Rebel Yell

by S. C. Gwynne

  The next day Jackson sent Jeb Stuart on a reconnaissance mission. Unhappy with his current cavalry chief, Beverly Robertson, he had summoned Stuart under the pretext of having him perform a “tour of inspection.” The two friends had colluded (as Jackson and Ewell had) to subvert military protocol, and the straitlaced moralist Jackson had lied about it. He seemed to feel no particular remorse. Stuart was Ashby without the administrative shortcomings and the hair-trigger temperament. Jackson liked the very idea of Stuart. He and his horsemen soon demonstrated yet again why Jackson, Lee, and everyone else found him so necessary, riding behind enemy lines, and even capturing a signal station.37 What he found was discouraging. Pope, stung by his defeat, was moving up troops to reinforce Banks. One of McDowell’s divisions under General James Ricketts had arrived to cover Banks’s retreat, and Franz Sigel’s 1st Corps was on its way to the front. Jackson would soon be colossally outnumbered, and he knew it. On August 11, after burying Confederate and Union dead under flags of truce, he began withdrawing his force to Gordonsville. Meanwhile, something interesting was happening—or not happening—that was at odds with Pope’s warlike bluster of the preceding week. The Union commander had vastly superior numbers at his disposal, he no longer seemed in any hurry to attack Stonewall Jackson.

  Though Jackson had won a clear victory, Cedar Mountain had been no tactical gem. He had fought before his army was at full strength; he had failed to realize the weakness of his left (though the confusion following Winder’s mortal wounding was to blame for this, too); his habitual secretiveness had prevented his commanders from understanding his battle plan, if he even had one. The Battle of Cedar Mountain seems to have been fought on both sides without clear schemes of attack. It was more of a stand-up slugfest punctuated by Samuel Crawford’s brilliant but doomed dash across the Union flank. To his credit, Jackson had planned and executed a highly destructive artillery barrage, one that claimed many Union lives and much matériel and that clearly got the better of his adversary.

  He had also, with his heroism on horseback in the heat of the battle, shown himself to be an inspiring field officer. There were many such brave men in the war on both sides; you can see them in old paintings on horseback and with sabers drawn, shrouded by white smoke and exhorting their men forward. But they were likely captains or majors or colonels, not corps commanders. Jackson’s men had seen him and heard him and they had followed him forward, and in so doing had helped drive the Federals back. After the battle, there was no one in his corps who did not know what he had done. Jackson himself considered his victory at Cedar Mountain his greatest military achievement, and he was uncharacteristically proud of it. If his confidence had suffered at all from the Seven Days campaign, it had now been restored. “I congratulate you most heartily on the victory which God has granted you over our enemies at Cedar Run,” Lee wrote to Jackson on August 12. “The country owes you and your brave officers and soldiers a deep debt of gratitude.”38 That same day Jackson wrote Anna, “On last Saturday our God again crowned our arms with victory. . . . I can hardly think of the fall of Brigadier-General C. S. Winder without tearful eyes.” Then he veered into that somewhat abstracted, impersonal, divinity-infused style that he often used in his letters: “Let us all unite more earnestly in imploring God’s aid in fighting our battles for us. . . . If God be for us, who can be against us? That He will make our nation that people whose God is the Lord, is my earnest and oft-repeated prayer.”39

  Most important, Cedar Mountain was another victory. It had his name on it, and now Jackson, seemingly invincible, was more famous than ever. The day after the battle, a Union prisoner who was being held near Jackson’s tent was discovered standing behind Little Sorrel, systematically plucking hairs from the horse’s tail. Noticing this, one of Jackson’s staff ordered the man to stop it just as Jackson himself emerged from his tent. “My friend,” Jackson asked in a soft voice, “why are you tearing the hair out of my horse’s tail?” The prisoner, removing his hat, replied, “Ah, General, each one of these hairs is worth a dollar in New York.”40

