To the other major general on the Suffolk front, John B. Hood, little of interest happened. Hood was a bachelor and was becoming a social lion in Richmond, but he had no love affair on the banks of the Nansemond. He was bored, in fact, by the conduct of what had become a make-believe siege. He wrote Lee a boyish letter: “I presume we will leave here so soon as we gather all the bacon in the country. When we leave here it is my desire to return to you. If any troops come to the Rappahannock, please don’t forget me.”30 That was his temper; if there was to be a fight, he wished to share it.
Vexation there was, finally, for Longstreet in the situation in the Carolinas. In Charleston, over which Longstreet had no control, Beauregard was expecting attack; Whiting in Wilmington apprehended every day that on the next tide the Federal fleet would arrive off his sand forts. Harvey Hill in front of Washington insisted that he must have more troops if he was to recover the town. Then the Federals ran in two vessels and replenished the supplies of the little garrison. That resolved all lingering uncertainty. Confinement of a small Federal force was not worth the effort and cost. The siege was abandoned. As an offensive it would have been rated close to the bottom of military effort, but as a demonstration it served a purpose. The Federal commander, General Foster, wrote Washington “that heavy operations will be necessary in this state….”31
Longstreet’s fruitless first experience in semi-independent command was drawing to a close. Had there been any real justification for an attack on the Federals at Suffolk, the time to have delivered it was immediately after Longstreet crossed the Blackwater. Then he had something over 19,000 men in French’s, Pickett’s, and Hood’s commands. The Federals at the outset were of approximately equal strength, but from the twelfth of April onward Union reinforcements arrived almost daily. The end of the month was to find about 9,000 more bluecoats around Suffolk than had been there when the month opened. Longstreet had to forgo any tenuous hope he ever cherished of assuming the offensive. All he could say of his situation on April 29 was, “I am of the opinion … that I can hold my position against any attack from the front.”32
The day he wrote that letter, Longstreet received notice that the Federals were crossing the Rappahannock in the drama that was to represent the supreme achievement of his comrade Jackson.
4
OLD JACK PREPARES FOR SPRING
Jackson spent the winter in preparation for the call that came to him and to Longstreet the twenty-ninth of April 1863. After Burnside evacuated the right bank of the Rappahannock the night of December 15-16, word came on the sixteenth that Federals were recrossing downstream, at Port Royal. Jackson put the Second Corps on the road to meet the new threat. They had marched some ten miles when Stuart announced that the report of a Federal crossing was untrue. Jackson promptly called a halt and ordered the column into bivouac for the night. He had the staff make a chill, cheerless camp in the woods. Eventually the cold, hunger, and a pulsing earache persuaded even the stubborn Jackson to yield. “Pendleton and myself rode forward in search of Corbin’s place,” Jed Hotchkiss entered in his journal, “and … secured an invitation to come to ‘Moss Neck,’ the palatial home of Corbin, and Hd. Qrs. were established there late in the night.”33
Old Jack went to spend the night and stayed for three months. That protraction was not deliberate. It was due, primarily, to the insistence of the Corbins. When they breakfasted with the general and his staff the next morning, he was offered a wing of the mansion as headquarters. He declined promptly with the argument that the house was “too luxurious for a soldier, who should sleep in a tent.” After about a week in the open, however, Jackson again developed an earache. Dr. McGuire insisted that Jackson go indoors, and the Corbin family prevailed on him to utilize the office on the lawn—a separate building of three rooms.
