Rebel Yell

by S. C. Gwynne

  But from the moment he took the job Lee was in an unsustainable position. He had quite possibly taken the worst job in the world. He was outnumbered by McClellan almost two to one. In a pitched battle in front of Richmond, he would stand little chance of surviving. In a siege—favored by Little Mac—he stood no chance at all. A Federal assault, meanwhile, could happen at any moment. This meant that he needed every soldier he could get his hands on, which meant that he needed Jackson, and he needed him now. One of Lee’s first moves was to send his valley subordinate three brigades of eight thousand troops so that he could crush whatever remained of Federal resistance in the valley and then join the army in front of Richmond. But Lee soon thought better of it and summoned his newly reinforced valley commander directly to Richmond. Jackson would have preferred to take forty thousand men and burn Philadelphia and Baltimore to the ground, thereby forcing McClellan from Richmond. While Lee would soon come around to his way of thinking, it was too late for that now.

  Jackson threw out a wide cavalry screen to “block all awareness of Confederate preparations and movements,” then launched 18,500 men and their supply trains over and through the Blue Ridge Mountains. Since he could only lay hands on two hundred train cars, his wagons, cavalry, and artillery all went by roads, while the infantry marched and rode the rails by turns in a hopscotching system of Jackson’s own design. It was this large-scale, highly secret troop movement east to join Lee that Confederate congressman Alexander Boteler had observed on that railroad platform in Charlottesville on June 19. Jackson, with his fame ringing through the South and his legend in full ascent, was going east to join Lee and save Richmond. With that city’s fate hanging in the balance, Jackson’s turn from the valley was one of the most thrilling moments of the war. “We are on the eve of stirring times,” wrote Jackson’s quartermaster, John Harman, a feeling shared by many of the men in that army.

  For Jackson an entirely new war began at an hour past midnight on June 23. That was when he left Fredericks Hall, near Charlottesville, on horseback, bound for a meeting of generals at Lee’s headquarters east of Richmond. Jackson traveled as an ordinary subaltern. He carried only a pass for “one officer” and was accompanied by two soldiers and a guide. Using relays of commandeered horses, he rode fifty-two miles in fourteen hours. When he arrived at a large, two-story mansion a few miles northeast of the Richmond city limits, he was told that Lee was working. Unwilling to disturb the senior officer, Jackson walked back into the yard to wait. A few minutes later, Major General D. H. Hill rode up and was startled to discover his brother-in-law Tom, dusty and tired-looking, leaning against a fence. In spite of his frail physique and sometimes sarcastic tongue, Hill was a first-class fighter. He was almost as religious as Jackson. The two men were greeting each other warmly when Lee’s aide beckoned them.

  Inside the house they found Lee and two other major generals: James Longstreet and Ambrose Powell “A.P.” Hill. Longstreet was a strapping six foot two with broad shoulders, a broad face, and a heavy beard. Everything about him was broad and blunt. He had graduated from West Point three years before Jackson. He was bright, self-important, and opinionated. He was also fearless, imperturbable on the battlefield, a dependable if unspectacular fighter who had burnished his reputation at the Battle of Seven Pines. He favored defensive fighting, a position that put him considerably in advance of the thinking of most military men of the moment. Lee trusted him. He had been born in South Carolina but grew up mostly in Georgia. He had spent his military career in a string of dusty outposts, mostly as paymaster. The loss of three children in an epidemic was said to have robbed him of his humor. Jackson knew him from Manassas. “Little Powell” Hill had been in Jackson’s West Point class where, along with other members of the Virginia aristocracy, he had made fun of the orphan from the western mountains. He was proud, sensitive, and thin-skinned, and had a hair-trigger temper; he would prove to be one of the South’s best fighters. His graduation from West Point had been delayed because of the venereal disease he had contracted—a sickness that helped spoil his chances to marry the lovely Ellen Marcy, who instead chose Powell’s close friend George B. McClellan. All four Confederate generals had been at West Point at the same time.

