Rebel Yell

by S. C. Gwynne

  Thus began the final drama of Stonewall Jackson’s valley campaign. Could Winder and the bloodied Stonewall Brigade hold until Taylor took out the Federal guns on the Coaling? Could he take them out at all? The question was eventually settled by some of the bloodiest, most intimate fighting that these veteran soldiers had ever seen. Ewell, arriving on the main battlefield, was able to reinforce Winder enough to slow the Federal advance. But the carnage in the wheatfield was awful. The 31st Virginia lost 97 of its 226 officers and men.5 Now everything depended on Taylor’s Louisianans. For them the battle began when, upon their arrival on top of the Coaling—just as loud cheers went up from the battlefield below as the Union troops broke Winder’s line, forcing it backward—Federal guns unleashed a storm canister “full in the faces of the Louisiana infantry . . . tearing great gaps in their ranks, strewing the [slope] behind them with the wounded and dying.”6

  The fighting soon centered on those Federal batteries and their cannons, limbers, caissons, horses, artillerists, and supporting infantry. Much of the combat was brutally personal, bayonet against bayonet, clubbed musket against clubbed musket, men killing men and being covered in the blood of their enemies. Artillerymen swung their rammers—normally used to load cannons—in the absence of anything better.7 Horses were bayoneted and shot to keep the Union from removing its guns, and their screams joined those of the men. “It was a sickening sight,” recalled one of the Louisianans, “men in gray and blue piled up in front of and around the guns and with the horses dying and the blood of men and beasts flowing almost in a stream.”8 Said Taylor, “I have never seen so many dead and wounded in the same limited space.”9 Three times the Federal batteries were seized and then lost, and soon the entire focus of the battle had shifted from the wheatfield to the Coaling. The great Federal counterstroke against Winder stalled.

  At about 10:00 a.m., with a final, mighty surge, Taylor, reinforced now by two regiments under Ewell, finally took the last gun, while Winder, on the plain below him, with pieces of various regiments, swept forward. The Union line staggered, then broke, and the bluecoats turned and headed hastily back up the road they had come in on. Jackson took a moment to pray, with his head bowed and his right hand in the air, as was his custom. And then he unleashed his artillery—deadly, bone-and-sinew-shredding canister from the equivalent of giant shotguns—on the receding blue column. A four-mile chase netted 450 prisoners, 800 muskets, and a field gun. But the land soon became too thickly wooded for further pursuit. The battle was over.

  Somehow it was perfectly in keeping with Frémont’s character that he should arrive, bayonets bristling, on the ground across the South Fork of the Shenandoah, where he could only watch helplessly as the Confederates marched their prisoners to the rear. It had escaped his notice, some hours before, that an entire Confederate division had left his front. At about ten o’clock he finally got up the courage to form his army in battle line and move forward, only to find that there was not a single enemy picket in sight. All he found was a church full of dead and dying men, with the now familiar pile of stacked arms and legs outside. Undaunted, Frémont marched crisply to the North River, where he discovered that the bridge had been burned. In the absence of any other obvious course of action, he mustered his impressive force on the riverbank opposite the battlefield. “In the afternoon he had advanced into the open ground near the river,” recalled Confederate chaplain J. William Jones, “and as I gazed on his long line of battle, his bright muskets gleaming in the rays of the sun, his battle-flags rippling in the breeze, I thought it the finest military display I had ever seen.”10

  It was also entirely pointless. Frémont decided to open fire with his artillery anyway, which sent Jackson into a fury because many of the shells fell among the casualties. Frémont, he wrote later, “opened his artillery upon our ambulances and parties engaged in the humane labors of attending to our dead and wounded and the dead and wounded of the enemy.” Jackson wrote a personal note to Union major general Irvin McDowell to complain about it. In the battle he had suffered 800 casualties to Tyler’s 1,018—disproportionately high considering he had outnumbered his opponent. Even his staunchest supporters on his staff thought his tactics that day were too impetuous.

