by S. C. Gwynne
Lincoln, too, was upset by the news from the valley, but whatever unease he felt soon faded. There is little evidence that he panicked, as many historians have suggested, or that he truly believed that Jackson posed a direct threat to Washington.2 But he was not above using Jackson’s attack to prod the eternally irresolute McClellan into action. In a wire to McClellan on the day of the battle, Lincoln told him that the enemy was driving Banks and threatening Leesburg. “I think [Jackson’s] movement is a general and concerted one,” he continued, “such as could not be if he was acting upon the purpose of a very desperate defence of Richmond.” Then he closed: “I think the time is near when you must either attack Richmond or give up the job and come to the defence of Washington. Let me hear from you instantly.” McClellan responded within a few hours, reassuring Lincoln yet again that “the time is very near when I shall attack Richmond” but also pointing out, with his characteristic, finely tuned sense of self-preservation, that Jackson’s attacks were designed “probably to prevent reinforcements being sent to me.”3
Lincoln’s main objective, however, in the wake of Jackson’s victory, was not to fortify Washington but to destroy Jackson where he stood. It was obvious that, isolated in the northern end of the valley, the rebel general was vulnerable—almost absurdly so, given how many Union troops were now converging upon him. Under Lincoln’s orders, Frémont was marching posthaste with his 15,000 men from Franklin to the valley, with the aim of cutting both Jackson’s escape route and his supply line. McDowell, with 21,000 men, was hurrying west across the Blue Ridge. All told, 36,000 Union troops were presumably on the march, well more than twice Jackson’s force. That did not include Banks’s 7,000 men just north of the Potomac, bloodied but operational, or another 7,000 at Harpers Ferry, and Geary’s 4,000 just over the mountains—bringing the total to 54,000—all of whom might be mobilized.4 When Lincoln and Stanton heard that Jackson had marched north three days after the battle, it seemed to them that, in addition to rattling the walls of Washington’s parlors and salons, he had also made a fatal error.
Jackson did not see it that way. Flight from Winchester after his victory had never crossed his mind, and anyway his old “unconditional friend,” Confederate congressman Alexander Boteler, had shown up in Winchester on May 27 bearing orders that restated what Lee had told Jackson on May 16: to “demonstrate” against Harpers Ferry to seem to threaten points east. Lee and Jackson thought alike anyway. After the accidental success of Kernstown, it had been Jefferson Davis’s idea to use Jackson deliberately to draw off Federal forces. Now he and Lee wanted to push this strategy as far as they could, forcing the Union high command to strip troops from its Richmond and Fredericksburg lines. They did not yet know that they had already succeeded. Neither did Jackson have any inkling of the fear he had inspired in the Northern capital. But he fully grasped that there was nothing quite like a victorious Confederate army marching unfettered and unopposed in the Virginia borderlands to get Washington’s attention.
After letting his exhausted army rest for two days, Jackson set it on a northeastward march on May 28. His men, lifted by their stunning victory, were in a buoyant mood. The trials of the past month, the lack of sleep and incessant hard marching in rain and mud, the rancid food and lack of such amenities as real coffee, all seemed to drop away. They had cursed their commander for keeping them in the dark about where they were going and why, but with hindsight they could now see clearly how extraordinary their achievement was. They understood exactly how far they had marched. They could see how their speed, endurance, and hard fighting had won the day, and they now spent hours before campfires reconstructing the campaign and writing proud letters home about how they had done it, from Kernstown to McDowell to Winchester. Many now had a completely different view of Jackson. This group included his crusty, pragmatic quartermaster, John Harman, who on May 9, the day of the McDowell battle, furious at Jackson on a dozen counts, had written his brother to say that “we have been worsted by mismanagement. I am more than ever satisfied of Jackson’s incompetency.” Two and a half weeks later, following the Battle of Winchester, he was writing his brother breathlessly: “We have not only astonished the Yankees, but moved the world. I cannot believe that such a movement was ever made under the circumstances.”5 One of Jackson’s privates wrote home, “This is one of the most brilliant moves of the war and Old Jack will be a greater man than ever.”6 Jackson’s burgeoning legend grew in part from his own soldiers’ accounts of him.