  Then there was Lee himself, the soldier’s soldier with three decades of spotless military service. He had been born in 1807, the son of Henry “Lighthorse Harry” Lee, a hero of the Revolutionary War. He had graduated second in his class at West Point and distinguished himself in the Mexican-American War, where his daring exploits as a scout and engineer were crucial in enabling Winfield Scott to break enemy defenses in three major American victories. He was the quintessential Virginia aristocrat. He lived in a Greek Revival mansion that was one of the largest homes in antebellum Virginia, and was married to the daughter of George Washington’s step-grandson, whom George and Martha Washington had raised as a son. Tall, handsome, and a bit heavyset, with a full gray beard and a head of gray hair, Lee was so gentle and polite, calm and stately that it was difficult to see the fighter in him, though in fact he had a far more pure strain of military character than even Jackson himself. Jackson’s interests ranged to literature, poetry; Lee devoted no time to literature and did almost no general reading; his interests beyond his family and his religion were few, and even though he was quite devout, even here he lacked Jackson’s taste for more complex theology. The Bible was sufficient. Unlike Jackson, he had by hard study and a career in the service made himself highly proficient in tactics, logistics, and engineering; those military sciences he knew as well as anyone.15 Just at that moment, Jackson was by far the more famous of the two. Since Lee had not yet proven himself, there were many in the Confederate army, including Jeb Stuart and Gustavus Smith (to whom Jackson pleaded his case for an invasion of the North in August 1861), who did not feel he should have been given the job. His King of Spades nickname originated in his orders to dig fortifications around Richmond, which suggested to his soldiers that he was afraid to go out and fight.

  At Lee’s field headquarters Stonewall Jackson, who refused food but accepted a glass of milk, now found himself the object of considerable interest.16 In his “rusty gray dress and still rustier gray forage cap” he stood out “from the spruce young officers under him,” according to one of Lee’s staff.17 Jackson was at that moment the most celebrated field commander in the war, and, in fact, in the Western Hemisphere. No one, North or South, had yet done anything like what he had done. Lee as a line general was a largely unknown quantity; he had only just taken command of an army. Though the Manassas victory had brought fame to Beauregard and Johnston, the former was in sharp decline, and Johnston, now wounded, had accomplished nothing since then. In the North there was only Grant in the western theater, though his performance at Shiloh had tarnished him. As Jackson stood there before his peers that afternoon, he was a bit of a wonder. He was also what he was to everyone else: a stubborn mystery.

  Lee explained his plan, which had its origins in Jeb Stuart’s daring hundred-mile ride with 1,200 cavaliers around McClellan’s entire army between June 12 and June 15. Stuart had discovered, among other things, that McClellan’s right flank was vulnerable. Not only did it contain far fewer soldiers than the force south of the Chickahominy, but also the flank itself was “in the air”—not anchored by any natural formation or obstacle. And it was that flank that Lee proposed to turn. He described the Union army’s position astride the Chickahominy River, a sluggish, swampy creek that ran roughly northwest to southeast, on the east side of Richmond. It roughly bisected the peninsula that was defined by the York and Pamunkey Rivers on the north and the James River on the South. The problem Lee faced was that he did not believe he could carry a frontal assault against the 30,000 troops in the Federal 5th Corps under Major General Fitz John Porter who were dug in behind the Chickahominy.

  His solution was to send Jackson’s army on a march to the north of Porter’s army. He would march clear around the Union right, flank, then turn and strike to the sout
h, threatening the main Union supply line. If the plan worked, Porter, facing envelopment, would be forced to abandon his position. As that happened, the Confederate army would commence a gigantic wheeling motion, sending sixty thousand soldiers en echelon against the collapsing Federal right. Forced from its defensive redoubts and falling back to protect its supply base on the York River, McClellan’s army would have to come out into the open and fight, giving away all of its present defensive advantages. Just as important, the Union army would have to abandon its positions in front of Richmond.

