Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories

by C. Brian Kelly

  Jackson’s Odd Failure

  IT HAS NEVER BEEN F ULLY EXPLAINED, AND MANY OF THOMAS J. “STONEWALL” Jackson’s fellow Southern officers could not quite forgive him for his lethargy, delays, and downright nutty behavior when called to the aid of Robert E. Lee in defense of Richmond in June 1862. After all, here was the man labeled “Stonewall” for his forthright stand at First Bull Run hardly a year previous; here was the brilliant leader fresh from running rings around the Federal foe in the Shenandoah Valley campaign, probably just as famous among military men and historians today as Napoleon’s First Italian campaign.

  Here was the great, if eccentric, leader on his way to Lee’s line-up for the first real counteroffensive against the massive Federal foe threatening from just six to ten miles outside of Richmond. And here was the genius of the Valley campaign, missing from Lee’s lineup, even taking to a chair on a porch, reading a novel briefly, then going inside for a nap!

  E. Porter Alexander, probably the leading artillerist of the Confederacy and a superb postwar memoir writer, stated the difficult-to-forgive case against Jackson most bluntly. “Lee’s instructions to him were very brief and general, in supreme confidence that the Jackson of the Valley would win even brighter laurels on the Chickahominy River east of Richmond.” Jackson’s role was made easy for him, Alexander maintained. “The shortest route was assigned to him and the largest force was given him. Lee then took himself off to the farthest flank, as if generously to leave to Jackson the opportunity of the most brilliant victory of the war.”

  And what did Jackson do in response? He repeatedly turned up late for his assignments, or not at all. Alexander asserted: “His failure is not so much a military as a psychological phenomenon. He did not try and fail. He simply made no effort…. He spent the 29th of June 1862 in camp in disregard of Lee’s instructions, and he spent the 30th in equal idleness at White Oak Swamp. His 25,000 infantry practically did not fire a shot in the two days.”

  Jackson’s delays, naturally, were soon noticed by his companion commanders in the field as Lee unfurled his battle plan to push George McClellan’s great host away from Richmond in what became known as the Seven Days Battle. John Magruder, for instance, informed by Lee that Jackson would be crossing the Chickahominy alongside Magruder’s own command, was stunned to hear from a subordinate, “I had hoped that Jackson would have cooperated with me on my left, but he sends me word that he cannot, as he has other important duty to perform.”

  Possibly, Alexander surmised, Jackson on one day was holding off because it was Sunday, the Sabbath, and Jackson was known to be fanatically religious. But in the past he had fought on Sundays.

  As his part in Lee’s plans to discourage McClellan from Richmond and its precincts, Jackson was expected to join in the battle opening the Seven Days affair on June 26, his assignment to flank the Federal right and cut off McClellan’s umbilical cord to the huge Union supply depot at White House Landing on the Pumunkey River near West Point, Virginia.

  It was an extraordinary gamble that Lee had devised. With McClellan and his superior numbers obviously preparing to besiege Richmond and pound the city with huge guns that could only be moved up by rail or by barge, Lee would leave a token force demonstrating at his newly dug fortifications and attack the Federal left with the divisions headed by A. P. Hill, James Longstreet, and D. H. (Daniel Harvey) Hill. The risk was that McClellan might see through Lee’s ruse and walk into Richmond past the defensive line with its small token force maintained by “Prince John” Magruder. In addition, Lee was willing to split his army and advance on either side of the Chickahominy, its swamps, and tributaries, a plan that made coordination difficult. Luckily for all, McClellan was so timorous that he never saw his great opportunity. Instead, in wailing tones he repeatedly asked Washington for more and more reinforcements and in the end predicted his far from irrevocable defeat.

  But Jackson inexplicably did not appear at his assigned “jump-off” position on June 26, and A. P. Hill launched his portion of Lee’s counteroffensive without waiting. That rash move dragged along Longstreet and D. H. Hill in support. Lee was thus committed to his plan without all his commanders in place.

