union troops stayed in place on December 14, and on December 15 they retreated across the river. Soon Burnside’s pontoon bridges were gone, too, and the Federals were back in their camps along the high riverbank, nursing their wounded.

  • • •

  Both armies ended the battle in the same place they started it, but this time there were no debates about who had won. Burnside wired the president the next morning with the disingenuously hopeful news that his men held “the first ridge outside of town” and that they intended “to carry the crest today.” But news of heavy casualties soon cast the outcome in a different light. That evening a reporter for the New York Tribune who had covered the battle met with Lincoln and gave him the unvarnished version: Fredericksburg was a disaster, the worst defeat ever suffered by the Army of the Potomac.50 By December 15 much of the Northern press, so recently proclaiming the glory of the impending victory, fully understood that it would be impossible to spin the results into anything but a crushing defeat. The New York Times called it “a black day in the calendar of the Republic.” The Cincinnati Commercial wrote, “It can hardly be in human nature for men to show more valor or generals to manifest less judgment, than were perceptible on our side that day.” Senator Zachariah Chandler, a radical Republican, wrote, “The President is a weak man, too weak for the occasion, and those fool or traitor generals are wasting time and yet more precious blood in indecisive battles and delays.” Lincoln soon faced a full-scale mutiny from the Senate Republican caucus, which in effect demanded Secretary of State William Seward’s head in compensation for the loss. Though the president famously outmaneuvered the senators—and Seward kept his job—the shocking loss on the battlefield once again suggested a rudderless, divided country fighting a war with no clear end in sight.

  The South, meanwhile, was giddy. Jefferson Davis, who had been feeling political heat for everything from the plunging value of Confederate currency to the impressment of supplies, the ragged condition of his army, and its failures in the western theater, rode the wave of victory. He claimed that the Federal defeat demonstrated yet again “the impossibility of subjugating a people determined to be free” and spoke of his “profound contempt” for the “impotent rage” of the Emancipation Proclamation.51

  Jackson, meanwhile, expressed only regret that he had not hit his adversaries harder. Looking out over the corpse-strewn battlefield, he said, in a tone of resignation, “I did not think that a little red earth would have frightened them. I am sorry that they are gone. I am sorry I fortified.”

  As always, such hard-heartedness was leavened with occasional kindness. During Meade’s attack Brigadier General Maxcy Gregg had been severely wounded. Gregg, a bookish and slightly deaf South Carolina aristocrat with a strong sense of right and wrong, had once called Jackson “tyrannical and unjust.” The two men had clashed on a number of occasions, once when Jackson had arrested Gregg’s regimental colonels for allowing men to break ranks, and once when he arrested them for allowing the men to remove fences for firewood. Jackson and Gregg had exchanged heated words, and Gregg at one point had preferred charges against Jackson, prompting Lee to intervene, saying that “he desired the matter to go no further.”52

  At about 4:00 a.m. Jackson, who had been awake in his tent reading the Bible, sent a messenger to inquire about Gregg’s condition. The answer: he was dying. There was no hope. The messenger said that General Gregg “wishes to tell you that he regrets having sent you the note he did the day before yesterday, as he has since discovered that you were right and he mistaken.”53 The note has been lost, and in any case Jackson did not remember it. But he rode through the early-morning darkness with his aide James Power Smith to visit Gregg. When he arrived he found him fully conscious and in great pain. Jackson took Gregg’s hand, and in a voice filled with emotion said, “The doctor tells me that you have not long to live. Let me ask you to dismiss this matter from your mind and turn your thoughts to God and to the world to which you go.” Gregg, with tears in his eyes, mumbled thanks. He died a day later of his wounds.

  On the way back to headquarters Jackson, riding now with McGuire and Smith, said nothing until they neared their camp, when he suddenly said, “How horrible is war.”

  “Horrible, yes,” McGuire replied. “But we have been invaded. What can we do?”

  “Kill them, sir,” Jackson said. “Kill every man.”54

  • • •

  Burnside would make one last attempt at Lee, more than a month later, on January 20. By this time many of his own generals, led by ringleaders William F. “Baldy” Smith and William B. Franklin, were in open revolt against him, undercutting him both in Washington and with his own troops. Smith, in fact, was demoted for doing so. Hooker was running down Burnside in press interviews. They were upset by what they saw as the needless butchery at Fredericksburg and by the appalling demoralization in the ranks. There were even cries for McClellan’s restoration.

