In the order of march first place fittingly was given the Stonewall Brigade which, in its earliest days, Old Jack had acclaimed proudly the “First.” Its 210 officers and men marched deliberately and without faltering up toward the village. Behind the men of Manassas moved the other brigades of Gordon’s division. Shadows they were, but they represented most of the regiments of Jackson’s old division—Lawton’s fine Georgians, Dick Taylor’s famous fighters of Middletown and Winchester, nearly all the other troops from Louisiana. Today each of the regiments occupied so little of the muddy road that they created a dramatic illusion. Their flags appeared to be massed. Federals who saw them coming to the Court House had to look a second time to be sure what it was they beheld: “The regimental battle-flags … crowded so thick, by thinning out of men, that the whole column seemed crowned with red.”
Gordon’s men were obeying in their last march the endlessly repeated command of Old Jack, the command heard on the way to Front Royal, and in Thoroughfare Gap, and along the forest road that led through the Wilderness to Hooker’s flank—“Close up, men, close up!” As they closed now, they saw ahead, in line on the left and on the right of the road, two full Federal brigades. At the right of the line, the color guard carried the Stars and Stripes and the flag of the 1st Division of the V Corps. Under the colors was a little group of officers. The central figure was Brigadier General Joshua L. Chamberlain. He watched the column as it came nearer, and spoke a word to a man by his side. A bugle rang out above the shuffle of muddy feet. Instantly, regiment by regiment, as smartly as if on dress parade, the Union troops shifted from order arms to carry arms, the marching salute. Gordon heard the familiar sound of the shift and, half startled, looked up. His figure stiffened; he turned his horse to General Chamberlain; he brought down his sword in salute and, wheeling again to his own column, gave the command to carry arms. Salute answered salute. Said Chamberlain afterward, “On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drums; not a cheer, nor word nor whisper of vain-glorying, … but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead!”
The column moved on until the head of it reached the Federal left. There it halted and faced to the south. Officers dressed the line and took their post. Gordon and his few generals rode to the rear of the troops. At a word from officers, bayonets were fixed. A heavy pause ensued. Then, in a low voice, the last command was given to Jackson’s foot cavalry. The men stepped forward four paces across the road and stacked their arms. Off came the cartridge boxes. In a moment these were hanging from the muskets. The color sergeants folded the regimental flags and laid them, too, on the stack. Silence held. They turned; they came back into the road, they marched ahead past the Court House. It was over.46
As fast as the divisions could—for waiting was torture—they moved up the road and repeated the ceremony. After Gordon came Rodes’s old division of Early’s. In the division of Grimes, formerly of Rodes, the brigade of Battle had been Rodes’s at Seven Pines and at Sharpsburg. Cox’s brigade, formerly Dodson Ramseur’s, included the famous 1st Carolina, the “Bethel Regiment” that had shared the opening battle of the war in Virginia. It counted now 71 present. In Phil Cooke’s brigade was the renowned 12th Georgia that had won the army’s admiration at Front Royal and at Cedar Creek. The 12th now numbered 60 men. The most distinguished commanders of every brigade of the division were listed among the dead.
Early’s division included the men who had been Garland’s. Lewis’s brigade had been Trimble’s and Hoke’s and Godwin’s. The brigade of James A. Walker had a few of Dick Ewell’s men of 1861. Pegram’s brigade originally had been Elzey’s and then Early’s. A hundred names, a thousand memories the passing of the Second Corps recalled! Gordon was mindful of them all, and afterward he addressed them with overflowing eloquence.
While Gordon was speaking, Anderson’s men were repeating the sad ceremony of surrender. Most of these units had not come to Virginia till the spring of 1864, but they included Wise’s brigade, a part of which had been with Rodes at Seven Pines. Bushrod Johnson’s division had borne much of the bitterest day-by-day fighting in the hideous red trenches of Petersburg.
To the village street moved the remnants of the Third Corps, under the command of that gallant, ill-fortuned gentleman Harry Heth. The men Heth surrendered included all the Tennesseans who in many battles far from home had acquitted themselves with honor. In John R. Cooke’s brigade were the 118 survivors of the illustrious 27th North Carolina which, with the great old 3rd Arkansas, had stopped the Federal attack on the center at Sharpsburg. Wilcox’s division was as close to Heth’s in the last hour as it had been in the Wilderness that May night of 1864 when, it now was plain, the army was at the beginning of the end. Every one of Wilcox’s brigades was renowned—Thomas’s had fought through nearly the whole of the war; Lane’s had been Branch’s till Sharpsburg; McGowan’s had been Gregg’s; Scales’s was Pender’s. This fragment of a division, 2,681 men, included four of the brigades of A. P. Hill’s famous old Light Division. Hill himself and four of the old brigadiers, Branch, Gregg, Pender, and Perrin, had been killed.
