by S. C. Gwynne
He had also benefited from the brilliant debut of Jeb Stuart, whose Virginia cavalry had been instrumental in making the retreat an orderly one. At one point Stuart and his men daringly swept around the Federal right flank and captured an entire company of Union soldiers—a neat trick considering how badly Stuart and Jackson together were outnumbered. “Col. Stuart and his command merit high praise,” Jackson reported, “and I may here remark that he has exhibited those qualities which are calculated to make him eminent in his arm of the service.”8 Though estimates of the numbers of killed, wounded, and captured at the Battle of Falling Waters vary widely, it is likely that each side suffered several dozen killed and wounded, in addition to the forty-nine Union prisoners taken by Stuart and the ten rebels captured by the Union.
Johnston was quick to realize what Jackson had accomplished. He was a combat veteran and knew a talented field commander when he saw one. On July Fourth, he wrote the War Department in Richmond to recommend that Jackson “be promoted without delay to the grade of brigadier-general.”9 But General Lee had already come to that conclusion himself, in spite of whatever reservations his associates in Richmond had about Jackson’s rash behavior. In a letter to Jackson dated July 3, Lee wrote, “My dear general, I have the pleasure of sending you a commission of brigadier-general in the Provisional Army, and to feel that you merit it. May your advancement increase your usefulness to the State.”
Jackson was elated. “My promotion was beyond what I anticipated, as I expected it to be in the volunteer forces of the state,” he wrote Anna, proudly enclosing the letters from Lee and Johnston.10 What he meant was that his commission no longer came from the state of Virginia. His appointment as brigadier general was to something entirely new: the Provisional Army of the Confederate States of America. He would be a general in the Confederacy, an organization that was slowly but steadily assuming authority over the states. Still, not everyone in Richmond was convinced that his promotion was a good idea. When President Jefferson Davis announced it, according to one Richmond insider, “it provided laughter among those who thought they knew him well.”11
Jackson knew nothing about what well-dressed men in Richmond salons and offices were thinking. He knew only that he had come very far in a very short time, and he had no doubt that God had made it happen, or that he deserved it. Though he did not say so, it must have thrilled him to realize that only two and a half months had passed since he had arrived, unheralded, unappreciated, and without a commission, in the teeming streets of Richmond.
CHAPTER SIX
MANEUVERS, LARGE AND SMALL
The real war was coming. There was no doubt about it now. It would be here with the summer’s heats and would be fought somewhere in the state of Virginia by large numbers of men, and the resolution would be Armageddon-like in its clarity. There was very little disagreement about that. “Everyone seemed to think one battle would settle it,” wrote Confederate officer William Blackford, “and those in authority, who had brought on all the trouble, who ought to have known better, thought so too.”1 The world would be sorted out, and there would be glory in the sorting.
Above all, nobody wanted to miss the show.
Witness, then, the 1st Virginia Brigade, 2,300 men in four regiments under the command of newly minted brigadier general Thomas J. Jackson, restive in its camps in early July in the heretofore peaceful and prosperous town of Winchester, at the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley, sixty miles east of Washington, DC. (This is also known, counterintuitively, as the Lower Valley because it is farther downstream on the Shenandoah River.) The past month had not exactly been glorious. The men had been ordered, much against their will and that of their commander, to retire from their base at Harpers Ferry in mid-June. They had been warned, in late June, not to engage the enemy if the enemy was in force, had engaged him anyway at Falling Waters, and had retreated under orders to the hamlet of Darkesville, just south of Martinsburg. They had waited there for a battle that never materialized, and then on July 7, to their anger and disbelief, they had retreated yet again under orders, this time into the safety of Winchester.
