by S. C. Gwynne
Jackson enjoyed other, less visible successes as well. He had, as it turned out, an exceptional eye for talent, particularly when it was attached to sober, hardworking, Christian men. He had assembled the core of what would become one of the most talented staffs in either army: John A. Harman, a loud, profane stagecoach operator from Staunton, would become one of the most effective quartermasters in the Confederacy. Wells J. Hawks, a stagecoach builder from Charlestown who had been one of that community’s leading citizens, became chief commissary—the man in charge of the food; the brilliant Hunter McGuire, a doctor destined for national prominence after the war, who was so young-looking that Jackson checked his credentials, became medical director on his staff; finally there was the whip-smart Alexander S. “Sandie” Pendleton, not yet twenty-one, and the son of William Nelson Pendleton, the Episcopal rector in Lexington, who became Jackson’s chief of artillery. The highly competent Pendleton quickly became one of Jackson’s favorites, starting out as an ordnance officer and ending up as assistant adjutant general (the chief administrative officer), and doing a good deal of the critical military work on Jackson’s staff. Jackson would have some forty staff officers in his Civil War career. But these four would always remain at the heart of his operations.
Jackson was, moreover, blessed with not one but two exceptional cavalry officers. There was James Ewell Brown Stuart, known as Jeb, a loud, joyous, irrepressible twenty-eight-year-old West Pointer who had spent his previous military career with the mounted rifles and cavalry in the West. He was an odd combination of flamboyance and puritanically strict personal habits: he wore oversized gloves, a yellow sash, and a feathered hat, went about singing and reciting poetry, and practiced a devout form of Christianity. Implausibly, considering how utterly different they were, Stuart and Jackson became close and even affectionate friends; Stuart was the only man in the army who could make Jackson laugh, the only one who could kid him and get away with it. There was also the thirty-seven-year-old Turner Ashby, a born leader of men who was almost recklessly brave and already a legend in his home state of Virginia. He had courtly manners, a flowing beard, and, while sorely lacking in administrative skills, had astounding abilities as a rider and fighter. He was perhaps the purest example of the South’s early, overwhelming dominance in cavalry. Jackson’s earliest personnel crisis involved both men. It was brought about by his own appointment of Stuart as head of cavalry. Facing an incipient revolt by Ashby, Jackson settled the matter by splitting the cavalry command in two, and preserving the loyalty of both men. Stuart and Ashby would loom large in Jackson’s future campaigns.
So would a smallish, gaunt sorrel gelding that Jackson acquired for his wife during his Harpers Ferry posting and named Fancy. The horse turned out to have extraordinary endurance; a gentle, rocking gait that Jackson liked; and the ability, later on, to doze peacefully in the middle of the hottest fights. To everyone else in the war the horse was known as Little Sorrel. He became Jackson’s principal mount for the rest of his life.
The point of all this frenetic organization and reorganization was, of course, defense against the Northern invasion. Harpers Ferry was not only the South’s northernmost military post, a knob jutting into the sovereign lands of Maryland; it was also a gateway to the Shenandoah Valley, the long, mountain-walled corridor that sat on Washington’s western flank, and to the still-disputed lands of northwestern Virginia. But the town’s main strategic value was as a transportation hub. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the largest railroad network in the United States and a key lifeline to Washington, ran through it, and the 185-mile-long Chesapeake and Ohio Canal hugged the banks of the Potomac, just across the river.
Harpers Ferry was also one of the least defensible strategic sites in Virginia, if not the entire South. The problem was classically military: the town occupied conspicuously low ground. There were large mountains on three sides of it. Artillery placed on those heights could annihilate within hours whatever army was camped in the town. With troops and guns enough to occupy those heights, of course, Harpers Ferry could be held. But Jackson had nothing like that.
