by John Waugh
Hotchkiss started north down the Valley Pike and Jackson on May 31 started his main army south in a falling rain. First he sent the 2,300 federal prisoners under guard. It would be the swiftest these soldiers ever marched for any general. The wagon train, stretching for seven miles, pregnant with captured federal stores, rolled into the line of march behind them.
Jackson’s soldiers believed he would stay rather than leave those wagons behind. Rather than give up a single wagon they reckoned he would fight a skirmish; rather than give up several he would fight a pitched battle. If a wheel came off a wagon he would stop the whole train and wait for it to be fixed, while the rear guard held off the baying enemy. “He would fight for a wheelbarrow in a retreat,” one of his officer’s said. Some called him the Wagon Hunter.7
Jackson’s army, all of it but the Stonewall Brigade, the brigade’s Second Virginia, and the First Maryland, which were still in Charles Town and Harpers Ferry, filed in behind the wagons. The army was still eighteen miles from the closing gate, farther from it than the advance troops of the two converging federal armies. Frémont was in Wardensville and closing. Shields was at Front Royal less than a dozen miles away.
But when Jackson reached Strasburg early that evening it was still unoccupied. Frémont had not arrived from the west when he told Lincoln he would, and there was no sign of Shields down the Front Royal road to the east. Jackson was in time. But would the Stonewall Brigade and the Maryland regiment also be in time? They were still miles behind. Could he hold the gate open long enough for them?
When Jed Hotchkiss reached Brigadier General Charles Winder with orders to wrap it up and hurry south, Winder’s Stonewall Brigade and the First Maryland were still busy with the Federals around Charles Town, thirty miles from Strasburg. The Second Virginia was several miles farther down the road still, at Loudoun Heights above Harpers Ferry, shelling Yankee positions in the town. Winder immediately called everybody in and they started back.
For many of these foot soldiers it was a case of here we go again. They had no information. Jackson had told them nothing, as usual. But they must be in a tight place, because they were marching furiously.8 That wasn’t anything new either. It was Stonewall Jackson’s way. “He forgets that one ever gets tired, hungry, or sleepy.…” one general was to say of him. “[He] would kill up any army the way he marches.” He will never get his vote for president, the general vowed.9
Right then Jackson wasn’t running for president, but a lot of these men marching for their lives might agree with the basic thesis. “Why is Old Jack a better general than Moses?” was the question they liked to ask. “Because it took Moses forty years to lead the Israelites through the wilderness,” the answer went, “and Old Jack would have double-quicked them through in three days.”10
“Man that is born of a woman, and enlisteth in Jackson’s army,” went another old saw, “is of few days and short rations.”11 Thinking of this probably reminded most of these men that they hadn’t eaten all day, just marched in the rain and the mud. The men of Jackson’s old Stonewall Brigade often felt that their general singled them out for this sort of particular misery because they had once been his. “I wish the Yankees were in Hell!” one of them said. “I don’t,” sighed another. “Old Jack would follow them there, with our brigade in front!”12
To all this banter Jackson would simply have said it was for their own good, that he was obliged to sweat them hard today that he might save their blood tomorrow.13 But he did allow them to rest every hour for a few moments on all their marches no matter how hard and no matter in how much of a hurry. He insisted on it and preferred for them to do it lying flat down, since “a man rests all over when he lies down.”14 Everybody in his army tended to obey, even Little Sorrel.
For these soldiers who did it all with their feet, the cavalry, who did it all with another part of the anatomy, was a sore sticking point. As the two branches of the service passed on marches, the foot soldiers would shout derisions at the horse soldiers: “Come down out o’ that hat, know yo’re thar; see your legs a hanging down!” Or “Get from behin’ them boots! Needn’t say you aint thar; see your ears a workin’!”15
On they flew, these soldiers who did it with their feet, and when they marched into Winchester in the late evening, on the last day of May, they found it deserted except for stragglers. Still Winder drove them on, and they reached Newtown about 10:00 that night, and dropped exhausted into a “cheerless, rainy bivouac.” Most of them had marched thirty miles, the Second Virginia even farther, and they had not eaten all day. They slept where they stopped and the next morning—June 1—broke bright and clear following the rain. Overnight Winder had procured barrels of crackers for them, and after eating they hurried out on the turnpike again. Strasburg was now but a morning’s march away.16
As they marched toward it they heard a new sound replacing yesterday’s pounding rain. Cannon were roaring on the right, ahead of them in the distance. Jackson must be in Strasburg still, waiting as he promised he would, holding the gate open for them. He was a hard man for a march, but he was a man of his word.
