Rebel Yell

by S. C. Gwynne

  • • •

  For the South, the unquestioned Confederate heroes of the Battle of Manassas were Pierre G. T. Beauregard and Joseph E. Johnston, in that order. Bory, hero of Sumter, got most of the credit. He really deserved very little of it. It is true that, once he had figured out that his great advance on Centreville was not going to take place, and once he had understood, at length, what young Porter Alexander had instantly realized from seeing the flash of a distant gun barrel, he moved expeditiously to the scene of the battle. And it is true that he did a reasonably good job of helping establish the Confederate line around Jackson’s Virginia regiments, playing the role of dime-store general, riding up and down the lines, exhorting the men, leading a charge here and there, and generally offering a good example to green troops. But he had very little tactical effect on the battle itself.

  None of that seemed to matter. For now the main story, and the one the press was running with, was that he had stayed at the front in the heat of battle and rallied the troops and had ordered charges at the right time. As the hero of the war’s first engagement, at Fort Sumter, enormous expectations had been loaded onto him and he had, almost miraculously, lived up to them. No one knew anything yet of his astounding errors of command that morning, or of the wildly impractical if not outright crazy battle plans he had proposed in the preceding week. No one suspected that his victory rested substantially on the shoulders of subordinates acting without orders. Those annoying facts would surface soon enough. For the moment he was, again, the confirmed hero of the South.

  Joe Johnston, meanwhile, actually deserved some of the laurels he received. He had gracefully agreed to retire to the rear, behind the lines and away from the fight, but from there exercised a large and telling influence on what eventually happened, calling up regiments and brigades, organizing them, and hustling them to the front. It was those replacements, inserted into Henry Hill and Chinn Ridge, that had finally made the difference. The other great public heroes of the battle were the martyred Barnard Bee and Francis Bartow. That week their bodies lay in state in Richmond with an honor guard, while lines of mourners filed by.7

  Then there was Jackson. Though he had contributed as much or more to the Southern victory as Bee, Bartow, Evans, Hampton, or Early—and arguably had done more than either Beauregard or Johnston—recognition in the general public of what he had done came slowly. This was not due to neglect by his commanding officers. Johnston had forthrightly praised his “high, soldierly qualities” and his “admirable conduct” and given him large credit for reestablishing order on Henry Hill. Beauregard, in his official report, lauded the astuteness of the defensive position Jackson had chosen, praised his brigade’s charge across the plateau, and said, “The conduct of General Jackson also requires mention as eminently that of an able, fearless soldier and sagacious commander, one fit to lead his efficient brigade. His prompt, timely arrival before the plateau of Henry House, and his judicious disposition of his troops, contributed much to the success of the day.”8 This was solid, if not rapturous, praise, and took its place in Beauregard’s lengthy report detailing much praiseworthy officer conduct.9 Still, such a commendation tended to stay where it was—inside the official army reports of the battle.

  Jackson, meanwhile, ever modest and self-effacing in public, had experienced the battle from its blazing center and knew precisely what he and his brigade had done. In a letter to his old friend Jonathan Bennett, he wrote that “my brigade passed our retreating forces, met the thus far victorious enemy, held him in check until reinforcements arrived, and finally pierced his centre, and thus gave a fatal blow,” and compared them to Napoléon’s Imperial Guard. God gets credit, as usual, but pride, ambition, and a desire for recognition permeate his words, up to and including the exaggerated idea that his men delivered the fatal blow. They did not.

