Rebel Yell

by S. C. Gwynne

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  IN WHICH EVERYTHING CHANGES

  Though few people understood the Seven Days battles at the time, the resounding Confederate victory was a good deal more pyrrhic than it looked. There was no question that the campaign had, by its shocking implausibility, changed the war. Within a month of his appointment as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee had turned national expectations upside down. He had driven the largest army the country had ever fielded to the banks of the James River, where it cowered and feared to come out from under Mother’s skirts. He had given new life to the Confederate dream of permanent, peaceful independence.

  But the irony here—and it was grand and tragic irony—was that Lee’s counteroffensive actually marked the end of that brief, fragile period when the Union could still be preserved without making slavery the war’s central issue—without, in other words, destroying the South. From the first days of the war, the stated goals of Lincoln and Congress had been to quell the rebellion and restore the Union. Congress had been quite explicit about this; the previous summer it had passed a resolution specifically disavowing any intent to end the institution of slavery. For a time this remained the essential position of moderate and conservative (i.e., nonradical) Republicans in the North, as well as both “war” and “peace” Democrats, neither of whom believed that freeing Southern slaves was worth spilling Union blood. Lincoln appeased the radicals in his own party and pursued his policy of fighting a war for limited ends.

  But by the summer of 1862 that brittle political calculus was falling apart. Lee’s victory coincided with a pronounced hardening of Northern attitudes. This shift was embodied in the rise of the radical Republicans, whose beliefs included three fundamental truths: that slaves should be freed, that freeing them could only be accomplished by war, and that the nation’s fate could no longer be separated from the issue of slavery.1 While the nominal reason for fighting continued to be suppression of the rebellion, the political winds were shifting: In January of that year, House Republican leader Thaddeus Stevens had called for total war and the emancipation of slaves. In March, Congress had forbidden US Army officers from returning fugitive slaves; in April it had abolished slavery in the District of Columbia; in June it had prohibited slavery in the territories; and in July it had authorized the enlistment of black soldiers and allowed for court proceedings to liberate slaves of “convicted” rebels. By the time of the Seven Days, the ruling Republican Party itself had been radicalized. Antislavery bills were flooding the halls of Congress, and it was hard to find anyone in the party who still believed that simply putting the Union back together as it once existed should be the goal of the war.2 Though the debate raged about how exactly emancipation should happen—from gradual, voluntary emancipation to compensated emancipation to outright confiscation of human “property”—a consensus was emerging: slavery must end.

  More than any leader other than Lincoln himself, McClellan was buffeted by these shifting military and political winds. He was a moderate “war” Democrat who wanted to end the conflict quickly, and as gently as possible, with the South and its institutions fully intact. By conquering Richmond he believed he could convince hard-liners on both sides to retreat from their positions long enough to negotiate peace. If he had succeeded, it would have established him as the savior of the Union and probably would have made him president. He had of course failed miserably. But he held fast to his vision of a limited war. In a meeting with Lincoln on July 8, six days after the Battle of Malvern Hill, McClellan handed his superior an extraordinary letter. The war, he wrote,

  should not be . . . looking to the subjugation of the people of any state. . . . It should not be, at all, a War upon population; but against armed forces and political organizations. Neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons, territorial organization of states or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment. . . . All private property and unarmed persons should be strictly protected. . . . Military power should not be allowed to interfere with the relations of servitude. . . . A declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present Armies.3

  The note was a superb summary of an opportunity that had already vanished by a man who had personally made it disappear. If McClellan had won at Richmond, there might well have been a negotiated peace; Robert E. Lee might never have become the hero of the South; the Union might have been put back together with a South whose economy and institutions were still intact. Lincoln might have been a one-term president. We will never know. Lincoln read the letter in McClellan’s presence, amazed at the jarring impudence of this timid general who had just dragged his beaten, sick, and demoralized army into its James River camps. Lincoln made no comment. Four or five months earlier, he might have agreed with McClellan. But not now. Three weeks after the end of the Seven Days campaign, the president delivered to his cabinet the first draft of what would become known as the Emancipation Proclamation. Among other things, the document asserted that, on January 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any state or states, wherein the constitutional authority shall not then be practically recognized, submitted to, and maintained shall then, thenceforward, and forever, be free.” Lincoln was not yet ready to issue it publicly, not after McClellan’s humiliation by Lee on the peninsula. But the draft was a sign of how fast the change was sweeping in.

