by S. C. Gwynne
Even these accounts did not upset General Banks terribly. They all seemed a bit hysterical, delivered by scared men who had likely fled whatever fighting was taking place. “Owing to what was deemed an extravagant statement of the enemy’s strength,” Banks wrote, as though yawning while he wrote the words, “these reports were received with some distrust.”4 His aide David Hunter Strother put it more bluntly. After hearing the apparently tall tale of Jackson and twenty thousand men, he remarked to Banks “that this fellow was some coward who had ingloriously fled the field and covered his ignominy by monstrous lying.”5 In spite of his skepticism, Banks dispatched a regiment of infantry along with some cavalry to Front Royal.
But the news kept rolling in. Throughout the evening telegrams arrived from Winchester, relaying information from various refugees—soldiers, teamsters, sutlers, and cavalrymen—that Front Royal had fallen to a force of Confederates, variously estimated at 15,000 to 20,000.6 At about midnight, yet another officer reported that his unit had been destroyed and that he had seen a rebel force of 5,000 or 6,000 “fall back on Front Royal.” By this point it was clear that something had happened out on the foggy perimeters, and that it had involved more than just a few companies of men.
Amazingly, it was not until 10:00 p.m. that Banks took any of this seriously, and it was midnight—ten hours after the initial attack—before he fully acknowledged that something disastrous had occurred on his flank, a mere twelve miles away. By the time he went to bed, sometime after 1:00 a.m., he had come to accept, finally, that his worst fears had been realized, and much faster than he had ever dreamed possible. He and his staff now agreed—conceded might be a better word—that Ewell was at Front Royal and that the shadowy Jackson was very likely moving northward toward them along the turnpike. “The extraordinary force of the enemy could no longer be doubted,” wrote Banks later. “It was apparent also that they had a more extended purpose than the capture of the brave little band at Front Royal. This purpose could be nothing less than the defeat of my own command.”7 He was used to being the hunter. He now understood that he was being hunted. He did not yet understand—and would have been far more upset had he realized—that the principal hunter, Jackson, in person and accompanied by the veteran army that had defeated Schenck and Milroy at McDowell, was also on his doorstep at Front Royal. Anticipating the worst, Banks got his wagon trains rolling late that night toward Winchester, which also happened to be in the direction of Maryland, safety, and home.
At seven o’clock in the morning that very same day—May 23—under the same hot sun and fair skies, some seventy-five miles to the east, President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton stepped from a steamboat onto a dock on the Potomac River. The place was Aquia Landing, a Federal logistical and supply depot less than ten miles by rail from the town of Fredericksburg. The two men had traveled all night from Washington to get there. It was a happy occasion. They had come to meet personally with General Irvin McDowell and to review his Army of the Rappahannock, all in anticipation of the big assault on Richmond.
In spite of McClellan’s dithering, Union prospects had never been sunnier, and Lincoln knew it. The Union victory at Shiloh and the seizure of New Orleans were fresh memories, as were the even more recent victories by McClellan at Yorktown (May 3) and Williamsburg (May 6). In the last two months McClellan had managed to haul his sprawling army up the soggy, brush-choked peninsula to the gates of Richmond. Confederates had evacuated Norfolk and its shipyards on May 9, and were forced to scuttle their prize ironclad warship Virginia (formerly the Merrimack) on May 11. Admiral David Farragut’s warships were steaming north toward Vicksburg, Mississippi, after capturing New Orleans, in a strategic thrust that would likely secure Northern control over the entire Mississippi River. And Union forces under John Pope and Andrew H. Foote had cleared the upper Mississippi nearly to Memphis with the capture of Island No. 10.
With the arrival of General James Shields’s division from the valley, McDowell’s army, which he paraded grandly that day before Lincoln and Stanton, was now 40,000 men and 86 cannons strong. It was almost as big as the entire Confederate force that had opposed McClellan on the peninsula. Three days hence, under Lincoln’s orders, McDowell was to advance toward Richmond.8 There was no one in the Union camp that day, or in the War Department in Washington, who believed that, with 150,000 to 160,000 men attacking the Confederate capital from two directions, they could fail to take the city. All the big logistical questions had been settled. What could possibly go wrong?