  In any case, the Battle of Port Republic was over, and he had won it decisively. Usually, in the oddball logic of Stonewall Jackson’s valley campaign, victory meant that some form of hunt and chase would begin anew. Not this time. On June 8, ironically just as Ewell was being attacked by Frémont at Cross Keys, Lincoln and Stanton had finally decided that they had had enough of this rogue rebel general marching and countermarching in the valley and twisting their war policies into knots. Lincoln had concluded, possibly correctly, that with Jackson’s skills and daring he could probably distract Union authorities indefinitely from the real business at hand: the assault on Richmond, the end of the war. “It is the object of the enemy to create alarms every where else and thereby divert as much of our force from that point as possible,” wrote Lincoln to Stanton. “On the contrary, we should stand on the defensive every where else, and direct as much force as possible to Richmond.”11 And so that day new orders went out recalling both Frémont and Shields, though they were not received until the next day. Shields was to join McClellan as soon as possible. Frémont was to withdraw to Harrisonburg and assume a defensive position. He was so scared that Jackson might pursue him that he went an additional twenty-five miles, to Mount Jackson. He did not have much of a future. Less than a month later, when he was placed under the command of a former subordinate—John Pope—Frémont angrily resigned. Shields, who continued to try to blame his defeat at Port Republic on Samuel Carroll—to the increasing disgust of Shields’s peers—was put on the shelf and quickly disappeared from public view.

  Jackson, meanwhile, was master of all he surveyed. Two Union forces were withdrawing from his front. There was a certain beautiful symmetry to it. The campaign, which started with a single enemy army pursuing Jackson southward through the valley, would end with two beaten Union armies withdrawing from him in a northerly direction. A week later, Jackson, in one of his most famous utterances, advised his mapmaker, Hotchkiss, to “never take counsel of your fears.”12 A person who followed such advice, of course, would be doomed to a short life. But at Port Republic Jackson had indeed disregarded the fears that any sane person would have had and produced a stunning victory in a manner that left military men in Richmond and Washington, as well as in the Shenandoah Valley, shaking their heads. His short, unadorned message to Richmond was all the more powerful for its brevity. “Through God’s blessing,” he wrote, “the Enemy near Port Republic was this day routed with the loss of six (6) pieces of his artillery.” Period. He was even briefer with Anna, someone he had been neglecting of late. “God greatly blessed our arms near Port Republic yesterday and today,” he wrote. Though he was aware that the Union had changed its mind about fighting in the valley, he did not yet know that Lee and Davis had come almost simultaneously to the same conclusion. The game was in Richmond now. Richmond must be saved.

  PART FOUR

  STIRRINGS OF A LEGEND

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  ACCLAIM, AND A NEW MISSION

  Jackson was suddenly famous. In spite of his heroics at Manassas, he had until late May 1862 been little more than a catchy nickname operating in the back alleys of Virginia. His troubled winter march on Romney was not much of a credential, nor was his defeat at Kernstown, in spite of its grand political and military repercussions.1 McDowell was a small-scale dustup on a mountain in a part of the country few had ever heard of. Jackson’s victory at Winchester changed all that. His back-to-back victories over two Union armies two weeks later confirmed—if anyone needed more proof—that he hadn’t just been lucky. Now, a little more than a month after his first win at McDowell, his name was pulsing through the nation’s arteries as the great new military genius of the South. The agents of this transformation were largely the Virginia newspapers, whose stories were circ
ulated and reprinted all over the Confederacy and who, desperate for good tidings in that hopeless spring, loudly trumpeted the news: with less than 17,000 troops (and sometimes far less), Jackson had taken on and routed 52,000 troops in three Union armies. He had inflicted 4,600 casualties (killed, wounded, or captured), seized 9,000 small arms and a vast trove of Union supplies, and had kept more than 40,000 Federal troops from joining McClellan in front of Richmond. In five battles and many smaller engagements from March 23 to June 9, he had marched his men 646 miles, knocked the entire Union war plan in the eastern theater off balance, and had done it all at a cost of 2,750 men. In the late spring of that year he was very likely the most famous soldier in the world.

