The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  “Come and eat a cracker with me; we will breakfast together here and dine together in hell.”

  When the order from Beauregard at Manassas still hadn’t come—it would never arrive, a casualty of the war—Ewell, now in a frenzy, interrupted his mounting and dismounting long enough to demand that Gordon at once send him a man on a horse “with sense enough to go and find out what was the matter.” Gordon hurried off to get one of the brightest of the governor’s Horse Guard, a crack volunteer outfit peopled by some of the best young blood of the Virginia aristocracy. When the bright young trooper arrived, Ewell hit him with some of the most rapid-fire, incomprehensible, and incomplete instructions ever uttered on a battlefield.

  “Do you understand, Sir?” Ewell demanded when he was finished.

  When the dazed subaltern asked for—uh—more explicit information, Ewell waved him away impatiently. “Go away from here,” he snapped, “and send me a man who has some sense!”

  It was also at Manassas that a comely young Virginian, seventeen or eighteen years old, who had been caught between the lines and seen some things, rode up to Ewell in a flutter of martial excitement. At that moment Ewell was directing the placement of a battery to fire on federal forces on the opposite hill. The girl began to pour out the intelligence she had collected, believing it of first importance to the Confederate cause. Ewell listened for a few moments, then pointed to the Union batteries going up on the opposite hill.

  “Look there, look there, miss!” he said in his quick, quaint manner. “Don’t you see those men with the blue clothes on, in the edge of the woods? Look at those men loading those big guns. They are going to fire, and fire quick, and fire right here. You’ll get killed. You’ll be a dead damsel in less than a minute. Get away from here! Get away!”

  The intense young woman glanced absently at the blue coats and the big guns, paying not the slightest attention to either, intent only on continuing to tell of all she had seen. Ewell, a longtime bachelor who knew far more about renegade Indians and dragoons than he knew about women, was astonished. He stared at her in mute wonder for a few moments, then turned abruptly to Gordon and said: “Women—I tell you, sir, women would make a grand brigade—if it was not for snakes and spiders.” Then thoughtfully he added: “They don’t mind bullets—women are not afraid of bullets; but one big black-snake would put a whole army to flight.”57

  In about a year he would marry one of these amazing creatures, his cousin Lizinka, a widow whom he had loved since childhood, but who had spurned him to marry a man named Brown, now deceased. She would give Ewell religion and moderate his language—some would insist she ruined him—and he would, among other things, introduce her to his friends as: “My wife, Mrs. Brown, sir.”58

  But in the early spring of 1862 this quaint man, still a bachelor, and every bit Jackson’s match for fearlessness, fighting, and idiosyncracy, was coming to join him in the Valley. He was riding as usual in advance of his division—just as he used to do at the head of his fifty dragoons.

  Ewell’s division was a crack outfit, three infantry brigades under three able brigadiers—Arnold Elzey, Isaac Trimble, and Richard Taylor—two regiments of cavalry, and field artillery to go with it: 7,529 men in all, and in an admirable state of efficiency.59 They reached Conrad’s Store at Swift Run Gap on the evening of April 30. In front of them the South Fork of the Shenandoah shimmered and to their rear the Blue Ridge loomed, and Jackson was just leaving.

  Where was he going? He wasn’t saying, but he would be in touch. Jackson ordered his mapmaker, Jed Hotchkiss, to brief Ewell on the federal position around Harrisonburg. Then he was gone, and Ewell would not hear from him for days.60

  Ewell was being exposed to yet another of Jackson’s maddening idiosyncracies—his passion for not telling anybody anything. Ewell need not have been offended; Jackson wouldn’t have told his wife, whom he called his dearest pet, where he was going or how he intended to get there. “If my coat knew what I intended to do,” he had been known to say, “I’d take it off and throw it away.”61 If he was not going to tell his coat where he was going or what he was going to do, he was not going to tell anything that could talk and tell somebody else. And there were no exceptions. Jackson kept his own friends, staff, fellow generals, soldiers, and wife as deeply in the dark as his enemies. It was his maxim always to mystify, mislead, and surprise—and that meant everybody. “I had learned never to ask him questions about his plans,” said one of his officers, “for he would never answer such to any one.”62