There was a clear theme here. Flight. Joe Johnston’s Army of the Shenandoah Valley was moving inexorably west and south. The action and glory, meanwhile, as everyone knew, almost certainly lay to the north and east. It seemed to be a war of maneuver, and they were losing it. Union commander Robert Patterson, inching down upon them from the north with eighteen thousand men, was certainly of that opinion. Crowing about his occupation of Harpers Ferry and Martinsburg, on the Virginia side of the Potomac, he observed that “we will thus force the enemy to retire and recover, without a struggle, a conquered country.”2
Even more unsettling, word had arrived that a Confederate force in western Virginia had been soundly beaten and its commanding general killed by a thirty-four-year-old military genius and foursquare Union hero named George Brinton McClellan. The men of Jackson’s 1st Virginia Brigade had been told they were already greatly outnumbered by the Union forces in Maryland. Now, with a victorious Union army apparently running roughshod over the northwestern part of Virginia, it seemed likely that Patterson would be coming with even more men, which would mean more caution, more retreat. It all seemed quite dispiriting. Jackson, irritated and restless, chafing at this enforced passivity, could do nothing about it. “I want my brigade to feel that it can itself whip Patterson’s whole army,” he wrote in a letter, “and I believe we can do it.”3 That was about the last thing Joe Johnston or Jeff Davis or anyone else was going to let him do.
So Jackson’s men settled, somewhat sullenly, into camp life, where they were relentlessly drilled by their stern commander and awaited whatever sort of war might descend upon them. They also discovered the first of war’s horrors, the sort that affected both armies equally and would eventually claim two soldiers’ lives for every one lost on the battlefield: disease. Epidemics of mumps, measles, and smallpox swept through the valley army in the late spring and early summer, adding to the misery already caused by the inevitable, intractable camp illnesses: diarrhea, dysentery, malaria, and typhoid. Jackson’s brigade was especially hard hit by measles and typhoid. Men who had never seen a battlefield were already dying painful deaths, and the number of soldiers on the sick list in Johnston’s army rose to a remarkable 1,700 as of mid-July, nearly 20 percent of his force. Much of the sickness came from the galling sanitary conditions in the camps. The mid-nineteenth century had seen many technological advances, but they did not yet include an understanding of bacteria or microbes. One of the key causes of disease in camp was the contamination of the water supply from what passed for latrines, which were nothing more than patches of ground, usually next to a watercourse, that were covered with fresh earth once a week.4 But men with severe dysentery and explosive diarrhea often did not make it to the appointed area, and so the soldiers were literally eating, sleeping, and drilling in a murk of infectious germs. Diarrhea, especially (which was also a symptom of typhoid and dysentery), was one of the major killers of the war. Even in the relatively controlled conditions of Richmond hospitals, more than 10 percent of all diarrhea cases resulted in death, usually from severe depletion of bodily fluids.5
Jackson, meanwhile, was getting used to the idea of command. His new rank had changed the fundamental nature of his relationship with the world around him. VMI cadets who had been his students, including those who had mocked and teased him, and former colleagues who now served under him could feel it. Behind every word, order, or request now rested the full weight of a brigadier general in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States. His obsessions with duty and detail now, in the perilous life of a large army, took on a different cast. Jackson, taking it all in stride, ignored the heat and the dust, which were plentiful, and the epidemics that were engulfing his tents (which included fleas), and ordered six drill sessions per day, punctuated by camp duties, roll calls, and meals. He did not limit himself to daytime work. The men marched at night, too. Often for half the
night. “Jackson is considered rigid to the borders of tyranny by the men here,” wrote one captain in his brigade. But that same captain also said he believed that Jackson “enjoyed the entire confidence of his command.”6 Jackson, in turn, was immensely proud of them.
As many of his soldiers noted, then and later, as hard as Jackson could be, he was also solicitous of his troops’ welfare, sometimes almost motherly in his concern for their well-being. He was, as any of his friends from Lexington who knew him well could tell you, a strange mixture of sternness, severity, and deep kindness. What his wife—who saw him clearly most of the time—called “this mingling of tenderness and strength” was on display in a remarkable letter he wrote to one of his officers who had requested an extension of a furlough to visit gravely ill and dying family members:
My Dear Major—I have received your sad letter, and wish I could relieve your sorrowing heart; but human aid cannot heal the wound. From me you have a friend’s sympathy, and I wish the suffering condition of our country permitted me to show it. But we must think of the living and of those who are to come after us, and see that, with God’s blessing, we transmit to them the freedom we have enjoyed. What is life without honor? Degradation is worse than death. It is necessary that you should be at your post immediately. Join me tomorrow morning.