Both Lee and Stuart professed to be scandalized by such self-indulgence on the part of the Southern Cromwell. Unabashed, Jackson gave his chief and his beloved Jeb Stuart a Christmas dinner at Moss Neck from the abundant food sent him for the holiday. Turkeys he had, a ham, oysters from down the river, unlimited white bread, pickles, even a bottle of wine that had come in a box from Staunton ladies. The general’s body servant, Jim, prepared all the dishes; the mess-boy, John, put on a white apron. Because of this flourish, Lee protested that Jackson and his staff were playing soldier. To see how plain soldiers live, they must come to Lee’s own headquarters. Stuart was even more shocked. Look at the print of butter on the table. Observe its adornment—it was a rooster, doubtless a game-cock. Jackson might protest that the print had been so made by the person who gave him the butter, but who could believe that? It must be Jackson’s coat of arms!34
Jackson remained at Moss Neck despite this and much similar banter and, in the main, enjoyed himself. He met the large number of callers at his office pleasantly and entertained them courteously, though with no wealth of small talk or of large. Over one peculiarity of his, irreverent young staff officers would smile privately: Whenever a guest came, Jackson would say, “Let me take your hat, sir,” and after he took it he would look around in some bewilderment for a place to put it. Finding none, he would deposit it on the floor. Apart from such trifles, there was no denying the expansion of Deacon Jackson. He was dressing much better, although the staff averred, in tribute to Jackson’s thrift, that most of his adornment represented gifts to him.35
Old Jack displayed small oddities of manner that soldiers loved to exaggerate when they spoke of him. He was not merely another general officer; he was not a corps commander only, though the army had no more than two. A personality he was, whose mannerisms plus his victories made thousands of boys believe that he had a mysterious genius, a special relationship to the Almighty. When he was not Cromwell, he was Joshua. Sometimes he was both.
In either role he watched ceaselessly the discipline of his corps. When six men of the Stonewall Brigade were tried by court-martial for desertion, the penalty for the three worst offenders was death. Paxton protested. No more than one of the three, he said, need be shot, and that one should be chosen by lot. Old Jack rebuked sternly his subordinate: “With the exception of this application, General Paxton’s management of his brigade has given me great satisfaction…. It appears to me that when a Court Martial faithfully discharges its duty that its decisions should be sustained. If this is not done, lax administration of justice and corresponding disregard for law must be the consequence.” Lee upheld Jackson; the President overrode both in the cases that involved the death penalty; but in these or in similar instances floggings occurred.36
In another dark matter of discipline that winter, Jackson stood firm. Charges were filed against Brigadier General J. R. Jones of Jackson’s old division for the offense of which no general in Lee’s army ever before had been accused formally—cowardice. Jackson was troubled and humiliated because he had himself selected Jones for promotion. He told Chaplain Tucker Lacy that he had almost lost confidence in man, for when he thought he had found just such a man as he needed and was about to rest satisfied in him he “found something lacking in him.” Jackson added, “I suppose it is to teach me to put my trust only in God.” In this spirit he had to face the prospect of a court-martial of the assailed officer.37
Amid these continuing daily demands for the enforcement of discipline, which was his prime duty that winter, Jackson had to prepare the reports of his battles. As he wrote slowly and painfully, with endless cancellation and revision, he manifestly needed literary assistance. To procure it he turned to Charles J. Faulkner, for eight years a member of Congress and, in 1859-61, United States minister to France. Faulkner held a lieutenant colonel’s commission in the adjutant general’s department and had the necessary skill in letters, but he knew nothing of the battles he was to assist in reporting. This required him to collect the material from subordinate reports and to settle controverted points by interviews with the participants.
Three months Faulkner spent on the reports, and then, with relief if not with full s
atisfaction, he submitted the last of them to Jackson for final changes and approval. Faulker himself felt that Jackson had prescribed a “severe Roman simplicity.” In particular, he was disappointed because Jackson eliminated much that had been written with great care to show the reason for some moves. On this Jackson was unyielding. He did not wish to publish to the enemy, he said, why he did certain things, and thus enable them “to learn [our] mode of doing.” Jackson realized how difficult it was to prepare accurate reports after a long interval. Said he to Faulkner, half seriously, half jestingly, “Now, Colonel Faulkner, when a battle happens … I want you to get where you can see all that is going on, and, with paper and pencil in hand, write it down, so we may not have so much labor and so many conflicitng statements, and then write up the Report at once after the battle.”38
In Jackson’s corps there was the endless question of vacancies to be filled and ambitions to be gratified or denied. From January 19 to April 30 these vacancies had to be filled: First, and far most important, as there was every reason to assume that D. H. Hill would remain in North Carolina, his division must have a permanent commander. Next, there was scant prospect that A. R. Lawton would return to command his brigade of Ewell’s, now Early’s, division. Third, Charles Field was still bed-ridden with the wound received at Manassas; his brigade needed a leader who would pull it together again as an effective unit of A. P. Hill’s division.