  It is interesting to note, too, that however patriotic the abolitionist radicals in the North may have been, the very last thing they wanted was for Little Mac to win the battle for Richmond. Winning might have meant the preservation of slavery and the Southern way of life.4 With no national emergency to force the end of slavery, the abolitionists would lose their influence.5 And so on, through a very long chain of hypothetical events. Because McClellan lost, the very thing he had wanted most was lost, too.

  If all of this swirling change was hard to grasp, the Seven Days’ immediate effects were not. The Army of the Potomac was, for the moment, useless and purposeless. Lincoln, who “was nearly as inconsolable as I could be, and live,” after the Union humiliation of the Seven Days, was pilloried from near and far as an ineffectual leader. “Not a spark of genius he has,” thundered Henry Ward Beecher from a Brooklyn pulpit, “not an element for leadership.” Abolitionist Wendell Phillips in Boston wrote that “He may be honest—nobody cares whether the tortoise is honest or not. He has neither insight, nor prevision, nor decision.”6 The stock market fell precipitously. The price of gold rose. And of course the South, for the moment, saw only good coming from its victory: Britain and France, horrified by the casualty counts and impressed by Confederate military prowess, seemed more interested than ever in some sort of mediation.

  But that remained a fond hope, and nothing more. A more likely future was suggested when, on July 2, the day after McClellan’s army had slunk miserably away from its victory at Malvern Hill, Lincoln, with a grim determination to finish what he started, ordered up three hundred thousand new volunteers. He understood that the rise of Lee and Jackson meant this was going to be a long, hard, expensive fight. The war, the new war, the actual war, was to be all about conquest, subjugation, and destruction.

  • • •

  The immediate aftermath of Malvern Hill was pure horror, at least for the burial details that Jackson ordered out onto the killing ground. In a steady downpour and mist that hung like a shroud over the field, the men gathered and stacked the dead and pieces of the dead. Unlike most Civil War battles, in which artillery caused less than 5 percent of casualties, at Malvern Hill more than half of the Confederate killed and wounded had been victims of Federal solid shot, shell, spherical case, and canister. The results were ghastly. Body fragments lay everywhere. Many corpses were headless. Some were just mounds of decaying ooze that yesterday had been human beings. Jackson worked the detail, trotting up and down and hurrying the men along. When someone asked why he was in such a rush to clear the field he replied, “Why,
I am going to attack here presently, as soon as the fog rises, and it won’t do to march troops over their own dead, you know.”7 He seemed his old hyperaggressive self again—rested, impatient to attack.

  He was in favor of hot and immediate pursuit. But for the moment that was a difficult idea: the field hospitals were jammed, the roads to Harrison’s Landing had turned to muck, and no one had much of an idea exactly where McClellan was anyway. Jackson rode to Lee’s headquarters, a bullet-strafed farmhouse, to petition him. The two men were studying maps before a fire when Confederate president Jefferson Davis, unexpected and unannounced, walked into the room with his brother, Colonel Joseph Davis. “President, I am delighted to see you,” said a surprised Lee. While Lee and a staffer chatted with the guests, Jackson, who had been sitting near the fire on the other side of the room, had risen and was standing stiffly by his chair, as though waiting for someone to notice him. Jackson had not recognized Davis at first, according to Hunter McGuire, who was with him. But when McGuire whispered the man’s identity Jackson “stood as if a corporal on guard, his head erect, his little fingers touching the seams of his pants, and looked at Davis.”8 Davis now noticed Jackson, too, and the two men stared silently at each other for a moment. Lee, realizing that Davis did not recognize Jackson, then broke in with one of the most famous introductions of the Civil War: “Why, President, don’t you know Stonewall Jackson? This is our Stonewall Jackson.” Then, according to McGuire, “Mr. Davis started to greet him, evidently as warmly as those he had just left, but the appearance of Jackson stopped him, and when he got about a yard away Mr. Davis halted and Jackson immediately brought his hand up to the side of his head in military salute. Mr. Davis bowed and went back to the other company in the room.”9

