The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  To whomever properly went the credit, a union of Milroy and Banks had been prevented and Jackson, as one of his soldiers said, had taught Milroy “how magnificently Jack can be turned up in the laurel bushes on the mountain side.”17 He now intended to turn up in other laurel bushes on other mountainsides before other startled enemies back in his Valley.

  On the other side of the Valley, the now nearly frenetic Richard Ewell had just received another enigmatic message from Jackson, which didn’t materially change his view that his new commander was a looney.

  “Your dispatch received,” Jackson had written hurriedly from McDowell. “Hold your position—don’t move. I have driven General Milroy from McDowell; through God’s assistance, have captured most of his wagon train.…”18

  What is the meaning of this? demanded Ewell. He had just learned from captured prisoners that Shields was about to depart the Luray Valley with eight thousand men to join Irvin McDowell, and he was wild to attack him before he could get away. But Jackson said don’t move and had underlined it. His hands were tied. All he could do was stay, and send Colonel Thomas Munford with some cavalry to harass Shields on the road to Warrenton.

  At about midnight Munford was ready to go and went to report to Ewell before leaving. He found the general in bed.

  Hand me that map, Ewell said. Under the dim glow of the miserable lard lamp, he attempted to show Munford where Jackson was. Before his cavalry officer could figure out what he was after, Ewell bounded out of bed in only his nightshirt and spread the map open on the carpetless floor. Ewell fell to his hands and knees before the map, his bones rattling, his bald head and long beard suggesting a witch rather than a Confederate major general. Growing every minute more exited and agitated, he jammed his finger first at Jackson’s position on the map, then at Shields’s, then at McDowell’s.

  After one of his wondrous parsed oaths, he shouted, “This great wagon hunter is after a Dutchman, an old fool! General Lee at Richmond will have little use for wagons if all these people close in around him; we are left out here in the cold.”

  Warming to the subject, he assured Munford that “this man Jackson is certainly a crazy fool, an idiot. Now look at this.”

  Ewell handed Munford the small piece of paper with Jackson’s message on it, and leaped to his feet and ran all around the room, shouting: “What has Providence to do with Milroy’s wagon train?” Then he stopped and said to Munford: “I’ll stay here, but you go and do all you can to keep these people from getting together.”

  After Munford left, Ewell climbed back into bed again where he continued to simmer. Outside someone approached his quarters and began to climb the stairs, his saber banging on each ascending step. Rapping at the door, the unsuspecting innocent, a courier, asked for Colonel Munford.

  Come in, Ewell beckoned, and light the lamp. With the lamp lit, he stared malevolently at the courier.

  “Look under the bed!” he shouted. “Do you see him there? Do you know how many steps you came up?”

  “No sir,” stammered the courier.

  “Well I do!” roared Ewell, “by every lick you gave them with that thing you have hanging about your feet, which should be hooked up when you come to my quarters. Do you know how many ears you have?”

  With the courier growing wilder and wilder in his frantic discomfort, Ewell shouted, “You will go out of here less one, and maybe both, if you ever wake me up this time anight looking for your Colonel.”

  Rushing out, his saber now riding high on his hip and well off the floor, the courier found Munford and begged never to be sent to Ewell again.19

  It had been a frustrating fortnight for Ewell all around—one of his worst. “I have spent two weeks of the most unhappy I ever remember.…” he wrote his favorite niece, Lizzie. “Jackson wants me to watch Banks. At Richmond, they want me elsewhere and call me off, when, at the same time, I am compelled to remain until that enthusiastic fanatic comes to some conclusion.… I have a bad headache, what with the bother and folly of things. I never suffered as much from dyspepsia in my life. As an Irishman would say, ‘I’m kilt entirely.’ ”20

  At New Market, Banks felt about the same way Ewell did at Conrad’s Store. He had no idea what Jackson had in mind either. He didn’t even know where he was. But he did have orders from Washington to fall back and fortify Strasburg.

