by S. C. Gwynne
Jackson had put the advance units of his army on the road at 6:00 a.m. Two hours later they had reached the tiny hamlet of Nineveh, about eight miles north of Front Royal. The assumption of such a march, of course, was that Banks was withdrawing along his supply lines to Winchester. But that was only a guess: Jackson had received no confirmation that Banks was actually doing that. What little intelligence he had gotten, in fact, from an engineer who had climbed the northern end of Massanutten Mountain to surveil the enemy, was dead wrong. His engineer had told him that Banks had two divisions totaling twelve thousand men, instead of the single division he actually had. At three to one—the real odds—a frontal assault would likely win the day. At three to two or one to one, Jackson’s approach had to be much more measured.
Jackson, meanwhile, was keenly aware that Banks had other options besides Winchester, a destination the former Massachusetts governor might avoid precisely because, with his men and trains strung out along the valley pike, he would be so completely vulnerable to attack. If Jackson and Ewell lunged toward Winchester, Banks could easily slip behind them, march east through Front Royal, out of the valley, and back to the safety of Washington. Banks could also just stay put at Strasburg, perhaps awaiting reinforcements from Frémont to the west—a logical and extremely plausible option—which created its own complex set of contingencies.
And so, at 8:00 a.m., Jackson brought his entire army to an abrupt halt. He waited more than two hours for some intelligence of Banks’s movements to emerge from the fog of war. Earlier that morning, he had dispatched his cavalry commander George H. Steuart with three hundred horsemen in the 2nd and 6th Virginia cavalry regiments north and west to the village of Newtown to see what, if anything, was moving down the pike. At 10:00 a.m. Steuart’s riders collided with Banks’s enormous line of wagons—the part carrying Federal sick and wounded—where they caused a great deal of havoc before being driven back by artillery. Black teamsters, especially, had panicked and fled at the sight of Confederate cavalry, leaving several dozen wagons in the ditch. At 11:15 Steuart’s courier caught up with Jackson with news of what they had seen. Banks was indeed marching north, wagon train and all. But just where was his main force? Determined to find out, Jackson split his army, leaving Ewell in place north of Nineveh—merely ten miles from Winchester—and backtracking with his own division through Cedarville and then onward to the valley pike at Middletown. Jackson’s patience, already wearing thin, was further tested by a feisty, stubborn force of Federal cavalry who, fighting to buy time for the main army, held him up for another two hours on the road to Middletown.
After a long and frustrating wait, the forward units of Jackson’s force soon discovered what they were looking for. At 3:30 p.m. at Middletown, they crashed with murderous ferocity into Banks’s army, which here consisted of massed groups of cavalry mixed with supply wagons. What followed, as Jackson’s troops opened from the Union flank with muskets and cannons, was a scene of such horror that even some of the Confederate participants had trouble watching it. Men and horses fell screaming. Solid shot from the artillery cut massive, bloody chunks out of Union formations. As one Union soldier put it, lying beside his dead horse, there was a “mass of living and dying men piled up in a heap on the road.”4 Jackson, rarely bothered by slaughter in battle, later wrote, “In a few moments the turnpike, which had just before teemed with life, presented a most appalling spectacle of carnage and destruction. The road was literally obstructed with the mingled and confused mass of struggling and dying horses and riders.”5 He had shown less sympathy on the battlefield itself. When Henry Kyd Douglas, standing next to him, told him that he thought their attack amounted to murder, Jackson replied simply, “Let them alone.” Meaning, let his soldiers do their awful work. Chief of Staff Robert Dabney saw the scene in biblical terms. “Behold the righteous judgment of God,” he wrote, surveying the bloody wreck of a once-proud Vermont cavalry regiment, “for these are the miscreants who have been most forward to plunder, insult, and oppress us!”6 Perhaps Jackson saw it that way, too. The clash was over in a few minutes. Jackson’s men took two hundred prisoners.