  The Southern press spared no adjectives in relating Jackson’s victories. The Richmond Dispatch insisted that in “striking blow after blow . . . in stunning succession” Jackson’s victories in the valley rivaled Napoléon’s legendary Italian campaign.2 In the flush of victory after Cross Keys and Port Republic, the Richmond Whig exulted:

  These two battles are among the most brilliant, if not the most brilliant, of the war. They are the crowning glory of Jackson and his associates. . . . Jackson and his army, in one month, have routed Milroy—annihilated Banks—discomfited Frémont, and overthrown Shields! Was there ever such a series of victories won by an inferior force by dauntless courage and consummate generalship?3

  While the Confederate press strutted and crowed, Northern newspapers were feasting as usual on spoon-fed misinformation about supposed Union victories over the upstart rebel general. After Cross Keys, a Washington abolitionist paper bragged, ridiculously, that “a battle between Jackson and McDowell” had resulted in “the loss of Gen. Jackson’s entire command. . . . Nine thousand prisoners fell into Gen. McDowell’s hands.”4 But even in these deeply biased accounts there was a sense that Jackson was something different, a new nemesis to worry about and pay attention to. In the days after the humiliating Union defeat at Winchester, the New York Times had persistently painted Nathaniel Banks as “one of the ablest and most useful of our chieftains” because he had kept Stonewall Jackson from crossing the Maryland border.5 Those papers began covering their tracks soon enough, unable to avoid the stark truths of Jackson’s victories. Either way, the odd, provocative name “Stonewall Jackson” was finding its way into the culture of the North. Several months later a Northern magazine—the American Phrenological Journal and Life Illustrated—even featured an advertisement for Pyles O.K. Soap claiming that Jackson himself used their product and liked it. “Stonewall Jackson nabs it, and sighs for more,” read the copy.6

  His fame spread just as quickly through soldiers’ letters, both Union and Confederate, that were often read aloud on family hearths. In the South, these were overwhelmingly adulatory. “I wish we had a whole army filled with Jacksons, and the Yankees would soon be shipped from our soil,” wrote a soldier of the 11th Virginia regiment. Wrote another from the 6th Louisiana, “Jackson is perfectly idolized by this army.” Northern soldiers sent home their own praise, too, calling him “a man of decided genius,” and “this great leader” who had “outgeneralled all our commanders.” One Union quartermaster was even court-martialed for pointing out that “Stonewall Jackson had whipped the US in every battle.”7 Porter Alexander, at the time Johnston’s chief of ordnance, wrote that Jackson’s valley exploits were “unsurpassed in all military history for brilliancy and daring.”8

  Exactly who this new celebrity was, was harder to say. Though his men cheered him loudly when he rode by and boasted of his genius in letters home, they were also painfully aware of how hard they had been used, and how many of their comrades—nearly a third of his force—had simply fallen away, unable or unwilling to follow.9 And yet this seemingly pitiless man with so little apparent sympathy for human suffering was also a devout Christian. He prayed in his tent and in the woods at 3:00 a.m. He prayed on his horse and prayed in the midst of battle. He encouraged his men to attend religious services, distributed Christian pamphlets, and arranged for preachers to give sermons in the regimental camps. Christians especially took note that he insisted on giving God credit for his victories and even refused to read newspapers that proclaimed his own renown. This was not mere convention or pro forma humility. He genuinely feared that pride and excessive ambition would anger God and destroy the Confederacy. “The manner in which the press, the army, and the people seem to lean upon certain persons is positively frightful,” he told his brother-in-law D. H. Hill, referring to himself. “They are forgetting God in the instruments He has chosen. It fills me with alarm.”10 He wrote his Lexington pastor, the Reverend William S. White, asking him to warn his congregation that “if we fail to trust in God & give him all the glory, our cause is ruined.”11 In all this, he seemed to many to be the epitome of the selfless leader, a commodity in short supply in both armies. “No thought of personal advancement, of ambition or applause,” wrote Robert Lewis Dabney, his chief of staff at the time, “ever for one instant divided the homage of his heart with his great cause.”12