  “I cannot think that those who gave the order know why they gave it,” David Strother fumed. Strother was himself a Valley man and a Virginian, and one of Banks’s staff officers. He had been lobbying his commander for weeks to attack Jackson. He believed they ought to have cleared the valley of Confederates long before this.21

  Banks started withdrawing according to orders on May 12, the day Jackson decided to give up chasing Milroy and Schenck. The weather was bright and mild in the Valley that day, but the mood was depressing. By the fourteenth it had begun to rain and there was that pesky Turner Ashby nipping at his heels again all the way to Strasburg. Shields had left to join McDowell, who was on his way to reinforce McClellan on the Peninsula, and Banks had only about eight thousand troops with him now. He had placed a thousand of them, mostly Marylanders, at Front Royal to guard the Manassas Gap Railroad and the roads to Winchester. He settled in with the rest of his dwindling command at Strasburg.22

  For Jackson’s troops, coming out of the mountains into the Valley was coming home again. Their march from Monterey to Mt. Solon was through a springtime paradise. The cherry and the peach trees were in full bloom, their petals all soft and white and pink, and the fields were rank with clover.23

  They marched with a purpose, as they always did with Jackson. Their commander had a dispatch from Robert E. Lee that went along well with his own line of thinking. “Whatever may be Banks’ intention,” Lee had written, “it is very desirable to prevent him from going either to Fredericksburg or the Peninsula, and also to destroy the Manassas [Gap Rail]road.” Lee had cautioned Jackson that he must also keep himself ready to come to Johnston’s support on the Peninsula, at a moment’s notice if necessary. But until then he was free to do what he would. Whatever he decided to do against Banks, however, he must “do it speedily, and if successful drive him back toward the Potomac, and create the impression, as far as practicable, that you design threatening that line.”24 These were the kind of orders Jackson liked.

  His men, marching happily through the blossoming valley, had no idea, as usual, where they were going or why. “What we are to do next,” Sandie Pendleton wrote home, “I cannot divine.”25

  This tore it as far as Richard Ewell was concerned. He held in his hands two conflicting sets of orders. Jackson was back in the Valley at Mossy Creek, and had ordered him to prepare to join him for an attack on Banks. But just now—it was May 17—contrary orders had come from Joseph E. Johnston to move toward Richmond.

  Ordering up his horse, Ewell swung into the saddle and galloped off alone to the west. At about daylight the next day—a Sunday—he pulled into Jackson’s camp at Mt. Solon.

  Jackson greeted him affably. “General Ewell,” he said, “I’m glad to see you. Get off!”

  “You will not be so glad, when I tell you what brought me,” Ewell grumbled.

  “What—are the Yankees after you?” inquired Jackson.

  “Worse than that. I am ordered to join General Johnston.”

  Jackson’s face clouded. This wasn’t what he wanted to hear at all. Without Ewell’s division there would be no attack on Banks. Would Providence thus deny him the privilege of striking a blow? Must he be satisfied with the humble alternative of hiding his little army in the mountains and watching others wage war? Would Providence do that to him?

  Ewell dismounted and the two generals walked apart to a nearby grove where Ewell produced Johnston’s order. Jackson was shaken. But Ewell had an idea. If Jackson would take the responsibility, he would ignore Johnston’s order long enough for them to attack Banks together. Johnston could be remonstrated with later.

  Jackson bought it. He order
ed Ewell to bring his command across the Massanutton as soon as possible, and Ewell remounted and galloped back to his command at Conrad’s Store.26

  Jackson was on the march the next morning when the sun rose. The day was bright and warm, the Valley looking tender and beautiful in its new spring colors.27 As his army swung down the Valley Pike from Mossy Creek toward New Market, Jackson could count eight thousand men, recently increased by Allegheny Ed Johnson’s two thousand. When Ewell joined them he would have sixteen thousand men and forty guns, enough to ruin the war for Banks.

