by John Waugh
Like Pegram, Garnett incorrectly assumed that McClellan was already in Beverly. Instead of successfully retreating south through the town, as he could have, he turned and headed northeast up a rough muddy road into a quagmire.
The reporter for the Cincinnati Commercial traveling with Morris’s troops was soon cursing on paper the road which the retreating and the pursuing armies were using in common. It was “of the worst description,” he wrote. “At every step the mud grew deeper and the way more difficult, and one felt as though somebody were tugging at his heels to pull off his shoes. Now slipping down in the mud, now plunging into a pool knee deep, staggering about in the mire like drunken men.…” By the time they reached the little village of New Interest [present-day Kerens, ten miles north of Beverly], “there was not a dry thread in our clothing.”58
If it was misery for the pursuers, it was disaster for the pursued. The fleeing Confederates were pounded by the rain, swamped by the swelling creeks they repeatedly had to cross, and mired in muck. They began to jettison their baggage, littering the road with it, marking the way for Morris’s army.
That army splashed up on the Confederate rear on Saturday, July 13. At a desolate, rain-clogged crossing at Corricks Ford on the Cheat River the two sides fought a short, angry skirmish. During the engagement a straight-shooting Methodist preacher with the Indiana troops was particularly conspicuous for his zeal and his steady fire. “He fired carefully, with perfect coolness, and always after a steady aim,” the Cincinnati Gazette’s Whitelaw Reid reported, “and the boys declare that every time, as he took down his gun, after firing, he said, ‘And may the Lord have mercy on your soul!’ ”59
The aroma in Garnett’s nostrils on this day was no longer Laurel Hill’s sweet cologne of summer, but the fatal fragrance of gunpowder. Marksmen from the Seventh Indiana found him at a small crossing above Corricks Ford astride a yellow horse. He was wearing a black overcoat and deploying a knot of sharpshooters behind a small stand of driftwood. An Indiana sergeant named Burlingame drew a bead from across the ford and fired. The ball struck Garnett as he was turning to rally his riflemen, and he tumbled backward to the creek bank.
Reid studied the Confederate commander’s dead body later as it lay there, the first general of either side to fall in the war. He noted the slight build, the “small head, finely cut and intelligent features, delicate hands and feet, black hair, and … full beard and moustache, kept closely trimmed, and just beginning to be grizzled with white hairs.” It was the sad end of a still young career that had held such promise. The doom Garnett had so greatly feared had found him.60
His death beside the bleak, rain-choked Cheat River ended the three encounters in western Virginia. The shattered remnants of Garnett’s army hurried on without him, only just eluding a final effort by McClellan to slam the door shut.
Contrary to his earlier pessimistic expectations, the sensational young West Pointer of the class of 1846 had earned laurels. He had won three Union victories in succession, the first and only in the war so far. He had shown a gift for command. Now he was about to show an equal gift for hype.
All through the campaign McClellan had trailed a telegraph line into every encampment. Many superstitious mountaineers saw this new technology stringing along behind the army as a supernatural agency.61 The Confederates weren’t happy with it either. “My God, Jim,” exclaimed one of them as he marched in custody past McClellan’s headquarters, “no wonder they whipped us; they have the telegraph with them.”62
Some of McClellan’s own officers viewed the new technology as a nuisance. Many of them thought that the telegraph could not be useful in war, and decried all efforts to introduce it.63
Anson Stager, the general superintendent of the Western Union Telegraph Company from Cleveland, had been brought in by McClellan to link the line to his army in the field. McClellan had seen the telegraph used in a limited way in the Crimean War and made note of it. In early July as the army moved from Clarksburg through Buckhannon to Roaring Creek and on to Beverly, Stager followed behind laying his wire. For the first time in history the telegraph accompanied an American army into battle.