  In part to prove his critics wrong, Burnside now launched a campaign “to strike a mortal blow to the rebellion.” The plan was to cross the Rappahannock upstream of Fredericksburg and try to get behind Lee’s position on Marye’s Heights. Once again, the plan looked reasonable on paper. But then a cold, wind-driven rain started falling, which turned into a howling nor’easter. Soon the army, trudging upstream along the Rappahannock, found itself in what one soldier called “a complete sea of mud.” Wagons sank to their hubs, horses to their fetlocks. Mules sank completely out of sight in the middle of the road. There was obviously no way
to continue, so Burnside called it off, ending once and for all his abortive winter campaign against Robert E. Lee.

  But he was just beginning his campaign to punish his own generals for their insubordination and conspiracy against him. He drew up formal dismissals of the offending officers, including Hooker, Smith, and Franklin. Since he had to get presidential approval for such an action, he traveled to Washington, where he told Lincoln, in effect, fire them or accept Burnside’s resignation. Lincoln chose the latter. He relieved Burnside and gave the command to Hooker, about whom he had reservations. “Hooker does talk badly,” he said, “but the trouble is, he is stronger with the country to-day than any other man.”55

  PART FIVE

  ALL THAT IS EVER GIVEN TO A MAN

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  WINTER OF DREAMS

  Eighteen months after the first shot at Fort Sumter, there were certain truths that the soldiers had come to know. Death in war was neither picturesque nor peaceful, and dying bravely didn’t make you any less dead, or mean that you would not be dumped into the cold earth of a mass grave with everyone else, brave and not brave. Nor was there likely to be anyone to hear your last miserable words. People of the era cherished the idea of a “good death”—a peaceful, dignified passing wherein God was embraced and sins repented and salvation attained, preferably in your own bed with your family gathered devotedly around to hear your last murmurs of Christian resignation. War made a mockery of all that.1 War made a mockery of the idea of a benevolent God. It replaced the family home with the rank, powder-scorched horrors of the battlefield. These were the new truths. In war you lived outdoors like a wild animal. You lived in blistering heat, drenching rains, and knifelike cold. You were exposed and vulnerable. The majority of men who died did not even have the honor of dying in a fight. Two out of three were carried away by diseases that killed them just as surely as minié balls. Those who survived did so on a quarter pound of bacon and eighteen ounces of flour a day—one-third the regular meat ration—with the infrequent small issue of rice, molasses, or sugar.2 (The rice ration was an ounce.) Men lived without shoes or coats or blankets. Food was short all over the South. Soldiers hunted up sassafras buds and wild onions to ward off scurvy.3 Horses died for lack of forage. In Richmond, where much of the eastern army’s fare was gathered and transshipped, there were bread riots.4

  In spite of these hardships, which seemed to multiply as the war dragged on, many of the men in the Confederate States Army remembered the winter of 1862–63 as one of the most extraordinary times of their lives. After the Battle of Fredericksburg they went into winter quarters on the right bank of the Rappahannock. They did not break camp until four and a half months later. In this period of sudden and miraculous leisure, free of fighting and marching, but with sharp, fresh memories of death and hardship, they experienced their own lives more keenly than ever before. As artillerist Edward Porter Alexander wrote later, echoing the sentiments of many of his comrades, it was “one of the happiest periods of all my life.”5 That happiness took many forms: in the joyous Christian revivals that continued to sweep through the army; in singing and band concerts and social visits and elaborately staged shows and snowball fights, and quiet evenings before fires smoking pipes and talking about the battles they had fought, the comrades who had died, and this extraordinary war to decide the fate of the nation that they found themselves in the middle of. It was a time to take inventory of oneself and one’s life, a time when men could dream again about something more than surviving to fight the next battle.

  For Jackson and his 2nd Corps this unusual interlude began at a place called Moss Neck, one of the most magnificent estates in Virginia. They had stumbled into it in darkness, about eight miles south of where they had fought: a newly constructed brick mansion in the Greek Revival style measuring 250 feet from wing to wing, trimmed out with teak and mahogany and ornate plaster carvings, and elevated on a picture-book knoll that overlooked the Rappahannock valley. His staff made inquiries: the place belonged to the Corbin family. Though the man of the house, twenty-nine-year-old Richard Corbin, was off fighting with the 9th Virginia Cavalry, the house had six occupants: Richard’s twenty-seven-year-old wife, Roberta (“Bertie”), and their five-year-old daughter, Jane Wellford Corbin (“Janie”); his twenty-three-year-old sister, Catherine (“Kate”) Corbin; and his other sister, twenty-four-year-old Netty Corbin Dickinson and her children, Jane Parke (four) and Gardiner (two).6

  The Corbins invited Jackson to stay with them and make his headquarters there. He declined, but was persuaded to accept the offer of an outbuilding 130 feet from the house, used by the family as an office. There was a small lobby in front; a closet for wood; a narrow staircase to the attic; and a fireplace with a cot on one side and a table, chair, and stools on the other. In the manner of Virginia country homes, the main room was festooned with paintings and engravings of racehorses and hunting dogs. Here Jackson would spend the winter.