  Jackson camped on the Pike, and the next day—the twentieth—the first of Ewell’s division arrived. Dick Taylor’s brigade of Louisianans with its sprinkling of Irishmen had left Conrad’s Store as soon as Ewell returned from Mt. Solon, and had swung around the foot of the Massanutton and down the Pike on the western side of the mountain. Jackson sat on a topmost fence rail and watched them come. Taylor’s brigade would have turned anybody’s head, marching in brisk and perfect cadence down the broad smooth turnpike in their fresh gray uniforms and white gaiters. They wheeled into camp, not a straggler in sight, every man in his place, the setting sun glinting from their gleaming bayonets, and their bands blaring.28

  “A ‘daisy’ she was,” said one of Jackson’s admiring foot soldiers.29

  Taylor swung down from his saddle and asked for Jackson, for they had never met. They hardly would have, except for this war. Taylor was a Louisiana planter and politician of wealth and prominence. He was the only son of Zachary Taylor, who was better at producing daughters—three of them—than he was sons. One of those daughters had married Jefferson Davis, but had soon died. However, Taylor had remained close to his ex-brother-in-law, now the President of the Confederacy. Taylor’s own marriage had connected him quite as highly in the other direction, to the most respectable Creole families in Louisiana. Aside from being well connected, he was gifted, cultured, and competent.30

  As Taylor and Jackson met and talked, the Acadian band of the Eighth Louisiana struck up a waltz and Taylor’s Creoles, as they often did at the end of a day, began to dance in couples. Jackson stared, and after a contemplative suck at a lemon, muttered: “Thoughtless fellows for serious work.”31

  The Louisianans stared back at Jackson. It was their first sight of him, and what they saw was not reassuring. There was nothing in his appearance that suggested anything above average ability. There must be some mistake, they thought. If he was an able man he showed it less than any general they had ever seen. But there he was, such as he was, the commanding general of this expedition, whatever that was and wherever it was going.32

  The next morning they started down the turnpike toward Strasburg, Taylor in the lead with Jackson riding at his side, that wooden look in his eyes, and saying scarcely a word. At New Market, Jackson abruptly took the army off the Pike and up the road that cut through the Massanutton eastward to the Luray Valley. Just as suddenly as he had appeared, he disappeared again. Now you see him, now you don’t.

  Jackson’s men paid the sudden change of direction no heed. They were so accustomed by now to their general’s whimsical departures from the road ahead that there was not the slightest ripple of surprise. They camped three miles north of Luray that night on the road to Front Royal instead of on the Pike to Strasburg. Richard Ewell filed in with the rest of his division and camped beside them. Everybody was present and accounted for.

  Now what?

  Since May 14 Banks in Strasburg had been reporting in his dispatches to the war department in Washington that all was quiet in the Valley. Quiet, except for Ashby who continued to dance about in his front, making it difficult to see anything up the Valley with any clarity. But on May 22, Banks felt something was not quite right. He reported to Washington that there could be no doubt Jackson was now back in the Valley. “Compelled to believe that he meditates attack here,” Banks urged Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to send heavier artillery and more infantry. He correctly put Jackson’s probable strength at not less than sixteen thousand men, against his own five thousand infantry, eighteen hundred cavalry, and sixteen pieces of artillery.33 Banks’s staff man from the Valley, David Strother, was even more uneasy. “The report is that Jackson is at New Market,” Strother told his meticulously maintained diary. “If true we are liable to attack at any moment.”34

  As Banks and Strother were penning their respective apprehensions, Jackson on the twenty-second was marching north down the Luray Valley with Ewell in the lead. That night they bivouacked only ten miles from Front Royal. At dawn the next day they were on the road again, drawing ever nearer as the morning wore on. There was no sign of opposition, not the slightest indication that they had been seen. When Ewell learned that the Federal First Maryland was holding Front Royal, he halted his column and sent a courier galloping back down the line to find Bradley Johnson.

  The First Maryland Yankees had been a longtime object of interest to Colonel Johnson and his boys in the Confederate First Maryland. They had heard often how their Yankee counterparts from home yearned to make their acquaintance, and the feeling was mutual. If there was anything they did desire, next to marching down Baltimore Street, it was to get as close to the bogus First Maryland as possible. And there they were at last, just up ahead. Johnson could hardly rein in his delight, which was heightened by Ewell’s orders to bring his regiment to the front of the column. They were to open the fight, he told his boys, they were to be in the post of honor.