Mahone’s division had at its head, in its last hour, the soldier who shared with Gordon and Hampton the highest distinction in the final year of the war. Mahone had grown with his duties. Scarcely with an exception, each of his battles had been better than the one that preceded it. Forney’s brigade had been Cadmus Wilcox’s pride; Weisiger’s had been led for more than two years by Mahone himself. Nat Harris had raised most notably the standard of Posey’s brigade, which once had been Featherston’s. The wounded Moxley Sorrel’s brigade had been Rans Wright’s which had held on at Malvern Hill. Mahone’s division had been Dick Anderson’s that smoky day at Chancellorsville. Well the division had fought under Anderson, but never better than under Mahone.
Last, now, the great old First Corps! Of Kershaw’s division, which had been McLaws’s, only 805 surrendered. Their comrades were on the way to prison—the men who fought at Fredericksburg under Tom Cobb, and Barksdale’s Mississippians who had waged the battle of the pontoons there, and McLaws’s own fine Georgians. Pickett’s men numbered 1,031, of whom 17 belonged to the 1st Virginia, a regiment with a history that ran back to the French and Indian War. Most of the soldiers of Pickett’s division had lost their arms at Five Forks, or on the retreat or at Sayler’s Creek. Those who formally laid down their weapons were merely “a little group,” perhaps 60, but all the bloody grief of Gettysburg was typified by them—Pickett’s exhortation, “Don’t forget today that you are from Old Virginia,” Armistead in the smoke with his hat on the point of his saber, Garnett wrapped in his overcoat, Cemetery Ridge red with Southern banners and with Southern blood.
Field’s division was among the last to march between those silent blue lines. Except for Tige Anderson, it had none of the brigades of its earliest days, when part of it had been Whiting’s and part David Jones’s. The division’s most renowned commander, John B. Hood, had left in the autumn of ’63 and had himself suffered in body and in spirit as miserably as had any of his old veterans of Gaines’ Mill, Second Manassas, Sharpsburg, the Wilderness. Evander Law had been transferred. Robert Toombs had resigned. John Gregg was dead. In the ranks still were some of Rock Benning’s men who had stood opposite Burnside’s Bridge on Antietam Creek that September afternoon in 1862. Of the Texas Brigade itself, perhaps the most renowned of all, 476 officers and men marched up the road and stacked rifles that had been heard in all the army’s great battles except Chancellorsville. For absence from that action, they had made atonement at Chickamauga and in Tennessee. Their name, their deeds, with which the old 3rd Arkansas was associated, already had become a part of the tradition of their state.
The rear guard had surrendered the last cartridge, the last remnant of a bullet-torn flag. For the waning day there was such converse, friendly or bitter, as might be exchanged by lingering “paroled prisoners of war.” Most Confederates were humiliated by their final defeat a
nd half dazed from their long retreat. Such thought as they were able to fashion, when they started away, was of burned homes and fenceless farms, of a planting season without teams, of a hungry urban family and no wages with which to feed wife and children. With bitter thought honest exhortation was joined. “Go home, boys,” said Bryan Grimes to Rodes’s veterans, “and act like men, as you always have done during the war.”47
Most precious of all were the words of Lee in his farewell order: “I need not tell the brave survivors of so many hard fought battles, who have remained steadfast to the last, that I have consented to this result from no distrust of them; but feeling that valor and devotion could accomplish nothing that could compensate for the loss that must have attended the continuance of the contest, I determined to avoid the useless sacrifice of those whose past services have endeared them to their countrymen…. You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed; and I earnestly pray that a Merciful God will extend to you His blessing and protection. With an unceasing admiration of your constancy and devotion to your Country, and with a grateful remembrance of your kind and generous consideration for myself, I bid you all an affectionate farewell.”48
For the first day after the surrender, and for many another day, long and weary roads were theirs, and strange and sometimes winding; but the words of their leader they kept fresh in their hearts: “Consciousness of duty faithfully performed”—that was the consolation which became their reward, their pride, their bequest.
