Rebel Yell

by S. C. Gwynne

  Nothing of the sort happened. That afternoon the entire unwieldy train made it safely—to many of the men, miraculously—into bivouac just north of Strasburg. They had run the gauntlet unharmed; Jackson had won the critical leg of the race. There were no Union troops in sight. In Boteler’s description, Jackson was “standing there like a hunted stag at bay defying his pursuers.”20 Though his own soldiers did not yet understand why, or to what magic they owed their deliverance, they gratefully made their camps in the rain. But now, ironically, it was Jackson who was really worried. That was because the Stonewall Brigade under Charles S. Winder and the 1st Maryland Regiment (Confederate), which had trailed the main army from Harpers Ferry, had not quite reached Strasburg. It was not for want of trying. They had marched thirty-five miles or more that day without food. They had finally collapsed late in the evening at Newtown, ten miles north of Strasburg, where many of them simply fell down and slept in the muddy fields. Jackson now knew that he had not only to hold his own position the next day against the two Union armies. He also had to hold the valley pike open for Winder and his cherished brigade. He would need another miracle.

  But how, exactly, had he escaped? The answer had more to do with the character and sensibility of his opponents than with strictly military strategy. The one who had the clearest shot at him was James Shields, the Irish-born politician who had been promoted to major general after the Battle of Kernstown, who had once bragged that Jackson was afraid of him, and who only days before had vowed confidently that he would “soon clear out the Shenandoah Valley.”21 Shields’s main problem now was, in fact, fear: his own, of Jackson’s growing legend, which was beginning to disconcert otherwise rational men. It was dressed up in different ways and rationalized in different ways, but it came down to the same thing.

  The fear began with basic assumptions about Jackson’s army. Though Jackson still had merely 15,000 men at his disposal, and the Union War Department believed this, in the eyes of its field generals Jackson’s strength had grown enormously. A close reading of Union dispatches shows various Union scouts estimating Jackson’s strength the day before at 30,000 to 60,000. That same day General Geary put the number at 25,000 to 30,000; McDowell himself accepted the 30,000 figure. On the day Jackson slid through, Shields himself was reporting Jackson at Winchester with as many as 40,000 troops.22 Shields believed the higher numbers because he wanted to and, believing them, found his own 11,000, unreinforced as yet by the other 9,000 of McDowell’s troops, to be inadequate. Then, too, he saw phantoms: he got the ridiculous idea that Confederate James Longstreet was moving up the Luray Valley with an army—ridiculous, because that would have left virtually no Confederate troops to defend Richmond.23 He also became convinced that Turner Ashby’s small cavalry, which Jackson had deployed on the road near Front Royal, was actually a large and formidable force. He did not have, moreover, specific orders from McDowell to attack, even though he knew as well as anyone that the whole idea, and the thing Lincoln wanted more than anything in the world, was to cut off Jackson’s retreat.

  So Shields, tying himself in mental knots at his camp in Front Royal, did nothing at all. It was not until early evening that he finally got up the small amount of courage required to test the enemy’s strength by sending a regiment against Ashby. The rebels were almost instantly routed; he had been afraid of nothing. But by now Jackson’s army was in Strasburg and it was too late to do anything about it. Shields, meanwhile, saved his most creative excuse for last. Two days later he wired the War Department to say that his decision to stay put had been quite deliberate and calculated. “We would have occupied Strasburg,” he wrote, “but dare not interfere with what was designed for Frémont. His failure has saved Jackson.”24 Having shifted the blame to Frémont, he added, breathtakingly, that he was off to chase Jackson, and “I have no fears of their numbers, which have been ridiculously exaggerated by fear.”25

