by John Keegan
During the afternoon of 8 May skirmishers from the two sides found each other and a battle began to develop. Jackson had reconnoitred the heavily broken ground and formed a plan to fall unawares on the Northern force, a detachment of Frémont’s army commanded by General R. H. Milroy. Milroy, however, had got wind of his approach and, though outnumbered, moved to the attack. In the confused fighting that followed, his men inflicted the heavier toll of casualties. Jackson reported to Lee “God blessed our arms with victory,” and in the sense that Milroy broke off the action, and retreated, the Confederates were the winners.25 It was a costly victory, nonetheless, and Jackson later reproached himself for bad management of the battle. It was the last mistake he would make in the Valley campaign.
Its pace was about to quicken. Lee, in Richmond, was increasingly concerned to keep the Union forces surrounding the Southern capital separated; so was Joseph E. Johnston, and both counted on Jackson to operate in a way that would pin Banks west of the Blue Ridge and keep Frémont in the Alleghenies. After the battle at McDowell, therefore, Jackson decided that he must pursue Milroy, meanwhile taking steps to impede Frémont’s ability to manoeuvre. He sent Hotchkiss, with a scratch force of cavalry, to block the routes from the Alleghenies into the southern Shenandoah, while himself following up Milroy’s retreat. By 12 May he had got as far as the small town of Franklin, deep in the mountains, but had not caught up. He decided accordingly to break off the pursuit and return to the Valley. His purpose as before was to keep Banks from leaving, but he also intended to rejoin his subordinate, Ewell, and combine forces so as to confront the enemy in superior strength.
The Valley Army was now adapting to the extraordinary exertions Jackson expected of it. On 8 May, the day of the Battle of McDowell, the Stonewall Brigade had marched, from breaking camp to contact with the enemy, and then from leaving the battlefield to regaining camp, thirty-five miles. Such marches would, in the month that was to follow, become normal practice. Despite dreadful roads, shortage of food and deficient footwear—marching barefoot, often for dozens of miles, became a common experience—the Valley Army would rise to the challenge. Though Jackson concealed his intentions from even his closest subordinates, the Army came to understand during the month of May 1862 that his strategy was to mystify and mislead the enemy by achieving speeds over distance quite outside the capacities of normal infantry. They came to call themselves “Jackson’s foot cavalry” and, on many days, justified the title by marching for as long as horsemen could ride.
On 17 May, after a hard trek out of the Alleghenies, Jackson’s men re-entered the Valley near Harrisonburg, west of the Massanutten. Banks had been there the previous month, his army facing southwards along the North River, but had since departed to Strasburg at the northern end of the Valley, in preparation to move to Fredericksburg. He had already sent ahead Shields’ division. It remained, as before, Jackson’s duty to hold him where he was. In his favour was a shift in the balance of forces; the departure of Shields had left Banks with only 12,000 men; Jackson now had, either directly under command or readily to hand, about 16,000 if the division of Ewell, in the Luray Valley, was included. Also in his favour was the deteriorating quality of Northern intelligence—Banks was unsure of the Valley Army’s dispositions, and his information would get worse. By 21 May he was placing Jackson eight miles west of Harrisonburg, Ewell in the Swift Run Gap, forty miles apart, with the gap widening. In fact, by then, Jackson had transferred to the Luray Valley, via the Massanutten Gap, Ewell had joined him and the combined army was pressing northwards against a weak detachment of Union troops at Front Royal, guarding the Manassas Gap railroad bridges east of Strasburg.
The realignment had not been achieved without difficulty, even creative disobedience. Mid-May was an awful time for the Confederacy. During March and April, defeat had followed defeat all around its frontiers, in the far west, on the Atlantic coast. By early May the defensive line across the Peninsula had been abandoned, the Battle of Williamsburg outside Richmond had been lost and McClellan was laying siege to the defences of the city itself. Between 15 and 18 May, Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston, both a hundred miles away from the Valley in Richmond, and in touch at a delay of only two to three days, despite having the telegraph and a relay of fast despatch riders at their disposal, had sent a variety of conflicting orders, the impact of which was, nevertheless, to separate Ewell from Jackson and send him to watch McDowell at Fredericksburg. Neither Jackson nor Ewell wished to conform, since to do so would be to rob the Valley Army of its temporarily decisive superiority over Banks, without any guarantee that success could be won elsewhere by the separation. Covertly, they agreed to play on the ambiguity of the orders they were receiving and to use the delay in their transmission to stay together and march on Banks.