Notes
Abbreviations
CV—Confederate Veteran
Hotchkiss, CMH 3—Jedediah Hotchkiss, Confederate Military History (Vol. 3): Virginia
OR—U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, and Supplement. Series I unless otherwise noted.
SHSP—Southern Historical Society Papers
Chapter 1: Opening Guns
1 OR 1, 266; Alfred Roman, The Military Operations of General Beauregard 1, 52ff, 64.
2 Beauregard graduated No. 2 in the class of 1838 at West Point.
3 Richmond Dispatch, May 1, 1861.
4 Roman, Beauregard 1, 66; Richmond Dispatch, Richmond Examiner, June 1, 1861; Sallie A. Putnam, Richmond During the War, 46.
5 Dunbar Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist 5, 58.
6 Richmond Examiner, April 26, May 7, 1861.
7 OR 2, 894, 42; Roman, Beauregard 1, 66.
8 OR 2, 896, 901; J. E. Cooke, Wearing of the Gray, 83.
9 W. P. Snow, Southern Generals (1865 ed.), 212; Cooke, Wearing of the Gray, 83; SHSP 28, 287; Richmond Whig, July 26, 1861.
10 OR 2, 831, 879, 841, 846.
11 OR 2, 902.
12 OR 2, 907.
13 William Couper, 100 Years at V.M.I. 1, 253; OR 2, 867ff.
14 OR 2, 868.
15 OR 2, 869; J. W. Thomason, “Jeb” Stuart, 63, 82, 83.
16 OR 2, 871-72, 877.
17 OR 2, 881, 896.
18 Yorktown and its environs were the principal defense. A small cooperating force was placed at Gloucester Point on the north bank of the river, opposite Yorktown.
19 SHSP 12, 105ff.
20 Baltimore American, April 23, Richmond Dispatch, April 26, 1861; Rowland, Jefferson Davis 8, 213.
21 OR 51:2, 36, 53; OR 2, 789-90, 865, 887, 884.
22 OR 2, 84, 95-96, 97, 82; Walter Clark, North Carolina Regiments 1, 88.
23 Richmond Dispatch, June 24, 1861.
24 Richmond Dispatch, July 4, 10, Baltimore Sun, June 27, 1861.
25 E. A. Pollard, Lee and His Lieutenants, 450; Clark, North Carolina Regiments 5, 645; 1, 125-26.
26 Richmond Whig, July 26, 1861; G. Moxley Sorrel, Recollections of a Confederate Staff Officer, 54. D. H. Hill and Jackson were brothers-in-law by Jackson’s second marriage. Their wives were daughters of the first president of Davidson College, Robert Hall Morrison.
27 OR 2, 49, 51ff., 64ff.; Hotchkiss, CMH 3, 45.
28 Military record, Garnett Papers, Myrtle Cooper-Schwarz Collection; Richmond Dispatch, April 23, 1861; C. Vann Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 176.
29 OR 2, 236-37.
30 Hotchkiss, CMH 3, 691.
31 Hotchkiss’s notes, sketches, and tables of distances supplied virtually all the topographical data for this section and for much of what appears in later chapters on the operations of Jackson.
32 OR 2, 237-38, 242, 264, 256, 275.
33 OR 2, 257, 265, 260.
34 OR 2, 283, 262, 260, 258.
35 OR 2, 260, 262-63, 258-59, 266-67.
36 OR 2, 285-88; Louisville Courier-Journal clipping, n.d., S. M. Gaines, December 29, 1902, Garnett Papers.
37 Besides mention of 555 prisoners in Pegram’s report, the only other detailed casualty list is that of the 23rd Virginia, which lost 32. The other units must have had at least 100 wounded and stragglers.
38 J. W. Gordon, August 14, 1861, Garnett Papers.
Chapter 2: Beauregard’s Battlefield
1 Roman, Beauregard 1, 82.
2 Beauregard to Davis, June 12, Davis to Beauregard, June 13, 1861, Roman, Beauregard 1, 77-78.
3 OR 2, 943-44.
4 To L. T. Wigfall, July 8, 1861, Roman, Beauregard 1, 81-82.
5 Beauregard to Davis, July 11, Chesnut to Beauregard, July 16, 1861, Roman, Beauregard 1, 82-83, 85-87; OR 2, 504ff.
6 P. G. T. Beauregard, Commentary on the Campaign and Battle of Manassas, 30; OR 2, 472; J. E. Johnston, Narrative of Military Operations, 38.
