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

by S. C. Gwynne

  • • •

  Jackson’s column had moved resolutely forward, in secret and in silence, cutting an elliptical arc around the Union right. The 2nd Corps had taken the Catharine Furnace Road, then the Wellfords’ road, then a series of narrow byways that had finally rejoined the Brock Road, which had put their lead at the Orange Plank Road in midafternoon. Except for the open area near the furnace, they had remained unseen and undetected. Every path and byway that went off to the right had been sealed off by Stuart’s horsemen. According to the plan Lee and Jackson had developed, the column would turn right at the intersection of the Brock and Plank Roads. From there the Union right was supposed to be about two miles to the east. To see if this was true, the 2nd Virginia Cavalry, under Tom Munford, conducted a reconnaissance up the Plank Road. They soon found a piece of high ground from which a Confederate captain saw a view rarely afforded to any scout. He galloped back to find Fitzhugh Lee, who saw it, too, then himself galloped back to find Jackson, who was riding at the head of Robert Rodes’s column.

  Lee drew rein, and said, “General, if you will ride with me, halting your column here . . . I will show you the enemy’s right.” Minutes later Jackson was gazing down upon a major piece of the Union army, not seven hundred yards away. This was Howard’s 11th Corps, though Jackson had no way of knowing that. But it was clearly the terminus of the Union right. From the spot where the Orange Plank Road intersected the Orange Turnpike, Jackson could see roughly half a mile of open space on either side. As Fitzhugh Lee recalled,

  Below and but a few hundred yards distant ran their line of battle, with abatis in front and long lines of stacked arms in the rear. Cannon in position were visible, and the soldiers were in groups, chatting, smoking, and playing cards, while the ones in the rear were driving up and butchering beeves.28

  Jackson could also see that the Union line was facing south. He thus understood, when it was pointed out to him, that an attack up the Plank Road would amount to a frontal assault. An advance eastward on the Orange Turnpike, on the other hand, which intersected Brock Road a mile and a half to the north, would mean that his own battle line would be almost perfectly perpendicular to the Union line. He turned to Fitzhugh Lee and said, “Tell General Rodes to move across the Plank Road and halt when he gets to the old turnpike. I will join him there.”29 Rodes did just that. He turned to the east on the turnpike, continued for a mile to a four-hundred-yard-wide clearing at the farm of John Luckett, and then stopped, unnoticed and unmolested by anyone in a blue coat.

  At about 3:00 p.m. Jackson wrote out a brief dispatch in his clumsy scrawl for General Lee: “The enemy has made a stand at Chancellor’s which is about 2 miles from Chancellorsville. I hope as soon as practicable to attack. I trust that an ever kind Providence will bless us with great success. Respectfully, T. J. Jackson.” He then added a postscript that read, with more of his usual deadpan understatement, “The leading division is up & the next two appear to be well closed.”30

  Though the marching had indeed been disciplined, it still took a long time to convert the elongated column to a battle line. It was even harder because most of that line had to assemble in the supposedly impenetrable woods. Over the next two hours Jackson labored to place 21,800 infantry and 8 pieces of artillery into position. This would be his attacking force. The rest would follow behind, in reserve. He had plenty of daylight to work with and was able to pay attention to the smallest details. He had never had this luxury before. Roughly half a mile ahead of him, his foes went about their business, suspecting nothing. When Jackson had finished, his battle line was two miles long, aimed directly at a Union army corps that was in most places only a few men deep, facing south.

  At 5:30 p.m. Jackson was sitting on his horse on the Orange Turnpike next to General Robert Rodes. His lines were formed and waiting. Though the men had marched some twelve miles and they were in high, fighting spirits, they were as yet unaware of exactly what was going to happen. Jackson’s veterans knew by now that long marches preceded spectacular events. After surveying his battle lines he turned to his fellow rider and said, “Are you ready, General Rodes?” “Yes, sir!” came the enthusiastic response. Jackson then said quietly, “You may go forward, then.”

  A bugle call rang through the woods, followed by responses from bugles on the left and right, and suddenly the woods were alive with fast-moving Confederates.31 As they quick-stepped forward through the tangled undergrowth, which didn’t seem to dampen their enthusiasm, the wild, eerie, corkscrewing sound of the rebel yell swept down the ranks. In minutes they were in range of the Union lines. Though the rough terrain broke up Jackson’s neat battle lines, the men did not stop to re-form but pushed forward, singly and in groups. Jackson rode close behind his men, shouting, “Press forward! Press forward!”