  The key, in any case, was Jackson. It had to be. His very name might be enough to turn the Union right. The generals agreed, with Lee’s endorsement, that Jackson’s army was to be in place on the night of June 25 and that he would begin his flank march in the early-morning hours of June 26. The four-hour conference broke up at about 7:00 p.m. on June 23. In the next forty-eight hours, Jackson had to ride back to his camp at night in the rain, and then march his army more than thirty miles into the brushy, swampy tangles of the York-James Peninsula and get it ready to fight. His legend said he had the fastest-moving army in history. That notion would now be severely tested.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  THE HILLJACK AND THE SOCIETY BOY

  In the fourteenth month of the Civil War, its two most celebrated generals, east or west, were George McClellan and Stonewall Jackson.1 They were both in the Virginia theater, so it was inevitable that they would fight. The two men were famous for such different reasons. Jackson owed his instant celebrity to his victories in the valley. McClellan’s fame was barely rooted in conquest at all. Though he had won a small fight in the western theater and a minor battle at Williamsburg on his way up the peninsula, Little Mac was mainly known as the man who had rescued the army—and the United States itself—from its deep despair after the Battle of Manassas. In personality and physical build the two men were virtual antipodes. McClellan was as compact, hearty, and outgoing as Jackson was gaunt, reserved, severe, and silent. Jackson was the equivalent of an attack dog who had to be restrained from marching on Philadelphia and Baltimore, while McClellan had had to be cajoled, coaxed, and sometimes lugged by Lincoln and Stanton every step of the way to Richmond, where he still had not managed to mount an attack. Jackson often camped with his men; McClellan never did. Mac was constantly telling his men how good they were and how proud he was of them; Jackson did this only rarely. McClellan never visited battlefields, and had an instinctive horror of the bloody front; Jackson took Anna on a tour of Manassas.

  In spite of these differences, the two generals shared one very large and important attribute: they had both been members of the Class of 1846 at the US Military Academy, a class that eventually produced more generals—twenty-two, twelve Union and ten Confederate, including two lieutenant generals and fourteen major generals—than any West Point class in history. But even as part of this tiny, cloistered world where the graduating class numbered only fifty-nine, their experiences at West Point were as different as the men themselves.

  It was remarkable that Jackson had been allowed into the place at all. His education, like that of many rural Americans of his era, fell somewhere between inadequate and incomplete. His uncle Cummins, who raised him, had never liked the idea of book learning much anyway and considered Tom the least smart of his brother’s three children. Thus whatever instruction Jackson got was spotty at best: winter months at a rural elementary school (the children were needed for summer and fall for harvests); a brief time at a school that he persuaded Cummins to start at Jackson’s Mill; and a few years at slightly more sophisticated schools in the nearby town of Weston. He did like learning, and read whatever he got his hands on, which wasn’t much. By the time he was fifteen, he was accomplished enough—by Virginia mountain standards, anyway—to receive a county appointment to teach eleven- and twelve-year-olds in a log cabin.

  In spite of his educational shortcomings, in the spring of 1842 Jackson had made application to his local congressman, Samuel L. Hays, for an appointment to West Point. Jackson and three others took a set of informal examinations, the most important of which was mathematics, a discipline in which Jackson had little formal training. Unfortunately, he was not quite as good in that subject as his friend Gibson Butcher, who got the appointment instead. Jackson was deeply disappointed. He had seen the academy, with its free education and promise of a military career, as a chance to escape the rural life at Jackson’s Mill.

  Then something happened to offer new hope. It took Butcher exactly one day to bust out of West Point. He quickly realized that he hated the whole idea of the place, returned home immediately, and told his friend Tom Jackson what he had done. Jackson, sensing opportunity, decided to reapply. He used his family connections to marshal recommendations from local officials, took crash courses in math and grammar from family friends, then traveled by stagecoach and train to Washington, DC, where he unloaded the whole scheme—Butcher’s resignation plus his own hastily solicited endorsements and renewed application—on a surprised Congressman Hays, who happened to be a neighbor of his uncle Cummins. Jackson got the appointment.