  Was Frémont really to blame? He was to blame in the larger sense that in spite of constant goading from Washington he had failed to bring up his army in time to cut Jackson off. He had arrived late on the afternoon of May 31 in camps about five miles east of Strasburg. He had been in no mood to push his men farther. Like Shields, he could list any number of excuses and reasons for his lateness: the men were exhausted from brutal marches in bone-drenching rains and knee-deep muck; they were sick, disabled, broken-down, hungry from want of rations. Straggling had reduced the size of his army. They were indeed demoralized, and had been since their muddy camps in Franklin. There was something of the loser about Frémont, something that suggested only bleakness and indecision and hardship and misery and none of the glory and clarity that soldiers craved. They reacted by giving him glum half efforts, by straggling and complaining. Jackson had faced the same conditions, the same scanty supplies, the same numbers of barefoot, sick, waterlogged troops; his desertion rates were far worse. Considering Lincoln’s sharp, almost scolding tone in his dispatches to Frémont—and his constant exhortations to move faster—it is astonishing that the Pathfinder elected to give his men a full day of rest on May 29, a mere twenty miles from Strasburg.26 Shields was wrong: both he and Frémont had failed together, and thus, together, they had “saved” Jackson.

  The next day was, if anything, more dramatic than the last. A snapshot of troop deployments on the morning of June 1 would have found Jackson camped just north of Strasburg; Shields twelve miles east in Front Royal; Frémont five miles to the west; and Winder, ten miles north on the valley pike. The latter was soon barreling south toward safety, fearful that he was too late. Jackson had decided that he would wait for Winder and his roughly two thousand men. He had erred in allowing his command to become so badly separated. Now he would fight, if necessary, to reunite it. He would fight both armies if he had to.

  His instincts—which would prove correct—told him that he would not. In a sign of extreme disrespect for Shields, he sent no infantry at all in his direction but once again merely fanned Ashby’s cavalry out on the road from Front Royal to Winchester. Ashby’s pickets would tell him if Shields made a move to cut off Winder. Jackson, meanwhile, threw the hard-fighting Ewell and his division out to the west, where they formed a line of battle and waited for Frémont, fully ready to fight. Just before 10:00 a.m., Frémont’s big guns thundered, Ewell’s replied, and an artillery duel sent booming echoes through the hills. North of town, the men of the Stonewall Brigade, hurtling southward, took it as a bad omen: they were already too late.

  But Frémont, as it turned out, was making only the most cursory of probes. When Ewell sent skirmishers bristling forth, and the crack of muskets rolled through the valley, Union troops withdrew to their lines. The artillery still thundered, but to no particular effect. To Ewell’s surprise, there was no push. While Ewell held Frémont at bay, the first of Winder’s units hove into view. It was an emotional moment. “We could plainly see the smoke of the discharges of the guns we had heard . . . and we knew that Jackson was holding back Frémont til we got by,” wrote McHenry Howard of the 1st Maryland (Confederate) in a later memoir. “To our relief, everything continued quiet on the Front Royal side where we looked for trouble from an advance by Shields or McDowell.”27

  At noon the Stonewall Brigade arrived in Strasburg, a bit shaken by the stress of the morning march and by having walked forty-five miles in two days with no food—an astonishing feat of marching that shamed Frémont’s army and seemed to confirm what at least one Federal officer believed: that “Stonewall Jackson’s men will follow him to the devil and he knows it.”28 The men were ecstatic to be reunited with the army, though they were not yet out of harm’s way. It had been a harrowing last few miles. “How different our feelings then!” wrote Private Randolph H. McKim of the 1st Maryland (Confederate). “Our spirits rose and we forgot our fatigue and were ready to sing ‘Baltimore, ain’t we happy! ’ What the men said to each other then was of a different complexion—‘Old Jack knows what he’s about! He’ll take care of us, you bet!’ From that hou
r we never doubted him.”29 Frémont, who had his command ready for battle by late morning, was simply frozen by uncertainty and fear: that Jackson outnumbered him, that he would have to fight Jackson without McDowell’s help. With an army about the size of Jackson’s, he was cowed into inaction even though his friends in Washington had told him in no uncertain terms that “he must find Jackson and fight him, or his chances thereafter for further preferment or reputation were as naught.”30 Apparently that wasn’t motivation enough.

