Rebel Yell

by S. C. Gwynne

  • • •

  At about this time something happened—quietly and without attracting notice—that would have a profound impact on the course of the war. Jackson, in his camp in Elk Run Valley, started to correspond for the first time in earnest with Robert E. Lee, and thus began an extraordinary partnership. Though Lee was officially President Davis’s military adviser, the former had begun, with Davis’s full approval, to function more like his chief of staff. And as more and more of Johnston’s, Davis’s, and the War Department’s time was consumed dealing with McClellan’s move up the peninsula, Lee began to exert more influence on the rest of Virginia. He was mostly trying to prevent McDowell, with his thirty-four thousand men at Fredericksburg, from advancing on Richmond and linking his forces with McClellan’s. Jackson had already proven his ability to tie up Union troops in Virginia. Quietly, informally, and with Davis’s approval, Lee had assumed de facto charge of the valley.

  On April 21 Lee wrote a letter to Jackson that must have seemed a revelation to the younger man. Jackson’s orders since March had always been, in effect, to protect himself and his supply lines, to venture near the enemy but not too near, to engage the enemy without taking undue risks. Now he heard a new voice, using an entirely new vocabulary. Lee opened by telling Jackson that he was worried about the concentration of Union troops near Fredericksburg. He then wrote, “If you can use General Ewell’s division in an attack on General Banks, and to drive him back, it will prove a great relief to the pressure on Fredericksburg.”28 Attack. Drive him back. Lee had watched Jackson’s bold, if imperfect, moves in the campaigns leading to Romney and Kernstown. Reading Jackson’s correspondence from the valley, he was convinced that the two shared the same deeply aggressive instincts. It is worth noting that, at this moment, few in either the United States or the Confederate States yet had any idea of this rougher, more combative side of the courtly, soft-spoken Lee; Jackson was one of the first to see it and grasp it. Somehow, the two kindred spirits—whose personalities could not have been more different—had found each other.

  And now Lee was offering Jackson precisely the opportunity he was looking for. On April 25 he went further. “I have hoped in the present divided condition of the enemy’s forces,” Lee wrote, “that a successful blow may be dealt them by a rapid combination of our troops. . . . The blow, wherever struck, must, to be successful, be sudden and heavy. . . . I cannot pretend at this distance to direct operations depending on circumstances unknown to me and requiring the exercise of discretion and judgment as to time and execution, but submit these suggestions for your consideration.”29 This was the music Jackson had been waiting to hear.

  What Lee got back from Jackson on April 29 was exactly what he wanted—proposals for three different, equally daring offensive strikes at Union forces: one against Frémont’s vanguard west of Staunton; another against one of Banks’s detached forces near New Market; and still another against Front Royal and Winchester, in the northern part of the valley. Pleased, Lee left the choice to Jackson. That was just as well, because Jackson had already decided on the first—and probably the most audacious—of the three. By the time Jackson received Lee’s response, his men were already marching.30 Staunton, the prosperous commercial center of the southern valley, a critical base of food, clothing, arms, and other supplies, and the vital railhead of the Virginia Central Railroad, was the true key to military operations west of the Blue Ridge. Losing Staunton meant losing the valley and giving the Union the ideal staging ground for an eastward strike against Richmond. Staunton must be held. But the town was now threatened by two Union armies. On April 27 the vanguard of Frémont’s western Virginia force, 3,000 men under General Robert H. Milroy, had seized the tiny, mountain-ringed town of McDowell, twenty-eight miles west and north of Staunton. Still farther north, at Franklin, was General Robert C. Schenck with another 3,000. Behind him, in the long valley of the South Fork of the Potomac, was Frémont himself, with roughly 10,000 more. Banks, meanwhile, had 19,000 at Harrisonburg, twenty-eight miles north and east of Staunton. That gave the Union some 35,000 troops within striking range of Staunton.31 United, they would be able to seize the town and its critical railhead, thus completing the strategic conquest of the valley. That was the problem.