Jackson moved on 19 May. His bridge-burning at Harrisonburg, which had protected his sortie into the Alleghenies, now ought to have blocked his own recrossing of the North River into the Shenandoah Valley proper but Hotchkiss, effectively operating as his intelligence officer, discovered a number of large wagons that, positioned to straddle a ford, allowed passage even though the river was in flood. By 20 May, Jackson had reached New Market at the western end of the Massanutten Gap, by the 21st he had passed through the mountain to join Ewell at Luray and by the 23rd his vanguards were on the outskirts of Front Royal. By a forced march of seventy miles in three days, he had arrived in Banks’ rear and was ready to strike a decisive blow.
He then had a stroke of pure luck, though brought by the circumstance of fighting in friendly territory. Advancing to contact, but unaware of the strength of the Union defence at the Front Royal bridges, one of his officers was met by a breathless girl, Belle Boyd, a pretty eighteen-year-old who had just walked through the enemy camp, charmed an officer and discovered that only one Northern regiment was present. “Tell him [Stonewall],” she urged, “to charge right down and he will get them all.”26 In the confused fighting that followed, most of the Northern infantry got away but the Confederate cavalry saved the bridges, which Jackson needed for the next stage of the operation against Banks at Strasburg, and destroyed the telegraph lines which would have warned Banks of the defeat.
On the evening of 23 May, Jackson pondered the situation that his rather ragged victory at Front Royal had won. He correctly concluded that Banks would feel exposed to a further Confederate attack in his position at Strasburg, where his numbers could be calculated to have fallen to about 10,000. He might fall back on Frémont, in the Alleghenies, but that was unlikely, since one of his duties was undoubtedly to protect Washington, which lay in the opposite direction. He might, improbably, go over to the offensive and attempt to recapture Front Royal, perhaps calculating that Jackson would set out northwards towards Harper’s Ferry, assuming that the Northerners were beating a retreat in that direction also; or he might simply do the obvious thing and retreat anyhow.
Eventually Jackson decided, correctly as it turned out, that Banks would go back towards Harper’s Ferry. He therefore ordered his army to follow the presumed line of Banks’ retreat, up the Valley Turnpike towards Winchester, by a converging route along the less good road leading through Cedarville and Ninevah. The distance each had to cover was about twenty miles, but while Banks was encumbered by a large wagon train, crammed with stores the Confederates coveted, Jackson was able to cover the countryside with a cloud of reconnoitring cavalry. On the morning of 24 May, the Confederate cavalry found Banks’ wagons, almost unprotected by fighting troops, jammed nose to tail in the Valley Turnpike at a point where it ran between stone walls. The Southerners brought guns up to fire into the mass, and Ashby’s cavalry charged in. Though the Federals set fire to as many of their wagons as they could, the Confederates captured a rich prize. Meanwhile, Jackson pressed the pursuit. On the evening of the same day, his army was arrayed outside Winchester, tired and footsore but prepared to give battle.