  With his army now reunited, Jackson pulled out of Strasburg and once again—this was starting to look bizarrely familiar—headed south on the valley pike. This time he had two armies to worry about. But anyone with a memory for recent history would also have known that Stonewall Jackson in “flight” up the Shenandoah Valley was a prelude to large, unanticipated, war-changing events.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  A STRANGE FONDNESS FOR TRAPS

  By early June, it could be fairly said that Jackson had done everything Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee had asked him to do, and more. For two and a half months he and his small, highly mobile force had occupied the attention of ever-larger Union armies. He had managed, by the sheer weight of his daring and audacity—and a growing reputation for both—to create a diversion that had temporarily stalled the Union campaign in front of Richmond. He had even thrown the Northern capital into a brief fit of panic. Now, having narrowly slipped through Lincoln’s pincers, the last thing anyone expected him to do was to turn and fight. He did not need to. His escape over the Blue Ridge to the safety of Robert E. Lee’s army was guaranteed. But escape had never figured in his plans. On June 5 Jackson, having sent his trains of captured supplies and sick and wounded men south to Staunton, turned off the valley pike at Harrisonburg, marched a few miles south and east on a narrow, rutted clay road, and under the looming 2,900-foot southern tip of the Massanutten Mountain bivouacked his army in rolling farmland near an obscure river-junction hamlet called Port Republic, and spun around to face his pursuers.

  This time they were coming at him from two different directions. To understand the nature of the threat, we have to back up several days to a time when Jackson was still retreating southward. After Shields had failed to intercept Jackson at Strasburg, the pugnacious Irishman had conceived what seemed to him a brilliant idea. While Frémont pursued Jackson in the now familiar way—straight down the valley pike—Shields would reverse Jackson’s stunning juke-step march against Front Royal. The Union general would start from his camps in that town, then slide southward along the South Fork of the Shenandoah, cross the Massanutten at New Market, and block Jackson’s southward retreat. Though he began his march down the boggy roads on the east side of the massive mountain in yet another of the seemingly eternal rainstorms that swept Virginia that spring, he was more confident than ever that this time he would “bag” the rebel Jackson. If the previous engagements with Jackson were about speed and maneuver, this one, featuring three armies instead of two, would be more like an intricate game of martial chess, played out among the roaring rivers, ravines, spurs, and ridges of the Luray and Shenandoah Valleys.

  The game this time was mostly about bridges—four of them—strung out over roughly forty miles in the Luray Valley between the towns of Luray and Port Republic. They were important because the South Fork of the Shenandoah—a navigable river in normal times that carried flatboats downstream to Harpers Ferry—was in flood stage, swift, swollen, and unfordable. Shields realized that he desperately needed the northernmost of those bridges, named White House and Columbia, to cross the river, cut through New Market Gap, and intercept Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley. On June 1, while Jackson was still passing through the jaws of Lincoln’s trap, Shields had dispatched one of his best officers, Colonel Samuel S. Carroll, to travel ahead of the army to seize and hold those bridges. He had other work for Carroll, too. Ten miles south was another bridge at the hamlet of Conrad’s Store, over which Jackson and his army had passed when retreating from Banks in April. It was the most direct escape route from the midvalley to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Shields, convinced that Jackson was indeed trying to escape, ordered Carroll to burn the Conrad’s Store bridge. “Everything depends on speed,” Shields told him. “Jackson must be overtaken.” And then, underscoring how vastly important this assignment was, he promised the young officer a brigadier generalship if he succeeded. “You will earn your star,” he said, “if you do all this.”1

  It was a good idea. Unfortunately for Shields, Jackson had beaten him to it. Jackson had noticed that Shields had not joined Frémont in pursuit of him, and had guessed correctly that the Union general was taking the back way through the Luray Valley to cut him off. Jackson had immediately dispatched Samuel Coyner of Ashby’s cavalry, who rode down the valley pike, crossed the mountain at New Market, and at dawn on June 2, after struggling through deep mud, a driving thunderstorm, and “the roughest road,” managed to burn both the Columbia and White House bridges. Carroll’s men, on foot and saddled with four pieces of artillery Shields had ordered them to carry, were two days behind them.2

  Curiously, Coyner and his Confederates had exactly the same orders Carroll did for the bridge at Conrad’s Store: destroy it. Coyner of course beat Carroll again, and burned it the next day. But how could it be in both generals’ interests to burn the same bridge? Because, once again, Shields had grossly misread his opponent. Instead of fleeing to Stanardsville on the eastern side of the Blue Ridge, Jackson was doing the thing Shields least expected him to do, which was to stand and fight. And because he had chosen to stay put, the very last thing he wanted was for the two Union armies to be able to easily unite against him. Burning the Conrad’s Store bridge and the two bridges near New Market Gap meant that would never happen. Jackson had decisively won the opening gambit. As the badly bogged-down Shields would soon discover, he could neither cut off Jackson’s retreat, nor unite easily with Frémont.