• • •
While Lincoln and Stanton were making plans with McDowell at Fredericksburg, and Banks’s men were idling in the languid sunshine at Strasburg, Jackson and Ewell were pushing their soldiers as fast as they could down the Luray Valley toward Front Royal and the small Union garrison there. Their column stretched for twelve miles. They had started at dawn, marching four abreast down the river road, following the course of the South Fork of the Shenandoah in the shadow of the long, humped ridges of Massanutten Mountain on the west and the soaring Blue Ridge on the east. The Luray Valley was a miniature of the Shenandoah, and just as lovely. Jackson and Ewell rode with the vanguard. Jackson’s division was the old valley army: all Virginians, most of them local. It held three brigades under Brigadier Generals Charles S. Winder and William B. Taliaferro, and Colonel John A. Campbell. Ewell’s division was a much more representative unit of the Confederacy, containing regiments from Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. They were organized into four brigades under Brigadier Generals Arnold Elzey, Isaac Trimble, and Richard Taylor, and Colonel William C. Scott. The army’s cavalries were commanded by Virginians: Brigadier General Turner Ashby and Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Flournoy. Colonel Stapleton Crutchfield, a former Jackson student at VMI, was in charge of artillery.
Just how many men Jackson actually had in his command as he marched on Front Royal is harder to say. Civil War troop strength is a notoriously muddy statistic, and the paper “returns” of an army often bore no resemblance to the size of the force a commander could deploy on a battlefield. Jackson, in the valley, offers a classic example. On May 3, he claimed 8,597 infantry. This number reflected huge growth since the Battle of Kernstown six weeks before, mostly in the form of new recruits who were anticipating being drafted. This probably seemed to the Confederate high command to be very good news. It wasn’t, really. In the next three weeks the valley army suffered from what amounted to mass desertion and mass straggling—often it was hard to tell the difference between the two—much of it the direct result of the extreme hardship of Jackson’s marches. Though the new recruits were most susceptible to this, forced marches with scant rations and minimal equipment in brutal weather conditions affected the veterans, too. On May 3 Jackson listed the Stonewall Brigade as containing 3,681 soldiers. Less than three weeks later, a mere 1,600 remained, a loss of 57 percent of the force. Such reductions were not limited to Jackson’s favorite brigade. “We are all broken down with fatigue, loss of sleep, and irregularity in eating,” wrote brigade commander Samuel V. Fulkerson to his sister on May 16. “Jackson is killing up all my men.”9 He estimated that his brigade had been reduced by half. As Jackson approached Front Royal, his division had less than 5,000 of the original 8,600 available for duty.10 The result was that Jackson had far fewer troops than the Confederate command thought he did. So his actual strength was “closer to 12,000 effectives.”11 That was at least 4,000 fewer than anybody thought.
Whatever the true number, it served as no deterrent to Jackson’s plans, which were now focused on cutting Banks off from his lines of supply and communication and destroying him. Jackson had made a good start. Once again, he had made an army disappear, only to reappear where the Union command did not expect to see it, and far sooner than Banks or anyone in the War Department in Washington would have believed physically possible. Though the existence of the single pass through the Massanutten connecting the Shenandoah and Luray Valleys
was a mystery to no one—Shields had just passed through it on his march to Fredericksburg—Jackson had used it just as effectively, in combination with Ashby’s lethal cavalry screens, as he had used the Virginia Central Railroad in his advance on McDowell.
It was as though Jackson had warped time itself: neither Banks nor Frémont nor any other Union commanders had ever moved with such sustained, deliberate, and determined speed over such large distances. They did not yet understand a general who virtually jettisoned his regimental supply trains, ordered his men to march without knapsacks or tents and with only light haversacks and a few days’ cooked rations, who was happy to have his men sleep on the ground in the rain or snow and get up before dawn and march all day. Day after day. Though Milroy and Schenck had certainly learned how fast their army could move when fleeing, in mortal peril, from Jackson, no commander in the war had yet done anything like what Jackson had done on a sustained basis. Union commanders did not think to look for Jackson in the Luray Valley, because they did not think he could possibly have marched his men that quickly from Franklin, a distance of ninety miles in bad weather over mostly substandard roads that included mountainous terrain. They were looking for him, once again, where he wasn’t.
