Rebel Yell

by S. C. Gwynne

  “I’m very glad to hear you say so, sir,” answered the courtly Boteler, “for I’m sure we cannot afford to lose him from the service. But you don’t know General Jackson. When he takes a stand in accordance with his own ideas of duty, he’s as firm as a rock.”32

  Boteler hustled down to tell Governor John Letcher, who was just as furious about it as he was. He soon went off to vent his anger at Benjamin and Davis and anyone else he could find in the War Department. Suddenly, indignant letters and telegrams were flying across the state, and within a few days, everyone from Lexington to Richmond seemed to know about Jackson’s resignation. Many people wrote to him directly to express their outrage. Typical of these was a note from the Reverend Francis McFarland of Mint Spring, Virginia, to Jackson. “I declare to you sincerely, General, no single fact has come to my knowledge during the war that has so grieved me, as the news of your resignation, & all speak of it with deep regret,” he wrote. “When one in high position in our army, who fears God (of whom we have, alas, so few), should feel compelled to leave it, I would regard it as evidence of the frown of God upon us.”33 Even a member of Davis’s own staff wrote, “No heavier blow has befallen us or is likely to befall us.”34

  Jackson himself seemed strangely unperturbed by all the commotion. “He was the only calm and unexcited man among us,” wrote his host, James Graham, in Winchester, who was, like many of the town’s residents, indignant at the affront. “There was no severity of temper, no acrimony of language, no suspicion of anger.” He seemed unusually happy, relaxed, and talkative, and told Anna how much he was looking forward to getting back to their old lives in Lexington. As he explained it to them, “The department has indeed made a serious mistake, but, no doubt, they made it with the best intentions. They have to consider the interests of the whole Confederacy.”35

  Which was exactly what politicians in Richmond were now frantically doing. The general sentiment in the capital was overwhelmingly pro-Jackson, and Davis and Benjamin and their allies had been made acutely aware of that. In Romney, according to Jackson’s quartermaster, “Loring is like a scared turkey, and so is his command.” There was no question that Jackson must not be allowed to resign, and now a campaign was mounted to get him back, one that specifically did not include the perpetrators. Johnston had already pleaded with him not to resign, pointing out correctly that the breach of protocol was as much an affront to him as it was to Jackson. Letcher wrote him a long, supplicatory letter, which was hand-carried to Winchester by Boteler, who made the case personally. Jackson was perfectly calm during most of it, except when Boteler made the indelicate suggestion that Jackson might not want to be “an exception” in a world where others were dedicating themselves to the cause and making sacrifices. Jackson, as Boteler later recalled, answered in an agitated voice, louder than usual:

  Sacrifices! Have I not made them? What is my life here but a daily sacrifice? War has no charms for me; I’ve seen too many of its horrors. . . . The hope of being serviceable as a soldier brought me here. I gave up the peaceful pursuits of a congenial occupation for the cares, discomforts, and responsibilities of the camp. I left a very happy home, Colonel, at the call of duty, and duty now not only permits but commands me to return to it.36

  But as the evening wore on, Jackson’s resistance weakened. When Boteler was leaving, he said, “Well, what message can I take back to our good friend, the Governor?” Jackson paused for a moment, then replied slowly, “Tell him that he’ll have to do what he thinks is best for the state.” Two days later, Jackson requested that Letcher withdraw his resignation.

  It was typical of the man that, reinstated in full power, and now free from the interference of Davis and Benjamin, Jackson immediately preferred charges against Loring. There would be no forgiveness, no accounts that would go unsettled. Under the rubric of “neglect of duty” Jackson detailed Loring’s sins, from failure to attack at Bath to permitting long delays in his column’s march, allowing his command “to become so demoralized . . . that it was necessary to abandon an important expedition against the enemy.” He did not leave out the petition, which he said violated military rules, or even Loring’s harsh words—“This is the damnedest outrage . . .”—spoken about Jackson to Loring’s own troops.37 Johnston agreed with Jackson that Loring should be court-martialed for allowing his regiments to lapse into “a state of discontent little removed from insubordination.” (With the political storm raging, Loring in fact withdrew from Romney on February 3.)