There were also the glowing accounts in the Confederate press, which quickly made their way into the ranks. “The name of ‘Old Stonewall’ seems likely to become as famous as that of ‘Old Hickory,’ ” wrote the influential Richmond Dispatch. “His last victory appears to have been a crusher. . . . In all the transactions this year, Jackson has proved himself to be a man of high military genius.”7 Wrote the Southern Literary Messenger, “Jackson has proved himself the captain we have all been seeking.”8 And if that were not enough to make the men happy, there was the cornucopia of war delicacies that had been delivered to them at Winchester, which included figs, lemons, oranges, ham, bread, various exotic canned goods, and authentic coffee.
On May 28, the army arrived at Charlestown, the town where Jackson and his cadets had provided security for the hanging of John Brown in December 1859, an event that now seemed a lifetime away. The Stonewall Brigade under Brigadier General Charles S. Winder fought a brief engagement with 1,500 Union troops, whom they quickly drove away. By the morning of May 29 the main body of Jackson’s army was camped three miles from Union-occupied Harpers Ferry. There he sat, unchallenged for the moment, a mere sixty miles upstream of Washington, on the Maryland border. That a Confederate army could do this at all, a year into the war, was the point of the exercise. Jackson had no illusions about what was going to happen to him. That same day he learned that Irvin McDowell was marching on Front Royal. The next day he learned that Frémont was closing in on him, too, from the west.
For once, most of his men also understood exactly what was happening. This was not just another retreat southward along the pike. Jackson’s move north had placed his army in grave and immediate danger of isolation and destruction. According to Jackson’s aide Henry Kyd Douglas, “everyone else thought it very imprudent to go [to Harpers Ferry] in the first place.”9 But there Jackson stood, and he seemed in no great hurry to leave. Indeed, on May 30, as Union armies closed in, Jackson seemed to operate at an oddly leisured pace. He met a delegation of local ladies in the morning, then in early afternoon rode out to the front to speak with General Winder and observe a minor artillery duel.10 While the shells shrieked and buzzed, he dismounted, seated himself at the foot of a large tree, then stretched out and fell asleep, where his sometime staffer Alexander Boteler—a talented artist—sketched him, as he put it, “with his arms folded over his breast, his feet crossed like those of a crusader’s effigy.”11 In Boteler’s account,
[I] was busily engaged with my pencil when, on looking up, I met his eyes full upon me. Extending his hand for the drawing, he said with a smile: “Let me see what you have been doing there,” and on my handing him the sketch he remarked: “My hardest tasks at West Point were the drawing lessons, and I never could do anything in that line to satisfy myself—or, indeed,” he added laughingly, “anybody else.”12
Such lighthearted moments with Jackson never lasted; in the next instant he was telling Boteler he had important work for him to do. He wanted the congressman to travel to Richmond to try to secure more troops. Such reinforcements could not help him out of his present predicament; it was far too late for that. But Jackson had larger plans. What he told Boteler, in this extraordinary moment of peril, is revealing of how his mind worked in a crisis. He began by enumerating, with remarkable accuracy, the forces being mobilized against him. Then, in Boteler’s account, Jackson said:
McDowell and Frémont are probably aiming to effect a junction at Strasburg, so as to head us off from the upper valley, and ar
e both nearer to it now than we are; consequently, no time is to be lost. You can say to them in Richmond that I’ll send on the prisoners, secure most, if not all of the captured property, and with God’s blessing will be able to baffle the enemy’s plans here with my present force, but that will have to be increased as soon thereafter as possible. You may tell them, too, that if my command can be gotten up to 40,000 men a movement may be made beyond the Potomac, which will soon raise the siege of Richmond and transfer this campaign from the banks of the James to those of the Susquehanna.13
He was still contemplating a scorched-earth invasion of Pennsylvania. But his more immediate problem was saving himself. He gave orders for the main body of his army to return to Winchester the next day. (Winder and the Stonewall Brigade would collect the 2nd Virginia from its mountaintop camp across from Harpers Ferry and follow later.) Jackson and Boteler, meanwhile, took a one-car train down the almost comically degraded tracks of the Winchester and Potomac Railroad, for Winchester. Jackson fell asleep en route. While he was napping his mapmaker Jed Hotchkiss galloped up to Jackson’s car and drew rein at the window. He carried the worst news possible. He told Jackson and Boteler that Colonel Z. T. Conner’s 12th Georgia Regiment—which Jackson had left at Front Royal to hold the town and guard captured supplies—had been routed by Union forces. This meant that General Irvin McDowell, or at least his advance unit, was already there. Front Royal was twelve miles east of Strasburg. Jackson’s army, meanwhile, was more than forty miles north of it. The implications were excruciatingly clear. While Hotchkiss waited expectantly for orders—there were none—Jackson read Conner’s dispatch. He then tore it into pieces, threw the pieces on the floor, told the conductor, “Go on, sir, if you please,” and went back to sleep.14 The message, in Conner’s urgent, messy scrawl and sent from Winchester, read as follows: “General: Just arrived. Enemy in full pursuit. Unless immediately succored, all is lost.”