But the victory was short-lived. Though Jackson had severed Banks’s column and destroyed or run off several regiments of cavalry, this had not given him any clearer picture of the location of the main body of Banks’s infantry. Had he hit the head, midsection, or tail of the snake? Unknown to him, Banks, upon hearing about Steuart’s attack that morning, had ordered his infantry to leap-frog the long wagon train. Much of his army was thus well down the road to Winchester when Jackson arrived in Middletown. Banks himself arrived in Winchester at about 7:00 p.m., about two hours after his advance units. Jackson had in fact struck the rear guard—the snake’s tail.
Still, he did not know that. He wanted to destroy Banks’s entire army, not just a piece of it. And in the service of that idea he now made what would turn out to be an extremely costly mistake. Hearing the musket fire of a minor skirmish between stranded Union troops and the 9th Louisiana, he now guessed, incorrectly, that a significant portion of the Union army still remained cut off on the other side of Newtown. So he turned his army south. It took him another full hour and a half—until five forty-five—before he finally understood that he faced only a small and insignificant Union force. He immediately sent a rider to Ewell, who was stewing yet again about sitting and doing nothing all day, with a message saying, “Major-General Jackson requests that you will at once move with all your force on Winchester.” Nearly twelve hours after his first units started out toward Winchester, Jackson finally launched the all-out pursuit of Nathaniel Banks.
Little daylight remained. The distance between Middletown, where Jackson started his final push, and Winchester was about twelve miles. Some of Banks’s infantry and supply wagons were still on the valley pike, en route to Winchester. But they were no longer vulnerable to the sort of attack that would have destroyed them outright a few hours before. Darkness fell, and with it came a series of Union rearguard actions starting at Newtown—ambushes, really—that slowed Jackson’s march to a crawl. Nor could Ewell, leaving as late as he did, and arriving near Winchester sometime after 10:00 p.m., have hoped to catch many Union troops. In darkness they had had to pick their way up the valley pike, which was cluttered with abandoned wagons, blankets, guns, oil cloths, sutlers’ stores, and other equipment—while the 2nd Massachusetts Regiment and other pieces of Banks’s army laid ambushes for them and contested their advance, setting up behind stone walls and opening up with brilliant muzzle flashes that lit up the night. Near Newtown, Ashby’s troopers, who had been leading the way, fell out of rank altogether and abandoned themselves to the looting of the Union supply train, stealing anything they could get their hands on, including horses. They were lost to the army.7 With all the stops and starts, and the stress of Federal bullets whirring by them in the darkness, it was another severe march by men who had already marched astounding distances since early March. Soldiers slept as they walked. Each time the army stopped, dozens simply collapsed.
Jackson’s objective had been a high ridge just southwest of Winchester. At 3:00 a.m. the army paused just north of Kernstown, the site of a battle that already seemed to have taken place a long time ago, in a very different world. Jackson fully intended to drive his army those last few miles. With his men dropping out by the hundreds—often facedown, asleep—Colonel Samuel Fulkerson summoned up his old authority as a Virginia state judge, approached Jackson, and told him that enough was enough. He had to stop and rest his army or he would not have an army to fight with in the morning. “My men are falling by the roadside,” he said. “Unless they are rested, I shall be able to present but a thin line tomorrow.” Jackson listened patiently, then said, “Colonel, I do not believe you can feel for your men more than I do. This is very hard on them, but by this night march I hope to save many valuable lives. I want to get possession of the hills of Winchester before daylight.” Jackson thought for a moment, then said, “Colonel, you may rest
your command for two hours. I will go on with my own brigade.”8 But he soon relented. Though he hated giving up the high ground, and would not have ordered a halt on his own, he realized that he had pushed his army to the limits of its endurance. It had been a strange, unsatisfying day, with an inconclusive finish. What was undebatable was that, because of his own prudence and caution, however justifiable, Jackson had missed one of the great opportunities of the young war: to swallow an enemy army whole. Ulysses S. Grant had done it at Fort Donelson in Tennessee three months before, the only general to do so in the first year of the war.9 He was famous for it.
• • •
President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, pleased with the success of their military mission to Irvin McDowell’s army, arrived in Washington shortly after sunrise on May 24, having steamed through the night up the Potomac River. They bid a hearty good morning to their colleague Salmon P. Chase, secretary of the Treasury, who wrote in his diary that the two men were “highly gratified by the condition of the troops and anticipating an imposing and successful advance [against Richmond] on Monday the following.” The trip had, in fact, been one of the high points of Lincoln’s brief career as commander in chief.