  He asked no advice, particularly after his one and only war council in front of Winchester. He shaped his own plans and told them to nobody. And when he set out on a march neither his soldiers nor his staff had any idea whether they were going north, south, east, or west, or why they were going there at all. Perhaps the only man who could predict in a general way what might be up was Jackson’s personal slave, Jim Lewis. He got his insight from the general’s prayer patterns. When Jackson got up in the night to pray, Jim said, “then I begin to cook rations and pack up for there will be hell to pay in the morning.”63

  It was as if Jackson believed that the day anybody, friend or foe, knew what he was about, that would be the day he would lose a battle. “Charlie,” explained an officer trying to help artillery Captain Charles Squires find Jackson before the battle at Bull Run, “this Gen. Jackson is the hardest man to find in all the army.”64 Union generals thought so too, except when he suddenly appeared before them, and when they didn’t particularly want to find him. But as Jackson said, “if I can deceive my own people, I shall have no trouble in deceiving the enemy.”65 It was to become a common thing for his soldiers to say, “If the Yankees are as ignorant of this move as we are old Jack has them.”66

  Ewell, a friend and ally, now knew nothing of Jackson’s plans, except some vague mention of Staunton. As he took Jackson’s place at Conrad’s Store and watched him march away toward somewhere, a lack of specific information was all that Ewell had left. Naturally nervous to begin with, he became apoplectic.

  Where had Jackson gone? When was he coming back? Would he be back at all? Colonel James A. Walker of the Thirteenth Virginia came to see Ewell on business and Ewell demanded as he walked in his tent: “Colonel Walker, did it ever occur to you that General Jackson is crazy?”

  “I don’t know, General,” Walker replied, “we used to call him ‘Fool Tom Jackson’ at the Virginia Military Institute, but I don’t suppose he is really crazy.”

  “I tell you, sir,” Ewell protested, “he is as crazy as a March hare. He has gone away, I don’t know where, and left me here with some instructions to stay until he returns, but Banks’ whole army is advancing on me and I haven’t the most remote idea where to communicate with General Jackson. I tell you, sir, he is crazy and I will just march my division away from here. I do not mean to have it cut to pieces at the behest of a crazy man.”67

  It looked like the beginning of a warm relationship based on a common lunacy.

  From

  under the

  Little Faded Cap

  Jackson left Conrad’s Store with his little army on the last day of April 1862 and headed south down the western edge of the Blue Ridge.

  Not a soldier in the army had any more idea where they were going “than the buttons on their coats.” Some thought Richmond; most didn’t know what to think. It was typical Jackson, as one soldier said, “just a little piece of pure strategy fresh from under the little faded cap.”1

  It soon appeared to most of them that what was under the little faded cap was tetched. The sixteen miles from Swift Run Gap to Port Republic, which was the way they found themselves going, was over an unpaved country road, which the heavy rains of the past ten days had turned into a multimile quagmire. It was the worst stretch of road for mud that Jed Hotchkiss had ever seen in the Valley, and he had seen plenty of them.2

  It was bottomless. Horses, wagons, and guns sank nearly out of sight and had to be dragged out by the cursing soldiers, wi
th Jackson often stopping to lend a hand. One infantryman was denouncing the general with stunning eloquence, when the object of his passion rode by and said, in his short way, “It’s for your own good, sir!”3

  It took them two and a half days to make the sixteen miles, and it hadn’t made any sense to anybody but Jackson. Out of the mire, they marched rapidly, crossing to the east side of the Blue Ridge at Brown’s Gap and on to the railway stop at Meechum’s River Station on the Virginia Central Railroad, where the foot soldiers were put on a train. When the train then headed west, the artillery caissons and the wagon trains following, the soldiers felt a surge of astonishment and joy. They were headed back to the Valley!