  This tension—describing his personal achievement in a desperate fight while simultaneously denying that he had anything to do with it—persists in a letter Jackson wrote to his wife, Anna, the day after the battle:

  My Precious Pet—Yesterday we fought a great battle and gained a great victory, for which all the glory is due to God alone. Although under a heavy fire for several continuous hours, I received only one wound, the breaking of the longest finger of my left hand. . . . My horse was wounded, but not killed. Your coat got an ugly wound near the hip, but my servant, who is very handy, has so far repaired it that it doesn’t show very much. . . . The battle was the hardest I have ever been in, but not near so hot in its fire. I commanded in the centre more particularly, though one of my regiments extended to the right for some distance. There were other commanders on my right and left. Whilst great credit is due to other parts of our gallant army, God made my brigade more instrumental than any other in repulsing the main attack. This is for your information only—say nothing about it. Let others speak praise, not myself.10

  The problem was there were no others, just at that time, speaking any praise. Almost all commendations in Southern newspapers went to Beauregard, Bee, Bartow, and various South Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana regiments. The Richmond papers—enormously influential in molding Southern opinion since their articles were reprinted everywhere—did not mention Jackson’s role in the battle for an entire week. Then it was to report that he had had his finger blown off (untrue) and a horse shot from under him (untrue) but had remained “cool as a cucumber.” So complete was the silence that, by the first week in August, Anna was upset over what appeared to be the total neglect of her husband’s accomplishment. On August 5, Jackson, who was transparently sensitive to all this, wrote to calm her down: “And so you think the papers ought to say more about your husband! My brigade is not a brigade of newspaper correspondents. . . . It is not to be expected that I should receive the credit that Generals Beauregard and Johnston would, because I was under them; but I am thankful to my ever-kind Heavenly Father that He makes me content to await His own good time and pleasure for commendation.”11 Meaning, presumably, that he fully expected that “commendation” to come.

  Unbeknownst to Jackson or Anna, however, his fame, or the first intimation of his fame, was already quietly spreading throughout the South. Within three days of the battle, the story of Bee exhorting his troops was already being told privately in Richmond among relatives and friends of soldiers. Confederate diarist Mary Chestnut, a bellwether of sentiment in Richmond and a private clearinghouse of information, wrote in her entry of July 24 that her husband “took the orders to Colonel Jackson, whose regiment stood so stock still under fire that they were called a ‘stone wall.’ ”12 This suggested that the story, too, was making its way through the army, where in many quarters there was already a clear sense of what Jackson and his men had done. Then, on July 25, the Charleston Mercury, another highly influential wartime newspaper from South Carolina, published its version of the Bee/Jackson exchange, rendering it as follows:

  He rode up to General Jackson and said, “General, they are beating us back.”

  The reply was, “Sir, we’ll give them the bayonet.”

  General Bee immediately rallied the remnant of his brigade, and his last words to them were: “There is Jackson standing like a stone wall. Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer. Follow me.”

  His men obeyed the call; and, at the head of his column, the very moment when the battle was turning in our favor he fell, mortally wounded.13

  Though the sequence of events was completely wrong, as was the case in all early accounts and most later histories—Bee’s warning to Jackson that he was being driven was uttered at least three hours before his “stone wall” comment—no one knew that or cared to know it, because the moment, as presented, was so perfectly dramatic. The star of the story, of course, was Bee, the hometown hero, the man who had stood against the Federal hordes on Matthews Hill. But it had the side effect of placing Jackson’s name, in an equally heroic context, before large numbers of newspaper readers in the South. On July 29 the Richmond Dispatc
h published the story; on August 15 the Lexington Gazette in Jackson’s hometown ran it. With these notices, public curiosity about Jackson started to grow. It is noteworthy that as the nickname began to attach itself to him, it also attached itself to his brigade. Soon enough, Thomas J. Jackson would be Stonewall to everyone in the South and eventually the North as well. But his five Virginia regiments that had fought so bravely and been so badly bloodied got the name, too. For the rest of the war and into the annals of American history, they would be called the Stonewall Brigade, the most famous fighting unit of the Confederacy.