  Jackson’s solution was an extremely risky military operation. It would depend heavily on both speed and deception. He would move through the valley to Staunton, directly in front of Banks’s encamped army at Harrisonburg and in full view of Banks’s scouts and spies—there was no other way he could go—and join forces with General Edward Johnson. Together they would strike Milroy’s Union force at McDowell before he could be reinforced by Frémont. Jackson would then turn, head back into the valley, and link with General Richard Ewell, who was currently camped with his division just on the other side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Together they would attack Banks. If Lee had doubts—he must have, considering how many things could go wrong with such a plan, starting with the likelihood that Banks would attack Jackson at Staunton—he did not express them. Perhaps it was enough that, whatever Jackson did, he would cause headaches for the Union. Keeping to his Winchester vow to hold no war councils, Jackson told no one but Lee, and even Lee got only the barest of essentials. His generals, from Ewell to Johnson, were told only the parts of it that they absolutely had to know, which, of course, drove both of them to distraction.

  Jackson’s first step was to summon Ewell, who promptly crossed Swift Run Gap and entered the easternmost part of the valley on April 30 with eight thousand men. The idea was for him to take Jackson’s place at Elk Run Valley while Jackson moved west, to Staunton. Ewell possibly understood that his purpose was to threaten Banks’s flank. But he did not know what Jackson planned to do, or who or when he might be planning to attack. Ewell’s men and officers, who were thrilled to be marching to the valley, were under the impression that they were going to join up with Jackson’s army, and were excited at the prospect. But when they arrived they found, to their astonishment, that Jackson’s army, whose distant campfires they had seen the previous evening, was nowhere in sight. “There was nothing, save the smoldering embers of the campfires of the night previous,” wrote one soldier later. “Jackson had disappeared; whither no one seemed to know. Quietly, in the dead of night, he had arisen from his blanket, and calling his troops around him, with them had disappeared.”32 Ewell, who understood that he was being kept in the dark, was angry and frustrated, a reaction that was fully in keeping with his character.

  Dick Ewell was one of that impressive array of volatile, difficult, and highly idiosyncratic personalities who populated the Confederate army’s upper ranks. He was a slight five foot seven, with a broad, prominent dome of balding scalp above a fringe of brown hair, an angular nose, and a less than luxuriant beard and mustache. In the famous description of his fellow Confederate general Richard Taylor, Ewell, with his “bright, prominent eyes . . . and a nose like that of François of Valois,” bore “a striking resemblance to a woodcock; and this was increased by his bird-like habit of putting his head on one side to utter quaint speeches.”33 He was also, wrote Taylor, a person “of singular modesty.” Like Jackson, he suffered from dyspepsia. He would often dine only on a special preparation of wheat. He was an odd mixture of gentleness and brutal profanity. “He was a compound of anomalies,” wrote John B. Gordon, later a general, who served in Ewell’s brigade, “the oddest, most eccentric genius in the Confederate army. He was in truth as tender and sympathetic as a woman, but, even under slight provocation, he became externally as rough as a polar bear.”34 While what Lee later termed his “quick alternations from elation to despondency” and “his want of decision” made him ill suited for independent command, he was at bottom a smart, tough officer who liked to fight, could follow orders, and harbored no grand ambitions.35 He had graduated thirteenth of forty-two cadets in the West Point Class of 1840 and served with distinction in Mexico and later in the American West. He was liked and respected by his men, who affectio
nately called him Old Bald Head. Standing in the mud below Swift Run Gap, staring at the picturesque fields, woodlands, and quaint gristmills of the valley below, he could not help but wonder what Jackson, about whose sanity he was already beginning to question, had in mind.36 He stayed put, stewed about his predicament, kept his own counsel, and waited for orders.

  Jackson, meanwhile, was on the move, pushing his force through a nightmare of mud and quicksand and moving water to Port Republic, heading for a pass through the Blue Ridge known as Brown’s Gap. The sixteen-mile march was agonizingly slow. According to staff member Henry Kyd Douglas, it was conducted “over soft and bottomless roads into which horses and wagons and artillery sank, at times almost out of sight, dragged along by main force of horses and men, the General himself on foot, lifting and pushing amid the struggling mass.”37 Jackson often dismounted to help gather fence rails and stones to give the wagons more traction. Once, while he was doing that, he found himself behind a common soldier who was doing the same thing, and cursing Jackson for putting him through such travails. “It is for your own good, sir,” came the voice, and the man turned and beheld the general himself.38 Dead horses and busted wagons littered the sides of the road.