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  THE HUM OF A BEEHIVE

  While the Virginia yeomanry suffered under Pope’s harsh new regime, which turned once-prosperous farmers into paupers overnight, Jackson’s own soldiers also found themselves in a much harder and less forgiving world.1 The most obvious signs of this were the new Confederate conscription laws, passed in April of that year, that extended terms of service for currently enrolled soldiers and made all males from eighteen to thirty-five subject to the new draft. The early war had been fought entirely with volunteers, many of whom believed that military regulations infringed on their basic rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These were people, after all, who had revolted against a centralizing government, natural antistatists who did not want anyone in authority telling them what to do. During Jackson’s valley campaign, he had lost thousands of men who simply went home. In June, Longstreet complained that soldiers were moving between the army and their homes “without the slightest regard for official policy.” Many never came back. The ones who did were punished lightly or quietly forgiven. None was shot for desertion, though hundreds easily could have been.2 In the first phase of the war, the army and the public at large would not tolerate mass shootings of deserters. Jackson, like other generals, had understood this.3

  But by the summer of 1862 the national mood had changed. Southerners were tired of seeing stragglers and deserters—“dirty villains,” as the Richmond Examiner called them—lounging about grogshops, boardinghouses, and hotels while brave men fought and died on the fields of war. As a result, those early days of tolerance and understanding were coming to an end.4 Stragglers, once considered an inevitable if unfortunate part of war, were increasingly treated as what they often were: men who would not fight. On the march from Richmond to Gordonsville, Jackson’s division commander Charles S. Winder had ordered thirty stragglers “bucked and gagged”—a painful form of punishment that consisted of tying the offender’s hands together at the wrists and slipping them down over the knees, while running a stick under the knees and over the arms. The “gag” was a bayonet placed in the mouth and tied from behind with string. Men would be left in this trussed position from sunrise to sunset. Winder hated stragglers. Though Jackson ordered him to stop the practice, Winder persisted in his other favorite punishment, hanging stragglers and other disciplinary cases from trees by their thumbs so their toes barely touched the ground, and leaving them that way all day.5

  The new severity brought far worse punishments. Before the Battle of Cedar Mountain, a court-martial established by Jackson had convicted three soldiers of desertion and sentenced them to death. Two of them were conscripts who were guilty of nothing more than missing their families and going home to see them, something many members of the Stonewall Brigade had done, often repeatedly, in the valley campaign. Jackson entertained two pleas for leniency. To the first, from a colonel in the 10th Virginia, from whose regiment two of the men came, he replied with icy fury, “Sir! Men who desert their comrades in war deserve to be shot! And officers who intercede for them deserve to be hung!” For Jackson, straggling and desertion were the ultimate violations of duty. Next came a chaplain with his own gentle plea. “General, consider your responsibilities to the Lord,” he implored Jackson. “You are sending these men’s souls to Hell!” Jackson replied, “That, sir, is my business. Do you do yours!” Jackson “then handled the chaplain rather roughly,” according to Jed Hotchkiss, “taking him by the shoulders, whirling him around, and pushing him out of the tent.”6 Jackson hated deserters with a special passion. He had only restrained himself from shooting them before because public opinion wouldn’t have tolerated it.

  On August 19, the day of the executions, Brigadier General William Taliaferro’s full division marched out in columns to a field beside the Mount Pisgah Baptist Church in Orange County, Virginia, while a regimental band played a funeral march. The prisoners were blindfolded and force
d to kneel in front of their caskets. The firing squad formed at six paces and fired a volley into the prisoners. Two were killed instantly. The third, who was still alive and tried to stand, was shot again.7

  The next day two Confederate soldiers who had deserted to the enemy were captured by Jeb Stuart’s cavalry. Jackson ordered them hanged from the limb of a tree by the roadside and left there while the rest of the army passed by, just in case anyone hadn’t gotten the message.8

  • • •

  The Battle of Cedar Mountain might have seemed at first like a version of Malvern Hill—a pointless slaughter brought on by a foolish attack that accomplished nothing in particular for either side. Jackson had withdrawn two days later to his previous position below the Rapidan River. The Union was no closer to its objective of taking the Virginia Central Railroad in Gordonsville. But a major change had taken place, and it had happened in the minds of Union war boss Henry Halleck and John Pope. Jackson’s lunge at Culpeper, as it turned out, had scared them.9 On July 31, Pope had vowed to Halleck that he would be “in possession of Gordonsville . . . within ten days.” But at five forty-five in the morning after his defeat at Cedar Mountain—exactly ten days later—he sounded like a different man. Now he warned Halleck that he expected “a very severe engagement” to follow and that “I will do the best I can, and if forced to retire will so do by way of Rappahannock Crossing.”10 Though he continued to rattle his saber, advising Halleck on August 12 that “The enemy has retreated under cover of night. . . . Our cavalry and artillery are in pursuit,” in fact he had little or no interest in advancing against Jackson. The wind had gone out of his sails.

