Rebel Yell

by S. C. Gwynne

  But Jackson was not, as virtually any other general would have been, thinking of escape. It was characteristic of the man that at such a moment of impending danger he was thinking only of how he could smash John Pope. He would be outnumbered, of course, possibly two or three to one. Thus he knew his only chance was to make sure the battle was fought on his terms and on his chosen ground.

  But how to do that?

  Before he left Manassas Junction Jackson had made up his mind. He knew the terrain well from the Battle of Manassas and he knew there was an unfinished railroad line several hundred yards north of the Warrenton Turnpike, west of the Sudley Road that had seen so much fighting in the First Manassas. The line, which ran for more than two miles, offered a superb defensive position, most of it in moderately thick woods. Jackson could bide his time there, near the tiny hamlet of Groveton, and wait for his opportunity to strike. Groveton, moreover, was less than ten miles east of Thoroughfare Gap, which meant that Jackson would be in a position to link with Longstreet’s army when it arrived. In the event of total disaster he could retreat to the north. At midnight, Jackson and his three divisions marched out of Manassas Junction for their new bivouac. Though his divisions under A. P. Hill and Richard Ewell got lost in the dark, by the following morning Jackson had his entire twenty-four-thousand-man force “packed like herring in a barrel” in the woods in front of the railroad excavation. By Jackson’s orders, the army was very quiet. Cooking was forbidden, along with music and shouting. Except for the periodic crash of Jeb Stuart’s horse artillery as he routed Federal scouting parties, according to one soldier, “the woods sounded like the hum of a beehive on a warm summer day.”37

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  AT BAY ON HIS BAPTISMAL SOIL

  For Major General John Pope, the world was a bright, promising place on the morning of Thursday, August 28, 1862, full of hope and possibility. He was certain that he had corralled the elusive Stonewall Jackson at Manassas Junction. All of his scouting reports told him that this was true. Jackson had finally gone too far. And now Pope would throw his full force against the trapped rebel commander. The night before, he had ordered a massive convergence on the junction, fifty thousand men advancing in a carefully spaced seven-mile-wide arc to prevent Jackson’s escape. That movement was under way. Pope was so convinced of his impending victory that he told Irvin McDowell, commander of his 3rd Corps, “If you will march promptly and rapidly, we shall bag the whole crowd.” Jackson had surprised the Union high command with his daring march. Now he would pay for it.

  Or perhaps not. At noon a Union division under one-armed general Phil Kearny, whom Winfield Scott once called “the bravest man I ever saw,” arrived at Manassas Junction to find nothing but smoldering desolation, charred skeletons of boxcars, and debris scattered everywhere. Beyond the wild destruction it had left behind, there was no sign of Jackson’s column. Confederate stragglers insisted that the men had all marched off to Centreville, seven miles to the northeast. This turned out to be a wonderfully effective and entirely unintentional piece of misdirection. Though Jackson had ordered Ewell and Hill to march north to Groveton with the rest of the column, a series of misunderstandings and bad directions had led them to march eastward—toward Centreville—in the process losing themselves in the darkness. Though the stragglers were telling the truth—authentically selling their comrades out—they did not know that the rebel generals had soon corrected their mistakes and marched on to Groveton. Their divisions were now neatly tucked into the woods with the rest of Jackson’s force.

  Still, Pope chose to believe these honest shirkers. At 2:00 p.m. he issued orders for a new massive convergence, this time on the town of Centreville. Now, as the afternoon waned, the fatal weakness in Pope’s character—his indecision under pressure—began to show itself. Soon after issuing those orders he received word that Longstreet’s army had reached Thoroughfare Gap, where it had clashed with a small Union force. In his zeal to catch and destroy Jackson, Pope had somehow neglected the rest of the Confederate army. Consumed by an impulsive desire to correct that mistake, he abruptly changed his orders again, directing his army to turn and march west. He soon rescinded those orders, too.1 Pope’s waffling only grew worse.2 At 5:00 p.m., swayed by persistent reports of Jackson’s march eastward, and believing he could defeat Jackson, then wheel and fight Longstreet, Pope ordered his troops to turn yet again and resume their march to Centreville, much to the dismay of his generals—especially McDowell, who had been raising alarms about Longstreet’s approach from the west. The fact remained: after a full day of probing with scouts and cavalry and entire divisions, and frenzied countermarching over an area familiar to many of them from the Battle of Manassas thirteen months before, Pope still had no idea where Jackson and his twenty-four thousand men were.