His buoyant mood ended abruptly the moment he and Stanton walked into the War Department and saw the grim, crestfallen faces of their staff, who had just received word of Jackson’s rout of Kenly at Front Royal. Throughout the morning the news got worse as dispatches streamed in from the valley. Some were accurate, some wildly wrong. Banks was fleeing down the valley. Banks was cut off from Winchester. Six thousand to ten thousand rebels were on the road to Winchester. All this was made worse by the doomsday dispatches from the headquarters of Brigadier General John Geary, who commanded an infantry regiment and some cavalry on the eastern side of the Blue Ridge whose main purpose was to guard the Manassas Gap Railroad. Trusting unreliable sources, a nearly hysterical Geary reported that some twenty thousand rebel troops were closing in on him from the west and south, meaning that at least one of those armies was headed in the general direction of Washington, DC. None of these phantom rebel armies existed. But with the panic Jackson had created ricocheting around Washington, no one in the corridors of power could yet be sure of that. From Harpers Ferry came a deeply disturbing telegraph, saying, “The rebels have cut the wires between Strasburg and Winchester,” and that there was “fighting within 8 miles of Winchester.”
By midafternoon, while Banks moved north and Jackson was still trying to figure out where his adversary was, Lincoln and Stanton, now in their own thick fog of war, had concluded that General Banks had likely been cut off at Middletown and was therefore stranded midway between Strasburg and Winchester without his supply lines. Wherever he was, the reports all indicated that he was in grave danger. If Banks was in trouble, of course, so potentially were the garrison at Harpers Ferry and the B & O Railroad, Washington’s lifeline to the West. No one had to remind the War Department that, in Confederate hands—specifically, Jackson’s hands—the Shenandoah Valley also constituted a loaded shotgun pointed directly at Washington. Most Union forces in Virginia were either at Fredericksburg or in front of Richmond. What, exactly, was there to stop Jackson from marching on Washington? He had a habit of popping up in inconvenient places, and there was no telling where he might appear next.
Lincoln acted calmly and resolutely, considering how badly he had just been whipsawed, and in spite of whatever regret he may have felt in having stripped away troops from the valley to feed McClellan’s ego. In response to this news he sent three telegrams: one to John Frémont, one to Irvin McDowell, and one to George McClellan. Frémont was immediately dispatched to save Banks. “The exposed condition of General Banks makes his immediate relief of paramount importance,” Lincoln said. “You are therefore directed by the president to move against Jackson at Harrisonburg and operate against the enemy in such a way as to relieve Banks.” To McDowell he delivered the harsh news that he was chopping his prodigious command in half and sending half of it to save Banks: “You are instructed to lay aside for the present the movement to Richmond and to put twenty thousand men in motion at once for the Shenandoah.” To McClellan, who still believed he was facing a rebel army well in excess of a hundred thousand men, he gave the worst news of all: McDowell’s entire force would now be withheld from him. It was McClellan’s oldest and worst nightmare: to be deprived of troops by cynical politicians and left to face a numerically superior enemy.
Judging from the reactions of Frémont and McDowell, one would have thought that traveling to the Shenandoah to fight Stonewall Jackson was a cruel fate indeed. “This is a crushing blow to us,” replied McDowell, whose main argument was that he could never get there in time to help Banks, needing at least ten days to get twenty thousand men into the valley. He later added, with undisguised bitterness, as though his job really did not consist of doing what his commander in chief asked him to do, “I shall gain nothing for you there, and shall lose much for you here. It is therefore not only on personal grounds that I have a heavy heart in the matter, but that I feel it throws us all back, and from Richmond north we shall have our large masses paralyzed and shall have to repeat what we have just accomplished.” He closed by asking Lincoln if he wanted McDowell to personally command such an expedition. The answer, to his chagrin, was yes.10 To make doubly certain that McDowell would comply, Lincoln immediately dispatched Salmon Chase to explain the orders to him in person.
