Jackson laughed. Then he got off his horse, lay down on the ground, and took a nap.
“La Belle Rebelle”
One of Jackson’s secret weapons in the Shenandoah Valley was an eighteen-year-old spy named Belle Boyd.
Boyd had been living with her family in the valley when Union forces arrived in 1861. A bunch of Union soldiers celebrated the fourth of July by getting drunk and breaking into homes. They started shattering plates, blasting their guns through windows, and tossing furniture into the street. After smashing up Belle’s home, they took out an American flag and prepared to fly it over the house.
“Men,” warned Belle’s mother, “every member of this household will die before that flag is raised over us.”
One of the soldiers shoved Mrs. Boyd and spit out a string of violent curses. For Belle, that was it. “I could stand it no longer … .” she wrote, “My blood was literally boiling in my veins. I drew out my pistol and shot him.”
The soldier died, but Boyd escaped punishment—a Union court ruled she had acted in self-defense.
The next year, when Stonewall Jackson came to the valley, Boyd began gathering information and passing coded messages to Jackson’s army. One day she found out that Union officers would be meeting in a nearby hotel. She hid in a closet on the floor above the meeting room and listened to everything through a crack in the floor.
Jackson’s army was fighting its way into town, and Boyd now had valuable information about Union plans. She ran into the street to find someone to deliver the news to Jackson.
“No, no,” said all the men she met. “You go.”
There was no time to think about it—she took off running toward the sounds of battle. Union soldiers shot at her as she raced across the battlefield. A few bullets actually sliced through her dress without hitting her.
Belle Boyd
“The rifle-balls flew thick and fast about me, and more than one struck the ground so near my feet as to throw the dust in my eyes.”
Southern soldiers cheered when she reached them. One officer recognized her and said, “Good God, Belle, you’re here! What is it?”
Panting from her run, Boyd delivered the information. Then she ran back home.
After winning another key victory, Stonewall Jackson dashed off a quick note: “MISS BELLE BOYD: I thank you, for myself and for the army, for the immense service that you have rendered your country today.—Hastily, I am your Friend, T. J. JACKSON”
Belle Boyd continued spying (despite being thrown in prison a couple of times) and soon became famous all over the world. A French newspaper nicknamed her “La Belle Rebelle”—the beautiful rebel.
Whenever You’re Ready, George
Now it’s time to check in on General George McClellan. We haven’t missed much—he’s still inching forward. And Lincoln is still begging him to speed up. “You must act,” Lincoln telegraphed.
“The time is very near when I shall attack Richmond,” McClellan insisted.
But Mac wanted more information before moving forward. He turned to an inventor named Thaddeus Lowe, who had built huge balloons in which he could float hundreds of feet above the enemy camp. Since there was no way to control the balloons in the air, they were tied to the ground with very long ropes.
Early one morning the Union general Fitz John Porter decided to have a look at the Confederate camp. He climbed into the basket, inflated the balloon, and started floating up. Then there was a sudden CRACK!—the rope holding the balloon to the ground snapped in half. Thousands of sleepy Union soldiers looked up and saw General Porter leaning out of the basket, waving his hands and yelling something that no one could hear.
“Open the valve!” shouted Thaddeus Lowe, pointing up to a rope connected to the valve that would let out the hydrogen gas that made the balloon rise. Soldiers ran along under the balloon yelling, “The valve! The valve! Open the valve!” But Porter couldn’t reach the valve. He kept floating up, up, and away … out over Confederate territory.
Deciding to make the best of it, Porter took out his telescope and started studying the enemy camp. Confederate soldiers shot at the balloon but couldn’t reach it. Both armies watched in amazement as shifting winds blew Porter back and forth, finally sending him crashing into an army tent—luckily for him, a Union army tent. Porter climbed out from the folds of the deflated balloon, unhurt.
Seven Days with Granny Lee
Through the rainy, muddy May of 1862, McClellan’s army continued pushing forward. By late May, Union forces were just six miles from Richmond. They could see the city’s church steeples and hear the clocks striking. The men cheered when Mac visited them:
McClellan: How do you feel, boys?
Soldiers: We feel bully, General!
McClellan: Do you think anything can stop you from going to Richmond?
Soldiers: No! No!
Robert E. Lee disagreed.
With his polite manners, his white hair, and his glasses, Robert E. Lee didn’t seem like a warrior. In fact, some folks in Richmond had taken to calling him “Granny Lee” (behind his back, of course). But soldiers who knew Lee painted a very different picture. As one Confederate officer said: “He will take more chances, and take them quicker, than any other general in this country, North or South.”
Step one for Lee was to find out exactly where the enemy army was. He didn’t have balloons, but he did have Jeb Stuart, a twenty-nine-year-old cavalry officer with a giant cinnamon-colored beard and a foot-long ostrich feather in his hat. Eager for action and fame, Stuart gladly accepted the dangerous mission of riding out and locating McClellan’s army.
“And if I find the way open, it may be that I can ride all the way around him. Circle his whole army.