  While Union soldiers, whipsawed by their commander’s shifting orders, marched hither and yon over the rolling fields and timbered groves searching for him, Jackson was looking for an opportunity to strike. His concealment had only been a temporary ruse. He had been waiting all day for a large Union force to pass by on the Warrenton Pike, as a spider waits for a fly, though in this case the spider was less than half as big as the fly. He was impatient and running out of daylight. And he had not heard from Lee. Throughout the day he had been restlessly riding his lines, mostly alone. “When he was uneasy he was cross as a bear,” wrote cavalryman W. W. Blackford, “and neither his generals nor his staff liked to come near if they could help it.”3 His demeanor changed temporarily when a courier arrived in late afternoon with the news that Lee and Longstreet were only twelve miles away and would likely arrive in the morning. Jackson’s normally stern face, according to one observer, “beamed with pleasure” and relief. “Where is the man who brought this dispatch?” he asked. “I must shake hands with him.” The news gave him all the more reason to draw Pope into battle. But he needed the mechanism by which to do that.

  At about 5:30 p.m., that mechanism came tramping eastward down the Warrenton Turnpike. When corps commander Irvin McDowell received Pope’s 5:00 p.m. order to march on Centreville, he had put his army on the road. Its advance units were four brigades under the command of Brigadier General Rufus King, an epileptic who was still woozy from his last, quite recent seizure. Among them was an unusual group of Indiana and Wisconsin regiments under their commander, John Gibbon, who had taught artillery tactics at West Point and authored a popular textbook on the subject. They were distinguished both by their origin—they were one of a few western brigades fighting east of the Mississippi—and by their attire: dark blue frock coats, light blue pants, white leggings, and outsized black hats with plumes. Known as the “Black Hat Brigade,” they looked somewhat pointlessly ornate, more like bandbox soldiers than a group of fighting men. Though this was their first fight, they would quickly distinguish themselves. They would go on to fame and legend as the “Iron Brigade,” one of the hardest-fighting units of the war and the Northern equivalent of the Stonewall Brigade.4

  King’s men had just had a leisurely dinner and were proceeding at route step down the Warrenton Turnpike, strung out for a mile on the road. The men were relaxed, even a bit drowsy, “chatting, joking, and laughing in their usual manner,” according to one of them, perhaps about the ridiculous cascade of ever-changing orders issuing from headquarters.5 As they shuffled forward, a lone rider appeared in front of the woods on the north side of the road, maybe 150 yards off. He was obviously a rebel. He was within easy musket range, but no one seemed to be in the mood to shoot him. He didn’t look like much. He wore a dusty, rumpled uniform and weather-beaten cap. He rode a substandard horse. He ranged back and forth over the broom sedge in full view of the Union column, surveying it as though attempting to understand its meaning. Then he turned abruptly and galloped away.

  As he thundered back into the woods, where half of the Army of Northern Virginia lay concealed, one officer, watching him approach, said, “Here he comes, by God.”

  The inquisitive ho
rseman was Jackson. And this was the opportunity he had been waiting for. After such an anxious morning and afternoon, he was pleased with the prospect of battle. According to one observer, he was suddenly “as calm as a May morning.” He turned to his officers and said, in a soft voice, “Bring out your men, gentlemen.” The soldiers had been waiting for this moment all day; now the looming action sent a wave of anticipation through their lines, like electricity. They understood that large numbers of men had been looking for them. “The hunt is up,” one of them wrote later. “Jackson is at bay on his baptismal soil, with Pope in front and the whole North behind him.”6 Moments later, Jackson’s artillery sounded, shells screamed into the Union lines, and several thousand men in blue coats dived for any cover they could find by the roadside. They quickly retreated to the woods south of the turnpike, unlimbered, and returned fire, and soon salvos from both sides were shattering the evening air.