McClellan used it with skill. It suited his personality. His code name, Mecca, crackled over the lines from command to command. Besides keeping him in nearly instant touch with his commanders—with the notable exception of Rosecrans on Rich Mountain—it had another stimulating potential that hadn’t escaped the Young Napoleon of the West, as he was now being called. It could also put him in instant touch with the entire North wanting word of a victory—any victory.64
McClellan put bold and stirring words on the line. To the war department in Washington he wired in his crisp staccato style: “Garnett and forces routed; his baggage and one gun taken; his army demoralized; Garnett killed. We have annihilated the enemy in Western Virginia.… The troops defeated are the crack regiments of Eastern Virginia, aided by Georgians, Tennesseeans, and Carolinians. Our success is complete, and secession is killed in this country.”65
He addressed his soldiers with a similar trumpet blast: “I am more than satisfied with you. You have annihilated two armies, commanded by educated and experienced soldiers, intrenched in mountain fastnesses fortified at their leisure.… I am proud to say that you have gained the highest reward that American troops can receive—the thanks of Congress and the applause of your fellow-citizens.”66
The war department, the administration, and the Congress were more than impressed. From Washington, General Scott, McClellan’s old mentor from Cerro Gordo, wired that he “and what is more, the Cabinet, including the President, are charmed with your activity, valor, and consequent successes.” In a follow-up letter Scott wrote: “You have the applause of all who are high in authority here.”67
Congress sent a unanimous joint resolution of thanks to him and his army “for the series of brilliant and decisive victories.”68
The nation was electrified. Here at last was the military genius the agonized times so desperately sought. Sophia Hawthorne, wife of New England’s celebrated man of letters, read one of McClellan’s stirring pronouncements and exclaimed: “How like the sound of the silver trumpets of Judah.… I conceive an adoring army following the lead of such a ringing of true steel.”69
“Glorious, isn’t it!” the New York Times editorialized. “We feel very proud of our wise and brave young Major-General. There is a future before him, if his life be spared, which he will make illustrious.” “It is a thing completely done,” the Louisville Journal intoned from Kentucky. “It is a finished piece of work. It stands before us perfect and entire, wanting nothing; like a statue or picture just leaving the creative hand of the artist, and embodying the whole idea.” The Journal coined a new word for what had just happened to the enemy in the mountains: they had been “McClellanized.”70
From Cincinnati came the most welcomed praise of all, a telegram from Nelly: “Am more happy than I can express. Do come home and receive my congratulations.”71
But her young hero-husband, now the most acclaimed name in the war, was headed in the other direction. He had been called to Washington. He was to write her a few days later: “Who would have thought when we were married, that I should so soon be called upon to save my country?”72
There was irony in these three little mountain victories. The new savior of the Republic had won three engagements, but had not been present at any of them. He hadn’t been in the same state for the first—the races at Philippi. He had only heard the thunder of the second, two miles away on Rich Mountain, and had misread it. And he was twenty-six miles from the third and final skirmish at Corricks Ford. Yet on the strength of these mud-spattered encounters, none of which he had personally commanded, he was being called out of the West to save the Union. Closely scrutinized, the credentials were somewhat suspect. But who else had done as much?
The rain-soaked little victories did much more than just catapult George McClellan into the big time. They also unclasped for good the Confeder
ate hold on the western two-fifths of Virginia soil. The rebels would continue to raid through the mountains until the end of the war. But the Union, in effect, now held the ground and the railroad at Cheat River, which Lee had believed it “would be worth to us an army” to rupture.73 In late July 1861, Lee himself would set out for western Virginia in a last effort to redeem Confederate fortunes. But he too would fail, and Virginia would lose its western two-fifths forever.
Because of these victories, Union-minded western Virginia would make its own counter-secession from Virginia stick. Just one month short of two years after McClellan was called to Washington to save the country, West Virginia would become that nation’s thirty-fifth state.
McClellan had done well in the mountains, but that hardly surprised his classmates. He was expected to do well anywhere. He was bound for glory, if any one of them was. They had known it all along.