  But Davis and Benjamin wanted no such thing. Jackson and Loring would be separated forever and life would go on. Loring was actually promoted, but also banished to southeastern Virginia, and his command was dispersed. He spent the rest of the war butting heads with his superiors, including Confederate general John C. Pemberton, who blamed him for the disastrous Southern defeat at Vicksburg in 1863. Jackson himself retained the lion’s share of Loring’s troops, including all of his Virginia regiments. As Jackson had predicted, Union troops reoccupied Romney after Loring had abandoned it. The damage to the tracks and to the C & O dam were repaired. On balance, Jackson’s winter campaign was hardly a success, and certainly did not endear him to his bosses, though it did make them painfully aware of the consequences of interfering with him.

  But in a very different sense, Romney was enormously telling. It was not about conquest as much as it was about command, and the exercise of it by a new general in a new war that was being invented minute by minute. The Romney Expedition witnessed the emergence of an extreme style of leadership that posed for the first time a question central to the outcome of the war: Just how far could you push both officers and common soldiers in pursuit of military goals? What the Confederates had done was no ordinary march. Jackson had forced his men to walk more than one hundred miles through a succession of brutal winter storms, high winds, ice, mud, and temperatures that stayed well below freezing. In spite of repeated protests from his officers, conditions that worsened as they marched, and troops with frozen, bleeding, bare feet, he held fast to his objective. He had imposed his will on an army of highly individualistic American volunteers and militiamen, who had freely given their allegiance to their country. They did not see themselves—indeed, could not imagine themselves—as blunt, unthinking instruments of death. The war they had enlisted in had begun as an exercise in glory and freedom. Under Jackson, it began to look more like grim servitude. Many of the men and officers in Loring’s command thought Jackson was literally crazy. He was, in fact, just slightly ahead of the soldiers’—and the nation’s—perception of what this pitiless war was all about, and just exactly how much raw suffering and death lay in the path of victory.

  Jackson had also demonstrated that pure gall and audacity counted for something. Romney had been evacuated because Jackson’s advance had scared George McClellan, who, a hundred miles away in Washington, was in no mood to engage with an aggressive rebel army of unknown size in midwinter.38 Though Generals Nathaniel Banks and Frederick Lander had wanted to move against Jackson, McClellan would not allow it.39

  After the Romney campaign Jackson wrote a note to one of his colonels, who had reported at one point that it was impossible for him to execute an order. “If your cavalry will not obey your orders,” Jackson wrote, “you must make them do it, and if necessary go out with them yourself. . . . Arrest any man who leaves his post, and prefer charges and specifications against him, that he may be court-martialed. It will not do to say that your men cannot be induced to perform their duty—they must be made to do it.” That was pure army, of course, but somehow, from Jackson’s hand, it had an entirely new ring.

  It is noteworthy that two weeks after the close of the Romney campaign, another unorthodox but fast-rising West Point graduate who was greatly underestimated by his peers also submitted his resignation. On February 16, 1862, in the western theater, Union commander Ulysses S. Grant had won a stunning victory at Fort Donelson in Tennessee, capturing twelve thousand Confederate soldiers. When asked by the opposin
g commander for terms, he had replied, “No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender.” Thus did the moniker Unconditional Surrender Grant become famous, just as Stonewall had attached itself to Jackson after Manassas. Like Jackson, too, Grant’s success had led to his promotion to major general. But following his victory at Donelson, Grant immediately ran afoul of his superior, Major General Henry Wager Halleck. Halleck, who thought him rash, overly aggressive, and far too independent, in effect stripped him of his army. On March 7, 1862, Grant wrote to Halleck:

  I have done my very best to obey orders, and to carry out the interests of the service. If my course is not satisfactory, remove me at once. I do not wish to impede in any way the success of our arms. . . . I respectfully ask to be relieved from further duty in the Department.40

  Halleck realized immediately that he had greatly overplayed his hand, and refused to accept the resignation. Grant was reinstated and given back his army. It was yet another sign that the war was changing, and that it was favoring certain individuals who did not play the game by conventional rules.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A LOOMING PERIL

  In the Confederate eastern theater, this strange war that seemed to roll on, month after month, with no actual fighting, was about to end. Everyone could feel it, and in the Southern diaries and letters of the era there is a strong sense of gloom descending. The writers could not know that the year 1862 would see a chain of battles in the East—Seven Days, Second Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg—whose previously unimaginable numbers of killed and wounded would make the first Manassas seem like a small fight. But they seemed to understand, in some part of their brains, that the war was about to take a brutal turn. It was amazing, in fact, how quickly the peaceful, warm, hopeful days of autumn had given way to the hard, bitter disillusion of midwinter. There would be no more languorous breaks, when men could ponder the gigantic illogic of what they were doing and hope that more level heads in Britain and France might intervene to settle the matter peacefully.