Jeb Stuart
And that’s exactly what he did. Stuart led 1,200 men on a three-day, hundred-mile ride around McClellan’s entire army. Losing just one man, Stuart’s force burned wagons full of Union supplies and brought back hundreds of Union prisoners. Stuart got famous. McClellan got embarrassed. And Lee got the information he needed.
Then, in a series of brutal battles known as the Seven Days, Lee attacked McClellan every day for a week. “Come on; come on, my men! Do you want to live forever?” shouted a Confederate officer to his charging soldiers. The Union soldiers staggered backwards, fighting their guts out but steadily losing ground. The casualties were enormous—a total of more than 30,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed or wounded. And though Lee lost even more men than McClellan, Seven Days was a major Confederate victory. The Union army had been driven far from Richmond.
When the fighting ended, survivors on both sides tried to put the weeklong bloodbath behind them. One Southern soldier remembered: “Our boys and the Yanks made a bargain not to fire at each other, and went out in the field … and gathered berries together and talked over the fight, traded tobacco and coffee and exchanged newspapers as peacefully and kindly as if they had not been engaged for the last seven days in butchering each other.”
What About Slavery?
Abraham Lincoln was in no mood to pick berries. The entire North was disappointed and angry, and Lincoln got most of the blame. He desperately wanted to fire McClellan, but he was afraid the soldiers would be angry. “McClellan has the army with him,” Lincoln said.
Then there was the always explosive issue of slavery. Abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass were demanding that Lincoln attack Southern slavery as well as Southern armies.
“To fight against slaveholders, without fighting against slavery, is but a half-hearted business.”
Frederick Douglass
Douglass was making an interesting point about war strategy. Southern farms and businesses depended on the labor of enslaved African Americans. And the Southern army was using slaves to build forts and cook food. Slavery was actually helping the South fight the war. So freeing slaves could help the North win it.
Lincoln agreed with Douglass’s logic. When asked about ending slavery, he said, “I can
assure you that the subject is on my mind, by day and night, more than any other.”
One of the questions on Lincoln’s worried mind was this: If the Confederacy’s 3.5 million slaves were freed, where would they live? Lincoln was considering an idea some politicians were suggesting—that freed slaves should move to another country, maybe in Central America. But black leaders came to the White House to urge Lincoln to put that stupid idea out of his mind. As Robert Purvis told the president: “In the matter of rights, there is but one race, and that is the human race … . Sir, this is our country as much as it is yours, and we will not leave it.”
Lincoln was also nervous about the four “border states,” or slave states that were still in the Union: Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. If he tried to abolish slavery, would those states join the Confederacy?
And here’s another question: Shouldn’t free African Americans be allowed to enlist in the Union army? As of the middle of 1862, this was still being debated in Congress.
Some people weren’t waiting for Congress to make up its mind.
Robert Smalls’s Dash to Freedom
Robert Smalls was a twenty-three-year-old expert boat pilot in Charleston, South Carolina. He was also a slave. In 1862, Smalls was working on the Planter, an armed steamship used by the Confederate navy.
On the night of May 12, the Planter was loaded with weapons and ammunition. The captain told Smalls to have the ship ready for an early departure the next morning.
“Aye, aye, sir,” Smalls said.
The captain and white crew went on shore for the night, leaving on board Smalls and the other black crew members. The captain never would have guessed that Smalls and the black crew, all slaves, had spent the past few months preparing for this exact moment.
At three a.m. on May 13, Smalls put on the captain’s hat and jacket. He powered up the steam engines and began cruising—very slowly, as if this were just another normal night. At a dark waterside spot he stopped to pick up his wife and children, as well as family members of the other crew members. Then he turned the ship and headed out to sea.
Now came the most dangerous part of the escape: the Planter had to sail right past five Confederate forts in the harbor. To pass each fort, a ship had to blow a different secret signal on its steam whistle. Smalls knew these signals, but if anything went wrong, he and the crew had agreed, they would never allow themselves to be taken alive. If stopped, they would blow the ship into the sky.
Smalls hunched over and paced back and forth exactly as the Planter’s captain normally did. Smalls had practiced this walk, and in the dark, from a distance, he looked like the captain. As the ship passed each fort, Smalls blew all the right signals on the ship’s whistle. At 4:15, just as the sun was beginning to rise, the Planter reached Fort Sumter, the last fort. Smalls blew the secret signal.
“Pass!” yelled the guard.
Safely beyond the fort, Smalls ran a white flag (the signal of truce or surrender) up the ship’s flagpole and sailed toward a group of Union ships floating about three miles out. As the Planter cruised closer, Union sailors were shocked to see a Confederate ship with an all-black crew. A Union captain demanded to speak with the Planter’s captain.
You’re speaking with him now, Robert Smalls told them. “I have the honor, sir, to present the Planter.”
Robert Smalls’s dash to freedom was a massive front-page story all over the North and South. It was “one of the most daring and heroic adventures” of the war, declared the New York Herald. The Union gained a valuable ship, full of supplies. And Smalls became a symbol in the debate over emancipation. To many Northerners, Smalls’s actions made it more obvious than ever that all African Americans should be free.