  But what sort of force were the Federals facing? Gibbon huddled with fellow brigade commander Abner Doubleday, another artillerist who had the great distinction of firing the first Federal shot from Fort Sumter.7 Pope’s communications throughout the day had assured them that Jackson’s main force was at Centreville. There was no question about that. And all Gibbon had seen were a few enemy guns banging away in the distance—very likely some of Jeb Stuart’s horse artillery, making its usual mischief. Gibbon and Doubleday decided that the best way to shoo this nuisance away would be to storm the battery. They sent skirmishers out, and the 2nd Wisconsin and 19th Indiana Regiments fell in behind them, and they all moved smartly toward the wooded area north of the turnpike.

  But as they were nearing musket range of the rebel artillery, the guns suddenly stopped firing. There was an odd, momentary silence, as though in response to a change of orders; then a line of Confederate skirmishers rose from the grass in front of the guns, and the advancing bluecoats could see white smoke from their musket barrels and hear the abrupt, rattling staccato of their volleys. The presence of infantry was odd. And then suddenly the woods themselves seemed to come alive. A wave of gray-clad soldiers rose, en masse, and swept down the gentle slope in perfect battle lines, a quarter of a mile away and closing, red battle flags with starred blue crosses fluttering over the ranks. Soon they were within range and then terrible, long, rolling volleys swept the field. The air buzzed with .58-caliber pieces of lead, and men started falling in great numbers. This was not a regiment of Jeb Stuart’s troopers with some light artillery. Gibbon and Doubleday had stumbled on old Stonewall himself.

  What followed was an old-fashioned slugfest, a powder-scorched prizefight in which the fighters—initially the Iron Brigade against the Stonewall Brigade—stood toe to toe, neither side seeking shelter or retreat. The two lines blasted away at each other, eighty yards apart along a half-mile front. They maneuvered for each other’s flank. Though Jackson had the advantage of numbers, it took him an excruciatingly long time to bring his regiments up, and he never fully succeeded. Frustrated, he himself took command on the field, ignoring the chain of command and feeding men into the fight as fast as he could. “I met Gen’l Jackson near a gate trying to rally some stragglers,” recalled one soldier, “more excited and indignant than I ever saw him, riding rapidly among them and threatening with his arm raised.”8

  Whether it was the ferocity of the Union fighters, or Jackson’s inability to bring more of his force into the fight, an hour and a half after it started the battle between his right wing and the advance units of McDowell’s corps was deadlocked. Neither side had given an inch. “It was a stand-up combat, clogged and unflinching, in a field almost bare,” wrote General William B. Taliaferro, who was seriously wounded in the fight, as was General Ewell. “In the dying daylight they stood, and although they could not advance, they would not retire. There was some discipline in this, but there was much more of true valor.”9

  At such close range, the firing was accurate and murderous. One of every 3 men in the fight was hit by a bullet. The 2nd Wisconsin suffered 276 casualties out of 430 soldiers, while the Stonewall Brigade lost 340 out of 800.10 Two Georgia regiments suffered 70 percent casualties, a percentage almost unheard of in the Civil War. More than a third of the Federal officers were left dead or wounded on the field.11 Darkness ended the fight. Spectral lanterns soon bobbed and floated across the field as roving details brought the wounded in. “Here, under the trees, lay the sufferers, awaiting each his turn to receive the attention of the two or three surgeons in this part of the field,” wrote one of Doubleday’s staffers. “Lighted by torches or bits of candle, these surgeons were busily engaged in their melancholy labors.”12

  To Jackson, the meaning of the bloody shoot-out at Groveton was clear. He had deliberately picked a fight with a piece of Pope’s army, thus revealing his hiding place, and he fully expected to be attacked by Pope’s entire force the next day. That was what he wanted. Lee understood this, but no one in the Union army did, and the improbable idea that Jackson was not in retreat was a source of great confusion to his enemies over the next two days. His choice did not seem rational. A rational man would not choose to maintain his position in the woods, awaiting certain destruction by a much larger army. As Jackson saw it, he had a perfectly good chance to strike a blow at Pope before more of McClellan’s reinforcements arrived. And he knew, moreover, that Lee was on his way.