  Halleck, meanwhile, was even more worried than Pope about the danger that lurked south of the Rapidan: “Your main object should be to keep the enemy in check until we can get reinforcements to your army,” he wired Pope on August 11. On August 13 he said flatly, “Do not advance across the Rapidan,” and repeated that order on the sixteenth.11 Pope’s orders were to wait for McClellan’s army to join him. Halleck, meanwhile, was badgering Little Mac into speeding up his massive troop transfer. McClellan, for personal and political reasons—not least because he thought that helping his detested colleague John Pope was contrary to his self-interest—was slow-walking the entire enterprise.

  Lee’s objective, conversely, was to strike Pope before McClellan got there. Lee had thus ordered Longstreet’s corps to join Jackson near Gordonsville, leaving a mere three divisions to guard all of Richmond. By August 16 Lee had an army of 54,000 men—30,000 under Longstreet and 24,000 under Jackson—facing Pope’s 50,000. Lee did not know how much of McClellan’s army was on its way to reinforce the Army of Virginia. But he knew he was running out of time. Once McClellan joined Pope it would be impossible to force the Federals from central Virginia, or to head north, as Lee was planning. Lee would be forced to withdraw.

  Lee, Jackson, and Longstreet spread maps in front of them and pondered their next move. Lee quickly saw that Pope had made a potentially fatal mistake. In his new, post–Cedar Mountain defensive posture, he had backed himself and his entire army into the delta formed by the junction of the Rapidan and Rappahannock Rivers. Though there were several fords across the Rappahannock, there was only one main bridge across which his army could escape. Burn it, Lee theorized, and he could cripple the Union retreat. Thus cornered, with his back to a great river, Pope’s army might be destroyed. It was one of those moments of crystal-clear vision that rarely happen in war. Pope was exquisitely vulnerable. Lee ordered an immediate advance. Unfortunately, he once again could not make the cumbersome machinery of his army move fast enough. By the time he got it in motion, Pope, aided by an intercepted message, had discovered his error and had promptly moved his army behind the Rappahannock. A disappointed Robert E. Lee ordered the two wings of his army—Longstreet on the right and Jackson on the left—forward to the south bank of the Rappahannock. On August 20 the two armies were staring at each other across one of the most formidable natural obstacles in the region.

  Now the game began in earnest, but with more pressure on Lee than ever. He knew that the Union armies might be only days from rendezvous, and he had left Richmond virtually undefended.12 To engage Pope before that happened, Lee would have to cross the Rappahannock at one of its three bridges or half dozen fords. Pope, understanding this, vigorously defended the crossings. For three days, from August 21 to 23, in a series of artillery fights and skirmishes that included an ineffectual Jeb Stuart raid into the Union rear at Catlett’s Station, Lee’s army probed for weak points in the Union line. When he was repulsed, Lee simply slid his army crabwise upstream, north and west, Jackson’s corps in the lead, looking for better opportunities and stretching Pope’s already thin lines. Pope and his generals showed considerable defensive skill. They mimicked Lee’s moves and parried his thrusts.13 On August 22 one of Jackson’s brigade commanders, Jubal Early, finally got beyond the Union right flank and managed to cross the river at Sulphur Springs. But he was isolated there by rains and a rising river, and suddenly found himself and his brigade trapped on the enemy’s side of the river. He was rescued from fast-closing Union forces only after Jackson’s engineers managed to build a makeshift bridge.