  The speed and direction of the Confederate attack took the 11th Corps completely by surprise. Because of an acoustical anomaly in the forest, they had heard none of the bugle calls. They had been enjoying a moment of drowsy calm and seemingly perfect security. Men were fixing dinner and taking naps or relaxing, listening to the distant music of a regimental band, or perhaps discussing the Confederate retreat, when suddenly all nature seemed to rise up in revolt around them. Through their camps rushed frantic rabbits, deer, quail, and wild turkeys, then there was an odd silence, and then Jackson’s massive, screaming, onrushing wall of gray was upon them. It was so sudden and so overwhelming that men who were there later used storm or avalanche metaphors to describe it. There was very little they could do about it, except to drop what they had and run for their lives. There was an effort made here and there by Union infantry to form and make some sort of fight, but the shock of the assault was too much for most of them. “The surprise was complete,” wrote Confederate artillery officer David Gregg McIntosh:

  A bolt from the sky would not have startled [brigade commander Leopold] Von Gilsa’s men half so much as the musket shots in the thicket, and the sight of their flying comrades, followed by a straggling line of skirmishers, and then by a solid wall of gray. . . . The resistance offered was speedily beaten down. There was nothing left to do but lay down their arms and surrender, or flee. . . . Arms, knapsacks, clothing, equipage, everything, was thrown aside and left behind. The camp was in wild confusion. Men lost their heads in terror, the road and the woods on both sides were filled with men, horses and cattle, in one mad flight. The rebel yells added terror to the situation.32

  The victory was fast and complete. In an hour and a half Jackson had shattered the 11th Corps and driven forward a full mile and a quarter to a point less than two miles from Hooker’s headquarters. The 11th Corps had suffered 2,400 casualties out of 11,000 men, including 1,000 captured. Jackson lost only 800 men.33 Former VMI professors Rodes and Colston had led the attack. The dashing Rodes in particular was a brilliant presence on the field, exhorting his men with his long mustaches flying. Jackson personally congratulated him on his gallant performance. Indeed, Jackson’s men had never seen their leader quite so thrilled with a victory. “He was in unusually fine spirits,” wrote one Confederate captain, “and every time he heard the cheering of ourselves which was the signal of victory he raised his right hand a few seconds as if in acknowledgment of the blessing and to return thanks to God for the victory.”34 One Georgian remembered that even after the fighting had died down the ground seemed “to tremble as if shaken by an earthquake, the cheering is so tremendous, caused by Gen. Jackson riding along the line.”35

  Like the hapless Otis Howard, Hooker had also been taken completely by surprise. He had been busy planning a full-scale pursuit of Lee’s supposedly retreating army for the following morning. He had certainly been curious about various Confederate advances on the turnpike and the Plank Road east of Chancellorsville at about five thirty—which was actually Lee demonstrating loudly to cover Jackson’s attack. He had had trouble getting Sedgwick to advance, as ordered, on Fredericksburg. And he still had not heard from George Stoneman. But he was not terribly worried.
He would work these things out. At about 6:30 p.m., as he was conversing with two captains on his staff on the porch of the Chancellor house, he heard a sudden noise from the road. One of the captains stepped off the porch, looked through his glass, and shouted, “My God, here they come!” Hooker and his staff rode westward on the road to see what was happening, and immediately encountered the men, horses, and wagons of the 11th Corps in wild panic and full flight. Many had no weapons, hats, haversacks, or coats. They demanded, wild-eyed, to know how to get to the bridges, so they could cross the river to safety.36 Because almost half of them were German, and shouting in their native language, it was hard to tell at first what was going on. (Hooker’s staffers may have learned at that moment that “Alles ist verloren!” meant “All is lost!”) But soon enough they understood that the 11th had been routed, and the Union flank shattered beyond repair. Hooker himself did not panic. He acted quickly. He brought up artillery and pointed it west instead of south, pulled other troops back from the furnace to the turnpike and faced them the same way, and shifted Meade’s 5th Corps to protect his lines to the river. He went to work constructing a new west-facing line three-quarters of a mile east of his headquarters. Orders went out that the high ground near the Chancellor house—the center of the army’s position—was to be held at all costs. In minutes, Hooker’s attitude had changed from serene self-confidence to fear for the safety of his army. He was right to be alarmed. To the west, through the descending darkness, Stonewall Jackson was planning to cut off his retreat and smash him yet again that very night.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  “AN IRON SABRE VOWED TO AN IRON LORD”1