The appearance of the Valley Army outside Winchester, only twenty-five miles
from Harper’s Ferry, only seventy from Washington, caused acute alarm in the Federal capital. It seemed to threaten a direct attack at worst, at least the need to dilute the campaign against Richmond. Lincoln, like Jackson, was studying a map—a less good map than Hotchkiss’—of the theatre.27 Between four and five on the afternoon of 24 May, he ordered Frémont to abandon his plan to move west out of the Alleghenies against the rail centre of Knoxville, in Tennessee, and to march east to the relief of Banks. He also ordered McDowell, who was preparing to join McClellan in the Peninsula, to send half his army to the assistance of Banks as well. “At that moment, 5 p.m., May 24, the Valley Army won its Valley campaign.”28
Jackson still, however, had much fighting to do, both up and down the Valley. On the morning of 25 May, in thick early mist, his advanced guard found Banks’ men positioned outside Winchester on hills that protected the town from the south. Jackson’s local intelligence had for once failed him. He thought the Union forces were behind, not ahead, of him, and he was expecting to cut them off from Harper’s Ferry. In the confusion that followed the initial encounter, brought on not by Jackson’s own brigades but by those of Ewell, marching to meet them, the Union troops at first inflicted heavy losses. Their batteries were well positioned on high ground. As the Confederate concentration grew, however, the Northerners found themselves outflanked to both left and right, their batteries brought under direct rifle fire and their infantry forced to fall back. Soon Banks’ men were in full retreat. They tried to make a stand in the streets of Winchester itself, but the townspeople, producing hidden weapons and shouting information to the advancing Southerners—many in the 5th Virginia came from the town in any case—undermined their resistance. By noon Banks’ army was streaming up the Valley Turnpike towards Harper’s Ferry with Jackson’s infantry—his “foot cavalry”—hot on their heels.
Had Jackson had his full force of horsemen under his hand at that moment, the destruction of his enemy might have been complete. Ashby, his cavalry leader, was elsewhere at the critical moment, on some cavalier venture of his own, the besetting fault of Southern riders. Banks, as a result, got clean away, managing to keep just ahead of Jackson’s vanguards until he reached Harper’s Ferry, where he crossed the Potomac on the night of the 25th, leaving the Valley in Confederate hands.
For how long? Lincoln, acutely alert to the dangers of the changed situation, and accurately reading it, was determined to prevent Jackson from disrupting the Union convergence on Richmond. He accepted General McDowell’s analysis: “Jackson will paralyse a large force with a very small one.” By correct disposition of his own forces, however, he hoped to crack the paralysis and re-establish the dominance that the North’s superiority in numbers ought to confer. Jackson’s advance to Harper’s Ferry appeared, on the map, to represent a threat to Washington. It could also be seen as an entrapment in a potential envelopment, and from three sides: by Frémont, advancing out of the Alleghenies to the west, by McDowell from the east and by Banks, if he recrossed the Potomac, from the north. The president sent the necessary orders to McDowell and to Banks on 29 May. To McDowell he wrote, “General Frémont’s force should, and probably will, be at or near Strasburg [on the upper North Fork of the Shenandoah] by 12 noon to-morrow. Try to have your force or the advance of it at Front Royal [on the two forks] as soon.” Lincoln, in short, was arranging a pincers behind Jackson’s back, which would cut him off from the Valley, and from Johnston’s army at Richmond, and expose him to defeat in isolation.
Jackson was not to be caught. Acutely sensitive to danger in any case, he was alerted to its correct reality by a succession of reports—that of a loyal Southerner, who had ridden from the Blue Ridge Mountains with word of a move by Frémont, then the transcript of the interrogation of a Northern prisoner who said Shields was marching on Front Royal, finally news of actual contact with Federals near Front Royal. By noon on 30 May, Jackson could no longer ignore the signs that his advanced position just short of Harper’s Ferry was overexposed and that prudence required a retreat into the Valley proper.
What followed might have been a rout. The Valley Army, rich with plunder, was encumbered with hundreds of wagons, some its own, some civilian, some captured from the enemy. They occupied eight miles of road. Military caution dictated that they should be abandoned, so that Jackson’s men could disengage as quickly as possible. Their commander was set on keeping his plunder, however, and counted on his soldiers’ ability to outmarch their pursuers to avoid entrapment. They also retained the capacity to deploy rapidly into battle formation off the line of march. On 1 June, as Frémont staged a thrust to cut the road, Jackson reversed the march of one of his brigades to drive the Union sally back. Some of his troops had marched as much as thirty-five miles in sixteen hours, snatching sleep on wet ground in wet blankets at intervals, but, with skilfully organised bursts of artillery, they succeeded in holding the enemy at bay. Jackson was in frequent conclave with Hotchkiss, who was reconnoitring energetically and measuring off relative distances on the map. He calculated, and so persuaded his commander, that the Valley Army could by quick marching just keep out of danger. On the afternoon of 1 June the Army was beyond Strasburg and still heading south, leaving the vanguards of the armies of Frémont and Banks closing hands on empty space.