Besides these three, a definite vacancy now existed in Toombs’s brigade. At last Toombs had concluded he could not “remain in the service with any advantage to the public or with honor” to himself.39 The question of “honor,” so far as one could observe, simply was the honor of promotion. On March 5 he formally bade farewell to his brigade. There may have been more relief at having him out of the army than concern over the prospect of having him in Congress. A year before, the reverse would have been the feeling. Yet another vacancy of the spring was due to the fulfillment of William B.Taliaferro’s threat that if he were not named to command Jackson’s old division, he would seek transfer. The continued denial of a major general’s commission was an affront to Taliaferro’s station as a landed aristocrat and a gentleman politician. He asked transfer, received it, and never fought again in the Army of Northern Virginia.
To succeed Taliaferro, the choice of Jackson fell on Brigadier General Raleigh E. Colston, who had been in command under French on the Blackwater and then had been transferred temporarily to Pickett’s division. Colston was graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1846, and in that year was added to the faculty of V.M.I., where he taught French and later Military History and Strategy. To the students he was “Old Polly” in an obvious pun on the parlez he required of the cadets. Colston had been mildly commended for his part at Williamsburg, but had been a subject of some contention in the operations of June 1 at Seven Pines. After that battle he had been stricken with a long and obscure illness. He was brought now to the Army of Northern Virginia because Jackson, who had been his colleague at V.M.I., had a high opinion of him.
Apparently Jackson had no concern because of Colston’s limited combat experience, or the fact that he was senior brigadier of Jackson’s old division, now Trimble’s. If Trimble’s recovery were again delayed, the division in the next action might be under a man who had two battles only to his credit as a brigade commander, and those two not at their hottest where he fought. There is no record of any reflection by Jackson on the seriousness of such a risk.
Charlie Field’s brigade of A. P. Hill’s division went to Harry Heth. This was as definitely Lee’s choice as Colston was Jackson’s. Heth was thirty-seven, a cousin of George Pickett’s, and a graduate of West Point in the class of 1847. In the old army he had followed the usual career of an infantry officer with something more than average credit. The good opinion of Lee he won while serving as acting quartermaster of the Virginia forces. He served in the Department of East Tennessee whence Lee asked his transfer to the Army of Northern Virginia. Tradition is that Heth was the one general officer whom Lee called by his first name; certain it is that Lee interested himself in Heth’s advancement as in no other instance of record. Heth was truthful, he was socially charming, and he had the finest elements of character, but in war he was to prove himself of a type not uncommon—the type that is capable but unlucky. Taking Field’s brigade, he became the senior brigadier in the Light Division. Was this just to such men as Archer and Pender?
Toombs’s brigade went to Old Rock Benning, who had been temporarily in command of Semmes’s troops. Early’s famous brigade passed temporarily into the devoted if unskilled hands of Extra Billy Smith. An appointment destined to mean far more to the army than either of these brought John B. Gordon at last to the head of Lawton’s brigade. Lawton, recovering from the wound received at Sharpsburg, had many calls and many opportunities in Richmond and in Georgia, and Lee doubted he would come back to the Army of Northern Virginia. If Lawton was not to return during the spring, then a vacancy existed among Georgia troops, a vacancy that Gordon could best fill. The commission that could not be used in the autumn, because there was no brigade for him, might be delivered him now.
Who was to receive the most coveted of the promotions, that of major general to head D. H. Hill’s division? Jackson was clear in his mind: He wanted Edward Johnson, “Old Allegheny.” Johnson, said the commander of the Second Corps, “was with me at McDowell and so distinguished himself as to make me very desirous of having him as one of my division commanders.” Lee was entirely agreeable to the promotion.