PART 4
DOWN
IN THE
VALLEY
The
Valley Man
In the war’s first big battle at Manassas in July 1861, Tom Jackson had attracted attention to himself simply by being himself—unreasonably adamant.
As the wave of Union troops rolled toward his position on Henry Hill, he vowed that he and his brigade would stand and give them the bayonet if necessary. Confederate Brigadier General Barnard Bee, whether in admiration or disgust, had remarked before dying that there stood Jackson like a stone wall. This stirring image captured imaginations everywhere. Jackson was known after that, even in the North, as Stonewall and his brigade as the Stonewall Brigade.
After Manassas, Jackson remained with his now famous command near Centreville until late October, when a letter came from Confederate Secretary of War Judah Benjamin. The rebel high command had just reorganized its eastern army into a Department of Northern Virginia under the command of Joseph E. Johnston and had split it into three wings—a Potomac District, Aquia District, and Valley District.
Benjamin’s letter told Jackson he had been picked to command the Valley District. The secretary explained that the exposed condition of the Shenandoah Valley between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny mountains worried Richmond. The war department was buried in appeals from the people in the Valley to send “a perfectly reliable officer” to protect them from the Yankees. By that they meant Jackson. The choice, Benjamin said, had been dictated in part by an appreciation of Jackson’s qualities as a commander, his knowledge of the country, its population, and its resources. But the clincher had been popular demand. “The people of that district, with one voice,” Benjamin told Jackson, “have made constant and urgent appeals that to you, in whom they have confidence, should their defense be assigned.” His command would be necessarily small to begin with, Benjamin admitted, but it would be beefed up as rapidly as Richmond could manage to do it.1
It was all true what the people of the Valley said about Jackson. This West Pointer of few words and stonewall determination was a Valley man. He was one of them. They felt safe in his resolute hands. The women of the Valley seemed ready to send their husbands, sons, and lovers to battle “as cheerfully as to marriage feasts”—if it meant they would fight under Jackson’s command.2 One of these women said of him, “He is such an idol with me, that I devour every line about him.”3
To take the Valley command Jackson had to leave his brigade behind, and neither he nor his soldiers welcomed this. The idea of waging war without him leading them was unthinkable. They were his; he was theirs.4 Like the people of the valley, the soldiers of the Stonewall Brigade—Valley men themselves for the most part—had come to love this unlovable man, and he them in his own peculiar fashion. Jackson told Secretary Benjamin he regretted having to leave his brigade, which “I had hoped to command through the war.”5
In early November, when his final orders came and he had to go, he undertook to tell them good-bye. But speechmaking was not his forte.
“I am not here to make a speech,” he began, “but simply to say farewell. I first met you at Harper’s Ferry in the commencement of the war, and I cannot take leave of you without giving expression to my admiration of your conduct from that day to this,—whether on the march, in the bivouac, the tented field, or on the bloody plains of Manassas, where you gained the well-deserved reputation of having decided the fate of the battle.”
He went on, saying among other things: “You have already gained a brilliant and deservedly high reputation, throughout the army and the whole Confederacy, and I trust in the future by your own deeds on the field, and by the assistance of the same Kind Providence who has heretofore favored our cause, that you will gain more victories, and add additional lustre to the reputation you now enjoy.… I shall look with great anxiety to your future movements, and I trust whenever I shall hear of the First Brigade on the field of battle it will be of still nobler deeds achieved and higher reputation won.”
He paused, then stood in his stirrups, raised his right arm in an electric gesture, and shouted: “In the army of the Shenandoah you were the First Brigade; in the army of the Potomac you were the First Brigade; in the second corps of this army you are the First Brigade; you are the First Brigade in the affections of your General; and I hope by your future deeds and bearing, you will be handed down to posterity as the First Brigade in our Second War of Independence. Farewell!”6
Then he caught the first train to the Valley that night vowing, “I shall never forget them. In battle I shall always want them. I shall not be satisfied until I get them.”7
Within the month he had them. When he arrived in Winchester, where he was to make his headquarters, he found the Valley basically undefended but for a small ineffectual force of Virginia militia. So he asked immediately for his old brigade and it came. Richmond also sent a command from western Virginia, and by the end of the year Jackson’s little army had grown to about 8,500 troops. With this force he went to work.