  Jackson at last arrived, twelve hours late. Fortunately, it appeared, he could still carry out his part of the attack the next morning. A. P. Hill’s attack had been repulsed, but McClellan was alarmed enough to prepare for possible movement of his vulnerable supply base to Harrison’s Landing on the James River below Richmond.

  The next day, June 27, Jackson was again late in taking his position, but the Confederates at last mounted a more concerted advance and by nightfall had collapsed the Federal right as originally planned. That night McClellan made the fateful decision to retreat to the James. A long-tailed column of one hundred thousand or more men by this time, the Federal host began its rearward march the very next day, June 28, with the White House landing base left once again to the Rebs.

  Here Lee was presented with an opportunity to pursue and strike a harsh blow, destroying the Union’s greatest army on the spot—in the river swamps east of Richmond. But things kept going awry for the Confederacy’s newly appointed field commander, even in the midst of a strategically great victory.

  Lee briefly lost contact with McClellan’s whereabouts, and it wasn’t clear for some hours if the Federal commander had actually headed for the James. Then, in mounting pursuit at last, Lee was frustrated by the mistakes of his subordinates (not only Jackson, but other subordinate commanders as well). As stated by historian Bruce Catton in his Terrible Swift Sword, “Magruder proved an inexpert tactician, [Benjamin] Huger moved much too slowly, and Jackson, most inexplicably, missed a crucial assignment.”

  And so, by July 1, “the head of the Federal column had reached Harrison’s Landing and the protecting gunboats [out on the James River waters].” When Lee caught up at Malvern Hill, the Federal guns on the high ground were simply too much for the attacking Confederates—“that afternoon and evening saw one of the most tragic and hopeless attacks of the war, with Magruder’s and D. H. Hill’s divisions and elements from other commands trying heroically to do the impossible,” added Catton.

  Throughout the Seven Days, quite obviously from all accounts, Stonewall Jackson had not covered himself with glory. Years later, South Carolina’s rough, tough cavalryman Wade Hampton would inform Porter Alexander of a visit to Jackson at a crucial point in the Seven Days to tell Jackson he had complied with orders to build a temporary infantry bridge over a small stream in their path. A key Federal force could be attacked just beyond.

  Hampton said he found Jackson seated on a fallen pine and made his report. “He drew his cap down over his eyes, which were closed and after listening to me for some minutes, he rose without speaking.”

  Hampton’s complaint was that if Jackson had proceeded, they might have defeated the Federal force just beyond, and thus the “Federal army would have been destroyed.”

  Jackson’s own brother-in-law, D. H. Hill, on the other hand, sought to explain his “inaction” by blaming the exhausting rigors his troops had been through in their Valley campaign, his pity for his own men, and their reduced numbers. “He thought that the garrison of Richmond ought now to bear the brunt of the fighting.”

  To which Alexander retorted, in his Military Memoir of a Confederate, that the veterans of the long Peninsular campaign “had suffered just as many hardships and done even more severe fighting, as the casualties will attest.”

  Further, to show a natural pity or affection for one’s own men “by shirking battle” was “no real kindness to them, apart from the tremendous consequences to the army and the nation.” In sum, Jackson’s failure was a “lapse of duty.”

  It wasn’t long, though, before the “old Jackson” reasserted himself and fought with skill and bravery by Lee’s side. It was his flanking movement at Chancellorsville a year later that won the battle but cost Jackson his own life when he was wounded by his own troops, who fired into the darkness as Jacks
on returned from a reconnaissance in front of them.

  So what happened to the rightly vaunted Stonewall outside of Richmond in June of 1862?

  Perhaps historian Clifford Dowdey was on the correct trail when, in the 1960s, he investigated the latest medical findings on the effects of stress. As he pointed out in his 1964 book The Seven Days: The Emergence of Lee, Jackson had been under extreme stress for the ten weeks of his whirlwind Shenandoah Valley campaign. When he led his forces to Richmond in response to Lee’s call, “not only were his naturally limited physical powers extended…but his total organism [had been] exposed to the prolonged stress of danger, sustained alertness and the urgent need of constant decisions affecting the cause he represented as well as the lives of the men entrusted to him.”