Conner would soon pay for such melodrama. When Jackson arrived in Winchester, he immediately summoned the colonel to his headquarters and asked him for an explanation. Conner gave him a detailed account of how the Confederates had been overwhelmed by superior Union numbers.
“Colonel Conner, how many men did you have killed?” asked Jackson.
“None,” he replied.
“How many wounded?”
“None, sir.”
“Colonel Conner, do you call that much of a fight?” snapped Jackson, and then dismissed him. As he left the room Conner remarked to Jackson’s commissary Wells Hawks, “Major, I believe General Jackson is crazy.”
A few moments later, Jackson’s aide Sandie Pendleton emerged from the general’s office. “Colonel Conner,” he announced, “you are to consider yourself under arrest.”
Amazed, Conner said, “Now I know he is crazy!”15
With that encounter Conner’s military career was over. Jackson cashiered him for dereliction of duty. In this case—as opposed to that of the hapless Richard Garnett—Jackson had every reason to do what he did. Conner was not the only one to feel Jackson’s wrath; his second in command, Major Willis Hawkins, was arrested for cowardice. For the 12th Georgia, which had fought so courageously and suffered so many casualties at McDowell, it was a calamity of a different sort.
If news of his impending doom bothered Jackson, he did not show it. He sent no urgent dispatches to Richmond; he asked no counsel of any of his officers. He wrote no dramatic letters home, as Banks had, bidding a sentimental farewell to his wife as his own death loomed. Jackson seemed, in fact, at the center of this building storm, to be completely calm. Hotchkiss remarked that the general was “in fine spirits.” That same evening he had even enjoyed the diversion of Alexander Boteler’s company. Boteler later related that he had taken the liberty of ordering two whiskey toddies to be sent up to their hotel room in Winchester, even though he knew Jackson did not drink. When he offered one to Jackson, the general replied, “No, no, Colonel, you must excuse me; I never drink intoxicating liquors.”
“I know that, General,” Boteler insisted, “but though you habitually abstain . . . there are occasions, and this is one of them, when a stimulant would do us both good.”
Jackson shook his head, but nevertheless picked up the tumbler and drank part of it. “Colonel, do you know why I habitually abstain from intoxicating drinks?” Jackson asked. “Why, sir, because I like the taste of them, and when I discovered that to be the case I made up my mind at once to do without them altogether.”16
• • •
The presence of McDowell’s troops in Front Royal was only one of Jackson’s worries. The larger potential threat to him—and the key to his defeat, in Lincoln’s mind—was not McDowell but Frémont. The president had studied the map of Virginia and had noticed not only that there was a road from Franklin, where Frémont was camped, to Harrisonburg but also that the distance was a mere forty miles. Harrisonburg, in the middle of the valley, lay north of Jackson’s supply base in Staunton. As Lincoln saw it, there was no way Jackson could beat Frémont to Harrisonburg, which meant that Jackson would have Union armies to the north and south of him. He would be isolated, his supply lines cut. Even Jackson could not escape from such a trap. “Move against Jackson at Harrisonburg . . . immediately,” Lincoln had ordered Frémont. “Put the utmost speed to it. Do not lose a minute.”