There was the thorny problem of political geography, too: Maryland was a slave state that had not seceded. But the belief persisted that it might yet secede—indeed, many Southerners believed that it would—meaning that any actions that might annoy Marylanders, such as military occupation of their lands, was thought to be a bad idea. The highest of the heights overlooking Harpers Ferry, as it happened, were on the Maryland shore of the Potomac.
On May 6, Jackson, who seemed unimpressed by such political considerations, wrote Lee that he had “occupied the Virginia and Maryland Heights” and was fortifying them.22 Lee, as President Jefferson Davis’s chief military adviser, responded immediately, and with some alarm: “In your preparation for the defense of your position it is considered advisable not to intrude upon the soil of Maryland unless compelled by the necessities of war.”23 As it happened, at that very moment Maryland was objecting strongly to the Union’s “invasion” of its sovereign land.24 Might not Maryland consider Jackson an invader as well?
But Jackson, an artillery officer who understood the tactical implications of his position, was pushing ahead on his own. He wrote Lee on May 7 that he had finished reconnoitering Maryland Heights and had “determined to fortify them at once, and hold them, as well as the Virginia Heights and the town, be the cost what it may.” Be the cost what it may. In case he had not made himself perfectly clear, later in the same letter he stated, “I am of the opinion that this place should be defended with the spirit which actuated the defenders of Thermopylae.”25 His reference was to the 480 BC battle in which 7,000 Greeks held off 100,000 or more invading Persians for seven days before succumbing. Jackson’s carefully chosen image is strikingly bloody, epic, and absolute in a war that had seen very little bloodshed. On May 9 Jackson wrote Lee again to report that he had placed five hundred troops on Maryland Heights, prompting this scolding retort from Lee: “I fear you have been premature,” he told Jackson. “The true policy is to act on the defensive and not invite attack. If not too late you might withdraw until the proper time.” Lee also pointed out the political repercussions of Jackson’s rash moves: “Your intention to fortify the heights of Maryland may interrupt our friendly arrangements with that state, and we have no right to intrude on her soul unless under pressing necessity for defense.”26
In any case, it was too late. The troops would stay. But Jackson, after proving his mettle as an administrator, had now begun to build a reputation as something less desirable—an officer who was overeager and required close watching by a superior officer, and who, above all, needed to be reined in. In his movement into Maryland he was completely at odds with the political climate in Richmond and with individual politicians such as Jefferson Davis, who were deeply suspicious of him.
This was in part Jackson’s own fault. He was motivated by the belief that, for the South to win against obvious industrial and numerical odds, it would have to win quickly. That meant hitting the enemy’s green troops hard and soon, and not paying attention to such political niceties as state boundaries. That meant burning Baltimore and Philadelphia and making Northerners understand on a visceral level what this war was going to cost them. As early as the week after secession, Jackson had proposed to Virginia governor John Letcher the idea he had mentioned in the letter to his nephew in January: a war of invasion in which the South would fly the “black flag”—meaning that all Union prisoners would be summarily executed. He even proposed to set the example himself.27
Though his plan sounded bloody, brutal, and un-Christian, as Jackson saw it there was clear and practical logic behind it. “He affirmed that this would in the end be the truest humanity,” wrote Robert Dabney, “because it would shorten the contest, and prove economical of the blood of both parties. . . . This startling opinion he calmly sustained in conversation, many months after, [saying that since] the Confederate Authorities had seen fit to pursue the other policy, h
e had cheerfully acquiesced.”28 But he still believed it. As for his then-radical idea for a war of invasion, he was simply ahead of his time. By the second year of the war, Robert E. Lee would come to the same conclusion. He would eventually invade the North twice. Jackson’s notion of total war, meanwhile, would soon define the entire conflict on both sides. The final campaigns of Union generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan in 1864 and 1865 were the fulfillment of Jackson’s ideas.29 For now, however, they were seen as wildly aggressive, if not outright crazy.