Your sympathizing friend, T. J. Jackson.7
His tenderness was very real, but it was also merely a sentiment; he would not allow it to interfere with what he considered to be his duty, and he would not budge in his insistence that the officer leave his stricken family.
The men were getting used to his idiosyncratic ways, too. Jackson was no less eccentric than he had been at VMI, though his behavior was now on display in a much larger arena, before thousands of men. He had his peculiar way of walking; his peculiar, ungraceful way of riding Little Sorrel, who seemed to be an extension of his personality; his dirty uniform and odd way of wearing his hat so that you could barely see his eyes; and his tendency to walk away abruptly in the middle of a conversation. He dined on cornbread and water, slept on “the floor of a good room” in a house with little or no furniture in Winchester, though he also found that he liked sleeping outside and spent several weeks sleeping outdoors on the ground, saying that it “agreed with me well, except when it rained, and even then it was but slightly objectionable.”8 And, of course, he prayed and read his Bible and consecrated every act of his life, every thought he had, to God. He did this consciously, every day. The blessings of his life—and in the month of July in the year 1861, Jackson believed he was in a high state of grace—all came from the hand of God. At least part of his devotion involved reminding himself constantly of just that.
• • •
Some 60 miles away, across the valley, through the towering ramparts of the Blue Ridge and the river-crossed lands of the Piedmont, the enemy was busy preparing for the war that the Northern newspapers, with rising shrillness, were demanding. The central—and somewhat bizarre—characteristic of the war was that the capital cities of the two enormous nations—the Confederacy alone encompassed 750,000 square miles and 3,000 miles of coastline—were just 90 miles away from each other. And so while recruits since mid-April had been swarming into large towns and cities across the country, in places such as St. Louis and Columbus and Atlanta and New Orleans, organizing themselves into regiments and brigades to fight the war across a broad front, the inescapable reality was that the first big fight was going to be—had to be—close to the power centers of the two nations, if only because losing one capital or the other would likely end the war almost before it started. “On to Richmond!” was the battle cry in the Northern newspapers. It was a catchy slogan and communicated a simple idea: Richmond, an easy and close target, would fall, and the South would lose whatever credibility it had as a military power, both at home and with such potential allies as France and England. Peace, on Union terms, would follow.
Thus by mid-July, a mere three months after the surrender of Fort Sumter, three Union armies confronted three Confederate armies in the Virginia theater, along the most likely routes of invasion. Across the Potomac River from Washington camped a Union army of 35,000 men, commanded by Irvin McDowell. Facing it, some thirty miles to the west, at a strategic railroad junction called Manassas, was a Southern army of 20,000, commanded by Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard. To the west, in the Shenandoah Valley, Joe Johnston’s 11,000 at Winchester faced Robert Patterson’s 18,000, and on the Chesapeake Bay coast at Fortress Monroe, John B. Magruder’s 5,000 Confederates squared off against Benjamin Butler’s 15,000. Thus the underdog Confederacy began the war outnumbered and outgunned at every point in Virginia: 64,000 to 36,000.
But there was plenty of reason for hope. Though the war had barely begun, the South had already found in Beauregard a hero for the ages, a five-foot-seven-inch bantam with an erect military carriage, piercing eyes, and a magnificent Van Dyke. He was a Creole from an important family in Louisiana. Like many other highborn sons of the South, the army had seemed a natural vocation. He had attended West Point and performed splendidly there, graduating second in the Class of 1838. In the Mexican-American War he had served as an engineer on General Winfield Scott’s staff, alongside Robert E. Lee and George McClellan. At the battle for Mexico City, he was wounded three times on the same day, and finished the war with the brevet rank of major. For the next thirteen years he mostly rebuilt and repaired forts in the South. In January 1861 he assumed the superintendency of West Point, only to be asked to resign soon afterward because of his pro-secessionist sentiments.