But General John Frémont, the formerly magnificent but now greatly diminished Pathfinder, who had failed in the western theater and had thus far been a model of inactivity in the mountains, saw an entirely different world. Frémont had two problems: First, he was a man who insisted on seeing obstacles where none existed. Second, in this case there actually were obstacles, which made everything doubly bad. Mired in constant rains in the valley of the South Branch of the Potomac, sixty miles from his supply base, Frémont’s army had suffered. Many commissary wagons had never gotten through. The men were on less than half rations, prompting Frémont’s chief of staff to complain that “our people were next to starving.”17
Frémont’s more serious problem was that the apparently convenient route on Lincoln’s map was actually a horrendously steep, twisting, unsurfaced country road that crossed two mountain ranges. More significantly, during the McDowell campaign Jackson had anticipated such a crossing and had sent Jed Hotchkiss with a crew of engineers to destroy that and other mountain passes to the Shenandoah Valley. They had done admirable work. Hotchkiss recorded in his diary on May 11 that he had procured axes and crowbars and by “sending details far up into the gorges . . . and cutting down trees and rolling large rocks into the road made a very effectual blockade especially of the road leading from Franklin to Harrisonburg.”18 It meant that Frémont—as he saw it, anyway—could not follow Lincoln’s orders.
This changed everything. Frémont was now taking the long way around, north along his supply lines and then east, pushing his army up the South Branch valley to Moorefield, where he would take a right turn and head to Strasburg to cut Jackson off. Lincoln, understanding nothing of Frémont’s problems, was furious when he found out. “I see that you are at Moorefield,” he wired Frémont angrily. “You were expressly ordered to march to Harrisonburg. What does this mean?” But there was nothing he could do. Lincoln ordered Frémont and his army to occupy Strasburg by the evening of May 30, which would put his 15,000 men there well ahead of Jackson. But here, once again, fate took a hand. Because of heavy rains and bad roads, and Frémont’s rather obvious inability to move an army as Stonewall Jackson could, Frémont had to camp that night twenty miles west of Strasburg, at Wardensville. He would not be able to reach Strasburg until the thirty-first. Union brigadier general James Shields, meanwhile, back in the valley now and looking for payback, though not quite so blustery as before, also was poised to reach Strasburg on that same day. Meaning that, in spite of the delays, the jaws of Lincoln’s marvelous trap were finally in position to snap closed, and just in time, too. It was also that very same day—May 31—that Jackson, with his main column, infantr
y, artillery, wagons, and 2,300 Union prisoners, dragged themselves out of their camps north of Winchester in a heavy downpour. They had more than twenty miles to go. An objective observer would have said they had no chance.
All of this set up one of the most stirring footraces in military history, a perilous gauntlet run that few believed Jackson could possibly win. Citizens of Winchester gazed with fading hope upon their shabbily dressed, somber-faced general as he rode out of town and tried to convince themselves that things were not as bad as they seemed. “We left our friends in Winchester trembling for our fate & more than we trembled ourselves,” wrote Kyd Douglas. “Everybody felt the great danger, but everybody looked at Old Jack & seeing him calm & cool as if nothing was the matter, they came to the conclusion that their destruction could not be as inevitable as they supposed.”19
Jackson pushed his “foot cavalry” hard that day, though perhaps for once they did not need to be pushed. Every man understood the peril he was in and knew that speed was his only hope. They knew, too, that, strung out in a ponderous, fifteen-mile-long column on the valley pike, they were exceptionally vulnerable to flank attacks from the two Union armies that had been sent to destroy them. Rumors swept through the ranks that Union forces had already occupied Strasburg, that they were already cut off, that Banks and Brigadier General Rufus Sexton were marching in their rear with a combined force as large as their own. The army itself, in its entirety, was at risk. One need only exchange Union for Confederate commanders to see what might have happened to it. Jackson would have cut such an army to pieces on the road.