  Jackson was waiting. Though he had already engineered one of the most stunning attacks of the war, and its most brilliant single march, he was not satisfied with the ground he had won, or that he had driven the 11th Corps clear through the center of Hooker’s army and out the other side. He wanted more. He wanted to hit the Yankee defenses on the Plank Road and around the Orange Turnpike, smash through them, and join forces with McLaws and Anderson, while his left swept the Union flank and cut off its main escape route at US Ford.2 The fact that darkness was falling and night attacks had proved difficult to manage (as at Second Manassas) did not seem to trouble him. Because the divisions of Rodes and Colston that had made the attack were now badly disorganized and commingled, the advance would be led by five fresh regiments from A. P. Hill’s division under Brigadier General James H. Lane, a former student of Jackson’s and colleague on the VMI faculty. In the weirdly still night air pierced occasionally by the shouts of Union soldiers, Jackson was waiting—he was actually riding restlessly back and forth in the rear of Lane’s brigade—for Lane to shake out his regiments into a line of battle.3

  He soon encountered A. P. Hill and some of his staff and asked his West Point classmate how long it would be before he was ready to move. A few minutes, Hill replied, the time it would take to finish bringing his men forward of Rodes’s troops. Jackson assigned his chief engineer, Keith Boswell, to Hill as a guide, then said, “General Hill, as soon as you are ready push right forward. Allow nothing to stop you. Press on to the United States Ford.” Jackson rode forward on the Orange Plank Road, then shifted slightly north to the parallel Mountain Road. He was now in front of the men of the 18th North Carolina, in the margin between the Confederate lines and Lane’s skirmishers, who were deployed several hundred yards ahead. Such personal reconnaissance was an old habit of Jackson’s. He liked to scout the battlefield from as far forward as possible. Though this exasperated his staff, who feared for his safety, he persisted in doing it. With him were eight other riders, including his signal officer, Captain Richard Eggleston Wilbourn, his brother-in-law and aide-de-camp Lieutenant Joseph G. Morrison, a couple of Signal Corps enlisted men, and several couriers. One of them, who lived in the immediate neighborhood and knew the road and terrain well, served as guide. Following them eastward was another mounted group of nine riders with A. P. Hill. In all, nineteen riders went forward into that uneasy, moonlit darkness.4 Hill, who was following mainly out of military etiquette, lagged about fifty yards behind Jackson. In a remarkable lapse of communication, neither Brigadier General Lane nor the men in his regiments knew that Jackson and Hill were in front of them.

  Jackson and his fellow riders continued forward, almost to where the skirmishers of the 33rd North Carolina were posted, where they could hear the sounds of Federal soldiers frantically felling trees to build obstructions to slow the rebel advance. To Jackson this would have been useful intelligence. Jackson listened for a time, then turned back toward the Confederate lines. At that point he was about 120 yards from his own infantry. It was after 9:00 p.m. A. P. Hill, still on the Plank Road, was now about 60 yards behind Jackson on a diagonal line. What happened next happened very quickly. A single shot, fired by a Confederate skirmisher, rang out well to the south of the Plank Road. Skirmishers on both sides took up the firing and it rolled in a northerly direction, and several hundred muskets were discharged in short order. Some of the men in the main Confederate line fired, too, which meant they were firing at the backs of their own skirmishers. Just as this small-scale firefight reached the center of the Confederate line around the Plank Road, the men of the 18th North Carolina, who occupied that position, saw what looked like enemy cavalry closing on them from short range. This was Hill, Boswell, and the rest of their group, returning to their lines. The infantry, of course, had no idea that there were Confederate horsemen in front of them, least of all A. P. Hill and Stonewall Jackson, and they knew that the mounted figures could not possibly have been their own footbound skirmishers. The 18th North Carolina opened fire.5