  Though Jackson left no record of his thoughts, he had already had three unpleasant run-ins with Davis, and his behavior almost certainly reflected this. The first had happened at Manassas, after Davis had arrived at the battlefield and breathlessly tried to rally the troops from what he thought was a terrible defeat. Jackson, flush with victory, had loudly dismissed the president’s panicky apprehensions and had vowed to march on Washington. The second was their meeting near Manassas on September 30, 1861, from which Jackson had emerged disenchanted and Davis had decided that Jackson was an overly aggressive fanatic. The third contretemps happened after Romney, when Davis allowed Jackson’s orders to General Loring to be superseded by Secretary of War Judah Benjamin—an unwarranted intrusion of politics into military operations—prompting Jackson’s resignation. His troubles with authority figures, from VMI superintendent Francis Henney Smith to his Florida superior, William H. French, are well documented; Davis may have awakened some of the same uncharitable feelings in him.

  In any case, Jackson soon got his wish; the bloodied Army of Northern Virginia trudged forward in the heat and humidity and mud toward the Union position. When they got there they found that it was nearly impregnable. McClellan’s army was dug in on the heights overlooking the river; behind them were the redoubtable ship-mounted guns of the navy. Lee and Jackson agreed that there was no question of attacking. They had missed their chance to destroy the army. It was a depressing moment, made worse by the knowledge that malaria, dysentery, and typhoid were sweeping their ranks and that sickness, death, and straggling had reduced some regiments by half. The peninsula, which seemed to the soldiers to be no more than a tangled, humid, malarial swamp punctuated by an occasional farm field, was a miserable place to wage war.

  Still, Jackson wanted more. A few days later, he summoned his faithful ally Alexander Boteler to his camp and once again outlined a plan—this was becoming quite familiar to Boteler by now—for an invasion of the North. He wanted Boteler to take his proposal to Richmond. In Jackson’s view, the Confederacy was “repeating the blunder we made after the Battle of Manassas, in allowing the enemy leisure to recover from his defeat.” Boteler protested that Davis would just send him back to Lee. Why didn’t Jackson just speak to Lee himself?

  “I have already done so,” Jackson replied.

  “Well, what does he say?”

  “He says nothing,” Jackson said, then quietly added, “Do not think I complain of his silence. He doubtless has good reasons for it.”

  “Then you don’t think,” Boteler persisted, “that General Lee is slow in making up his mind?”

  “Slow!” Jackson said with sudden energy. “By no means, Colonel. On the contrary, his perceptions are as quick and unerring as his judgment is infallible. But with the vast responsibilities now resting on him, he is perfectly right in withholding a hasty expression of his opinions and purposes.” He then paused for a moment. “So great is my confidence in General Lee that I am willing to follow him blindfolded. But I fear he is unable to give me a definitive answer now because of influences at Richmond.” With that rare glimpse into Jackson’s feelings about Lee, Boteler was once again dispatched.10 Each time Jackson proposed this idea of taking the war to the North, he sounded a little less crazy, though what he and Boteler were doing amounted to gross insubordination.