CHAPTER FIVE
A BRILLIANT RETREAT
Jackson’s one-man show in Harpers Ferry was not destined to last. Upper Virginia was too important, and Jackson was a mere colonel, a largely unknown quantity. On May 23, the twenty-sixth day of his command, Brigadier General Joseph E. Johnston arrived to replace him. The transition was perfectly characteristic of the scrupulous, by-the-book Jackson. Since he had not been informed by either Lee or Letcher of the change of command, Jackson politely but firmly refused to relinquish it until Johnston—whose staff was dumbfounded by Jackson’s stubbornness—could produce proof of his appointment. Johnston was not just any officer. When the war started, he was quartermaster general of the US Army and the highest-ranking officer to join the Confederacy. He was considered by several high-ranking officers on both sides—notably Longstreet and Sherman—to be the equal of Robert E. Lee. When warned by Johnston’s staff officer Chase Whiting, Jackson’s supercilious upper-class tutor at West Point, that he might be arrested for his behavior, Jackson stated calmly, “I consider my duty clear.” He was never impolite. He even took Johnston on a tour of the camps. But he was insensitive to peer pressure, and he did not waver. Johnston, who managed to maintain his soldierly bearing and understood the military rule that officers should not relinquish command on verbal assurance alone, soon located a telegram with Lee’s endorsement. Jackson immediately gave way, with no hard feelings. For anyone who was paying attention, it was another signal that Jackson was not like other officers in the Confederacy. Though he was clearly ambitious, he would not extend even this small, rule-bending courtesy to one of the Confederate army’s most important officers and the man who would be in a position to promote him.
Johnston, meanwhile, brought a radically different approach to the defense of Harpers Ferry. Where Jackson had preached the spirit of Thermopylae and as good as invaded Maryland to set his defenses, Johnston’s first thought was to fall back. “This place cannot be held against an enemy who would venture to attack it,” he wrote to Lee. He offered a lengthy list of reasons why this was so, including lack of men, lack of ammunition, the presence of a hostile populace, and an inability to guard river fords. Lee, who regarded Harpers Ferry as a critical part of his strategy in northern Virginia, protested strongly in a letter to Johnston, writing, “The abandonment of Harpers Ferry will be depressing to the cause of the South.” Johnston immediately fired back, “Would not the loss of five or six thousand men be more so?”1
On June 14, with reluctant approval from the Davis administration—and against Jackson’s wishes, too, though he did not air his objections—Johnston evacuated Harpers Ferry. His pretext was the presence of a large Union force in the town of Romney, sixty miles to the east. It would later turn out that no such force existed. Johnston ordered Jackson to arrange the evacuation, which meant taking with them whatever equipment and matériel they could, burning what they could not, and looking after sick men and military records. This included setting fire to much of the town, and blasting to bits the magnificent nine-hundred-foot B & O Railroad bridge over the Potomac. Three days later, Jackson systematically destroyed the sprawling B & O Railroad shop complex. He hated doing it. All he could see was the destruction of key wartime assets.
In spite of the awkward transfer of power, Johnston and his duty-obsessed subordinate managed to get along. Johnston appreciated Jackson’s talents immediately, retaining him as commander of the Virginia regiments and thus making him his top lieutenant. Though he had insisted on retiring from Harpers Ferry, Johnston was anything but a coward. He had graduated from West Point in the Class of 1829, ranking thirteenth out of forty-six cadets, had fought with distinction in the Mexican-American War (where he was twice wounded) and in the Seminole wars, and had attained a higher rank in the regular army than his West Point classmate Robert E. Lee. Confederate general and war historian Richard Taylor pronounced him the “beau ideal of a soldier,” an officer who “gained and held the affection and confidence of his men.”2
It was under Johnston that Jackson—known to his men by the name he had been called at West Point and the name he would be called for the rest of the war, Old Jack—saw his first combat experience as a commanding officer. On July 2, he was encamped with 2,300 men and four cannons north of Martinsburg, a town about fifteen miles northwest of Harpers Ferry in what is now West Virginia, when he received word that Union troops had crossed the Potomac River and were coming toward him. Jackson, whose standing orders from Johnston were to retire if the enemy approached him “in force,” could not tell exactly how many soldiers he was facing, though he knew that a large Union force under Major General Robert Patterson had been camped on the Maryland side. So he decided to find out in the most aggressive way possible, conducting what was known in military jargon as a “reconnaissance in force”—an attack whose purpose is to make the enemy reveal himself.