Jackson was there. He had sent the prisoners and the wagons on through Strasburg and up the Pike out of harm’s way. But he and his army were still there, waiting between the two Union commands that had been sent to crush them.
It had now been two days since Lincoln had seen time and opportunity slipping away and wired Frémont.
“Where is your force?” he had demanded. “It ought this minute to be near Strasburg. Answer at once.”17
Frémont assured him then that he would be there around five o’clock the next afternoon. But here it was the morning of June 1 and Jackson was in Strasburg, but Frémont wasn’t.
It was another Sunday, and duty was calling Jackson again louder than Providence. He sent Ewell out on the west side of town to hold off Frémont’s arriving army, and to keep the gate from slamming shut before Winder could squeeze through. Down the road to the east there was, incredibly, still no sign of Shields or McDowell.
Winder was coming as fast as he could through the morning, approaching Middletown. Captain McHenry Howard of his staff was riding about a hundred yards in front of the hurrying column when he saw ahead of him a group of horsemen waiting at the turnoff of the road to Front Royal. As he approached, one of the officers rode out to meet him, and Howard recognized Turner Ashby.
“Is that General Winder coming up?” Ashby asked Howard.
Howard told him it was.
Ashby’s swarthy face relaxed in a smile. “Thank God for that!”
As Winder rode up, Ashby gripped his hand warmly and said, “General, I was never so relieved in my life. I thought that you would be cut off and had made up my mind to join you and advise you to make your escape over the mountain to Gordonsville.”18
Ahead the soldiers saw the smoke from the guns they had been hearing. Their roar was now immediate, directly in their front. They had now only to squeeze through the still-open gate. And when they were safely past in the early afternoon, slipping “through the jaws of the closing vice like a greased rat,”19 Jackson sent a message to Ewell, and Ewell pulled back. The trapdoor slammed shut, but the game, as Lincoln called Jackson, was gone.
When the two Union armies entered Strasburg that evening, Jackson was twelve miles up the turnpike, making his camp in Woodstock and calling it a day. The soldiers of the Stonewall Brigade bivouacked along fence rows on the turnpike well south of Strasburg. It is very likely that as they retired for the night, dog tired, they cursed Jackson one more time. And they probably smiled when they said it.
The next day was Monday, the beginning of a new week, and the whole business had now turned into a stern-chase and another footrace. Frémont, too slow in slamming the door, now had to throw his army after Jackson up the Valley on the western side of the Massanutton. McDowell sent Shields racing up the eastern side on a parallel track to try to cut him off.
Shields had been worrying Jackson. He had not showed
up at Strasburg when the Confederates passed through the day before, although he had been in possession of Front Royal for more than forty-eight hours. This could only mean one thing; he must be moving up the Valley on the other side of the mountain to get in front of him or cross one of the bridges and hit him in the flank. Jackson knew he must foreclose this possibility, and above all he must prevent a union of Shields and Frémont anywhere along the track. The solution was simple enough: burn the bridges.
This happened to be one of Turner Ashby’s specialties. Soon the White House Bridge over the South Fork of the Shenandoah and the Columbia Bridge upriver were in flames. As Jackson marched over the North Fork bridge at Mount Jackson, he burned it as well. Frémont arrived just in time to see it falling into the river, and wearily called for pontoons. The only bridge still spanning the Shenandoah was the one at Port Republic around the south end of the Massanutton.20
While Ashby was away burning bridges, the Stonewall Brigade was bringing up the rear doing his work, withdrawing before Frémont slowly, regiment by regiment, gun by gun—setting up, checking him, withdrawing, setting up again. It was the same maddening ritual that had frustrated Banks and Gordon in their pursuit of Jackson up the Valley a month and a half earlier.