  But mere appointment was only the first step in a West Point candidacy. In those days applicants had to travel to the academy in June to undergo the ordeal of formal entrance tests. In the examination room, Jackson was required to stand at a blackboard and solve problems presented to him by the examining board. Nothing in his own academic background had prepared him for such a trial, and he found the examination excruciatingly difficult. As he labored through his problems, sweat streamed off his face. He wiped it off first with one cuff and then the other. Somehow he also became covered with chalk. His classmates found the process painful to watch. Several days later, the board posted the results of the examination: of 122 candidates, 30 had failed, leaving only 92 students who would enter the first-year class. Jackson’s name was the very last on the list. It was thought by some that he had not passed at all, but somehow the sheer, wretched, sweat-stained doggedness of his effort had convinced the board to let him in.

  When the new admit arrived at his barracks, wearing his plain gray homespun clothing, a coarse felt hat, and oversized leather brogans and carrying a pair of weather-stained saddlebags, he looked very much like what he was: a semieducated bumpkin from the Allegheny Mountains.2 He seemed quite out of place. He was visibly uncomfortable. When a fellow cadet from Virginia named Dabney Maury came to his room to say hello, Jackson, in Maury’s words, “received my courteous advances in a manner so chilling that it caused me to regret having made them, and I rejoined my companions with criticisms brief and emphatic as to his intellectual endowments.”3 Those companions included future Confederate generals George Pickett and A. P. Hill.

  • • •

  George Brinton McClellan’s entrance into West Point could not have been more different. While Jackson’s father was a failed lawyer, compulsive gambler, and alcoholic who died when Jackson was two and left the family destitute, McClellan’s Yale-educated father built a thriving surgical practice in Philadelphia, founded a medical college, edited an influential journal, and owned a stable of trotting horses. He had married Elizabeth Steinmetz Brinton, from one of Philadelphia’s leading families. Together they moved in the upper stratum of that city’s society, counted Daniel Webster among their friends, and gave their son George an education fully appropriate to his social rank.4 He was sent first to an elite private elementary school, and then to a private tutor with whom he learned to read the classics and to converse in both Latin and French. He was a brilliant student, a prodigy in both language and mathematics. He was also charming, engaging, and anything but a grind. He was, said his sister, “the brightest, merriest, most unselfish of boys.”5 He briefly attended a preparatory academy and then, at age thirteen, enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania. Two years later he had, according to his father, “nearly completed his classical education at the university,” and he enrolled at West Point at age fifteen and a half.6 Most of the ot
her admits were at least eighteen, and some were twenty or older. While the miserable Jackson toiled and sweated at the blackboard, the magnificently prepared McClellan breezed into the academy. According to one classmate, “he went at once to the head of the class, and remained there until the end.”7

  What he and Jackson encountered there, when classes began in the fall, was one of the nation’s toughest and most demanding academic programs. As the nation’s top engineering school, West Point was math-heavy and math-driven. The academy was, moreover, a true university, requiring students to pass courses in ten different fields of study.8 Examinations were held twice a year, in January and June, and each one was an academic watershed: if you failed, you went home, never to return. When Jackson went on the school’s only vacation—a single furlough in the middle of a four-year course of study—he told his nephew Thomas Arnold that at one point he was allowed only three weeks to “learn the English grammar” and that if he failed he would have been sent home immediately. “Oh, I tell you I had to work hard,” he said.9 The daily regimen itself was tough, too: cadets awoke at 5:00 a.m., and the day that followed included ten hours of homework in addition to classes and drills. The barracks were primitive and chilly in winter; food was often “bull-beef” and boiled potatoes. Strangely—in retrospect—the only part of the curriculum specifically related to the operations of an army was Professor Dennis Hart Mahan’s fourth-year course on engineering, fortifications, and military tactics. Mahan, moreover, devoted a mere nine hours of class time to army organization and battlefield tactics. The brevity of the course, plus the fact that many of its dogmas were frozen in Napoleonic times, would limit the effect of Mahan’s teachings on the Mexican-American and Civil Wars. (Grant later dismissed the effect almost entirely;10 Jackson did take two of Mahan’s principles to heart: “celerity” and “boldness.”11)