  It did not help Jackson’s condition that on his way to Richmond he left his marching columns to ride ahead by horseback. “He foolishly made the fourteenhour night ride to Richmond from 1 a.m. to late afternoon on the 23rd, and then, without rest or food—taking only a glass of milk—made the return ride through a second night from about seven in the evening until mid-morning of the 24th.”

  All that was exhausting enough, but no doubt, as Dowdey adds, “his judgment had already been affected when he made the all-night rides on successive nights.” In Dowdey’s view, Jackson was the victim of stress exhaustion, his mental and physiological resources already depleted beforehand. Still, “in Stonewall Jackson’s world, no general would have considered such an ailment as stress fatigue, even if he had been aware of the reactions to stress.” While all certainly knew the effects of strain and loss of sleep, “a leader was supposed to be above the limitations of the flesh.”

  Obviously, not even a Stonewall Jackson could be that superhuman. Wrung out by his Valley exertions, he simply had been asked to resume the strain of march, command, and battle too soon…too soon again.

  Hello, Richmond

  FOR RICHMOND, THESE WERE GIDDY, CROWDED DAYS. HIGH DRAMA SIDE BY SIDE with everyday events. Real, classical tragedy together with the pathos and even the occasional human comedy. And all so tightly packed into such a short time frame.

  One potentially bright moment in the capital of the Confederate States of America was the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as Permanent President, no longer provisional. But the event was not quite as gay as the prior ceremony held in Montgomery, Alabama, the previous year. For one thing, it was pouring down rain on this bleak twenty-second of February 1862 (George Washington’s birthday, at that). The umbrellas of the assembled crowd struck the onlooking Constance Cary as “an immense mushroom bed.” Wrote this teenage girl, “As the bishop and the President-elect came upon the stand, there was almost a painful hush in the crowd.” They felt the gravity of the occasion, and although a shout went up when Davis “kissed the Book,” the crowd quickly dispersed with no real show of elation.

  And then there was that awful story about Mrs. Davis—Varina—on her way to the inauguration that day. Her coachman drove her carriage at “snail’s pace,” reported Constance Cary later, and escorting her were four black men, two to a side, all wearing white gloves and black clothing, all stepping slowly and somberly. It was just like a funeral procession, and indeed, the coachman said he thought that’s what she wanted. “This is the way we do in Richmond at funerals and sich-like,” he explained.

  Earlier that winter, horrible weather had afflicted the Old Dominion, and in January scarlet fever had struck Richmond, a lethal threat to any child. Confederate General James Longstreet was in northern Virginia opposite the Federal lines when he received word to hurry to his family’s side in Richmond. Wife Louise and their four children were staying with friends, and all four youngsters had come down with the fever.

  Longstreet arrived in the capital in the final days of January just in time to see their twelve-month-old Mary Anne lose her battle with the disease. A day later, January 26, four-year-old James died. And after him, on February 1, six-yearold Augustus succumbed as well. Only thirteen-year-old Garland survived the fever’s onslaught. The Longstreets were so devastated that Brigadier General George Pickett, later to lead Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, had to make the funeral arrangements for them. They said that Longstreet was never the same again, and little wonder.

  Soon Richmond itself heard the not-so-distant sound of guns. As May gave way to June and the weather turned fair, the Battle of Seven Pines (Fair Oaks) began. It was May 31, and “Every heart leaped as if deliverance were at hand,” noted teenager Constance Cary. At the same time, she added, there “hardly” was “a family in the town whose father, son or brother was not part and parcel of the defending army.”

  For the city’s civilians, its leaders, war planners, and soldiers alike, darkness brought a pause in the cannon fire, but they slept that night “lying down dressed upon beds.” Early the next morning, “the whole town was on the street.”