All that gave him a record as accomplished as most officers in either army. But what made the dapper little man with the hair-trigger sense of dignity famous—indeed, an instant legend—was the Battle of Fort Sumter. It was Beauregard, as commanding officer in Charleston, South Carolina, who had demanded the surrender of Union troops. And it was Beauregard who had ordered and supervised the thirty-four-hour artillery attack on the fort. It had not been his idea to shell the fort, and in the “battle” that followed the only casualty was a Confederate soldier who bled to death from a misfired cannon. And, indeed, the fort he was pounding into submission was, for all practical purposes, defenseless, and was about to run out of food anyway. Virtually any officer could have given the same orders.
None of that made any difference, nor did the fact that Beauregard was not an especially engaging personality. The war was commenced, and Beauregard, the brave and audacious soldier who had ordered the first shot, was an instant hero.9 The Southern press portrayed him as a Napoleonic figure—that part was hard to miss in a compact, French-speaking soldier with grand ambitions—and when he traveled north in late May to assume command of the Confederate Army of the Potomac in front of Washington, throngs turned out to meet his train, cheering rapturously. When he arrived, Carolina troops who had served under him roared, “Old Bory’s Come!”10
The North, as yet, had only McClellan to pit against Beauregard, and he was off in the mountains of western Virginia, still largely unknown. Beauregard’s opposite number, commanding the Union forces in front of the capital, was Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, an army lifer who had never actually commanded troops in combat. A large, plain-looking man with a doughy countenance, a large, square head, a square jaw, and a squarish beard to go with it, he had, like so many general officers in the war, attended West Point, where he graduated in 1838, eight years before Jackson. His subsequent career had been spent on various military staffs, starting as an aide-de-camp in the Mexican-American War and ending in the War Department in Washington, where he served under Winfield Scott and Joseph E. Johnston, among others. Though he had pursued a solid, unspectacular career, he was earnest, intelligent, self-confident, and politically well connected, most notably to Lincoln’s Treasury secretary, Salmon P. Chase. On May 14, 1861, McDowell, still a brevet major, was vaulted over many officers who were superior in rank and length of service and made brigadier general. Soon he was given the most important com
mand in the Union army.
He was in many ways a hard man to like. Stiff, formal, and aloof, a poor listener who often drifted while others were speaking—unless the subject was fishing—he had a singular inability to remember names and faces. Even his friend Salmon Chase thought him a bit distant. “He is too indifferent in manner,” Chase wrote. “His officers are sometimes alienated by it. . . . There is an apparent hauteur—no, that is not the word—rough indifference expresses better the idea, in his way towards them, that makes it hard for them to feel any warm personal sentiment towards him.”11 He was a strict and unforgiving disciplinarian, which made him unpopular with the volunteers. He was also a massive eater, so much so that, while in the midst of a meal, he often paid little attention to the people around him. “At dinner he was such a Gargantuan feeder and so absorbed in the dishes before him that he had but little time for conversation,” wrote a Union officer who attended formal dinners with him. “While he drank neither wine nor spirits, he fairly gobbled the larger part of every dish within reach.”12 Nevertheless, he would be the one to fight the big, definitive battle that would decide the fate of the nation.
If McDowell seemed to be a minor sort of man—in talent and career achievements—his immediate supervisor, Winfield Scott, was in most ways larger than life. Scott was the nation’s preeminent soldier. He was, as it happened, actually older than the United States itself. Virginia-born in 1786, he had been a hero as a young man in the War of 1812, became general in chief of the US Army in 1841, and was the chief architect of its stunning victory in the war with Mexico. He ran as the Whig Party candidate, and lost, in the presidential election of 1852. He was everyone’s idea of what a general ought to look like. A massive six feet five inches tall, with splendid side-whiskers and hair swept back from a noble brow, and dapper in his blue uniform, he was, as his subalterns said in Mexico, a magnificent man.