During the next two weeks, Jackson would escape from a real or suspected trap several more times. As he headed south from Strasburg, just out of the enemy’s reach, his acute sense of danger alerted him to the makings of another. With Frémont, as he believed, hard on his heels and Shields advancing down the westward side of the Massanutten Mountain, he foresaw the two encircling him lower down. That was to overestimate Shields’ rate of advance; but, with the barrier of the Massanutten between them, his anxiety was understandable. His solution was to hurry a cavalry force ahead, with orders to pass through the Luray Gap and burn the surviving bridges across the Shenandoah at Luray, thus blocking Shields’ way southward.
Jackson’s own way south, towards New Market, was impeded by the constant harrying of Union cavalry and by appalling weather, which turned the surface of even the macadamised Valley Turnpike to glue. Men linked arms to keep their footing in the great press of traffic, swollen by the convoy of wagons which Jackson refused to abandon and by the complement of Union prisoners who, sensing how close their own side followed, dragged their feet and had to be bullied onward. The bridge at Rude’s Hill, which Ashby had failed to destroy in April, was burnt in the face of the enemy on 3 June.29 The Valley Army was now running out of room to manoeuvre. Robert E. Lee, who had succeeded the wounded Joseph E. Johnston in command around Richmond, actually contemplated stripping his forces of troops to strengthen Jackson, with a view to his leading an invasion of the Northern states of Maryland and Pennsylvania, as would happen a year later. In the circumstances of 1862, however, such a démarche was impossible. Jackson, like it or not, was still bound to the retreat. His problem was to find the means to continue drawing Frémont and Shields after him, without becoming entangled in a costly battle, and then to disengage on favourable terms.
The trouble was that the earlier cunning of his bridge-burning was now telling against him. He needed routes to fall back on his main base at Staunton and towards the Virginia Central Railroad, which led from it towards Richmond: one was his point of resupply, but also the spot where he could disembarrass himself of his hundreds of wagons, liberating the army for a counterattack if necessary; the other was his line of escape. A key point was Conrad’s Store, to which a road ran from the Valley Turnpike, and a way through the Swift Run Gap (in the Blue Ridge) to the railroad. The necessary bridge had been burnt, however, and Jackson’s engineers advised him that the Shenandoah, swollen by the exceptional rains, could not be bridged with any safety.
The only way out, therefore, was that followed by the Valley Army the previous month, after its foray into the Alleghenies: a bad track leading to the village of Port Republic, short of Conrad’s Store, from which there was a way via Brown�
�s Gap to the railroad at Mechum River Station. It was risky. Shields, moving south from Luray, might catch the Valley Army in column of route and, in its exhausted state, defeat it. Hotchkiss was, however, acting energetically as Jackson’s eyes. From a lookout position at the southern tip of Massanutten Mountain he observed Shields encamp his army on the afternoon of 5 June near Conrad’s Store. Jackson, having done the distance a month earlier, reckoned that the Union force could not outpace him to Port Republic, now his touchstone of safety.
Not until 7 June, however, did Jackson bring his headquarters into Port Republic, after two days of desperate fighting which had left several regiments shattered and Ashby dead on the field. Union forces were pressing harder than he had anticipated. Pressure was shortly to bring on a battle that threatened to cut off his line of retreat. The Port Republic position was complex. Compressed between the southern tip of Massanutten Mountain and the Blue Ridge, it was also the junction of several key roads and the site of the confluence of three rivers, the South Fork of the Shenandoah, the North River and its tributary, the South River. A surviving bridge at the top of Main Street crossed at the junction of the North River and South Fork, while the South River was fordable at two points, Upper and Lower Fords. Jackson needed to dominate the whole scene of action in order to outface the enemy—Frémont, advancing from the northwest, Shields, advancing from the northeast—and still to preserve his options of retreat southwestwards.
His advantage in intelligence was played out. He was at close quarters with the enemy, who could read the situation map as well as he could. They dominated two sides of the battlefield, including the northern high ground. Unless he could fight them off, they might envelop him to left and right, cut off his line of escape and achieve the Union victory he had staved off for the last four months.