  Weather was not the only worry. The men were exhausted. They were also eating a shockingly deficient diet. The basic Confederate fare in the war consisted of two principal items: salt pork and cornmeal. The former, sometimes called “bacon” or “sow belly,” was what most Americans of the era would have considered nasty stuff: often blue-colored, cloyingly salty, fatty meat with hair, dirt, and skin left on. When the order was given to “cook three days’ rations,” soldiers would gather in small “messes” around a fire and a pot, and attempt to render their food into a form that could be carried in their grease-logged canvas haversacks. This process usually began by cooking the chunks of pork, then taking the grease and mixing it with the cornmeal. That mixture could be mixed with water, then fried to make easily transportable “corn dodgers” or other types of cooked cornbread patties. Either way, it was cornmeal and grease. Needless to say, such a diet was hard on the digestive tract. Sometimes their Commissary Departments did not even have sufficient supplies of salt pork, in which case soldiers would be given the dreaded, unpalatable “salt beef,” a nauseating horror made of the lesser parts of the cow—organs, neck, head—that the soldiers called “salt horse.” To dress it up, they would chop it, stew it in water, then crumble cornbread into it. The mixture was called “coosh,” and it was not much of an improvement. The coffee was rarely authentic—more likely a substitute made from such things as chicory, roasted acorns, okra seeds, or wheat.39

  Though this was the basic diet, it was not all Confederate soldiers ate. If they were lucky—or if they had captured Union supplies—they might get molasses, sugar, peanuts, dried peas, and even fresh vegetables. Their picket guards often traded with their Union counterparts, exchanging Southern tobacco for authentic Northern coffee. If they had time, they foraged for everything from corn to apples, peaches, cherries, spring onions, potatoes, eggs, and turnips. Best of all were the packages from home. But most of this was a matter of serendipity. Jackson’s troops often subsisted on what might be considered starvation rations, which were virtually a guarantee of poor health.

  On May 3, a warm, sunny spring day at last, Jackson and his army finally crested the heights of Brown’s Gap, crossed through the Blue Ridge Mountains, and descended through the brilliantly green, rolling landscape of Albemarle County to a small depot on the Virginia Central Railroad known as Mechum’s River Station. Word of his departure, which ricocheted through the southern valley, was greeted with shock and sadness in Staunton and other cities. “Suddenly the appalling news spread through the Valley that [Jackson] had fled to the east side of the Blue Ridge,” wrote artillerist John Imboden. “Only Ashby remained behind with one thousand cavalry. Despair was fast settling on the minds of the people.”40 As it was among Jackson’s own men, convinced now that they really were leaving for good. At Mechum’s River Station, Jackson had—remarkably—managed to commandeer half a dozen trains with locomotives, which stood along the main tracks and sidings. His men boarded the cars sullenly. (A few regiments departed on foot.41) No one doubted, wrote Imboden, that the train “was to be taken to Richmond. . . . It was Sunday, and many of his sturdy soldiers were Valley men. With sad and gloomy hearts they boarded the trains. . . . When all were on, lo! They took a westward course!”42 Loud cheers rang through the cars. They weren’t running away after all. They were going back to the valley!

  If Jackson’s men did not know whom they were going to fight, at least they knew where they were and in which direction they were going, facts that continued to elude the Union command. Jackson’s cat-and-mouse game in late April and early May was a work of considerable tactical brilliance, even if some of its effects were unintentional. Early Jackson historians gave him full credit for his deception; certain later chroniclers took some or all of that credit away. But a close reading of Union war dispatches shows that in a world full of spies, traitors, deserters, casual informants, and escaped slaves, where military secrets often migrated through enemy lines with amazing speed, Jackson managed to confuse almost everybody, and almost all of that confusion worked to his own advantage.