  Thus, three of the bridges. The fourth, and most critical to Jackson’s strategy, was in the town of Port Republic, a small cluster of buildings in the delta formed by the North River and the South River just before they flowed together to form the South Fork of the Shenandoah. Shields, increasingly lost in his own private fog of war, would misunderstand its importance, too. Jackson had chosen Port Republic over every other place he could have gone—and by now he and his brilliant cartographer, Jed Hotchkiss, knew all of them—because of its peculiar location at the junction of the three rivers. His army, on the morning of Sunday, June 8, was camped in the rolling wheatfields north of the town, facing attack from Frémont’s army from the direction of Harrisonburg and from Shields coming down the Luray Valley. The Union armies were so close that they posed a classic problem of military strategy: Jackson could not afford to throw his entire army at one or the other; he could not take them in succession, or “in detail.” He would somehow have to deal with both at once. It was yet another reason for him to march for Brown’s Gap as fast as he could, depart the valley, and join the Confederate forces at Richmond. It is hard to think of another general, on either side, who at this point in the war would not have done so.

  But Port Republic, like so many of Jackson’s choices of positions in the war, then and later, was actually a terrific tactical play.3 Its beauty lay in the fact that it offered both the protection of a roaring river and an escape hatch if things went wrong. Its best feature, tactically speaking, was a sturdy covered bridge over the rampaging North River. This was the fourth bridge. In the absence of the others, it was the only way for either army to cross the river. If Frémont beat him on the battlefield, he could easily retreat over the North River and burn the bridge. East of town there was the South River, breast-high and moving like a millrace but still fordable or bridgeable with pontoons or wagons. It separated him from Shields’s oncoming army. If he lost that fight, he could recross the lesser stream and head to Brown’s Gap a few miles away on a good road that ran south out of town.

  On the morning of Ju
ne 8 Jackson’s army looked like this: Its headquarters was in the small village of Port Republic. Seven thousand men under his direct command were camped outside of town just north of the North River, while Ewell’s five-thousand-man force was camped about four miles north at a hamlet known as Cross Keys. Jackson’s numbers were down because his brutal marches had once again taken a fearsome toll on his army, which now had at least three thousand absentees.4 It was the price paid for his extraordinary maneuvers. “We have been on a retreat for five days and an awful time it has been,” wrote one artillerist. “I never saw so many men with their feet all swollen and bleeding.”5 Facing Ewell across gently swelling farmland covered by wheat, clover, patches of timber, and the occasional picturesque farmhouse were twelve thousand bluecoats under Frémont in full battle lines and ready for a fight. To the east, bogged down in muck and mire downstream near Conrad’s Store, lurked Shields’s brigades.

  For all of his cleverness in isolating his enemies and in devising a place where he might fight both of them, Jackson now made several critical errors in judgment. Having chosen this river straddle as his main tactical play, he proceeded to neglect the key to it all: the North River bridge. Though that bridge needed no protection from north of Port Republic, where most of Jackson’s army was bivouacked, it was deeply vulnerable from the south and east. But Jackson had placed only a very light guard on the two river fords across the South River, over which the threat from the east would come. There were no guards on the bridge itself. He made an even more serious mistake by ordering Quartermaster John Harman’s enormous wagon train with most of the army’s supplies to park in the fields behind headquarters, both highly visible and highly vulnerable to any attack from the east. (An advance unit from Shields had only to cross the fordable South River to get at them.) Worse still, loss of the North Bridge would mean that Jackson’s army and its supplies were on opposite sides of the unfordable river. Indeed, Jackson himself might have been separated from his own army.