  Ewell’s division stood aside for them as the Marylanders moved up. It cheered as they passed and shouted affectionately, “There they go! look at them!” The Louisiana brigade presented arms. Not 250-strong, the overjoyed Marylanders hurried at quick time through column after column, seeming “to tread on air as they swung along.”35

  The morning had opened in beauty and serenity for the Federal First Maryland at Front Royal. The trees of the richest green were bathed by the morning sun. The fields around glistened with dew. They had no idea that their rebel neighbors from home were less than ten miles away and closing fast, with a meeting on their minds. In Strasburg, Union Colonel George Henry Gordon of Massachusetts thought that everything this morning seemed more in harmony with life and peace than with bloodshed and death. He also had an old friend—a West Point classmate named Jackson—in that Confederate column moving now toward the little garrison at Front Royal. But like everybody else in the Union camp he didn’t know he was coming.36

  A Union sentinel in a red shirt lay full length under a rail shelter at Front Royal taking his ease. It was a lazy Friday afternoon and all was quiet. At about one o’clock he looked out through hooded eyes toward the road leading south and saw a group of horsemen who hadn’t been there a moment before. He looked again, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, and after a moment he lazily rose to his feet and reached slowly for his musket. Raising it quickly, he fired toward the horsemen, then bolted, running for his life. The terrible truth had dawned. Those were rebels, come from nowhere.37

  Henry Kyd Douglas, who had a sure eye for the ladies, was the first to see her. She was just a solitary figure in a dark blue dress covered by a little fancy apron, and she was waving a white sunbonnet. She was approaching from town over a looping route to the eastward to avoid the Yankees. She was signaling urgently. For a moment she disappeared behind a rise, then reappeared again, seeming to heed neither weeds nor fences nor the cross fire now erupting between the two sides.

  Douglas called Jackson’s attention to this bizarre apparition as she disappeared into another depression. They all watched her come and wondered who she was, and why she was there. Ewell, who since Bull Run was rather accustomed to young women behaving in strange ways, suggested somebody go find out. Jackson sent Douglas, who had seen her first.

  It was a task well suited to Douglas’s romantic nature. The woman’s tall, supple figure struck him most favorably as he drew near. There was something oddly familiar about her. Her speed slackened as he approached, and he was start
led to hear her call his name.

  “Good God, Belle, you here!” Douglas exclaimed in a burst of sudden recognition. “What is it?”

  Douglas should have known. Who else would it be but Belle Boyd, whom he had known from earliest childhood? She had been spying on the Federals again.

  Her hand pressed against her heart and nearly exhausted by her long run through the fields, Belle gasped, “Oh, Harry, give me time to recover my breath.”

  After a few seconds her words came in a rush. “I knew it must be Stonewall, when I heard the first gun. Go back quick and tell him that the Yankee force is very small—one regiment of Maryland infantry, several pieces of artillery and several companies of cavalry. Tell him I know, for I went through the camps and got it out of an officer. Tell him to charge right down and he will catch them all.”

  The flabbergasted Douglas nodded.

  “I must hurry back,” she exclaimed. “Good-bye. My love to all the dear boys—and remember if you meet me in town you haven’t seen me today.”

  Douglas raised his cap in salute. Belle blew him a kiss, and was gone.

  This was just the sort of information Jackson needed. He had not been certain of the Union strength at Front Royal until Belle had appeared. There was no reason now to hold back. He would do as she suggested and do it quickly. As the Confederate First Maryland rushed down the hill with Major Roberdeau Wheat’s Louisianans by their side, Jackson turned to Douglas with a half smile and suggested he go along with them and see if he could get any more information from that young lady.38

  None of this would have surprised Kate Sperry. Kate was an eighteen-year-old acquaintance of Belle’s from Winchester. The last time she had seen her, in October, Kate was certain the budding Confederate spy had gone over the edge. “Of all the fools I ever saw of the womankind,” Kate thought then, “she certainly beats all—perfectly insane on the subject of men.” Belle had been wearing a dark green riding dress the day Kate last saw her, with brass buttons down the front, a pair of lieutenant colonel shoulder straps, a small riding hat with a row of brass buttons on the rim representing every state in the Confederacy, a gold palmetto breast pin, and a genuine palmetto sticking straight up atop her head. Put all this together with no brains, Kate told her diary, “and you have a full picture of the far-famed Belle Boyd.… Since the army has been around her senses are perfectly gone.”39