Issuing precise orders in a soft voice that carried an accent from the western mountains of Virginia, Jackson ordered one of his four regiments—the 5th Virginia—to advance accompanied by a single piece of artillery. The 2nd and 4th Virginia Regiments were to act as reserves, in a state of full readiness; the 27th Virginia loaded the brigade’s baggage and equipment onto wagons. Less than half an hour after he had gotten the news from Stuart’s courier, Jackson’s men were on the move. The Federals were moving, too. When Jackson’s force of 380 advanced on them at 9:15 a.m., at a place called Falling Waters, Union troops were about 3,000 strong. Jackson swung his men immediately into action, sending one of his companies on a flanking movement to the right. “The enemy soon advanced, also deployed, and opened their fire,” wrote Jackson in his battle report. His skirmishers returned fire, driving the enemy back.3 The Federals came on a second time, and were again repulsed. But that was the end of whatever tactical advantage Jackson enjoyed. He was clearly outnumbered, and now he could see just how bad the mismatch was. Federal guns began to rake his position, while enemy soldiers appeared in a battle line that was two regiments wide—enough to flank and even envelop Jackson’s small group. Jackson gave the order to fall back. Before he did, his battery chief, William Pendleton—who less than three months before had been the Episcopal rector of Grace Church in Lexington—fired a cruelly efficient volley of solid shot that, in Jackson’s words, “entirely cleared the road in front.”4
Jackson handled the retreat masterfully. It was the first real sign of his talent as a field commander. He held his command together as it executed the difficult and nerve-racking task—even for veterans—of falling back three miles under fire before an enemy that held an eight-to-one numerical advantage. Under Jackson’s calm, self-possessed guidance—he was on horseback, in the middle of the fight—the regiment withdrew slowly and deliberately, constantly checking the Federal troops, who, Jackson wrote, “were advancing through the fields in line and through the woods as skirmishers, endeavoring to outflank me.”5 It was, in other words, a fight all the way. Throughout it, as bullets and shells buzzed about them, Jackson, seated on his horse and moving constantly in front of his troops, had seemed fearless. In midfight he stopped by the side of the road to write a note to Johnston. While he was writing, according to an artillery corporal who witnessed it, “A shot from a Federal battery struck centrally, ten feet from the ground, a large white oak that stood in the fence corner close to Jackson and knocked a mass of bark, splinters and trash all over him and the paper on which he was writing. He brushed it all away with the back of his hand, fi
nished the dispatch without a sign that he knew anything unusual was going on, folded it, handed it to the courier and dismissed him courteously: ‘Carry this to General Johnston with my compliments, and see that you lose no time on the way.’ ”6
In his first test Jackson had performed well. By the tactical standards of the early war, he had done exceptionally well. He had conducted an aggressive reconnaissance in force, had inflicted damage on the enemy, and then, obeying the letter of Johnston’s orders, had conducted a disciplined retreat, contesting ground all the way. He was so effective that Union general Patterson estimated Jackson’s total strength at 3,500 men, ten times what he actually had on the field. Most gratifying of all to Jackson was the performance of his men, all of whom he had trained personally and almost none of whom had seen combat before. “My officers and men behaved beautifully,” Jackson wrote Anna. Then, lest it seem that he was giving them too much credit, he added, “I am very thankful that an ever-kind Providence made me an instrument in carrying out General Johnston’s orders so successfully.”7 This was no figure of speech, no trope of the era: Jackson believed that he was merely God’s instrument, a crude tool in God’s hands. All credit for victory belonged to God, and to no one else.