  The participants in the Bath/Romney expedition in January had felt the lash of the wind and had shivered in subzero weather. But its sequel was, in its own way, worse. February and March brought unrelenting sleet, snow, and freezing rain to Jackson’s army in its camps around Winchester, turning the earth to a deep, glutinous mud that engulfed horses and wagons and found its way into tents, clothing, and food and made it difficult even walking to the “sink,” as men called the latrine. As always, the camps wreaked destruction on nature: forests were cut down for firewood and breastworks, once-clear streams became clogged with filth, and the air was filled with the smell of woodsmoke and offal and feces and unwashed men—the pervading stink of armies. The dense gray clouds meant that there was no starlight or moonlight; nights were cloaked in an eerie, opaque darkness.1 Desertions—a new and unsettling problem that challenged the most basic Confederate assumptions about why the war was being fought—were becoming more and more frequent. Many of these men were walking north toward enemy lines, carrying with them not only their betrayal but troves of military intelligence as well.2 In an even more unsettling development, slaves, too, were starting to cross through enemy lines in ever-larger numbers.

  Thus the hard, unhappy winter unfolded. When Loring’s men returned to Winchester from Romney in February, they arrived cold and wet and miserable and fully loaded with bitterness and grudges held. They were openly critical of Jackson and often ended up in fistfights with the members of the Stonewall Brigade, many of whom were equally unhappy about the Romney expedition but reserved to themselves the right to criticize Old Jack. Then there were the sick, so many that Winchester itself had been turned into an enormous hospital: churches became medical wards, pews became beds. In January and early February there were some 3,200 sick in a town whose normal population was less than 5,000, with illnesses that ranged from dysentery and pneumonia to scarlet and typhoid fevers.3

  The war was closing in on them in very specific ways, too. Since the beginning of the year the Union’s bad luck had turned decisively in a string of victories. At Roanoke Island on the North Carolina coast, Union troops had landed, won a quick victory, and captured 2,500 prisoners. Confederates had been routed at Mill Springs, Kentucky. In Tennessee, Grant had won battles at Forts Henry and Donelson. At the latter he had swallowed an entire Confederate army whole. Nashville itself, the state capital, had surrendered. These defeats had immediate political consequences: President Jefferson Davis, hailed as a genius in the wake of Manassas, was now the target of sharp censure, as though in a matter of months he had somehow gone from being clever and adroit to being lamentably stupid. He had “lost the confidence of the country,” said the Richmond Whig.4 One congressman bemoaned his “incredible incompetency,” while George Bagby, editor of the influential Southern Literary Messenger, stated flatly, “We have reached a very dark hour. . . . Cold, haughty, peevish, narrow-minded, pig-headed, malignant, he [Davis] is the cause. While he lives, there is no hope.”5

  And though McClellan’s army remained in its camps around Washington, it had swelled to an enormous size: 155,000. Jackson’s fear was now fully realized. The once-raw Union recruits were well trained, highly disciplined, and superbly equipped, and now constituted a far more lethal threat than the one the Confederate army had faced the previous summer. There was no missing these signs. “Darkness seems gathering over the Southern land,” wrote a disconsolate Maggie Preston in her diary in March. “Disaster follows disaster; where is it all to end?”6 Jackson’s quartermaster, John Harman, wrote his brother in a similar mood after news of Henry and Donelson and the evacuation of Nashville. He wrote, “This is the severest blow of all. . . . I have no hope that England and France will interfere, so we will be reduced to great straights [sic].”7