At about 2:00 p.m. on May 23, while Ashby sliced west to cut telegraph lines, Jackson’s Maryland and Louisiana regiments, emerging from the shadows of the Luray Valley, drove in the Union pickets and swept away the provost guard in the small village of Front Royal. Then they smashed into Colonel Kenly and his roughly one thousand men in camp just north of town. Like Banks, Kenly was taken completely by surprise. Like Banks, he had no idea that Confederate infantry was even in the general area. And because Banks for some reason had allotted him no cavalry, he had possessed no way to see what was coming at him. What followed was a surprisingly spirited fight, considering the lopsided Confederate advantage. Kenly, who had no idea how big a force he was facing, gamely withdrew to a promontory called Richardson’s Hill and there, with a couple of rifled, ten-pounder Parrott guns, he held off the Confederates for two hours.
He was actually quite lucky that he wasn’t simply blasted off the hillside, as he should have been. His luck came in the form of a critical mistake by Jackson’s artillery chief, Stapleton Crutchfield, who had graduated first in the VMI Class of 1855 but had not yet fully learned his craft. He had ordered shorter-range smoothbores to locations appropriate only for longer-range rifled guns. This meant that they did not have the range even to suppress Kenly’s own tiny battery, which, in the absence of counterbattery fire, was devastatingly effective.12
But Kenly did not have the numbers to last. At four thirty, as his Union regiment was slowly being surrounded, he fell back across the two forks of the Shenandoah that met just north of Front Royal, and found another piece of high ground, where he made another valiant stand, using his cannons to maximum advantage. Jackson, impatiently watching the action, and lamenting the unforgivable absence of cannon fire—“Oh, what an opportunity for artillery!” he complained later in the battle—ordered Flournoy’s cavalry to seize the Parrott guns.
At 6:00 p.m., finding himself again in the closing jaws of a trap, Kenly, who still did not comprehend that he faced a twenty-to-one disadvantage, fell back northward again to the hamlet of Cedarville, to make a final stand. As Flournoy’s four companies of cavalry closed in on what was left of his force, Union riflemen delivered one last devastating volley. Then, as they tried to reload, the Confederate horsemen were upon them. What followed was a rare, rollicking, often hand-to-hand fight between cavalry and infantry, featuring flashing sabers cleaving skulls, arms, and hands, clubbed muskets thudding against wheeling horsemen, the crack of pistol fire, and the screams of men and horses.13 Colonel Kenly’s head was split open by a saber. He would survive, but the battle was soon over. The Union soldiers who fled were quickly rounded up and captured.
Though Kenly and his men had fought bravely, the battle was a thorough defeat for the Union. Once again, Jackson’s brilliance in strategic maneuver had made the fight itself almost an afterthought. At a cost of only 36 killed or wounded, Jackson had killed or wounded 83 and captured 691 Union soldiers. He had secured large quantities of commissary, quartermaster, and sutlers’ supplies and had captured two splendid rifled cannons. After the battle Jackson remained on the field for several hours, overseeing the roundup of the prisoners and making sure his precious captured supplies were properly collected and inventoried. The day had been a rousing success. Not the least of it was General Ewell’s personal epiphany. His courage in standing by Jackson had paid off, and his opinion of the man had changed. “The decided results at Front Royal,” wrote Ewell, taking no credit for himself, “were the fruits of General Jackson’s personal superintendence and planning.”14 It seemed that the “crazy” general actually knew what he was doing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
A LETHAL FOOTRACE
Banks decided to run, as fast as he could, back to Winchester, eighteen miles north of his Strasburg camps. As he saw it, there was nothing else he could do. If he fled with his army over the mountains to the west, he would have to abandon his enormous cache of food, medicine, and equipment. To stand and fight, with rebel armies in his front and rear (as he thought), was suicidal. If he marched north, he at least had a chance of beating Jackson in a footrace, which was exactly how he saw it. “It was therefore determined,” Banks wrote later in his official report, “to enter the lists with the enemy in a race or a battle, as he should choose, for the possession of Winchester, the key of the Valley, and for us the position of safety.”1 He did not need to add that the ultimate safety was Winchester’s proximity to the Potomac and the North. (Union-occupied Harpers Ferry was thirty miles northeast.) The day ahead was thus all about maneuver, pitting Banks against Jackson in the very thing Jackson was best at.