  Christmas dinner at Moss Neck offered a glimpse of the pleasantly aberrant season to come. The affair took place in Jackson’s office and was attended by Generals Robert E. Lee, Jeb Stuart, and William Pendleton along with select members of their staffs—ten guests in all. Considering the privations of war that were visible all around them, the meal Jackson’s new aide, James Power Smith, put on was extraordinary. Almost all of the foods were gifts: three turkeys, a ham, a bucket of oysters, a box of fine foods sent by ladies from Staunton, pickled vegetables, and even a bottle of wine. Jackson’s servant Jim baked some white biscuits from regular rations. There was a plate of butter in the table’s center bearing the ornate imprint of a fighting cock.7 To serve it all, in this room festooned with images of the sporting life of upper-class Virginia, was a slave named John who was assigned to Jackson’s staff, turned out in a white apron.

  The effect was startling. Lee and Stuart both reacted by making jokes at Jackson’s expense. Lee said that Jackson and his staff were merely playing at being soldiers; they should come to Lee’s headquarters to see how soldiers really lived. Stuart, pretending that Jackson himself had chosen the office decor, launched an attack on the general’s questionable taste. As Smith recalled it, Stuart toured the room, commenting on the paintings in solemn tones, saying that he “wished to express his astonishment and grief at the display of General Jackson’s low tastes” and that it would be “a sad disappointment to the old ladies of the country, who thought that Jackson was a good man.” He concluded by pointing to the chanticleer-imprinted butter, thundering, “If there is not the crowning evidence of our host’s sporting tastes! He even puts his favorite gamecock on his butter!”8 Throughout Stuart’s tirade Jackson grinned and blushed. He liked Stuart immensely and never minded being teased by him. (The next day Stuart led one of his trademark raids that had made him for many Southerners and Northerners alike the most glamorous officer in the war. He crossed the Rappahannock upstream with 1,800 horsemen and four guns and struck a supply depot twenty miles into Yankee-held territory. Facing stiff resistance, he turned north instead of south, captured a Union telegraph office just fifteen miles from Washington, and sent a wire to Union quartermaster Montgomery Meigs complaining that the substandard mules he was capturing were not up to the job of pulling all the provisions he was stealing. He returned to Fredericksburg on New Year’s Day with two hundred prisoners, two hundred captured horses, a hundred arms, and twenty wagons stuffed with loot.9)

  While the generals feasted in the office, Bertie Corbin threw a sumptuous party in the parlors of the main house. The featured attraction was her unmarried and very engaging sister-in-law Kate. Several of Jackson’s younger staffers, including Clement Fishburne and Sandie Pendleton, were already falling for her. Fishburne later wrote that he was “very nearly in love,” but “discovered, before I became hopelessly gone, that my friend Col. A. S. Pendleton . . . was likely to be a successful applicant.” He also noted that several other officers “were further gone than I was,” and that some of them actually proposed.10<
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  Moss Neck became the center of life in Jackson’s corps that winter. In the army’s camps that spread outward from the estate, men quickly learned to build wooden huts against the unusually cold Virginia weather. Bertie Corbin wrote one of the best descriptions of life there. “Thousands of soldiers in sight,” she recalled,

  the hills echoing with noises of army life, fife and drum, brisk tattoo and reveille, the sound of many axes, the crashing of great trees as they fell—all became our daily fare of strange experience. The great forests surrounding Moss Neck were literally mowed down. Almost instantly there sprang into life settlements of wooden huts. . . . How the sounds of camp life haunt me still! The hum of voices, the music of the bands, especially the “Stonewall Brigade Band,” stationed right in front of the house.11

  Hers was not the only Virginia estate watching its forests razed to the ground. By one estimate, fully thirty square miles of timber on both sides of the Rappahannock were clear-cut by the armies.12

  While Jackson enjoyed cordial relations with the older Corbins and was a frequent social guest at the main house, he developed a very special friendship with five-year-old Janie, who visited him in his quarters in the afternoon. She was a bright, attractive child, with large eyes and light blond hair. She was very much taken with the kind general. She would spend hours cutting out paper soldiers and parading them on his table.13 He always had a present for her when she came: an apple or orange, a piece of candy, or a bright print.14 One day he discovered that she had lost the comb that normally kept her long hair in place. He took his lieutenant general’s hat in hand—the one Anna had given him—and with a penknife carefully removed the band of gold braid that encircled it and bound it around her head. Then, taking her head in his hands, he asked her to wear it for him. He later explained to Anna, “I became so ashamed of the broad gold lace that was on the cap you sent me, as to induce me to take it off. I like simplicity.”