Frémont, while nominally agreeing to obey the order, also tried mightily to beg off. The last thing he wanted was to be sent to rescue Banks. The enemy was everywhere around him, he told Stanton. He had few supplies. As usual, rain had bogged down the mountain roads. And so on. He found no sympathy. From Lincoln he received an irritated reminder that “this movement must be made immediately.” Of the three recipients of Lincoln’s missives, only McClellan, uncharacteristically, appeared to take the news well, replying stoically that “I will make my calculations accordingly.” (The next day, however, he was writing his wife with more indignation than usual, saying that the president “is terribly scared about Washington” and that “it is perfectly sickening to deal with such people. . . . I get more sick of them every day—for every day brings with it only additional proofs of their hypocrisy, knavery & folly.”11)
Thus did Jackson, who had not yet even engaged with the main body of Banks’s troops, rearrange, on a single afternoon, the carefully laid Union plans to join together two armies at Richmond and thus bring crushing numbers to bear against Joseph Johnston. By the night of May 24 more than thirty-five thousand troops were under orders, quite specifically, to stop Stonewall Jackson.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE TAKING OF WINCHESTER
The evening after his army’s miraculous escape from a more powerful enemy, Nathaniel Banks wired Lincoln to tell him that he had arrived safely in Winchester. Considering what had just happened to him, his dispatch was remarkably self-possessed. “I concluded,” he wrote the president, “that the safest course for my command was to anticipate the enemy in the occupation of Winchester. My advance guard entered this town at 5 this evening with all our trains in safety.”1 Put in those unembellished terms, Banks’s situation didn’t sound so dire after all, though in the past thirty hours he had actually lost more than 25 percent of his supplies and more than a hundred of his men had been killed or wounded and another thousand taken as prisoners. But he had somehow outrun Jackson and Ewell. And against all odds he had arrived with most of his division intact in the sanctuary of Union-occupied Winchester, though his escape had been more the result of the Confederate confusion than of his own tactical acumen. Lincoln’s worst fear—that Banks had been cut off—had not been realized.
Whatever comfort this may have offered the president or his War Department in Washington, however, was pure illusion. The stark truth was that as of dawn on Sunday, May 25, Banks and his entire army were in immediate danger of annihilation. Though Jackson had not c
aught his adversaries on the road, he had actually won the battle of maneuver by pushing his troops so relentlessly the night before, closing hard on his enemies, and precluding any possibility of reinforcement or unmolested retreat. He had thus left Banks only one option other than surrender. To protect his supply trains and whatever retreat he could muster, Banks had to fight. The alternative—instant, headlong flight before Jackson and his preternaturally aggressive cavalry—was unthinkable. At the same time, the raw Confederate numerical advantage meant that Banks was going to lose the fight. And though the dapper New Englander, as he gamely put it, was “determined to test the substance and strength of the enemy by actual collision,” the only real question was how badly, and how quickly, he was going down. Whatever his faults may have been, Banks did not lack courage. His practical-minded division commander General Alpheus Williams had already concluded privately that he and his men were going to be prisoners of war. For Union troops, the dreary Sabbath dawn heralded approaching death, destruction, and imprisonment. They would fight hard anyway.
The Battle of Winchester began on the foggy morning of May 25 at 4:30 a.m. with the sharp crack of Jackson’s muskets and the rolling thunder of his artillery. He and his division were drawn up just south of town, on the western side of valley pike. Ewell, with smaller numbers—some two thousand troops—was on the right, east of the pike. Union regiments were in place on the high ground in front of them. The battle lines stretched east to west for a mile and a half. For three hours, the two sides engaged. Eight Union rifled Parrott guns and sixteen mostly smoothbore Confederate cannons issued forth sheets of flame and smoke, shook the earth, and rattled windows in Winchester, while pulses of crackling musket fire swept across the fields south of town. Soldiers who were there that morning described a strange and terrible beauty on the battlefields, an effect of swirling fog and bright sunshine, dew sparkling on wheatfields, and shells bursting over the town in perfect white spirals, with jets of white flame piercing billows of white smoke.2