  Their volleys tore through both Jackson’s and Hill’s parties. Since Hill was closest to the firing, his group suffered the worst. Two men were shot dead (including Jackson’s engineer, Boswell, shot twice through the heart), one mortally wounded, one shot twice in the face, and another severely injured when his horse was killed. The horses of two others were shot and carried their riders helplessly into Union lines, where they became prisoners. Only two staffers were neither killed nor injured, but both of their horses were killed. Hill escaped harm only by lying facedown on the ground. Farther off in the darkness, where the bullets found Jackson’s group, the damage was less severe to individuals and horses, but devastating to the Confederacy and its chances of winning the war. Six of the nine riders with him were untouched by bullets. One of the couriers was killed, another wounded and carried by his horse into Union lines.

  Then there was Jackson himself, whose astonishing good luck on the battlefield had just run out. He was hit by three bullets. One, a smoothbore round, entered above the base of his right thumb, broke two fingers, and buried itself under the skin on the back of his hand. The other two hit his left arm and were far more destructive. One entered an inch below his elbow and exited just above the wrist. The other hit him three inches below the shoulder and completely shattered the bone. His signal officer, Richard Wilbourn, seeing that he was hit, managed to rein in the frantic Little Sorrel, who had initially taken off toward enemy lines, then helped his wounded general to the ground.6 Soon A. P. Hill arrived, and the two men ripped through Jackson’s jacket, pulled off his blood-filled gloves, tied handkerchiefs above and below his shoulder wound, and made a sling for his right arm.7

  The problem was how to get him back to safety. The firing now became more widespread, and Union artillery opened on the suspected rebel advance. With more than a dozen men attending him at various times, Jackson was alternately supported while he walked and carried in a litter. Twice while being carried he fell to the ground: once when one of the litter bearers was shot, again when one tripped and fell. Both falls landed him on his shattered arm, which caused him excruciating pain. He groaned loudly. “At this moment the scene was a fearful one,” wrote Hunter McGuire. “The air seemed to be alive with the shrieks of shells and the whistling of bullets; horses, riderless and mad with fright, dashed in every direct
ion.”8 According to Jackson’s aide James Power Smith, the men were so frightened by the barrage of shell and shrapnel that “we were obliged to lay the litter and its burden down, as the litter-bearers ran for the cover of the trees.”9 Smith himself lay down next to Jackson, covering him with his own body. At one point the group encountered Brigadier General Dorsey Pender, who was shocked to see Jackson and told him he was worried about the damage the Federal barrage was doing to his brigade. Jackson, defiant in spite of his wounds, pushed aside the men who were helping support him, raised himself up to his full height, and said in a weak voice, “General Pender, you must hold on to the field; you must hold out to the last.”

  Once behind Confederate lines, Jackson was taken to the ambulance wagon Hunter McGuire had brought up.

  “I hope you are not badly hurt, General,” McGuire said when he saw his pale general.

  “I am badly injured, Doctor,” Jackson replied in a calm but feeble voice. “I fear I am dying.” After a pause he went on, “I am glad you have come. I think the wound in my shoulder is still bleeding.”

  It was. Jackson in fact had lost a good deal of blood. His clothes were saturated with it. He had a very faint pulse. McGuire stopped the bleeding, administered some whiskey and morphine, and the ambulance rolled westward toward the field hospital that had been set up half a mile in the rear at Wilderness Tavern. Riding with Jackson in the bed of the wagon was his artillery chief, Colonel Stapleton Crutchfield, who had been wounded in the leg.10 Jackson was quite concerned about Crutchfield, and according to McGuire “expressed, very feelingly, his sympathy” for his former VMI student. At one point Jackson reached up and pulled McGuire down to him and asked quietly if Crutchfield was severely injured. “No, only painfully hurt,” replied McGuire. “I am glad it is no worse,” said Jackson. A few minutes later Crutchfield did exactly the same thing, and asked McGuire the same question about Jackson. When McGuire told him that the lieutenant general was “very seriously wounded,” Crutchfield groaned and cried out, “Oh, my God!” Jackson, mistaking this for an expression of agony, ordered the ambulance to stop to see if something could be done to ease his comrade’s pain.11