When Ashby returned to take charge of the rear again, things settled down into a more leisurely routine. Jackson’s retreats, unlike his advances, were never hurried—busy, but not hurried. At Mount Jackson on that Monday he paused long enough to write Anna. “I am again retiring before the enemy,” he told her cheerfully. “They endeavored to get in my rear by moving on both flanks of my gallant army, but our God has been my guide and saved me from their grasp. You must not expect long letters from me in such busy times as these, but always believe that your husband never forgets his little darling.”21
All through the day the army marched along to the constant thudding of artillery in their rear. But in the evening the guns grew quiet and the Sixteenth Mississippi’s little cornet band ministered to the tired spirits of the footsore soldiers with a concert. “Bonnie Blue Flag,” “Gentle Annie,” “The Marseilles Hymn,” “Maryland, My Maryland,” and “Dixie” swelled on the quiet night air, ending wistfully with that ultimate song of the heart, “Home Sweet Home,” and the rebel yell.22
Jackson was not looking for either quiet or home. He was thinking as he rode along where would be the best place to strike the Federals yet another blow. He had Frémont behind him and Shields blocked off on the other side of the mountain, and now his busy mind was pondering how he might turn first on one, crush him, then turn on the other. He believed he knew just the place. Twice on one day during the retreat he called in Jed Hotchkiss to ask him questions about the country around Port Republic, where he had left that one bridge standing.23
The little army moved along up the Valley, with Ashby badgering Frémont in the rear, for the next three days. The main column reached Harrisonburg before midday on June 5 and took the road leading southeast. For many of these soldiers this retreat was a replay of the earlier one. They had done it all before, only last April. They could only wonder now as they had wondered then: What is going on under that little faded cap?
Turner Ashby was much like the general he served. It was just as impossible to divine what was going on in his battle-crazed mind as it was to figure what was happening under Jackson’s sun-browned cap. Ashby was slender, spare and graceful, of medium height and as dark as a Moor. “Nothing [was] light in his appearance,” Captain McHenry Howard said, “but the whites of his eyes. I thought he looked more like an Arab, or the common idea of one, than any man I ever saw.”24
Put him on the stunning milk-white horse he rode until it was inevitably shot out from under him, and you had the perfect picture of the dark avenger. He had jet-black hair and a long jetty beard that floated on the wind like wavy silk, so long that it often mingled with the mane of his galloping horse.25 His eyes were piercing gray, and he had a magical way with a horse and an understanding that seemed to R. L. Dabney to have been “formed by nature for war.”26 His home was in the saddle, a friend said of him. He was a man who “looked like work,” always spattered by whatever the earth at the moment was throwing up, mud or dust, with eyes that never blinked at peril. He seemed to dare his enemies to kill him and gave them constant opportunity. And how they tried.27
Ashby’s men were another matter altogether. Most of them were from Virginia’s northern and western border counties. They had never been in a camp of instruction in their lives and were never likely ever to be in one. Most of them had no idea how to perform the simplest evolutions of a company drill, and no sense of discipline. They were the despair of Stonewall Jackson. It was simply impossible for Ashby to do anything with them but lead them into a fight, armed as they were with such weapons as they could pick up, and totally without any regard for order. And he did that supremely well. Like another rough-hewn Confederate horseman named Bedford Forrest, who was winning a like reputation for courage and skill in the West, Ashby was a natural soldier. But don’t ask him to organize anybody.28
J.E.B. Stuart, Ashby’s counterpart in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, had a word for the life they led. It was the world of “the sleepless watch and the harassing daily petite guerre.”29