The sole question was whether Johnson was able to discharge field command. His ankle bones had not knit satisfactorily, nor had his leg lost its stiffness, from the wound received at McDowell. Johnson went to Richmond and there, chafing at his slow mending, made the best of misfortune. If he could not pursue the field of Mars, he enjoyed the domain of Venus. It was said that his thunderous voice had been heard in a loud proposal of matrimony to one belle of the city, and that, not a week later, he admitted “paying attention” to one of his cousins, whom he pronounced a “lovely girl.” A curious, somewhat uncouth, strangely fascinating man was Old Allegheny. He winked ceaselessly because of an effection of one eye, and sometimes by this shocked newly met ladies who thought him over confident if not impertinent. “His head,” reported Mrs. Chesnut, “is so strangely shaped—like a cone, an old fashioned beehive….”40
If and when his ankle mended, whether or not his suit had ended, Allegheny Johnson would join the Army of Northern Virginia as a division commander. He would come solely on the basis of Jackson’s estimate of him, and he would be among soldiers who knew him by reputation only. Never had he fought with any part of that army save with the few regiments of his old command and with the troops Jackson had moved to McDowell almost a year previously. This, manifestly, was as long a chance as Lee took with Heth.
Curious it was that Jackson, who insisted so often on the right of subordinates to the promotion he so seldom gave them, should in two instances have entrusted so large a part of his corps to men of combat experience so limited. As Lee sponsored one of these assignments, that of Heth, and approved those of Johnson and Colston, much of the responsibility was his. The aim of Lee and Jackson was to bring to the army the most capable men available, but that had an ominous implication: The supply of men ripe and qualified for promotion within the army was, in the judgment of the commanders, at the moment exhausted. Good colonels there were; but none who had the required seniority, or could get it readily by transfer, was suited to brigade command. The attrition of two years, particularly in Jackson’s corps, now had offset the development of new men in the hard school of battle.
Among those in line for the next major generalship, Dorsey Pender did not believe he could win promotion while he was under A. P. Hill. Reports that he had been commended to Jackson as the best brigadier in the corps did not make his pulse beat faster. Said Pender: “I do not believe Gen. Jackson will have me promoted because I have been recommended by
Gen. Hill.”41 Pender’s pessimism was deepened, in all probability, by the knowledge that the quarrel between Jackson and Powell Hill had been renewed with more violence than before.
In January Hill asked General Lee for a trial on the charges preferred against him by Jackson. Lee explained patiently, “Upon examining the charges in question, I am of opinion that the interests of the service do not require that they should be tried, and have, therefore, returned them to General Jackson with an indorsement to that effect. I hope you will concur with me that their further prosecution is unnecessary….” Hill did not concur. He argued that while the return of the charges to Jackson was a rebuke to that officer, it was “not as public as was General Jackson’s exercise of power toward me.” If the charges against him were true, “I do not deserve to command a division in this army; if they were untrue, then General Jackson deserves a rebuke as notorious as the arrest.”
As Lee did not answer, nothing developed until, in March, Hill wrote his report of Cedar Mountain. In that document he set forth his version of the disputed day’s events that had been the beginning of the quarrel between him and Jackson. This was the sort of challenge Jackson never failed to take up. He responded with a detailed endorsement of the report; Hill pressed anew for a hearing. Painstakingly Jackson revised his charges and specifications, and on April 17 had them ready for presentation to a court.
Before any action was taken by Lee, who was anxious to bury the whole affair, an entirely new controversy arose. Hill was a stickler. He insisted that all orders to his subordinates, from even officers of the general staff, pass through him. While that matter was being adjudicated—General Lee disapproved the practice—a dispute boiled up over an order Jackson sent directly to Hill’s signal officer. Hill said defiantly that the order need not be obeyed; it was not passed through him. This moved Jackson to a startling climax: “When an officer orders in his command such disregard for the orders of his superior, I am of the opinion that he should be relieved from duty with his command, and I respectfully request that Genl. Hill be relieved from duty in my corps.” To that the long quarrel had come: Jackson asking that the commander of his strongest division—many thought, the best division in the army—be relieved of command when a great battle manifestly was in the making!42
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