Lincoln Is Convinced
In a meeting with his cabinet on July 22, 1862, Lincoln announced an important decision. He was going to declare all slaves in the Confederacy free.
Once they got over the shock, most of Lincoln’s advisors supported the idea. But the secretary of state, William Seward, raised a concern. If they issued this plan now, when the war was going so badly for them, wouldn’t they look kind of weak and desperate? Wouldn’t it be better to wait for a military victory?
Good point, Lincoln said. He put the Emancipation Proclamation back in his desk.
In August there was another big battle near Bull Run in Virginia. Lee and Jackson crushed a large Northern force, sending the Union army stumbling back toward Washington.
“Well, John, we are whipped again, I’m afraid,” Lincoln told his secretary. And that proclamation stayed in his desk.
Lee’s Hungry Wolves
Remember that quote about Robert E. Lee taking chances? On September 4, Lee’s army waded into the Potomac River and splashed across the shallow water to Maryland. Lee was invading the North.
Lee knew he could lose everything—his entire army, and the war too. But he also knew he could win everything. One huge victory on Northern territory just might convince the North that it could never win this war. The South would have its independence.
There was only one problem, as Lee told Jefferson Davis, “The army is not properly equipped for an invasion of an enemy’s territory.”
That was putting it mildly. Thousands of Lee’s soldiers were barefoot. Their clothes and bodies were so filthy, people in Maryland said they smelled the army before they saw it. One witness called them “the dirtiest men I ever saw, a most ragged, lean, and hungry set of wolves.” Lee’s half-starved soldiers picked unripe apples and corn, and soon thousands of men were sprinting into the woods, sick with diarrhea.
Still, Lee’s soldiers continued marching north in high spirits. These were tough combat veterans who were used to winning.
Then, in a war full of incredible events, something truly unbelievable happened.
Who Dropped the Cigars?
A few days after Lee’s army marched through Frederick, Maryland, the Union army began to arrive. At about ten in the morning on September 13, a group of Indiana soldiers sat down to grab a quick rest. Corporal Barton Mitchell was sitting under a tree when he noticed a piece of paper lying in the grass a few feet away. He picked up the paper and found that it was wrapped around three cigars. Barton was thrilled—he sent his friend for matches to light the cigars. Then he unrolled the piece of paper. “As I read, each line became more interesting,” he said. “I forgot those cigars.”
Special Orders, No. 191
Headquarters Army of Northern Virginia
… The army will resume its march
tomorrow, taking the Hagerstown road.
General Jackson’s command will form
the advance …
This was General Lee’s entire plan! Some careless Southern officer must have wrapped a copy of the plan around his cigars and dropped it there by accident. The letter described exactly where each part of Lee’s army was and where they were headed. And best of all, it showed that Lee’s army was spread out all over the place—completely unprepared for battle.
“Now I know what to do!” shouted McClellan when he saw the letter. “Here is a paper with which, if I cannot whip Bobby Lee, I will be willing to go home.”
Southern spies told Lee that McClellan had his plans. Lee rushed messages to all his commanders to gather as quickly as possible at a town called Sharpsburg. When Lee got there he pointed to the high ground above Antietam Creek and said, “We will make our stand on these hills.”
McClellan, meanwhile, moved so slowly that he missed a golden opportunity to attack before Lee was ready. By September 17, Lee had about 40,000 soldiers at Antietam Creek. Little Mac had about 80,000.
Families hid in their cellars and frightened farmers cleared their cows and horses from the fields.
Into the Awful Tornado
When the armies woke before sunrise on September 17, a milky mist covered the fields near Antietam Creek. Sleepy soldiers began the day by wiping the dew from their rifles.
A group of Texas soldiers had just begun
cooking breakfast (their first hot meal in three days) when they were ordered into battle. “I have never seen a more disgusted bunch of boys and mad as hornets,” one soldier said.
Union soldiers were building fires and boiling coffee when the first Southern shell came screaming into camp. A soldier named Albert Monroe said: “Every one dropped whatever he had in his hands, and looked around the group to see whose head was missing.”
No one’s was—yet. But another huge and horrible battle was under way.
All day the armies charged at each other, driving one another back and forth across a large cornfield and a dirt road that became known as the “Bloody Lane.” Entire rows of men were cut down as they charged at enemy guns, and arms and legs were blasted thirty feet into the air. “A man but a few paces from me is struck squarely in the face by a solid shot,” recalled George Kimball of Massachusetts. “Fragments of the poor fellow’s head come crashing into my face and fill me with disgust.” Kimball wiped his face and continued fighting.
After a few hours, soldiers said they could have walked across the battlefield on fallen bodies without ever touching the ground. “A savage continual thunder that cannot compare to any sound I ever heard” was how Charles Johnson of New York described the fight at Antietam.
“The earth and sky seemed to be on fire,” said a Texan named W.R. Hamby.
Two Miserable Presidents Page 7