  To Gibbon, Doubleday, and their division commander, Rufus King, the meaning of the fight was far less clear. King at first insisted on following his orders, which meant continuing down the turnpike to Centreville to engage Stonewall Jackson. Gibbon argued that such a move was pointless, since all evidence, including testimony from captured Confederate prisoners, suggested they were in the presence of the legendary Stonewall himself. They would be better off beating a sensible retreat south toward Manassas Junction, with the hope of finding reinforcements.13 Gibbon pushed the point, won the argument, and King’s brigades fell back. They knew they could not possibly fight Jackson alone.

  Pope had his own, inevitably personal interpretation of the evening’s events. He and his staff had watched the battle’s brilliant illuminations from a patch of high ground near Bull Run, eight miles to the east. By 9:30 p.m. he was convinced that King’s brigades had struck Jackson’s corps. Once again, Pope saw nothing but opportunity. He was an optimistic man. Jackson, he theorized, had been camped at Centreville and was now retreating westward to escape destruction, staggering beneath the weight of his stolen supplies. King’s brigades had intercepted him in midflight. Pope’s vision thus conformed to all of his own hopes and preconceived notions. Thrilled at this development, he wrenched his entire army once again from its appointed courses by ordering a dawn attack. “I stated to several of my staff officers that were present,” he testified later, “that the game was in our hands, and that I did not see how it was possible for Jackson to escape without very heavy loss, if at all.”14 For all of his swagger, Pope, having been deceived three times by Jackson, this time took precautions. His army would spread out and march on Jackson’s position from both the east and the west, placing Jackson in a box and leaving no room for error. Pope was unaware that, in his unshakable conviction that Jackson was fleeing and did not want to fight, he had actually been deceived a fourth time.

  Even more impressive than these deceptions, Jackson had accomplished what he had really wanted all along: to goad Pope into attacking him, entirely on Jackson’s own terms, before the Army of Virginia had been fully reinforced by McClellan. Adrift in visions of glory, Pope had been drawn into a battle he did not have to fight.15 Jackson posed no offensive threat to an army three times his size, after all. He was certainly no threat to Washington. Time, moreover, was on Pope’s side. The wiser, more conservative course would have been to fall back toward the capital, wait to unite the two armies, then move forward against Lee, Jackson, or anyone else who tried to stand in their way. The Union numerical superiority would be crushing. Instead, Pope was putting his army into needless combat against
one Confederate corps while a second one, with none other than Robert E. Lee in tow, loomed up from the west. Instead of laying an elaborate trap for Jackson, Pope was actually walking into one, and both Lee and Jackson knew it. Jackson had no intention of using his three divisions as bait or sacrifice; he had come to understand the profound advantages that men firing from defensive cover had in this war. And he had carefully chosen a superb defensive position.

  • • •

  On the morning of August 29, expecting the full fury of the Union army to fall upon him—an expectation that would not be disappointed—Jackson shuffled his force east and north, placing his twenty-four thousand men in a gentle two-mile arc behind the unfinished railroad spur. To level the land for railroad tracks, engineers had dug trenches in some places (“cuts”) and piled dirt in others (“fills”). The effect was that of a linear fort, dead-level in a few isolated places and occasionally a bit too deep, but largely continuous along a wooded ridge. Any infantry that hoped to carry it would pay dearly in blood.

  That would be the story of the battle. At daylight artillery on both sides began their barrages, and soon Franz Sigel’s Union skirmishers advanced into the woods north of the Warrenton Turnpike. They were probing, looking for the exact location of Jackson’s men. Behind them came the lines of battle, broken into clusters and odd groupings by the thickets. A Union general described “the weird clatter of rebel bullets against leaves and tree-trunks and branches.” And suddenly “the rattling fire of skirmishers changed into the crash of musketry, regular volleys, rapidly following each other. We [had] evidently struck Jackson’s main position.”16