  Jackson gave a rare explanation of his performance under fire to John Imboden, who had asked him, in frank astonishment, “How is it that you can keep so cool, and appear so utterly insensible to danger in such a storm of shell and bullets as rained about you when your hand was hit?” Jackson gazed at the young officer of artillery and replied, “Captain, my religious belief teaches me to feel as safe in battle as in bed. God has fixed the time for my death. I do not concern myself about that, but to be always ready, no matter when it may overtake me. That is the way all men should live, and then all would be equally brave.”14

  • • •

  As the story of Jackson’s exploits on Henry Hill seeped forth into a nation that had never heard of him before, there were others, in both the United and the Confederate States, who very definitely had heard of him. These were men who had fought in the war with Mexico fourteen years earlier, most of whom were still alive and now fighting for one side or the other in the new war. The Mexican-American War was, at bottom, a political landgrab on an enormous scale. As Ulysses S. Grant phrased it in his memoirs, it was “one of the most unjust [wars] ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”15 Yet from a soldier’s point of view it was a sort of glorious aberration, a grand adventure to conquer a foreign land that had resulted in a series of military victories, some of them spectacular, all of them exotic and without precedent. There was nothing in the regular army to compare it to. No service in the Indian wars could possibly match the romance and grandeur of it, and none of the men who marched triumphantly into Mexico City or Monterrey among the drawn sabers and fluttering regimental flags and bands playing “Yankee Doodle” ever forgot those moments. In the face of overwhelming numbers, they had conquered a nation. The Mexican-American War had produced many heroes, most prominent among them Zachary Taylor, who would soon become president, and Winfield Scott, who would soon run for president. But it also featured, among its lesser lights, a slim, soft-spoken subaltern from western Virginia who had done something so extraordinary that his fellow soldiers and officers would not soon forget that, either.

  The US Congress had declared war on Mexico on July 22, 1846. What followed was essentially a war of territorial expansion, though the nominal reason for it was the 1845 US annexation of Texas, which Mexico still considered one of its northern provinces. Americans wanted to keep Texas, and, under the expansionist banner of Manifest Destiny, also had designs on Mexico’s other territories in the West, including California. Jackson had graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point on June 30, just in time for the war. He was twenty-two years old, and ranked a respectable seventeenth out of fifty-nine cadets in his class. He had received his marching orders in July, then traveled to Mexico with an artillery company in the late summer and early fall, an arduous, country-girding journey, mostly by riverboat.

  In late November 1846 he arrived in the northern city of Monterrey, having just missed its conquest by the dashing General Zachary Taylor. Jackson found, to his disappointment, that there was little to do there. But he soon received new orders to join General Winfield Scott’s 10,000-man expedition by sea to the coastal city of Vera Cruz, where he would launch an invasion aimed at Mexico City, 260 miles inland. It was an extraordinary operation, not least for the cast of officers who were present, many of whom would later gain fame in the Civil War. They included the following future generals: Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, George McClellan, Ambrose Burnside, Pierre G. T. Beauregard, Joseph E. Johnston, Braxton Bragg, George Meade, Joseph Hooker, Fitz John Porter, Albert Sidney Johnston, D. H. Hill, and John Pope.

  Jackson had been thrilled by the prospect of combat. On the way to Vera Cruz he met a friendly if somewhat sharp-tongued young lieutenant named Daniel Harvey Hill, who had already seen fighting at Monterrey. Jackson had been recommended to Hill by a mutual friend, George Taylor, who had told Hill that Jackson “will make his mark in this war. I taught him at West Point. He came there badly prepared, but was rising all the time, and if the course had been four years longer, he would have been graduated at the head of his class. He never gave up on anything.”16 The two young men were introduced—they had been four years apart at West Point—and Hill was surprised to meet, instead of a rising star who seemed destined for greatness, a very “reserved and reticent” young man. In spite of his shyness, he was desperate to know what Hill’s battle experiences had been like. As the two walked along the beach, Jackson asked him questions about commanding troops under fire. “I really envy you men who have been in action,” the youthful Jackson told him. “We who have just arrived look upon you as veterans. I should like to be in one battle” [Hill’s italics].17 Hill later recalled that when Jackson spoke those words “his face lighted up, and his eyes sparkled as he spoke, and the shy, hesitating manner gave way to the frank enthusiasm of the soldier.”18 (Harvey Hill was destined to loom large in Jackson’s life: as the man who got him his job at VMI, as his brother-in-law, and as a hard-fighting Confederate general who fought with Jackson in many battles.)