His orders were to stay in touch with General Johnston at Centerville and to drive the Federals from the Valley if possible. As Dabney Maury had said of him in another context, things “had to move along.”8 By late December he had damaged a principal dam on the Potomac River that fed the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.
“That will give the enemy abundance of trouble,” a clerk in the war department in Richmond noted appreciatively. “This Gen. Jackson is always doing something to vex the enemy; and I think he is destined to annoy them more.”9 By January 14 he had harassed and annoyed them right out of the Valley. “Through the blessing of God,” he wrote Judah Benjamin that day, “I regard this district as essentially in our possession.” He had done all he felt the circumstances would justify. He had left the Federals in possession of the Confederate frontier; but the Valley was his.10
Jackson believed that having the valley of Virginia in his possession was mandatory, and in line with the designs and intentions of almighty Providence. This is “our valley,” he told his soldiers flatly, and if it is lost, Virginia is lost.11
It was one of the most beautiful river valleys in America. Bounded by the Blue Ridge on the east and the Alleghenies on the west, it was an amphitheater that stretched for 120 miles from Staunton in the south to the Potomac in the north. Its average width was twenty-five miles and its surface was unlike a valley, swelling gracefully from rise to rise and flaring occasionally into abrupt hills.
Down its center, rising suddenly from the plain near Harrisonburg in the south and running parallel to the Blue Ridge to Strasburg, humped Massanutton Mountain. The Massanutton was more than a mountain. It was a series of interlocking ridges bonded together into one great whole, a giant backbone that split the Valley into two valleys. Up its Allegheny side, giving the Valley its name, ran the North Fork of the Shenandoah River. On the other side, between this tangled green wall and the Blue Ridge, lay the Luray Valley.
To an astute strategist, the Massanutton could be “the glory of the Valley,” a shield and a comfort, an opaque curtain behind which to mobilize, march, s
trike, and disappear. For a victim it could be a maddening blind, blocking off all vision, hiding every movement and intention, screening an attack, and bringing bitter disaster.12
Jackson knew the Valley. Its geography and the distances between its towns were burned into his brain like his lessons at West Point. He seemed to know every hole and corner of it, someone said, every cow path and goat track, “as if he had made it, or, at least, as if it had been designed for his own use.”13
But he had to know it better; he had to have it laid out before him on paper in detail. And he knew how to get that done. He called for Jedediah Hotchkiss.
Hotchkiss had led the small breakaway party of fifty beaten rebels safely from the disaster at Rich Mountain the year before. He had since joined Jackson’s little army in the Shenandoah. This was his valley, too. He was a schoolteacher by profession, the owner and headmaster of the Loch Willow Academy at Churchville, Virginia, and a self-taught topographer and mapmaker. Like Jackson, he was an ardent Presbyterian. In late March 1862 Jackson called him to his headquarters and told him, “I want you to make me a map of the Valley, from Harpers Ferry to Lexington.”14
It was too much to expect that the Union army would not want to reclaim this wondrous valley, so strategic in the war. George McClellan, now the general in chief of that army, agreed with his West Point classmate that to hold Virginia one must hold the Shenandoah. Northern opinion at the moment was demanding that he hold Virginia as soon as possible, beginning with Richmond. McClellan knew, however, that first things must come first. If he was to invade the living room, then he must first secure the back door. Winchester, where Jackson was now wintered, was but a scant sixty miles from Washington. And it did not make those miles seem any safer to know that sitting out there at the end of them was that unpredictable classmate, whom McClellan well knew to be “a man of vigor & nerve, as well as a good soldier.”15