  Jackson, meanwhile, laboring at his desk in his Winchester headquarters, was in an exceedingly dangerous position. There was peril all around him, it was fast closing in upon him, and he faced it virtually completely alone, with little hope of reinforcement. He was greatly outnumbered. Though on paper the valley army had ten thousand to thirteen thousand men, his ranks had been badly depleted by sickness, absenteeism, and desertion. He had also lost men to “recruitment furloughs,” the result of a December 1861 law that granted leaves and paid bounties to men who agreed to enlist for the rest of the war. (Original enlistment terms expired in April.) A number of officers were absent on trips to their hometowns to drum up new recruits.8 The effect was to reduce Jackson’s effective troops to fewer than four thousand men. Harman, who had to supply them, thought the number was more like three thousand.9

  Against him were ranged three Union forces, all under the command of Major General Nathaniel Banks, that totaled thirty thousand men—a ten-to-one advantage if they were all brought to bear on Winchester, which was not just a theoretical possibility. By the end of February, two of these forces had already crossed the Potomac River and entered Virginia; another was camped at Harpers Ferry. Banks’s main force, a day’s march away in Charlestown, had twenty-three thousand men, enough to envelop Winchester and crush Jackson where he stood.10 The Union advantage extended to weaponry, too. Many of Jackson’s men were carrying “percussion smoothbores,” outdated muskets with a range of maybe a hundred yards against a Union army that had mostly rifled weapons accurate at three times that distance.11 But many others had no weapons at all. In a remarkable letter to Governor John Letcher in early March, Jackson made what Union commanders would have considered an astonishing request. “As you say we must, under Divine blessing, rely upon the bayonet when firearms cannot be furnished,” he wrote, “let me have a substitute, so as to make the arm six inches longer than the musket with the bayonet on.” In the event that it was unclear what he was requesting, Letcher appended a note at the bottom of the letter before forwarding it to the War Department: “Respectfully referred to General Lee for information, with the hope that 1,000 pikes may be furnished to Genl. Jackson.”12 Pikes. Jackson was planning to go into ba
ttle, outnumbered seven to one, with medieval weapons against rifled muskets. Not only that but Lee, who saw pikes as a way to solve a larger weaponry shortage, actually approved the request. Long, sharp sticks were better than nothing. (The governor of Georgia, equally desperate, ordered ten thousand of them,13 but they were never used in battle in the Civil War.)

  Neither side was under any illusion about the other’s strength. Unlike in McClellan’s Washington camps, where overestimation of enemy numbers was becoming a way of life, Banks’s troop estimates, made with the help of deserters, escaped slaves, and a spy network of Union sympathizers in the Lower Shenandoah Valley, were extremely accurate. Both commanders were fully aware of the absurd mismatch.14

  Jackson was only in trouble, of course, if he could not be reinforced. To remedy this he sent Davis an urgent request in late February, along with the warning that large numbers of Federal troops would soon be moving against Winchester and thus threatening the valley itself. “It is unnecessary to say that I have not the force to send,” came Davis’s gently chiding response to Jackson’s superior Joseph Johnston, suggesting the utter futility, if not outright preposterousness, of Jackson’s plea, “and have no other hope of his reinforcement than by the militia of the Valley.” Recruit your own soldiers, in other words, even though we have no weapons to give them. Davis’s only advice, considerably less than helpful, was to “avoid the sacrifice of the army.”15

  Jackson was thus quite alone: sixty miles from the nearest of Joe Johnston’s forces across the Blue Ridge at Culpeper, thirty-five miles from his brother-in-law D. H. Hill’s four regiments in Leesburg, which in any case were spoken for, and many days’ march from Brigadier General Edward Johnson’s small command between Staunton and Franklin in the southwestern mountains. (They were there to guard the mountainous back door into the Shenandoah Valley.) The math was irrefutable: Jackson was going to have to fall back, a process that his quartermaster, John Harman, had already started by the end of February, moving clothing and supplies twenty-one miles south to the town of Strasburg. But even the sturdy, usually optimistic Harman knew that Strasburg would not be far enough away to offer safety. “I do not think they will stop there if we have to leave Winchester,” he wrote his brother on February 26. “Nobody is coming to reinforce us.”16 That meant flight—continuous, perilous flight—or destruction.