  Perhaps no commander in the war was quite as isolated from common humanity as Jackson was. Command is lonely anyway; Jackson’s policy of sharing little or no important information with his officer corps made it doubly so. He held no councils of war, consulted no one about strategy or tactics. Unlike most generals in the war, he did not even ask for casual advice from peers or subordinates. This isolation was almost certainly made worse by the absence of any emotional leavening in his life: there was no Laura, Ellie, Maggie, or Anna to whom he could spill out his heart behind the safety of closed doors. The loving, affectionate, domestic side of his dual personality had temporarily disappeared. Though he never admitted it—even in letters to Anna—he must have been terribly lonely.

  The most human part of him—and the most surprising to his men—was his exceptional kindness, something that everyone who knew him well, from West Point forward, inevitably commented on. It was perhaps the least understandable of all of his unusual personality traits. It did not seem to fit with the rest of him. In spite of the crushing demands of his job, he sat for hours with his surgeon Hunter McGuire to comfort him after a family tragedy, which prompted McGuire to write later of “his great kindness, his tenderness to those in trouble or affliction.”13 Brigadier General William B. Taliaferro, one of the leaders of the revolt against Jackson after Romney, and a man Jackson disliked, who was recuperating from an illness in the valley, wrote that Jackson “insisted that I should rest myself upon his bed; and as he assured me that he had no immediate expectation of collision with the enemy, I consented, and he carefully, with his own hands, threw his blanket over me. I mention this incident to show the genuine kindness of his nature.”14 All of this was part of his growing notoriety, too—a notoriety that, as it lodged itself in the thinking of the Union command, would have everything to do with what happened next in the Virginia theater of the Civil War.

  While people in the North and South sought to calibrate the man, and to discover what he was made of, the fundamental truth of him was still his string of stunning victories in the valley campaign. It was so transformative that it naturally inspired jealousy—both then and later—the gist of which was, as Longstreet was the first to say publicly after the war, that Jackson’s accomplishment had come against less than excellent Union generals. No one would argue the central point: Banks, Shields, and Frémont were in many ways typical of the early war generals on both sides who did not fight especially well and were soon weeded out. Jackson took what they gave him and ruthlessly exploited their weaknesses. The same could be said for the wartime career of Ulysses S. Grant, who in the first two years of the war operated in a similarly chaotic environment against inferior opponents. At Fort Donelson, where he insisted on “unconditional surrender,” which made him famous, he was up against Gideon J. Pillow, one of the worst generals in the war. Lesser generals were the rule, not the exception, in the early part of the war, and the great generals made their names agai
nst inferior opposition because that was the only opposition that existed. Such arguments, moreover, miss the fact that Jackson and Grant were both among the great early innovators of the war, for whom the quality of the opposing commanders was merely one of many problems they faced and solved. Both were doing things without precedent in military history, executing marches and military maneuvers and transporting troops and building supply lines in ways that were quite new.

  • • •

  While Jackson was leading his army through the last phase of the valley campaign, an event of singular and momentous importance had taken place in Richmond. That event was not, as one might have expected, the wounding on June 1 of Major General Joseph E. Johnston at the Battle of Seven Pines, a bloody eleven-thousand-casualty stalemate fought after Johnston had attacked McClellan’s left wing east of Richmond. Though that might have been a crippling blow to a Confederacy already short of competent generals, it turned out to be a wonderful piece of good fortune. The transformative event was an order, issued by Confederate president Jefferson Davis at 1:30 p.m. on June 1, appointing Robert E. Lee to replace Johnston as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. This was by no means an obvious move. Lee, while widely respected, had not performed well in his only prior field command in western Virginia in 1861, and had spent the war in a desk job as Davis’s military adviser. Many generals in that army did not believe he was equal to the work. A bit too fussy, was the feeling. Now Davis was entrusting him with the fate of Richmond and, by extension, the South. Though no one suspected it at the time, Davis had made what was probably the single most important decision of the war, on either side.