  “Our homes,” one of them exulted, “might still be ours.” It was a qualified joy, however. They still didn’t know what Jackson had in mind or where they were going or why. Wild conjecture swept the ranks. But since nobody could figure it out, one of his soldiers said magnanimously, “we concluded to let him have his own way.”4

  When they began pulling into Staunton on Sunday, May 4, everybody in town was surprised, delighted, and grateful. The last they had heard, Jackson appeared to be marching from the Valley altogether. But suddenly, there he was in Staunton in time for church, and the town went with a happy heart to praise God.5

  “So here we are, Gen. Jackson and the army,” Sandie Pendleton wrote his mother from Staunton, “and the enemy have left Harrisonburg and gone back down the Valley.”6

  Banks, of course, was as mystified as anybody. He also had thought Jackson gone from the Valley, and now he pulled back under orders from Washington in some perplexity and bewilderment. Perhaps things would become clearer later.

  He was no more perplexed and bewildered, however, than Jackson’s new chief of staff. The Reverend R. L. Dabney was not only in doubt where they were headed; he was confounded why he was with the army at all. He was just a parson, a “soldier of the Prince of Peace,” as he put it, “innocent, even in youth, of any tincture of military knowledge.” He had only recently been ministering to the troops as a chaplain, and now here he was Jackson’s adjutant general.

  Only a month before he had been at home trying to shake off a fever, caught while doing the Lord’s work among the troops, when a letter arrived from Jackson. The West Pointer whom some considered a little odd had written this man of the cloth that his regular chief of staff, James Armstrong, a member of the Virginia state senate, was unable to continue because of an extra session of the legislature. To Dabney’s utter astonishment, Jackson offered him the job. He would have the rank of major and his duties “will require early rising and industry.”

  Dabney hurried to Conrad’s Store to protest his unfitness. He argued eloquently that he was not only unqualified, but half broken by camp fevers.

  “But Providence,” Jackson countered, “will preserve your health, if he designs to use you.”

  “But I am unused to arms,” Dabney protested, ignorant of all military art.

  “You can learn,” Jackson insisted.

  “When would you have me assume my office,” Dabney asked lamely.

  “Rest to-day, and study the ‘Articles of War’ and begin tomorrow.”

  “But I have neither outfit, nor arms, nor horse, for immediate service,” Dabney objected.

  “My quartermaster shall lend them, until you procure your own,” Jackson said.

  “But I have a graver disqualification, which candor requires me to disclose to you.…” Dabney said, playing his ace. “I am not sanguine of success; our leaders and legislators do not seem to me to comprehend the crisis, nor our people to respond to it; and, in truth, the impulse which I feel to fly out of my sacred calling, to my country’s succor, is chiefly the conviction that her need is so desperate. The effect on me is the reverse of that which the old saw ascribes to the rats when they believe the ship is sinking.”

  “But, if the rats will only run this way,” Jackson said with a laugh, “the ship will not sink.”

  So Dabney became the unlikely adjutant general to this unlikely general and marched off with him through the mud on the roundabout road to Staunton. And he had had no more idea where they were going than the buttons on his coat.7

  Jackson in fact didn’t intend to stay long in Staunton. He stopped only long enough to get his hair cut and take off the old blue U.S. major’s uniform he had been wearing and exchange it for a suit of Confederate gray.8 He was about to leave the Valley again and go to McDowell, a small village nestled among sheer cliffs in the Alleghenies, to attack a Union force under the command of a former Indiana lawyer named Robert Huston Milroy.

  Milroy had been moving toward Staunton from the direction of Monterey. Part of his command had already crossed to the east of the Shenandoah Mountain and was encamped near the Harrisonburg and Warm Springs turnpike. If he wasn’t stopped, he might unite with Banks and cause serious trouble. Jackson intended to put a stop to it by uniting with somebody himself. The Confederate brigadier, Edward (“Allegheny Ed”) Johnson, was standing in Milroy’s path six miles west of Staunton with two thousand soldiers. Jackson’s plan was to join Johnson and attack Milroy, and when he had whipped him, team with Johnson and Ewell for an assault on Banks in the Valley. Nobody, of course, had any idea he had this in mind, except Robert E. Lee in Richmond, who had been exposed to the plan in theory.