  For now came the wounded, in from the great battle just beyond the city. “Ambulances, litters, carts, every vehicle that the city could produce went and came with a ghastly burden; those who could walk limped painfully home, in some cases so black with gunpowder they passed unrecognized.” By afternoon, “the streets were one vast hospital.” In homes and other buildings, hastily converted into temporary hospitals, mutilated men suffered or died—or both.

  Several days after the “first flurry of distress,” the young diarist saw “flitting about the streets” and hurrying to the hospitals from the homes of the affluent, “smiling, white-jacketed negroes, carrying silver trays with dishes of fine porcelain under napkins of thick white damask, containing soups, creams, jellies, thin bisquit [sic], eggs à la creme, broiled chicken, etc., surmounted by clusters of freshly gathered flowers.”

  Then, too, “day after day we were called to our windows by the wailing dirge of a military band preceding a soldier’s funeral.” Day after day. “One could not number those sad pageants: the coffin crowned with cap and sword and gloves, the riderless horse following with empty boots fixed in the stirrups….”

  It wasn’t always thus, of course. Only a year earlier, Richmond’s beginnings as a new nation’s wartime capital were heady, confusing, thrilling. “Noise of drums, tramps of marching regiments all day long, rattling of artillery wagons, bands of music, friends from every quarter coming in,” wrote Mary Chesnut back in July 1861. “We ought to be miserable and anxious, and yet these are pleasant days. Perhaps we are unnaturally exhilarated and excited.”

  Perhaps so. “A young Carolinian with queer ideas of a joke rode his horse through the barroom of this hotel [the Spotswood]. How he scattered people and things right and left!”

  Then, too, after news of the Federal defeat at First Manassas, Mary Chesnut could report: “Mrs. [Jefferson] Davis’ drawing room last night was brilliant, and she was in great force. Outside a mob collected and called for the president. He did speak. He is an old war-horse—and scents the battlefields from afar. His enthusiasm was contagious.”

  And a few days after that: “At the fairgrounds today—such music and mustering and marching—such cheering and flying of flags. Such firing of guns and all that sort of thing. A gala day: double distilled 4th of July feeling.” Only it was August 1, 1861, in the capital of the Confederacy. And soon, the glad excitement would give way more often to grim tidings, friends and relatives with wounds, others widowed or dead, depending upon their gender.

  Mary Chesnut’s fellow South Carolinian Frank Hampton died at Brandy Station, the largest cavalry engagement ever staged in North America. She and several other ladies visited their fallen soldier’s open coffin at the State Capitol. “How I wished I had not looked! I remember him so well in all the pride of his magnificent manhood. He died of a saber cut across the face and head and was utterly disfigured.”

  In Richmond, too, despite the united war effort, not all was harmony among the principals. There came a moment of tension, for instance, between Longstreet and General Ambrose Powell Hill, both West Point graduates and
among the generals responsible for the Confederate victory in the Seven Days campaign outside Richmond in June 1862. A Richmond newspaper editor, greatly impressed by the Virginia-born Hill, wrote a series of articles giving Hill exclusive credit for a major aspect of the Southern victory. Longstreet, outraged and feeling publicly humiliated, persuaded a more-than-willing aide to write to a rival paper pointing out the discrepancy.

  Hill, upon that report’s reaching the public, felt humiliated in his turn, and so the affair went, with Hill asking to be transferred out of Longstreet’s command, then ignoring, then refusing a Longstreet order, then being placed under house arrest. He finally challenged fellow Confederate general Longstreet to a duel, but Robert E. Lee at last stepped into the dispute and ordered Hill transferred to Stonewall Jackson’s command at Gordonsville.

  That cooled the argument, but Hill naturally still visited Richmond from time to time. On one such occasion, he was called into the chamber of the Virginia House of Delegates to receive an official accolade from that body for his battlefield prowess. Another time, all Richmond was agog over the visit of a Confederate hero and brother-in-law to Hill who had recently escaped from Union custody—John Hunt Morgan, the cavalry raider revered for his breakout from the Ohio State Penitentiary.