  In the weeks that followed the Seven Days, Jackson was perfectly Jackson: self-contained, serious, hardworking, engaged with the minute details of managing his army. “He seems to have no social life,” observed one soldier. “He divides his time between military duties, prayer, sleep, and solitary thought. He holds converse with few.”11 Though his recent performance paled next to the brilliance of his valley campaign, the more momentous Confederate success before Richmond had elevated him even higher in the popular mind. He was cheered everywhere he went. Often the cheers grew into the weird, corkscrewing ululation of the rebel yell. He acknowledged the cheers by lifting his hat, then invariably spurred Little Sorrel and galloped away from all that adulation, which he believed was rightly due God and not him. “He is of course a great military genius and has made such an impression on the men that ‘Old Jack’ is at once a rallying cry and a term of endearment,” wrote cavalryman Charles Minor Blackford. “The army is full of stories about him and everybody, citizens and soldiers, is trying to get a glimpse of him.”12

  Those stories had begun to reverberate through the South. “The masses of his countrymen,” wrote Allen C. Redwood, who fought with the 55th Virginia Regiment,

  found something peculiarly acceptable in the character of the man, apart from his services: his retiring modesty, his indifference to display, his simple trust in the Giver of all victory, were shining virtues in the eyes of a people who had only taken up arms in behalf of what they considered their dearest rights, and with no care for the pomp and circumstance of war. His very homeliness was a recommendation to the essentially practical-minded Southerner, regarding himself as the peer of any man, and constitutionally intolerant of the pretension symbolized by gold-lace and other fripperies of official rank.13

  Jackson received all sorts of gifts from these new admirers, too, in the wake of the campaign. Baskets of food arrived daily, usually intercepted by his staff, who knew he had no use for them and were afraid they might be returned.

  His renown was no longer limited to the South. If Lee’s attacks had been poorly orchestrated and Jackson had been less than fearsome in some of them, those niceties were lost north of the Potomac. Indeed, one popular Northern explanation of what had happened credited the victory to the onslaught of the invincible Jackson on the Union flank, sweeping in from the west, where he had left a wreckage of Union armies. In a version of this, the New York Times said inaccurately that “Stonewall Jackson rushed from the Valley of the Shenandoah . . . and got in the rear of our whole army” by means of a “coup de guerre.” Harper’s Weekly marveled at his “suddenness” and described “the furious attacks of enormous Rebel armies.” An editorial writer for the New York Times expressed the wish that a rumor of Jackson’s death were true because “he has evinced more real genius . . . than anybody on either side.”14 Jackson was for many Northerners the embodiment of the “pitiless, fanatical, religiously-obsessed warrior.�
��15 But for others he was emerging not simply as a Cromwellian zealot in a cause they despised, but also as someone with qualities they otherwise might actually admire: competence, fearlessness, valor in the field, humility, and devotion to God. To his enemies he was the strangest, most intriguing, and most threatening of all the Confederate generals.

  Those who had known Jackson before the war were amazed at the sheer speed of his transformation, which had raised him so far and so quickly above so many other powerful and influential people. One of the best examples involves Jackson and one of his brigadier generals, Robert Toombs. In the days just before the war began, Henry Kyd Douglas happened to see both men within days. First he had observed Jackson in Lexington, “pursuing the noiseless tenor of his way, instructing a class of mischievous cadets in natural philosophy and almost unknown beyond the limits of that town.” A few days later, Douglas happened to be in Washington, DC, where he saw the US senator from Georgia Robert Toombs—later one of the founding fathers of the Confederacy and its first secretary of state—give a fiery speech on the Senate floor in favor of the acquisition of Cuba.16 Roughly fifteen months later, Douglas and Jackson were riding through an area where the brigade commanded by Toombs was camped. Jackson noticed immediately that there were large gaps in Toombs’s picket lines. He immediately rode to brigade headquarters, where he found the general lying down in the shade of a small fly tent. Jackson “routed him out” and according to Douglas “directed General Toombs with some sharpness to go at once, in person, and make the necessary connection.”17 Jackson then turned and rode away. This once-powerful national figure was now being given curt, peremptory commands by the eccentric former physics professor. “Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis,” Douglas commented. Times change, and we change with them.