  Banks was Jackson’s principal victim. Almost from the moment he had been ordered by Stanton to withdraw and divide his forces, he had begun to have second thoughts, alternating between confusion and worry about his own well-being. Judging from his dispatches, he began to be afraid for his soon-to-be-split army’s safety, a condition that would worsen in the coming weeks. On May 2, less than three days after reasserting the absolute truth of his claim that Jackson had left the valley, Banks wrote Frémont that Jackson “was seen today moving toward Port Republic. . . . His march is possibly a feint, possibly to join Johnson and attack Milroy near Staunton.” Thus Banks had completely reversed himself. Jackson was in the valley after all, he now asserted. Jackson was not only there but was also in motion and dangerous. Banks happened to be right, for a change, and he was miraculously right again in his May 3 wire to Stanton, saying that Jackson had been reinforced in the valley by Ewell.

  Now Banks began to rethink those sweepingly dismissive dispatches of just a few days before. “I do not think it possible to divide our force at this time with safety,” he wrote Stanton that same day in a new, cautionary tone that must have mystified the secretary of war. (Shields was still with him and would not depart, with his ten thousand men, until May 12.) The next day, Banks, now reconciled to Jackson’s supposed presence in the valley, wired to say that “our officers are all confident that Jackson’s force is near Port Republic.” But, once again, he was completely wrong. This time the reason was, ironically, that Jackson had finally fulfilled Banks’s own earlier claims and actually left the valley. (Just how befuddled the Union command was, as a whole, was evident in Irvin McDowell’s note to James Shields on May 2, while Jackson was mired in the mud on the way to Brown’s Gap, saying that he was well east of the Blue Ridge and that he had “pushed through Gordonsville” on his way to Richmond.)

  At this point—May 4–5—Banks, Frémont, Milroy, and the entire Union command lost Jackson entirely. Their dispatches reflect this. They had seen him moving toward Port Republic, and then, suddenly, they did not see him at all. Jackson’s railroad ploy was, in retrospect, brilliant. No one saw through it. By feinting east across the Blue Ridge, then making an about-face and moving his force by train from Mechum’s River Station to Staunton, he had effectively made his army disappear. Banks, unaware of this movement, which placed his own army squarely in Jackson’s rear—an enormous tactical advantage—asserted with placid confidence in a dispatch to Stanton on May 6 that Jackson’s force, which he still believed was near Port Republic, was “greatly demoralized and broken.” Union general Robert Milroy was just as badly deceived. On that same day he wrote his boss, John Frémont, saying that Jackson’s movement from Port Republic towar
d Staunton or Waynesboro—which was a complete fantasy in the first place—was merely a feint in the direction of Confederate general Edward Johnson in the western mountains. And Milroy knew why it could not be anything but a feint: “[Jackson] cannot move from Port Republic toward my advanced position without leaving Banks in his rear . . . which he will not do.”43 That, of course, was exactly what Jackson was doing.

  By midday the first train had arrived at Staunton, creating an uproar in the streets as the electric news of Jackson’s arrival spread throughout Augusta County.44 Jackson, worried that such a celebration would draw attention, ordered Ashby’s men to seal off the town. No one was allowed in or out. Thus far his plan was working. Various Union commands did not know where he was; or, more accurately, Federal sources reported him at many locations, including Waynesboro, Port Republic, Gordonsville, Harrisonburg, Staunton, and en route to Richmond.45 Even Richard Ewell did not know where he was. The other news Jackson received, to his undoubtedly pleasant surprise, was that Banks had withdrawn from Harrisonburg on May 4 and was moving back north again.46 Exactly why, Jackson did not yet know.

  By May 5 the trains had carried Jackson’s entire army to Staunton, where they were joined by the command of General Edward “Allegheny” Johnson, a loud-voiced, bluff, popular old warhorse with a Mexican-American War eye injury that made one of his eyes wink continuously. He was a hard fighter, popular with his troops, and a man Jackson liked and admired. Jackson’s army was also joined by two hundred cadets from VMI, whom he had summoned north from Lexington. Their role would be, as Jackson explained to VMI superintendent Francis H. Smith, limited to “care of the prisoners and baggage trains,” which would allow “volunteers to go into battle who would otherwise be kept out.”47 Jackson met Johnson on May 6, wearing, for the first time, a full uniform of Confederate gray. Until then, he had worn only his old, mud-splattered blue major’s uniform from VMI. He had gotten a haircut, too. At dawn on May 7, the commands of Jackson and of General Edward Johnson, some ten thousand men, marched west and north into the mountains for the town of McDowell.