7 Roman, Beauregard 1, 90.
8 OR 2, 44ff.; Roman, Beauregard 1, 92ff.; James Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox, 33ff.
9 OR 2, 478, 473.
10 OR 2, 486, 473, 474; Johnston, Narrative, 40-41.
11 Roughly 15,500 of 33,000. Smith’s brigade is not included in the total, inasmuch as his men had not arrived.
12 OR 2, 486-87. Johnston’s troops had been styled the Army of the Shenandoah; Beauregard had called his the Army of the Potomac. After the junction of the two, the latter name prevailed until supplanted the next year by the one that became even more renowned.
13 OR 2, 479-80. The defense made of these orders in 1886, after they had been criticized by General Johnston, will be found in Roman, Beauregard 1, 55ff. It is not apt to convince students.
14 OR 2, 518, 559, 474.
15 Roman, Beauregard 1, 447-48.
16 OR 2, 543, 565, 537, 487, 555.
17 OR 2, 488-89.
18 OR 2, 519, 491; E. Porter Alexander, Military Memoirs of a Confederate, 31.
19 OR 2, 474.
20 OR 2, 491, 536, 537, 543, 565; OR 51:2, 689.
21 Alexander, Military Memoirs, 34; Johnston, Narrative, 47.
22 OR 2, 475, 491, 543, 492.
23 OR 2, 475, 492; Johnston, Narrative, 48; Battles and Leaders of the Civil War 1, 248.
24 OR 2, 475.
25 OR 2, 493.
26 OR 2, 483, 347, 394, 402, 406, 407, 481, 494.
27 OR 2, 494-95.
28 OR 2, 495-96, 550, 547; OR 51:1, 29-30.
29 OR 2, 522, 476, 496.
30 Richmond Whig, November 20, 1861; Jubal A. Early, Autobiographical Sketch and Narrative of the War Between the States, 20ff.
31 OR 2, 476, 496, 556-57.
Chapter 3: Beauregard’s Star Wanes
1 Johnston, Narrative, 52-53; OR 2, 476, 477, 497.
2 OR 2, 483; Early, Autobiographical Sketch, 25-26.
3 Longstreet, Manassas to Appomattox, 51-52; OR 2, 519, 544, 477, 497; Roman, Beauregard 1, 109.
4 Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government 1, 349; OR 2, 987; Alexander, Military Memoirs, 49.
5 Roman, Beauregard 1, 116; OR 2, 502, 503.
6 Johnston, Narrative, 59; Roman, Beauregard 1, 119.
7 Richmond Dispatch, July 31, 1861; OR 51:2, 215-16; Richmond Examiner, August 14, July 22, July 23, Richmond Dispatch, July 23, 1861.
> 8 Charleston Mercury, July 25, 1861; Punch, reprinted in Richmond Examiner, September 6, 1861.
9 Mary Anna Jackson, Memoirs of Stonewall Jackson, 178, 180; SHSP 19, 83, 302.
10 McHenry Howard, Recollections of a Maryland Confederate Soldier and Staff Officer, 35; Smith’s diary in CV 7, 108; Richmond Dispatch, August 8, 1861.
11 OR 2, 476; Richmond Dispatch, August 8, Richmond Examiner, July 22, 1861.
12 John O. Casler, Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade, 25.
13 OR 2, 558; Pollard, Lee and His Lieutenants, 477; Cooke, Wearing of the Gray, 110ff.
14 OR 2, 474, 499; Thomas C. Caffey, Battle-fields of the South, 59.
15 Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Civil War, 24; Putnam, Richmond During the War, 35-36; SHSP 22, 47ff
16 OR 2, 476-77; Richmond Whig, August 3, 1861; E. P. Alexander in SHSP 9, 515.
17 Richmond Dispatch, July 15, 1861; Dictionary of American Biography 8, 213-14.
18 M. C. Butler in Library of Southern Literature 5, 2061ff.; Richmond Dispatch, May 29, 1861; Snow, Southern Generals, 472-73; Cooke, Wearing of the Gray, 61ff.
19 OR 2, 566-67.
20 Roman, Beauregard 1, 121-22, 123-24, 135; Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States 1, 305, 306; OR 2, 507-8; J. B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary 1, 88.
21 For this controversy, see OR 5, 850, 877, 881, 903-4ff, 913, 920, 921, 945, 990; OR 51:2, 255, 272, 339, 345; Roman, Beauregard 1, 157, 161-62, 187ff
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