At about nine o’clock on the cool, drizzly morning of May 24, Banks’s troops moved out. They were not quite aware yet that they were running for their lives, though this was exactly what they were doing. Ahead of them, already strung out for more than fifteen miles along the valley pike, was their enormous train of five hundred army wagons plus another two hundred civilian wagons of one sort or another. Some of the wagons that had left before dawn were already rolling into Winchester as Banks’s infantry started marching. With them, too, were large numbers of escaped slaves they had collected in their travels. Banks no longer commanded just an army but a vast assemblage of refugees and whatever assets they had managed to drag along with them. Many believed that Stonewall Jackson would kill them outright. All were terrified of being sent back to their masters. As one Connecticut soldier saw it, there were “half as many negroes as soldiers.”2 They, too, traveled with wagons, some of them almost comically overloaded with human cargo. All were headed to Winchester by a single road: the hard macadam of the valley pike. It was a curious exodus, a sort of dark, fearful version of the same army’s confident, triumphal march south in March and April.
Banks himself was deeply pessimistic. The way north was crossed in two places by main roads where his army and train could be intercepted. He had received reports that a Confederate army was already on its way to Winchester. His army could be sliced in half. Or he could arrive in Winchester only to find the town occupied by rebels. Either way, all or part of his army would be cut off. And of course he still believed that the main body of the Confederate army—the strange, aggressive Jackson himself—was very likely closing in on him from behind. Though he did not betray his emotions to his officers, Banks believed that he might not survive the day. An hour before he departed, filled with longing for his family and fearful that he might never see them again, he wrote his wife the sort of letter many Civil War soldiers wrote before going into battle. He told her about Colonel Kenly’s defeat at Front Royal, complaining bitterly that “our govt. separates its forces into little powerless squads without power to crush the foe—anywhere.” In his anger at his bosses he had forgotten that his predicament w
as largely his own fault. Or maybe that explains his excessive bitterness. Then he as good as bid her farewell:
Kiss the dear children for me. I love them and their mother greatly. Dear Birney—how I should love to hug her once more. And Fremont and Maud. Darling children. How I love them . . . I want our dear children to be just, to be truthful. That embraces everything . . . I have been very fortunate in having so good a friend in my wife and I can never say how dear she is to me. Take care of our dear children. They are very fine creatures. It would be a pleasure to live if only to watch them; but life is not worth much. Remember me affectionately to my mother, my brothers and sisters. I need not write any more. I am in good health and good spirits—the best. Have perfect confidence in getting through our difficulties. Good-bye.3
His wife may not have believed his feeble assurances at the letter’s end, particularly since they were followed by the resoundingly final sign-off of a man who, apparently, fully expected to die.
Whether he lived or died, Banks’s path, at least, was clear to him. Jackson, his larger force bristling on the Union flank, had no such advantage. Ahead of Jackson that day was a chess-like game of contingencies, multiplying options, and psychological puzzles. In spite of advances in weapons and mechanization, communications in the Civil War sometimes seemed to exist on the same medieval level as sanitation and personal hygiene. Just as it seemed incredible that it had taken Banks eight or more hours to figure out what had been happening twelve miles from him, it would seem to defy logic that Jackson, a man with an uncanny sense of terrain and troop movement, could not get a fix on the location of a 6,500-man army with a fifteen-mile-long wagon train. Yet that, strangely, is what happened on the day after the Battle of Front Royal.