On June 6 Ashby was between Harrisonburg and Port Republic waging one of those “little wars” in the rear of Jackson’s slowly retreating army. He had set up on the road about sunset and was beating back an enemy cavalry charge. Expecting a major thrust, he had sent to Ewell for infantry support and Ewell had hurried to him with the First Maryland and Fifty-eighth Virginia. He found Ashby, as usual tempting fate beyond all reason, exposing himself beyond anything war called for. His horse, another one, had just been shot from under him. Extracting himself from beneath it, he rose to his feet one more time and shouted, “Charge men; for God’s sake, charge!” As he said it a musket ball hit him full in the breast and he died instantly. The Yankees had finally caught him.30
Ashby’s death paralyzed emotions throughout Jackson’s army, from the general to the lowest private. There was probably nobody who doubted it would happen sometime and nobody who could believe it when it did. When Ashby’s body was carried on to Port Republic to be prepared for the grave, Jackson came to where it lay and demanded to see it. There he stood for a time in sorrowful silence.31
Jackson had had his differences with Ashby; there was little love lost between them. Jackson disapproved of Ashby’s lack of discipline. But right then Jackson was as close to unutterable grief as he had been at any time in the war. “As a partisan officer,” he was to say of his fallen cavalry commander, “I never knew his superior; his daring was proverbial; his powers of endurance almost incredible; his tone of character heroic, and his sagacity almost intuitive in divining the purposes and movements of the enemy.”32
An artilleryman in the ranks, who had fought beside Ashby in his many petites guerres, was more emotional: “Ashby is gone. He has passed the picket line that is posted along the silent river.… tenting to-night on the eternal camping-ground that lies beyond the mist that hangs over the River of Death, where no more harsh reveilles will disturb his peaceful rest nor sounding charge summon him to the deadly combat again.”33 He had passed by, a friend lamented, “like a dream of chivalry,” devoted to death and to glory, “the bold rider, the brave partisan … the knight without fear.”34
Ashby had been the young Confederacy’s knight-errant, its dashing cavalier, its Galahad, and he had died in the morning of his glory. The army would miss him terribly.
James Shields, the only Union general yet to have beaten Jackson in a battle—at Kernstown—was out to catch the pest once and for all. Jackson had eluded them again at Strasburg, but it was going to be different this time. As Frémont pursued him up the Shenandoah side of the Massanutton, Shields was paralleling the chase up the Luray Valley, looking for a bridge to cross that would let him fall on Jackson’s flank as Frémont hit him from the rear. Jackson
had burned the bridge at the White House crossing. The one at Columbia was also gone. So Shields hurried on, hoping to find the bridge at Conrad’s Store still standing. No luck. Jackson had burned that one, too. The rain wasn’t helping. It had been coming down in torrents for three days; the Shenandoah was overflowing its banks and the mountain streams were turning into rivers. It looked to Shields like the showdown was to be at Port Republic. If he could get there first, Jackson would be caught in a vice between his army and Frémont’s with an impassable river in his front and nowhere to go. It was a perfect plan. He had to get a message through to Frémont. Jackson was caught this time.35
Sunday morning, June 8, found Captain McHenry Howard of the Stonewall Brigade looking forward to a quiet day in camp. He had taken the little store of clothing from his carpetbag and had it lying about him, when he heard a cannon roar in the direction of Port Republic. He began immediately thrusting his things back in the bag.
“What are you doing?” someone asked him.
“Well,” said Howard, “it’s Sunday and you hear that shot.”
They should have guessed. It was the Sabbath, so naturally there was going to be a fight. By now Jackson’s soldiers believed he would rather fight on Sunday than on any other day. And in truth, Howard that morning had overheard Jackson whispering to Dabney in a confidential undertone, “Major, wouldn’t it be a blessed thing if God would give us a glorious victory today?”36
All of the ingredients were there. Frémont was nearby, having come up on Jackson’s heels from Harrisonburg. As one of the rebel soldiers said, “We were ready again for our usual Sabbath exercises, and Frémont was on hand with his congregation.”37 Shields was believed to be at Conrad’s Store only fifteen miles away, and also of a mind to attend the services, with his advance already within hailing distance.