  By August 24, Lee’s army was once again in stalemate, facing Pope across the Rappahannock. This time they were farther upstream, but with no better chance of crossing than they had had four days before. Artillery continued to boom but was increasingly meaningless. Pope’s defensive maneuvers had gotten him what he most needed: time. That day the first of his reinforcements began arriving. Many more were on their way, marching west from Fredericksburg or south from Alexandria. The Army of Virginia and the Army of the Potomac, it seemed, were on the verge of unification.

  That Sunday afternoon, August 24, Lee summoned Jackson to his headquarters near the town of Jeffersonton, behind the Confederate left. Jackson was in a bad mood. His army’s maneuvers had produced nothing. He had been forced to save Early from almost certain destruction. Nothing had been gained. Jackson arrived to find that “headquarters” was really a table that had been set up in an open field, away from any structures, human or natural. “There was not even a tree within hearing,” recalled one officer. This was to be an extremely confidential meeting. Lee was seated at the table with a map laid out in front of him. James Longstreet was seated on his right, Jeb Stuart on his left. Jackson approached the table and stood, facing them.14 While artillery grumbled in the distance, the four generals talked. Though staff officers loitering nearby listened as hard as they could, they could make out nothing. Hunter McGuire recalled many years later that at some point in the meeting “Jackson . . . was very much excited, drawing with the toe of his boot a map in the sand, and gesticulating in a much more earnest way than he was in the habit of doing. General Lee was simply listening, and after Jackson had got through, he nodded his head, as if acceding to some proposal.”15 The only record of what was said came from Douglas, who heard Jackson say, at the meeting’s end, “I will be moving within an hour.”16

  Though we do not know what words were spoken, we know with great certainty what the meeting was all about. What had gotten Jackson’s attention was one of the most profoundly daring plans of the war, one that violated both military theory and common sense in equal measure. To pry Pope out of his secure position behind the Rappahannock, Lee proposed that Jackson and his entire corps march in a sweeping arc around the Union right, climbing north across the foothills of the Blue Ridge, then turning east through the Bull Run Mountains, and landing on the plains deep behind Union lines. His mission was to cut the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, Pope’s main supply line. In that sense, the plan was similar to what Lee had proposed in front of Richmond: to force a Union army to withdraw to protect its supplies. Except that now, any rebel force in Pope’s rear would also be on Washington’s doorstep. Once Pope discovered what had happened, he would have no choice but to leave his Rappahannock camps and move toward Washington. James Longstreet, meanwhile, w
ould try to keep Pope’s attention engaged as long as he could. When Pope fell back, Longstreet would follow Jackson’s route north. Twenty-five mounted couriers from the vaunted Black Horse Troop would keep Lee and Jackson in touch.17 If there was one lesson Lee had learned at the Seven Days, it was the importance of communication.

  The risks inherent in Lee’s plan were breathtaking. By dividing his army he left each half vulnerable to attack. If Pope learned that there were now two small rebel armies separated by fifty miles, he could attack and destroy Lee, then turn on Jackson. Then, too, there was the problem of McClellan’s army, some of which might be landing at Washington (two entire army corps, in fact, under Franklin and Sumner). That would leave Jackson trapped between McClellan and Pope, with Lee unable to help. Whatever happened, Jackson would be alone in the Union rear with no supply line and no reinforcements within a two-day march. From the moment he left the Rappahannock, he would be in constant peril. The closer he got to Washington, the more hazardous his position would become. Jackson, who had proven his ability to operate alone and without support while engaging multiple Union armies in the valley, was the obvious choice for the job. As in the valley campaign, Lee left the details of Jackson’s operation to him. Jackson was ecstatic: he was being ordered by Lee to strike deep in the heart of enemy territory, surrounded by unprecedented peril, with almost unimaginably high stakes.

  He lost no time getting started. At 6:00 p.m. on the night of August 24, Longstreet’s brigades quietly replaced Jackson’s troops along the river. At 3:00 a.m. on the twenty-fifth, Jackson’s bugles blew reveille, the men were rousted, and the army trooped off, tack creaking, wagon wheels rattling, shanks of bayonets clanking rhythmically against canteens. None of the men had the slightest idea where they were going. But that was nothing new. They joked that Jackson’s piety expressed itself in the directive “Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.”18 But by now they knew Jackson well enough to know that they were headed for a fight.