  Jackson, who commanded a unit of artillery, saw his first action during the US Army’s siege of Vera Cruz. He performed exceptionally well under fire. One of his West Point classmates even observed that “Old Jack” was “as calm in the midst of a hurricane of bullets as though he were on dress parade at West Point.”19 He was cited for “gallant and meritorious conduct,” and received a promotion to brevet first lieutenant—by no means a routine upgrade.20 He marched west with the army in April 1847, played a minor role in the American victory at the Battle of Cerro Gordo, and arrived near Mexico City in mid-August, now assigned to one of four light artillery companies under the command of the flamboyant and theatrical Captain John Bankhead Magruder. Magruder was a strange fellow. He was a drinker, a braggart, and a social climber. He was also a mean-tempered and often harsh disciplinarian who, for his own personal advancement, exposed his men to extreme danger. For this reason young officers did not like to serve under him. According to one observer, he despised Jackson, who was in most ways his opposite and, in any case, was not from an F.F.V. (First Family of Virginia) and so not worth Magruder’s time. But for Jackson this was an unrivaled opportunity, and he had eagerly applied for the transfer. He wanted to be where the battle was hottest, and Magruder’s presence as a commander virtually guaranteed that.

  Jackson got his wish. At the Battle of Contreras, some ten miles south of Mexico City, he found himself in a three-hour duel against vastly superior Mexican artillery. In spite of the heavy enemy fire, Jackson refused to back down. He “stayed there without a thought of withdrawing,” recalled a fellow soldier. “He had been ordered there, and his conception of duty as a lieutenant required him to stay. His men were falling all around him, and he too, with the last, would have fallen.”21 When the other section commander in his battery fell, mortally wounded, Jackson advanced into the smoke and confusion and continued to fire his guns. The Americans won the battle, but it was a hard fight, and Jackson had distinguished himself again. Whatever Magruder may have thought of him initially, he now dispensed high praise, saying that Jackson’s conduct was “conspicuous throughout the day.” General David Twiggs included Jackson on a short list of officers distinguished for their “coolness and determination . . . whilst under fire.”

  Jackson was beginning to stand out. His bravery under fire at Contreras—he was one of those soldiers who seemed completely at ease
with death flying all around them—won him both a regular promotion to first lieutenant and a brevet promotion to captain. When asked later how he had reacted to being in a full-scale battle for the first time, he replied, in a rare moment of immodesty, that he had only been “afraid that the fire would not be hot enough for me to distinguish myself.”22 Though he later cited his faith in God as the reason not to fear death on the battlefield, at this point in his life he was not yet a deeply religious man. Long before he placed his life in the hands of God, even a casual observer could see that the young man wasn’t afraid of bullets or cannon fire.

  Still, he was not immune to the horrors of war, which he was fast learning. He wrote to his sister, Laura, “I have since my entry into this land seen sights that would melt the heart of the most inhuman of beings: my friends dying around me and my brave soldiers breathing their last on the bloody fields of battle, deprived of every human comfort, and even now I can hardly open my eyes after entering a hospital, the atmosphere of which is generally so vitiated as to make the healthy sick. . . . To die on the battlefield is relief compared to the death in a contaminated hospital.”23

  Jackson had fought well at Vera Cruz and Contreras, but those battles were not what Mexican-American War veterans remembered him for. What they would recall, in later years, was what he did in the final, decisive fight for Mexico City. As Winfield Scott’s army moved ponderously forward, the last obstacle to the country’s capital was a large castle atop a two-hundred-foot hill southeast of the city known as Chapultepec. As the army advanced, Jackson’s artillery unit, which consisted of two six-pounder cannons and was attached to an infantry regiment, found itself on a narrow causeway beneath the castle’s battlements, engulfed by enemy fire. Jackson later described his situation as being fully exposed “in a road which was swept with grape and canister, and at the same time thousands of muskets from the Castle itself pouring down like hail.”24 The Americans were trapped there, unable either to retreat or advance.