  On Wednesday morning, May 7, with his hair cut and his clothes changed, Jackson broke camp and set out behind Allegheny Ed, “who knew the country almost as well as if he had made it.”9 Allegheny Ed had been wounded in the eye in the Mexican War, and when he was in the least startled or agitated the eye winked incessantly. Johnson meant nothing by it, indeed he didn’t know it was happening. The eye vibrated independent of his will. It was probably twitching this morning as they marched along.10

  With Jackson’s column was a battalion of cadets from VMI, who had come to fight under their old professor. Bringing up the rear was the Stonewall Brigade, now under the iron hand of a new brigadier, Charles S. Winder. This harsh disciplinarian had fought side by side with a member of the class of 1846 before. He had commanded the mountain howitzers that terrible day four years before on the bloody battlefield in eastern Washington when the northwestern Indians killed Oliver Taylor.

  As the army marched along, Sandie Pendleton looked about with disgust and disapproval. It was the meanest country he had ever seen. “It is up one mountain and up another and so on for the whole road,” he wrote his mother. “But still it is old Virginia and we must have it.”11

  Johnson’s advance found Milroy later that day at Shaw Ridge, and the next morning—May 8—Jackson wrote Ewell, whom he had left staring at Banks from Swift Run Gap, to tell him where he was. “This morning we move forward,” he wrote, “and I pray that God will bless us with success.”12

  As they ascended Bull Pasture Mountain later in the morning, Jed Hotchkiss, who knew the country as well as Allegheny Ed, went ahead with the skirmishers up the winding turnpike road. At each bend, finding the way clear, he waved his handkerchief and Jackson came on with the main column. In the afternoon, when they reached the summit, Hotchkiss and Jackson stood together on a spur and looked down on the town below. There in the valley lay the Union camp. Milroy had been reinforced that morning by Brigadier General Robert Schenck, who had hurried down from Franklin and taken command. Hotchkiss quickly sketched a map of the enemy position as Jackson looked over his shoulder.13

  Whatever Jackson was thinking, Schenck and Milroy made it academic. They decided not to wait for the rebels to attack. About 4:00 in the afternoon, they launched an assault of their own. This surprised Jackson; he preferred it to be the other way around. A vicious four-hour fight followed. But it was a no-win situation for Milroy and Schenck from the beginning; they found that it was just another stonewall. Jackson and Johnson had seized the high ground and there was no taking it back. Fighting was hard in mean terrain such as this, and the Federals fought hard for four bloody hours with not much to show for it. B
ut they shattered a bone in Johnson’s ankle, and they about wore out the Confederate soldiers.

  “It seemed to me we had been at it about a week,” one rebel soldier sighed, when at last it ended.14

  But not much else had been accomplished, and once was enough. The next morning the Union force, so much present and hard-fighting the afternoon and evening before, was just as suddenly gone. Schenck and Milroy were marching back to Franklin, where they could unite with a much larger force marching down from the north under their commanding general, John C. Frémont.

  Jackson ordered an immediate pursuit, intending to follow as far as practicable. That wasn’t very far, as it turned out. Pursuing up that narrow trench of a valley was not easy to begin with, and when the Federals set fire to the forest to mask their flight, it became nearly impossible. The valley and the sky above were soon choked with smoke and the middle of the day was like the middle of the night. Jackson called off the pursuit on May 12 and retraced his steps to McDowell. Now that Milroy was out of the way as scheduled, he had other matters to attend to.

  But first things first. After the battle, before the pursuit, Jackson wrote a terse message to Richmond which he had sent out of the mountains with Captain John D. Imboden to be dispatched from Staunton. The message said the minimum and gave credit where Jackson thought credit was due. “God blessed our arms with victory at McDowell yesterday,” was all it said.15

  After he had called off the pursuit, Jackson in his short, curt way spoke a few words of congratulation to his soldiers for their gallantry in the battle. He appointed ten o’clock that morning as an occasion of prayer and thanksgiving to Providence and to implore His continued favor. Down on its knees and with Jackson standing motionless with his capless head bent, the little army prayed, glancing nervously up now and then as a few of Milroy’s cannonballs screeched overhead. They prayed, one of them said, “with real devotion, by the book, ‘from battle, murder, and sudden death, good Lord deliver us.’ ”16